When Youth Dies for Loyalties Sake The Hallowed Memory of Love Abides.
This inscription reads as startling on the pages of a newspaper as it does in the dim light of our University Chapel.
The chapel might be the last place that you would expect to find a vital piece of our nation's sports history, but a little sleuthing will reveal just that. Our University has an important claim to the birth of modern college football, and perhaps more than a few lessons to teach us about the sport's present state.
The next time you find yourself with five minutes to burn on Central Grounds, step into the chapel. Towards the front altar in the alcove to your right hangs a large white marble tablet, engraved with two spooky knights and a solemn inscription:
In Memoriam this tablet is erected by the comrades of Archer Christian, a student of this University, who at the age of eighteen years from injuries received on the football field Died November XIV MCMIX.
Christian, it turns out, was a first-year student at the University in 1909, and a standout half-back on Virginia's football team.
According to historian John Watterson, Virginia was crushing Georgetown that afternoon in November of 1909, and Christian himself had kicked a field goal and scored the team's third touchdown to put Virginia up, 21-0. When Virginia got the ball back, it went straight into Christian's hands, and Christian went straight to the bottom of a Georgetown pile. He managed to stumble to the sideline before collapsing into a coma, and dying within hours of brain hemorrhages.
In a game played with primitive head protection and brutal tactics, death was not unheard of. In 1909, however, there was a distinct increase in the number of football related injuries and fatalities: In October, a Navy quarterback suffered a hit that paralyzed and eventually killed him, while Army left tackle Edward Byrne died of cumulative contusions to his spinal cord. Christian's death followed right on the heels of these well-publicized cases, made the front page of the New York Times and almost immediately set a match to the tinderbox that was public opinion of college football.
University of Virginia president Edwin Alderman found himself at the center of the blaze. Watterson describes Alderman as a longtime supporter of college football, which he considered "essential to the students' morale in the small and limited world of Charlottesville, Virginia." Alderman believed that further reform of the rules of the game could reduce the extreme risks -- a brave position when other high-profile universities, like Georgetown, were banning the game altogether.
One of football's most well-documented critics was John Mosby, a 75-year-old former Virginia student with a colorful past, who wrote a letter detailing his moral objections to football as a college-sanctioned sport.
Mosby, in an eerily prescient criticism, voiced his "objection to football because it was not a recreation for students but that many were making it a profession
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