Radiolab - Ghosts of Football Past

Episode Date: February 4, 2018

In anticipation of Super Bowl LII (Go Eagles), we're revisiting an old episode about the surprising history of how the game came to be. It's the end of the 19th century -- the Civil War is over, and the frontier is dead. And young college men are anxious. What great struggle will test their character? Then along comes a new craze: football. A brutally violent game where young men can show a stadium full of fans just what they're made of. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn -- the sons of the most powerful men in the country are literally knocking themselves out to win these gladiatorial battles. And then the most American team of all, with the most to prove, gets in the game and owns it. The Carlisle Indian School, formed in 1879 to assimilate the children and grandchildren of the men who fought the final Plains Wars against the fathers and grandfathers of the Ivy Leaguers, starts challenging the best teams in the country. On the football field, Carlisle had a chance for a fair fight with high stakes -- a chance to earn respect, a chance to be winners, and a chance to go forward in a changing world that was destroying theirs.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S. See? See?

What's up, everybody? This is Jad, Radio Lab surprise podcast here. Tomorrow is the big game. Go Eagles. And whether you like football or not, I happen to be a fan. But whether you like it or not, it's one of the biggest sporting events in the world. And it's a game that in many ways has always been wrapped up in what America is and what it isn't. And so what we thought we'd do, just as a corrective measure, is bring back an episode that we put together a couple years ago about the origins of that game.

It's kind of an amazing story. And look, we're all going to be sitting there watching Tom Brady probably, but hopefully not win another Super Bowl. And we'll be watching Timber Buns do the halftime thing. And throughout it all, no one will be talking about the people. without whom the game would be nothing. So this is an honor of them. It's a story that we got to from journalists and author Sally Jenkins

from her book, The Real All-Americans. I mean, football is as old as the Celtic civilizations. I mean, you can trace primal games of, you know, Danish invaders kicking skulls around the shores of England. I mean... That's not football. That's just skull kicking. That's a different...

But organized football is really a creation of the 1860s in this country. It's a post-Civil war creation. It comes along just really a couple of years after, you know, the last great conquering armies settle the West.

Basically, she says you had these kids whose parents had fought in the Civil War, and then some of them had gone west to fight the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Rapho, the Apaches, and now those wars were winding down, which oddly enough created kind of an issue for young men at the time. If you're a young

student, say, back east, at a fancy school like Harvard, how are you going to prove your own toughness? I mean, your older brother, your father, they may be fought at Gettysburg, batt a little bighorn. What the hell have you done? The American frontier experience was over. There was this feeling among a lot of intellectuals that American men were losing their masculinity. They were being feminized in a sense. And so, according to historian David Adams, you just heard, those kids were desperate for opportunities to man up. There was this cult of manned. Around this time, says David Adams, you see a bunch of violent sports take off, and in particular, for our purposes.

You see these kids at Harvard and Yale getting together and knocking the snot out of each other in this game that's kind of like rugby, but just more violent. The game used to be basically brutality. The origin of football was such a profound, different game. Writer Chuck Closterman before him, historian Dr. Conrad Crane. You know, a first down instead of 10 yards was only 5 yards. He had 3 downs to get 5 yards. And basically all the teams

did was sort of slam into each other and try to move the ball incrementally. It was almost as if every play of the entire game was a goal line stand. You know, the metaphor people always use when discussing football, of course, is military. It's the idea of taking land and giving

land. Well, the origin of football, that was even amplified. There were formations and strategies and that kind of thing, but it was pure, like, right out of Napoleon's military playbook, where you concentrate your force. Yeah, my shoulder next to your shoulder, neck to his shoulder. It's like, it's a line. Yeah, like you bunch up all your men and then pierce the other guy's army. Yeah. That was the basic idea. And so you just end up with piles of guys.

Yeah, and inside those piles. There's all kinds of things that go on in those scrums. I mean, there's kick and there's bite and there's gouging. Eye gouging and crotch kicking and head wrenching. Remember we were talking about Harvard boys doing this? I have to work to imagine that because I think of Harvard and Yale now, and I think of like... Pencil-neck geeks? Yeah.

I don't think of them as big guys. Well, at the time, they were the... I mean, there were all these wonderful stories about these chops that they would eat for dinner. I mean, they were drinking milk by the gallon, and the ivies were the great power of the time physically as well as intellectually. But then along comes this school. This tiny little school founded in 1879 in the middle of nowhere. that if you're a football fan or just a fan of American history

kind of changed everything. Where was Carlyle? Carlisle was in Pennsylvania, right, very close to Gettysburg. Let's go there. So tell me about what is the... So when was it formed and what was it there? The Carlisle Indian School is formed by a former...

Well, actually, he was an active military officer at the time named Richard Henry Pratt. Big guy, shock of white hair, large nose. Pratt had served gallantly, quite gallantly, in the Civil War. and then he had actually served out West in Oklahoma territory. He had fought American Indians himself. And it was after winning a lot of those fights, too many of those fights, really.

We're talking 1870s now, that Pratt had a change of heart, and he suddenly became concerned about the very people he had just been fighting. The fact of the matter is that Indians were in very, very desperate situation. The bison were almost extinct. They were being pushed on to reservations. and population had fallen to its almost all-time low. Pratt and a lot of other policymakers came to the conclusion that something had to happen fast or Indians would literally become extinct.

They would, in fact, become the vanishing race. And so Pratt... He comes to Washington with an idea. His idea was to start a boarding school, specifically for American Indian children, That was kind of a radical experiment. Children would be taken, removed for several years at a time. They would be stripped of their, what was called, their savage heritage, and they would be civilized.

I.e., they would be whitatized. It was forcible assimilation. Pratt had a slogan, Kill the Indian, save the man. That's Barbara Landis. Carlisle Indian School Biographer. We went up to Carlisle to talk with her and her colleague Kara Curtis. And they told us that Pratt basically made that pitch.

Kill the Indian, save the man. Not just to Congress, but directly to American Indian families all over the country. I want your son? How does that work? I want your children because white people are going to keep coming and coming. They want to settle in your lands. They want to take your lands. And you need to learn how to deal with these people. So we need to teach your children how to speak English. We need to teach them how to communicate with the white man so that when the white man comes

and tries to get you to sign away the Black Hills, you won't find out. fall for it again. And it was a convincing argument. Well, you know, back in those days, you're talking about survival over here. Would you mind introducing yourself? Okay, my name is Joe American Horse. I'm 79 years old, and I'm a grandson of Chief American Horse. Joe lives near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He's Lakota. He told us the story about his grandfather, who was a famous Lakota chief. In the 1890s, his grandpa led a delegation of American Indians to Washington. Well, he went to Washington. DC. And he was down there, but he said a lot of people down there. Joe says his grandpa had this moment where he was just stunned by how many white people there were.

His phrase was, they're like ants. And pretty soon they're going to come to our area. So he had the idea of trying to send his kids to school so they can intermingle or intercept it, whatever. Basically, Joe says his grandpa just had this realization. We can't go back. We've got to go forward. it seemed to him Carlisle was the way forward. So where are we going now? This is our photo archive.

As kids were admitted, here's how it would work. They would come in and they'd immediately have their picture taken on arrival. Then they'd be given an extreme makeover, which would also be photographed. Okay. This is Tom Torlino. Wow. So this is Tom Torlino as he comes in. Barbara showed us a picture of a Navajo kid looking maybe 18 years.

This is 1882. This is when he arrived. So he's got kind of dark skin, high cheat bones. He has long, and you hear you can see. Earrings. He's wearing elaborate necklace. It looks like it might be made of bone. And he's wrapped in a blanket.

And then... And then here he is. And a suit with clean cut hair. In the second picture, his hair is very short, not long. No blanket. He's wearing a three-piece suit. Sitting there with a cravat and a spread collar and a parted hair. Wow, it's like in a snapshot you have Tom Indian.

Tom Indian, Tom white man. And Sophie. Joe American Horse said his family saw that transformation firsthand. And Sophie was there in Carlisle for five years. And when she came back, she looks like a white woman. You know, she had a real tiny waist and bonnet and everything. And she can't speak likeota. She forgot.

Uh-huh. Just think about this for a second. Just think about this. We spoke with one guy, a professor Eric Anderson, who teaches. teaches at Haskell, he's also part Potawatomi. Just imagine the parents, he says, the first time they see their kids. Parents are seeing their students marched around in essentially the uniforms of what had not very long before for many of the tribes been the uniform of the enemy. At the very least, I think that would be startling.

In any case, according to Sally Jenkins, after the kids were recroped and redressed, Pratt would run them through a bunch of drills. I mean, Carlisle was a little military academy, and the Indian kids were so unhealthy at first. They had been put on an unfamiliar diet. They had been sleeping indoors for the first time in their lives, and a lot of them were getting sick. I mean, we know that in the 39-year history of the school, at least 200 kids died of disease or poor health or even homesickness. And so Pratt was constantly trying to get the kids outside. And at a certain point, he had hired some teachers.

And Sally thinks that one of those hires. Probably one of the first dormitory masters. This guy who had formerly taught at an Ivy League school, he showed the Carlisle Indian kids, this game that the kids at Harvard were playing. Maybe he thought it would toughen him up. Who knows? But suddenly, they were playing football. Now, keep in mind, this was, you know, at a point talking 1882, where football's barely a thing. Not so many schools had teams.

There wasn't such a thing as a head coach. back then. They were volunteer coaches who tended to be students or ex-students. But the Carlyle kids self-organized, level the field start to play. They even start to scrimmage some kids across town. And at one of those games, according to Barbara. Stacey Matluck, who was a Pawnee student at Carlyle, later became a Pawnee Chief. He broke his leg playing football. And Pratt said, that's it. No more football. Because in his mind, he was trying to civilize these kids and football was doing the opposite. But a short time later, says David Adams.

Approximately three dozen Carlisle boys came in to Pratt's office and they said, we want to play football. Do we know what they said exactly? We don't have the exact words. But Pratt says at one point, he says, while they stood around my desk, and I'm quoting here, while they stood around my desk, their black eyes intensely watching me. He says, the orator gave practically all the arguments in favor of our contending an outside football and ended up requesting

the removal of the embargo. According to his memoir, Pratt was sort of bowled over by the eloquence and passion of the appeal. So he said, okay. You can play, if you do these two things. One, he says, never slug. People who are looking on will say

that's the Indian of it. Just see them. They're savages and you can't get it out of them. Okay. And the other one was you have to beat the best teams in America. And at that early point in American football, far and away the most powerful team was Yale. Which brings us to October 24, 1896. It's a raw fall day in New York. They played in New York?

Yes, at the old polo grounds. Apparently there was about 4,000 people in the stands, including... A handful of newspaper men, New York newspaper men. Really? I mean, it was a big story. How did they publicize it? What did they say? Well, the newspapers became incredibly intrigued. On one side were the undergraduates of an old and great university.

Ilah! Ila! Yeah! They represent physically the perfection of modern athletics and intellectually the culture and refinement of the best modern American life. On the other side, Niliwaka-Kawawai, whoopra, who are we? Kala, Kala, Kala. It was the aboriginy, the real son of the forest and plain. The red skin of history, of story of war, developed or veneered, as the case may be, by education. And if you read the newspaper stories, they're written as, they're written in this kind of blood-curdling, shot through with Indian clichés, you know.

Here come the Redskins. Right, right. According to David Adams in one paper. There's a reference to yodling, the writer said that the fans were yodling in that Indian fashion. I mean, try to put yourself in the shoes of a New Yorker in the early 1880s. Your contact with an American Indian was in a Wild West show. It was theater. And here comes a football game.

and all of these American Indian kids run onto the field. And there's literally an instance in one of the first games where someone in the audience says, well, they look just like our boys. Because, of course, that's what Brat wanted. Now, one thing that was immediately clear to everyone in attendance when they saw the Carlisle players was that they were physically outmatched.

Their average weight is 164. Exactly 20 pounds lighter to a man. The impression going in is that it'll be an absolute smear job. Or at the very least, the odds were heavily against. against them. But three minutes into the game, in the midst of a big pile up, a Yaleie fumbles the ball, it comes squirting out, Carlisle guy picks it up, and runs the entire length of the field, 63 yards, and scores a touchdown. Now, nobody had scored on Yale in seven games. They They were furious, so what they do is they use their bulk to slowly push the pile down

the field. Twice to take the lead. And with three minutes left, Yale is up 12 to 6. Carlisle has the ball. Carlisle running back charges the pile and gets clobber, falls backwards, and just as he's about to hit the earth, he laterals the ball to a teammate who grabs it, runs around the scrum. entire length of the field and scores. Carlisle scores a touchdown

that would have tied the game. But it's called back by a referee who was a Yale man. Why? The call was that the referee claimed that a whistle had blown the play dead.

And what was the crowd's reaction? Well, they were furious. Yes. There was bullying and hooting. Everyone knew it was a terrible miscarriage of justice. And some of the Carlisle players said, we're going to walk out of here. We are leaving this game.

But according to David, at the last moment, Pratt runs down from the stands, comes onto the field and says, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second, wait. Don't forget rule number one. Be a gentleman. Pratt did not want this game to end because of their tempers, even though they'd been wronged by that call. So the Carlisle boys finished the game. And when they walk off the field, they get a standing ovation.

Carlisle wins incredible respect and renowned. in the aftermath of the game. In fact, one of the newspaper men... After another Carlisle Yale game where something similar happened... ...wrote something to the effect of Carlisle could beat 11 Yale men, but they couldn't beat 11 Yale men and a Yale referee. Whoa. Yes.

After the Yale game of 1896, Pratt is committed. Pratt believes that it's the greatest thing that can happen to his school. It is an instant way to do what he's been struggling to do for 15 years. years at the Carlisle School, which is to prove the value of these American Indian kids against their white peers. To prove the value or to quote civilize them? Well, both. To civilize them, but also to prove that given education and equal opportunity, they were the equal of their white peers. I mean, he was, for all of his forcible assimilation methods, which were, you know, to remain extremely cruel and destructive, he truly believed in the concept of, of, of, of, you know,

racial equality. The complicatedness of Pratt and of the whole Carlisle idea kept smacking us in the face as we were putting this show together. I mean on the one hand there were clearly students who felt that Carlyle was prison. In fact Barbara Landis when she took us on a tour of the grounds of the former Carlyle Indian school she said that kids would even set fire to the buildings. Yeah some did burn down which is kind of typical on Indian campuses. A lot of fires and burning buildings Why? It's a form of resistance.

On the other hand, when we started looking around for original archival recordings of some of the earliest Carlisle players, pretty much the only recording we could find. This tape we would like for it to be as much of your making as possible. Was this oral history with a guy named... Your name, your full name is... Albert Andrew Exendine.

Albert Exendine. The interview was done in the early 70s when he was 88. He entered the school. Just before 1899. You were 15 years old. Yes, ma'am. I can't really play you too much of this because the audio quality is really bad. But in the interview, Pratt comes up.

And Exendine talks about him with a great deal of affection and gratitude. We call him the father of Indian education. We call him the father of Indian education. Oh, he was a wonderful man. So he's a tough figure, Pratt. He's got a very mixed legacy. I mean, I like to say Pratt was his country. Whatever you think of him, he was his country.

So, okay, so 1896, he gets the bug. Like, he sees football's good PR. Yes. What happens next? Well, he hires, he begins looking around for coaches, full-time coaches to come in and coach the team. And he winds up with a Cornell grad named Pop Warner. Glenn Pop Warner.

Now, Pop Warner was an interesting guy. Is this Pop? Just to give you a visual. Whoa! Barbara and Carrey showed us pictures. It looks kind of like Mike Ditka, if Mike Ditka had Einstein's hair. Pop's a little bit of an outlier. He's got these Texas roots.

He's a bit of a rogue. It can be kind of vulgar. He likes to party a little bit. He likes to gamble. Really? And that is exactly what he does, inspecting. spectacular fashion when he gets to Carlisle. Because Pop Warner looks at his squad and he realizes that...

Sure, they're fast, they got hard. But they're underweight and they're small. Way small. You know, while they might occasionally force a tie with a Yale if they, you know, half killed themselves physically, they weren't going to beat the Ivy League on any kind of consistent basis without doing something different. And there was a very fine line between innovation and cheating. And Pop Warner starts exploiting that line absolutely as hard as he can.

And he comes up with the trick play. For example, 1903. Pop Warner devises the hidden ball trick. What is that? The hidden ball trick is the quarterback takes the ball and actually behind this huge pile of men tucks it under another guy's sweater. While the big pile of men is struggling in the ball. mud in the center of the field, not knowing quite where the football is, but believing it's

somewhere in the middle of the pile. Here's this kid who squirts around the end with the football hidden under his jersey, and he's 30 yards downfield before anybody realizes it. And how does he keep the ball from falling out of his jersey onto the floor? I think they actually sewed the jersey so that the ball would stay in there without falling out. So they made a cheating pocket? They made a cheating pocket. Was that legal? Did they get a legitimate touch now? Was it legal, you ask. Pop Warner would have said there was nothing in the rulebook against it. Another thing he does, which actually works, brilliantly, is he sows footballs onto the front of their jerseys, which were really bulky sweaters at the time. He sows leather football-shaped patches onto the

front of their jerseys in order to try to disguise who's got the ball. Really? Against Harvard. And the Harvard coach goes insane. Well, I would too. I mean, like having semi-pregant players? That's amazing. But Harvard did not take this lying down. Harvard retaliates by painting the footballs the same color as their jerseys. It's maroon everywhere.

So when they held the ball against their chest, the ball basically, well, you can't see it. I mean, they all broke the rules. American football is essentially a rule-breaking experience, as opposed to British football, which didn't have referees. At least initially, British football ran on the honor system. But with American football, the refs were there practically from the beginning. And she says it was largely a response to the brutality of the game, but also to the kind of rule bending that you saw from Pop Warner and the Carlisle Indians. Every time Pop Warner came up with an innovation, the next year there was a rule against it.

So immediately the Ivy League would get together and pass a rule and say, okay, no more of that. And that's how the rule book really burges in American football. And it's thanks to Pop Warner's slights of hand. And Pop Warner's greatest sleight of hand, and maybe the Carlisle Indian's most soaring moment, and I mean that literally, happened at a moment when the game almost disappeared. That's coming up. Start of message. Yes, this is David Adam. This is Conrad Crane.

I got an email message asking me to read credit text. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Okay, there it is. Hope you can use that. Take care. End of message.

Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Boomeran. I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. And getting back to our story on the Carlisle Indian School and the birth of the modern game of football, one of the most important moments in this story happens at a time when football, it was right on the edge of disappearing. talking about 1905. This was the most violent year in football to this point.

19 people died on the football. 19? 1 9. 1-9. 1-death is a lot. 19? That's crazy. Yeah.

Because what would happen is that Carlis would try and do these things to sort of open up the game. The ivies would consistently respond by making the game more about brute force, more about violence. So you had all these deaths. And suddenly all the major programs were spooked. You know, Columbia pulls their football team. Harvard even thinks about doing that. And so, and this is kind of odd, into the phrase steps the president of the United States of America, Teddy Roosevelt. Because he was a fan, according to Conrad Crane.

He liked football. He liked the manly aspects of it, the tough aspects of it. But nobody liked people dying. And then there was his kid. His son was playing and getting beat up pretty badly as well. Broke his nose, slid his eyebrow. In one game, he got knocked out cold. So after the violence of 05, the president calls the presidents of all these colleges and so on to Washington.

And according to David Adams, he basically tells them that the rules had to be rewritten. It had to become a little bit more safe at least, or it would be banned. And out of that, we see a couple of rule changes. First, the schools decide, in order to loosen up the pile, so to speak, they're going to tinker with the down yardage ratio. Instead of going from three downs to gain five yards, it becomes. comes three downs to gain 10 yards. Three downs to get 10 yards or four downs to get 10 yards? Four would come a couple years later.

But the second rule change, which is maybe the most important for our story, is for the first time, they legalize the ability to move the ball through the free-floating air that surrounds us all. So where do we go? What's the next? So if I could place you in a moment, unless there's a moment before this you'd like to hit. I believe November 23rd, 1907. Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Can you set the scene? Well, the scene, from the standpoint of broader American history, things have gone airborne. You mean Wilbur and Orville, right? I'm talking about not just them, but I'm talking about hot air balloons. There are aeronautical experiments happening really all over the world in France. Everyone is experimenting with flying machines. Things are going up in the air. But not so fast with football, because...

When the rule committee had made that rule about forward passing, they had also hedged a little bit saying, if you throw a forward pass and your receiver doesn't catch it, you are penalized 15 yards, which back in the day was a monster amount, so nobody threw the ball. It was too risky. But story goes, as soon as that rule got passed, Pop Warner goes back to his garage. It's always a garage, of course, with a ball,

and he starts experimenting, and he starts to think, what would be the most efficient way to toss this thing? People have to understand that the footballs in those days are not the footballs we have today with a nice, you know, whatever the oblate spheroid or whatever they call it, with the nice points and things. These are rugby balls. She's sort of imagine a deflated basketball. They're thicker in the middle. They're not as well-shaped. They're really tough to get your hand on to throw right. And in 1906, there's a tiny bit of tape in Albert Exendine's oral history where he talks about this. In 1906, he says, Pop called all the players together. He tells them,

I think, boys, you will have to learn to spiral the ball. He says, I think you're going to have to learn to spiral the ball. To spiral. Because if you throw the ball in a spiral, it gets ten times less air drag than if you throw it end over end. Plus, it's easier to catch. Yeah. They start experimenting with it a little bit in 1906, but they come out in 1907 as a throwing offense. Which gets us to that game.

November 23rd, 1907, Carlyle plays the University of Shurbanes. Chicago last game of the season, we're in Chicago, and the Chicago team is arguably the best in the nation. The best. I don't think it's even arguable. Well, Carlisle's good at this point, though. Yeah, but Chicago's like Stagfield. And there are 27,000 people in the stance. Well, what happened was the Chicago players had decided to try to defeat Carlisle's innovative forward passing by just knocking the crap out of their receivers every time they came off the line of scrimmage. And so Carlisle's greatest receiver, Albert Exendine, our guy, had been stymied the entire game

because the minute the ball was snapped, the Chicago players would hit him and try to throw him down or knock him out of bounds. So Pop Warner said to Exendine, here's what we're going to do. Next time they hit you out of bounds, sneak around the bench and get back on the field. By some accounts, this was Exendine's idea, but whoever thought of it, on the next play. Albert Exedine, as expected, ends up out of bounds. but he keeps running. He runs around the back of the bench. Runs around the spectators,

maybe around the band. And comes back on the field. Right at that moment? Hauser, the quarterback of Carlisle. Let's loose a vicious spiral. Can I have you read something? Sure. Hold on.

This is Sally's description of that moment from her book, The Real All-Americans. For a moment, it was a frozen scene in a stage drama. The ball hung in the air. a tantalizing possibility. Could Exendine reach it? Would he catch it?

Or drop it? Defenders wheeled and stared downfield. Spectators watching from the stands found that the breath had died in their collective throats. The spiraling ball seemed to defy physics. What made it stay up? When would it come down?

In that long moment, 27,000 spectators mashed together on benches and crammed on platforms may have felt their loyalty to the home team evaporate in the grip of a powerful new emotion. They may have noticed something they never had before,

that a ball, traveling through space, traces a profoundly elegant path. They may have realized something else, that it was beautiful. The ball struck its human target. Exendine caught the pass all alone and trotted over the Chicago goal line. The stadium exploded in sound and motion.

It was the game breaker. The rest was just anti-climact. climax. The final score was 18 to 4 for Carlisle. But the very next year, the Ivy League passes a rule that you can't leave the field and then come back on to the field and play again. Yes, that's where that rule comes from. And I got to say that that description of the ball in the air is, is timeless in a way. That's exactly why football is still beautiful at times. That's when Carlisle in 1907 is when American football becomes the sport that you watch today. Oh, wow, is this the field? This is the field? This is the field.

Can we get out? Yeah. After we spent an entire day looking at pictures of, you know, Albert X-Nine and Pratt and Pop Warner and Dilo Sloan Wolf and Tom Dorino and all these Carlyle players, Barbara and Kara took us to the field where they practiced. All right, so this is the Carlyle Indian School football field. Covered in snow. Like 10 degrees out here. Really, really bright sun coming off the snow. And it's just empty.

And we just kind of walked around and tried to imagine all the stuff we'd just seen in photos. It was a little bit like walking among ghosts. Yeah. That's the sound of the flag blowing in the background. I remember standing on that field and having this thought that I couldn't quite articulate. But later, Eric Anderson, that professor from Haskell, was a member of the Pottawatum Nation, he sort of put his finger on it. And he essentially said that there's a lot of room on a football field.

I mean, there's room for anger and war and violence, but there's also room for pride. And a kind of coming together. That's not a Pratt coming together, where one side gets erased, but it is a coming together. Yeah, I mean, there is a middle ground. Clearly, it's more than a game. The stakes are higher than that.

You know, will we... as Indian people be accepted on our own terms. And also in our ability to meet you halfway, will we be accepted through this as the vehicle? It's clearly more than a game. A lot of people to thank for this episode. We had original music made for us for that episode from Morgan O'Kane. You can hear him right here playing the banjo.

That's Morgan O-K-A-N-E music.com. Check him out. Also, we had original music from Austin musician, shaky graves, and the Albert Exendine tape that we played is from the Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Thanks also to the Cumberland County Historical Society in the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center where you can go and see tons of photos

from both archives, or you can come to us. On our website, RadioLab.org, we have a ton of old archival football picks, a ton of those before and after pictures from the... Amazing. Really amazing. And we also have a link to Sally Jenkins' book, which is highly recommend the Real All-Americans. That's on our site, RadioLab.org.

Thanks also to Reggie Kathy and to Scott Graham, to Noah Robbins, to Michael Churness, to Matt Delapina, Cole Wimpy, to J.R. McCarthy, to Nick Cappodice. Colin and Michelle Campbell. Ed Heyber. And special thanks, very special thanks, to our amazing volunteer cheer squad that came out and weathered the Brooklyn cold to scream and holler and bring this story to life.

And speaking of that, very special thanks to Brenna Farrell, who found the story and produced it with us. And production support from Damiano Marquetti. So that was part of an episode called American Football that we put together at Radio Lab. A few years back, hope you enjoyed it. There's more of that episode. It's actually some great interviews that happened in the second half that you can hear at RadioLab.org. I'm Chad Ibum Rod. Thanks for listening. Go Eagles.

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