HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: What it was, was football - But the Trinity College program was doomed from the start
Dec. 16—TRINITY — If you think football is a violent sport today, you should've been here 135 years ago, when a game got so heated that a player for Trinity College actually challenged an opponent to a duel.
Yep, that kind of duel, with guns and everything.
Talk about unnecessary roughness.
It happened during the fall of 1888, the first year football was played at Trinity College. The college, as you may know, was in Trinity at the time but would soon move from rural Randolph County to Durham and become Duke University.
On Nov. 29, 1888 — Thanksgiving Day, no less — Trinity played the University of North Carolina on a field at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, with a crowd of about 500 curious spectators looking on. Trinity defeated the Tar Heels that day, 16-0.
Despite the one-sided score, the game was intensely fierce — maybe this is where the infamous Duke-Carolina rivalry was born — so fierce that a Trinity player formally challenged one of the Carolina men to a duel after the game. The two students even selected what were known as "seconds" — trusted friends who would accompany them to the duel and ensure a fair fight — and they agreed on a time and place.
Fortunately, in this instance, a cooler head prevailed.
He was Trinity College President John Franklin Crowell, a football fanatic who had learned the sport at Yale — considered a football juggernaut at that time — and then introduced Trinity students to the game when he came south. Crowell convinced the two feuding players that "in the intensity of football playing, such misunderstandings were perfectly natural," North Carolina sports historian Jim Sumner wrote of the incident.
No one recognized it at the time, but that near-duel may have been a harbinger of what lay ahead for Trinity College football. In that era — when players didn't wear helmets, mouthguards or protective padding — injuries, and sometimes even deaths, were not uncommon. While nobody died during any of Trinity's games, a series of negative incidents gave football the reputation of being overly violent and dangerous — an image that eventually would lead to the football program's banishment from Trinity.
In an 1889 game, for example, a North Carolina player suffered a broken leg against Trinity. Also in 1889 — perhaps during the same game — officials ejected Trinity star Tom Daniels for unsportsmanlike conduct because, in the words of his opponents, he "seemed determined to cripple our team by every means in his power," Sumner wrote.
The team's public persona was so rough-and-tumble that one Trinity player used an alias to take the field so his disapproving parents wouldn't know he played on the team.
Trinity also faced accusations of using illegal players, or "ringers," in its games, including a stud from Yale — when there was no such thing as the transfer portal — and a 225-pound railroad worker from Randolph County.
Oh, and never mind that a number of these guys were on their way to becoming Methodist ministers.
On the field, the team held its own, winning about as many games as it lost. The highlight came in 1891, when Trinity finished the season 3-0 and claimed it had won the championship of the entire South. The season included wins over North Carolina (6-4), Virginia (20-0) and Furman (96-0).
We don't mean to pooh-pooh an unblemished season, but claiming a championship after going 3-0 — even if one of those wins was a 96-0 rout — would be somewhat akin to the Carolina Panthers outscoring an opponent in the first quarter and claiming they'd won the game.
Nonetheless, one North Carolina newspaper celebrated the dubious championship by printing the official Trinity College cheer (which we promise we're not making up):
"Rah! Rah! Rah!
Hip-hoop-pee!
Fizz! Boom! Tiger'r!
Hipera! Hipera!
Trinity!"
No, we don't know what it means, either, but after reading it with pretend enthusiasm, we must admit we're pretty fired up now.
As we mentioned, though, bad things were on the horizon for Trinity College football. Even amid the excitement of moving from Trinity to Durham in 1892, the Methodist-affiliated college was coming under fire for its condonement — nay, for its celebration — of such a violent sport.
The Methodists' Western North Carolina Conference went so far as to deem intercollegiate football "a source of evil," calling for Trinity to abolish its program. The Christian Advocate, a prominent Methodist newspaper, echoed that sentiment, arguing the sport was not only brutal and detrimental to students' study habits but also fostered such sins as gambling, drinking and cussing.
Crowell, the college president who had brought football to Trinity, fought valiantly to save the program, and the student body largely sided with him. The school's board of trustees, however, jumped on the anti-football bandwagon. Crowell saw the writing on the wall and resigned in 1894.
The following year, without Crowell to stand in their way, the trustees abolished the Trinity football program — a ban that would last 23 years. Crowell's replacement, John Kilgo, strongly supported the ban, publicly stating that football was "unfit to be played by young men at college, especially at a Christian college."
When football was finally reinstated in 1918, you can imagine how students felt about the sport's return:
Hip-hoop-pee!
Jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579
