Australian Game of Football is Best - New York Times

An interesting article about Australian football appeared in the New York Times - in 1910. The historic piece was quoting Major Peixotto, leader of the Pacific Coast Amateur Athletic Union. It dates back to an era when the sporting landscape was vastly different. The professional sporting bodies of today did not exist, and a variety of amateur associations encouraged endeavour across a range of sports, some of which no longer exist - basketball teams even competed in weight divisions.

It seems that Australian football was being exhibited in California and met with enthusiasm. "Practically a similar summing up as that of the major's is the consensus among the Californians who have seen the game as demonstrated as it is now being taught on the coast. Its general absorption of most of the other types of contests with the leather spheroid has proved the rule whenever the issue was football", wrote the Times.

"If we Americans want a safe and sane game of football we can do no better than to emulate the Australian style of game", Major Peixotto says. "It is almost as open as lacrosse, as changeable as basketball, presents almost as many dribbling chances as the association game (soccer), and admits of no such close formations as exist under our college rules..."

He goes on to describe 4 x 25 minute quarters (as they were until recently), the long fields up to "180 yards", crowds of 50,000 to 100,000 per game, 18 players a side, mostly playing one on one (again, as used to be the case before zone defences and floods).

The article came at a time when American football was still only just emerging and was under threat due to fatalities due to crushing head to head contests. Those that mock the padding worn in American football would do well to remember that the sport was nearly banned in the United States due to the number of deaths - good reason to enforce the use of helmets. There was genuine debate in the US as to whether colleges should replace American football with Rugby or soccer.

Apparently a man of the name Eric Cullen Ward was in the US teaching Australian football as part of attempts to encourage its spread, having won a contest in the Sydney public schools system to do this.

The Major described Rugby as obsolete in Australia except for in Sydney, so it is interesting to reflect that somewhere along the way Union and Rugby League managed to push Australian football even further aside from the public (government) system, and it was not until the 1980s and 90s with the emergence of a national league (becoming the AFL) that the impetus to restore Aussie Rules regained momentum.

The full article is here and was brought to our attention via our friends at AFL Samoa.