Harry,

Did you read this article. It discussed the idea that Rugby was considered
as an alternative sport to football, but I don't believe it discussed Rugby
as a colligate or intercollegiate sport at U of Kansas, if it did I missed
it.

You are really grasping at straws.

"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
PocoLoco wrote:
If Harry says he introduced rugby to the midwest in the early 1900's, so
be it.
I can't believe you actually think facts are persuasive.


On Sun, 2 Oct 2005 13:33:36 -0400, "Mr. Skip Starbuck"
wrote:

Krause,

Your memory of Midwest Rugby is different than the Univ. of Kansas
JayHawk
Rugby Club's memory of Midwest Rugby.

from: http://www.jayhawkrugby.com/About.htm

" Rugby did not exist anywhere between the Mississippi River and the
Rocky Mountains until 1964. In the fall of that year, George Bunting
returned to study Law at the University of Kansas after having completed
his
undergraduate degree at Dartmouth

Ahh, I see Smithers has his nose up my butt, as usual. I'm afraid the
well-intentioned KU Rugby Club historian is wrong. In fact, there was a
Rugby Union formed among midwest universities while I was still in high
school in the east.

Here's another interesting article from the same university on the same
subject:

January 28, 1910

The Day They Almost Abolished Football

Twenty seasons after its formal introduction at the University of Kansas,
the game of football had plenty of fans – and plenty of detractors as
well. In the former category were many KU students and alumni, as well as
University Chancellor Frank Strong (although he did, apparently, have some
reservations about the sport). But in the latter zone were J.W. Gleed and
William Allen White, members of the Board of Regents and significant men
in their own rights in early twentieth-century Kansas.

And on this day in KU history, Gleed proposed and White seconded a motion
to abolish football until the rules were changed to eliminate endemic
corruption and promote player safety. Although the motion was defeated,
the Board of Regents agreed that it was “opposed to the game of football
as now conducted, believing it does not tend to clean athletics.” For the
next few months, the future of football at KU hung in the balance, and for
a while, it almost seemed that English Rugby would replace this classic
American college game.

KU’s Athletic Association had organized its first football team in
September 1890. Despite an inauspicious inaugural season that saw the
Jayhawkers lose twice to Baker (though Kansas fans claimed the second game
as a victory because of some questionable officiating), students and the
rest of the University faithful embraced the sport wholeheartedly.

The universities of the sort to which KU aspired to equal – the Ivy League
schools and Michigan for instance – all maintained top-flight football
teams, and so the University of Kansas’ supporters believed their
institution needed to develop a similarly excellent team. As a result,
football came to enjoy an immense popularity at KU. Students, alumni, and
faculty members all rallied their school spirit behind a team that over
its first two full seasons (1891-1892) enjoyed a record of 14-1-1.

These initial successes fostered the expectation that future teams would
fare equally well. When this failed to happen, Kansas boosters sought
other ways to help ensure gridiron victories. KU began recruiting paid
athletes and the team allowed players who were not passing their classes
(or were not enrolled students at all) to participate in the weekly games.

By 1895, the demise of the team’s amateurism had bred a number of critics
within the University, including English professor Edwin M. Hopkins who
had served as KU’s football coach for its very successful 1891 and 1892
seasons. Hopkins was not alone in wondering whether football on Mt. Oread
had come to “stand for brutality, for trickery; for paid players, for
profanity, for betting before games and for drinking after them.”

The brutality to which Hopkins alluded was indeed an integral part of the
game as it was played in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries. Players wore very little in the way of protective gear, even
spurning helmets. Compounding these problems was the fact that officials
enforced what few safety rules there were rather unevenly. In 1894, for
example, the officials failed to penalize Michigan’s team after one of its
players jumped (with both feet) on a Kansas player who had just scored a
touchdown.

Two years later, a player named Bert Serf from Doane College in Nebraska
was killed while making a touchdown-saving tackle against Kansas in the
final minute of a game in which he had earlier been knocked unconscious.
Serf’s death led the Kansas University Weekly to conclude, “rather than
allow this [sort of] danger to exist it would be better to abolish the
game completely.” When the paper ultimately backed off and asked instead
that the Western Inter-State University Foot Ball Association (to which KU
belonged) “adopt the needed reforms,” it fell in line with the majority of
the game’s critics.

But in 1901, KU Coach John Outland (of the Outland Trophy fame) was caught
using an ineligible player with an assumed name. Criticism of the game
began to mount again and continued to do so for the remainder of the first
decade of the twentieth century. Much of the criticism was well deserved.
After a 1903 Kansas-Nebraska game, both sides charged the other with using
ineligible players and in consequence suspended all future athletic
contests between the schools. The following year, KU Chancellor Frank
Strong had to fire Coach Harold S. Weeks for carrying on a sexual
relationship with a freshman girl.

By the end of the autumn of 1905, the University was not alone in its
skepticism about the benefits of football. Following that year’s season –
in which 18 college players from schools around the country died from
injuries sustained in games and more than 150 were hurt seriously – cries
for football’s abolition echoed from every quarter of the nation.

In December 1905, influential representatives of 62 universities met in
New York City to decide the fate of the game. They decided to keep it, but
formed the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (which later became the
National Collegiate Athletic Association) to work with the American
Football Rules Committee to make the game safer. Most of the rules that
were adopted early in 1906 (including the legalization of the forward pass
and the adoption of a neutral zone) were designed to spread out the
players so that there would be fewer pileups.

The change in the rules, coupled with KU’s entry into the Missouri Valley
Conference in 1907, eased the debate over the game’s future at the
University. But this was only temporary. Complaints about football cropped
up again during the 1909 season when it became apparent that certain KU
boosters were paying substitutes to cover the shifts of football players
when their outside jobs interfered with practices or games. (At the time,
it was acceptable for college athletes to be employed, as long as they
actually worked for the money.) In addition, the University had broken
conference rules by spending more than $400 on training tables, which
regularly featured steak dinners aimed at keeping the players healthy.

The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back came, perhaps, in the
rumor that opposing coaches had begun supplying their players with alcohol
and narcotics both to ease pain and heighten energy. Thus it was that when
the Board of Regents met on January 28, 1910, J.W. Gleed made a motion to
abolish intercollegiate football at the university. Fellow regent William
Allen White joined him in his motion.

This proposal failed to achieve majority support, but the Regents
subsequently invited representatives from the other schools in the
Missouri Valley Conference to a meeting scheduled for April 19 in which
the matter of the “betterment of the present game” might be discussed. If
the talks concluded that that the game was irretrievably corrupt, the
Regents were willing to accept the substitution of English Rugby for
football or mandate football’s outright abolition.

In the weeks that followed, the relative merits of football were debated
at all levels of the University. The Regents remained divided over the
issue even after Gleed published an attack on the game in which he alluded
to players who “get a passing grade without earning it” and maintained
that it was not “possible for men to engage in fierce hand to hand
physical struggle without arousing the smashing and destroying instinct
which comes down to us from our animal ancestors.”

Chancellor Strong, who favored the retention of football, wrote a letter
to the American Football Rules Committee encouraging them to make
substantive changes in the rules to protect collegiate players. KU Coach
Bert Kennedy asserted that the game was no more dangerous than any other
sport at the University and argued that his “football players [were] among
the manliest men in the school.” College Dean Olin Templin, however, hoped
that rugby would replace football and insisted that “from a spectator’s
point of view [English Rugby was] much the better game.”

Even W.H. Stubbs, the governor of Kansas, entered the fray and announced
his opposition to football in April 1910. As might be expected from a
politician, he waffled somewhat. When addressing a crowd of students, he
claimed to “like clean American sports,” and announced that the “old
American game is good enough for me.”

KU students, for their part, almost universally favored retaining football
and soon launched, as the Kansan reported, “an open campaign against
rugby.” Members of the football team, Coach Kennedy, and Dr. James
Naismith, the inventor of basketball and KU’s director of physical
culture, assisted the students in this effort. Naismith gave a resounding
endorsement of the contested sport when he announced at a mass meeting
that he had “always believed that football [was] the typical college
game.” Shortly thereafter, a “football ticket” was organized to run in
student government elections, and all of its candidates won.

Nonetheless, student hopes for the preservation of KU football began to
dwindle in early April when word leaked out that Coach Kennedy would
devote the team’s spring practices to teaching his players the game of
rugby. Within days, many students had grown downright despondent and
started to assume that their cause was lost. The Kansan even published an
article explaining the rules of rugby to the students so that they would
understand what it was they had been opposing.

This “Monday mourning” turned out to be premature. On April 19, 1910, the
schools of the Missouri Valley Conference voted to retain their football
teams. However, the conference did institute some rules it hoped would
de-emphasize the importance of football at its respective universities.
The representatives of the schools banned freshmen from playing on the
varsity football squad, proscribed Thanksgiving Day football games,
mandated that all intercollegiate games be played on college campuses, and
forbade the hiring of any coach who was not a “regular member of the
teaching staff employed by the governing board of the institution, for the
full academic year.”

Although the changes made little difference in the questionable practices
of KU’s football team, the game was never again threatened at the
University. (The following year, for example, a man named Henry Ahrens
“was induced to [play football for] the University by offers of payment in
one fashion or another” and managed to masquerade as a law school student
while he was on the team. When the matter was discovered, the Board of
Regents hinted that it might again “seriously [consider] the abolition of
football,” but ultimately did not.)

Ironically enough, despite all of the emphasis placed on football in the
early years and the cheating that accompanied it, KU never developed into
a football powerhouse in the manner that the flagship universities of the
states immediately to the north and south of Kansas did. And while all
this attention was focused on football, KU quietly developed a basketball
program that would rank among the very best in the nation. If KU could not
say it achieved the greatness of Notre Dame, Michigan, or Alabama in the
sport in which it so badly wanted to excel, its ability to claim
membership in the same basketball fraternity as UCLA, Duke, and Kentucky
proved to be a more than adequate consolation prize.


- - -


Isn't it interesting that at least 75% of "Smithers" life on usenet is
spent with his nose up my butt...