Oklahoma Sooner Football

When referring to Oklahoma Football it is generally referred to as Bud Wilkinson having created the "monster" of a program. While he may have fed it well, the hunger for football has always been raging in Oklahoma, even during the fall of 1895. Just six years after settlers charged as "Boomers" and "Sooners" across the border in the land run the game of football was getting ready to make its first official appearance. The absurdity of that moment was almost matched by the absurdity of Oklahoma Territorial University's first game.

As the early November kickoff for the first ever Oklahoma Football game emerged John Harts realized that he had a problem, he was a few players short of fielding a legally competitive squad. Harts quickly fixed the problem by throwing the barber, Bud Risinger, in the game at tackle even though he was not an official student of the school. The game was brutal and almost an insanely vicious at the time, another parallel to the times in the region off of the football field. During the land runs of the 1890s the New York Herald observed that "It is an astonishing thing that men will fight harder for $500 worth of land than they will for $10,000 in money."

In the same breath it was equally astonishing the brutality that men endured to play a game that was still newborn and without a future career possibility. Prior to this point, football in America had lived a tumultuous existence. According to Richard Whittingham's book, The Rites of Autumn, "a form of association football called 'ballown' is played in Princeton" in 1820. No rules or regulations were set for the game for many years and Harvard University actually banned the sport for 11 years from 1860 to 1871 due to its violent nature.

The first college football game ever played is believed to be between Princeton and Rutgers Universities in 1869 with Rutgers winning 6-4 in a game that more resembled soccer than modern-day American Football. In 1873, representatives from Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Columbia met to finally incorporate a set of rules to the outlaw game. Whittingham tells us these rules consisted of:

• Scores only being made by kicking or butting the ball with the head across the opponent's goal line and under the crossbar.

• Players cannot run with the ball.

• Passes can only be made laterally or backward.

• Tackling below the waist is prohibited.

• The field of play is 140 yards long and 70 yards wide.

• There are to be two 45 minute periods.

The first game in the south was between Washington & Lee and Virginia Military Institute, a game in which both squads exploited something that the rules committee's forgot to discuss as they both fielded about 50 players. In 1876, representatives from Harvard and Yale met to discuss rules and form the Intercollegiate Football Association which adopted more rugby-like rules, including running with the ball and adopting the oval-shaped ball instead of the round soccer-ball.

This first game day was a rough day for the University squad, not yet officially nicknamed, as they not only were shutout, but they didn't score a point. The opening kickoff was returned 50 yards by Bert Dunn who was somewhat miffed by how rudely he was tackled to the ground. Several members of the team got injured and quit during the second half. The Oklahoma City squad loaned them the players to finish the game and the University squad even played a spectator on the line in the second half, after all, no pads were required at the time.

By all accounts, it was an incredibly rough game and one that Sooner fans of today would fill the lines of a call in show to vent about. Final score, Oklahoma City Town Team 34- The University of Oklahoma 0, a very inauspicious start to what would become one of the top five programs of all time. However, the University boys weren't completely soured on the taste of this exciting, but brutal game. Harold Keith recounted their thoughts in Oklahoma Kickoff: "A north-south gridiron was laid out on the prairie north of the lone university building. The university's first stadium was a single strand of smooth wire fence strung around this playing rectangle. Most of the players wore brown overalls cut off at the knees and padded in front with mother's quilting. A few had regular uniforms. ... Old-timers say the only difference between this event and Custer's massacre, which had occurred only nineteen years earlier, was that in the football game there were survivors from both sides. Most of the university players trooped disconsolately to Risinger's barber shop where they washed, dressed each other's wounds, and excitedly discussed the contest. ... Harvey Short, one of the university students who saw the contest as a spectator, let the field of battle shaking his head positively. 'That was the roughest thing I had ever seen,' recalled Short, 'I told myself right there they'd never catch me doing anything like that.' One year later he became a regular at halfback."

It was obviously no smashing success or anything that anybody would have considered at the time to be the birth of a monster. However, that is exactly what it was, the birth of something that isn't easily duplicated around the country. This was the birth of a collegiate athletics monster.