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Professional football - Canada vs. United States
By
Bob Orrick
As the United States version of professional football enters its countdown to the Super Bowl to be played Sunday, 26 January in San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, perhaps a look at the sport both north and south of the Canadian-American border is in order.
First, the game of football - the kind played with the pointed ball - grew out of a frustrated soccer [football, round ball type] English player [William Webb Ellis] who in a moment of weakness picked up the football [soccer, round ball] and began to run toward the opposing team's end of the field [pitch]; however, he was soon tackled. As most players stood around in utter amazement at this most grievous lack of proper conduct, the frustrated soccer [football, round ball] player unknowingly sowed the seeds that would become rugby. Rugby - the English version not the Australian derivative - aspirants saw that in order for a player to be reasonably successful at carrying the ball, it needed to be pointed and not round. A round ball [football, the round type] too easily fell from the player's hands; hence, the ball was lengthened somewhat and given 'pointy ends.' In time, the rules of football [soccer style] changed and the eleven man side [football, soccer type] increased to fifteen for rugby. The die-hard football [soccer types] stayed with their non-exciting, boring game while the rugby aspirants took off - literally and figuratively - and the game was on. Where soccer [the round ball game] featured cross-pitch [field] passing combined with back passing and a 'do-not-touch-another-player' policy, the new game of rugby featured gung-ho players hell-bent-for-leather as they smacked each other about and had a heck of a lot of fun. Rugby had arrived in full bloom. The year was 1823 and the first game was played in a town with the unlikely name of Rugby. What a coincidence that the game that is now played in more than one hundred countries would carry as its name the name of the town that gave the sport birth. What imagination!
After a period of gestation in Merry Olde England, the British took their new sport abroad to the New World. The British garrison in Montreal played a series of games against Montreal's McGill University. The McGill gang so liked the sport that they arranged a game versus Harvard University in the United States. The game had truly become international in scope. The year was 1874.
Both the Canadian version of football - the pointy ball type - and the American version with the same ball [the Yanks fancy a slightly smaller ball, not as fat as the hardy Canadian ball] came about because of that McGill-Harvard game. A check into the history of both Canadian and American football reveals that the story does not end there. The American version differs from the Canadian version in that the dates and places of the game of football [pointy type ball] differ.
But what is football? Long before the game was taken over by money-hungry owners willing to shell out gazillions of dollars to equally-money hungry players, [more so in the States than in Canada] the game was amateur in status. The professional version came about, in the U.S. at least, on 12 November 1892 when a player from the Allegheny Athletic Association [AAA] was paid the staggering sum of five hundred dollars to suit up for the AAA side. The AAA team's opponents on that infamous day were a team from Pittsburgh. They were astounded that a player would stoop so low as to accept a 'bribe' to play a game that all others to that time enjoyed for the sheer sport of the play. "Zounds, what was happening?" the Pittsburgh group asked in amazement. How could such corruption come about in the amateur game of football? They did not dwell on the subject long before they realised that they, too, had better find and pay players if they wanted to be competitive. Professional football had arrived in all its trappings. By the way, the five hundred dollars was paid to a William [Pudge] Heffelinger; documents confirming that fact came to light not too many years ago. Another source suggests that the first professional football game played in the U.S.A. was in 1895 at a place called Latrobe, Pennsylvania between a Latrobe team and one from Jeannette, Pennsylvania. In any event, professional football had sprung from the natural grass field.
According to the National Football League [NFL] website, the NFL came about on 06 November 1869 when Rutgers played Princeton. This is where the American and Canadian versions of the origin of the sport of football [pointy ball] differ. The Yanks claim the aforementioned date as the start of the NFL, while the Canadians claim that the British, sometime subsequent to 1823, introduced the sport of rugby to Canada and eventually to the U.S.A. with the McGill-Harvard 1874 game, five years after the Americans claim the NFL set up shop. The question is: which side is 'off-side'? Perhaps too many players and league officials were tackled 'out of bounds' with the result that a few eggs were scrambled. Does it matter when or where the game began in North America? Today, both the Canadian Football League [CFL] and the National Football League are healthy and drawing sizeable crowds.
In Canada, the right to claim the title of champion goes to the winner of the annual Grey Cup game. The Grey Cup [1909] is the oldest sport trophy in North America being decades longer in the tooth than the NFL's Super Bowl. The Super Bowl came about in 1970 with the merger of the older National Football League and the American Football League [AFL]. The upstart AFL had opened its doors to the American football crowd in 1960; it was an eight-team league. Each the NFL and AFL competed for fan loyalty and each held its championship game at season's end. In 1966 the two leagues agreed to merge in 1970 with two conferences named the National and American. The Super Bowl, at times anything but super, was the result. Some have described the Super Bowl as the Super Bore. The Grey Cup, on the other hand, pits the eastern and western conferences of the CFL head to head in a no-holds-barred, knock-'em-down, drag-out contest that usually exceeds all expectations for excitement. The CFL with it more alluring scoring rules, three down, backfield-in-motion-toward-the-line-of-scrimmage-before-the-snap-of-the-ball, wider field and longer end zones provides pure adrenaline pumping excitement whereas in the NFL the rules tend to stymie innovative plays. The CFL with its one-yard zone between the offensive and defensive lines seems silly to proponents of the NFL who are used to seeing opposing linemen nose to nose. The Canadian twelve-man team is one more than the American's eleven-man team. Canadians do not have a 'fair catch' rule on kick-off and punt-returns as do the Americans; the receiver is fair game and an easy target for onrushing opposing players intent on sending the receiver into tomorrow. To offset the 'danger zone,' the CFL has a five-yard restraining zone that, theoretically, allows the receiver to catch the ball before being smacked hard by an opposing player. The five-yard restraining zone is more fiction than fact.
With Canadian rules, a football game is played quicker than the American game; for instance, the American quarterback has forty seconds to put the ball in play whereas his Canadian counterpart has half that time. In the CFL if a game is tied at end of regulation time, the teams play two five-minute overtime games, each with a kick-off. Teams have an equal opportunity to score and win the game. South of the border, the NFL does not have that; there, teams play overtime but the first team to score wins. There have been games in which one team - the receiving team on the kick-off - wins the game before the opposition has touched the ball. This strikes me as a bit unfair and sets up a foregone conclusion to the game's outcome.
Another difference between the two leagues is that CFL team rosters are much smaller than the NFL rosters. The NFL has about double as many players as do the CFL teams. That means the CFL players put in more time on the field doing more tasks; for instance, offensive and special teams or defensive and special teams.
In the end, any discussion about the similarities or differences between the two leagues is just that, a discussion. The Canadians play a faster game on a larger field with fewer players and more ways to score points while the Americans' game is slower, has more players, and generally bigger players and far more hype. The Americans tend to fill their stadiums to capacity whereas the Canadian teams have been known to play to less than full attendance. The exception in Canada is the Grey Cup. The largest crowd to witness a Grey Cup was in 1977 in Montreal's Olympic Stadium when 68,318 fans were shoe-horned into the 'Big Owe.'
Who will win this year's Super Bowl? Who knows but millions of fans will tune in to find out. Will the 2003 version be a 'super bowl' or a 'super bore'?
[The comments about soccer and rugby are from research and personal play. Soccer was fun to play but rugby really got the adrenaline pumping. As a player, for sheer excitement rugby wins every time. Admittedly, I have not seen NFL games on TV for years; perhaps some of the nonsensical rules have been discarded and the game dragged into the present. Note too, that some 'poetic' license has been taken in the above comments.]
Bob is hoping that readers will take the time to think about his column to the extent that they may decide to send an email to syears@senioryears.com and comment, either positively or negatively about what they have read. We will display letters at Talking Back to Bob.
Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to off-shore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
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