Bloody Monday (Harvard)
Bloody Monday is about an annual Harvard football tradition.
“Bloody Monday,” as it came to be known, was a tradition at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dating back to the 1700’s. In an open field known as “the Delta,” where currently stands Memorial Hall, sophomores and freshmen would meet annually on the first Monday of the school year and engage in a free-for-all wrestling match. Sometime in the 1800’s, a ball was added and would be placed between the two groups and each would try to move across the opposing side’s goal line. This game was a precursor to the intercollegiate football that would soon after take hold of the Ivy League. In 1925, with the game well established in the college community, the Harvard Crimson paper still referred to this annual tradition as a “football match.”[1]
Much like the first football games played at universities such as Rutgers, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, there were not many rules, if any at all. The event always devolved into a massive fight between the competing students, with injuries, torn clothing, and even arrests being the norm. In 1903, a reporter from the New York Times noted that “black eyes and bruises were seen everywhere, and everyone received a liberal smudge of mother earth.”[2] In what is considered the first recorded account of a Harvard football game, James C. Richmond, in 1827 wrote a poem entitled “The Battle of the Delta.”
The Freshmen’s wrath, to Sophs the direful spring
Of shins unnumbered bruised, great goddess sing;
Let fire and music in my song be mated,
Pure fire and music unsophisticated.
Through warlike crowds a devious way it wins,
And advancing shins meet advancing shins;
Across the rampart many a hero bounds;
But sing Apollo! In can sing no more,
For Mars advancing threw the dust before.[3]
The game that would eventually evolve from this spectacle would be no less dangerous. The early days of college football saw gruesome injuries and even deaths. However, the difference is the early Harvard tradition was less about the game, and more about the clash between students. A Harvard Police official, General Charles R Apted, described the games as the “upperclassmen [gathering] all the Freshman in the Yard and administer[ing] justice.”[4] The faculty viewed the tradition as a hazing rather than a game and eventually voted to ban it from campus in 1860.[5] As a show of protest, the students held a mock funeral for an entity they dubbed “Football Fight, um.” A report in the Harvard Crimson described it: “Sophomores appropriately garbed, held imposing funeral procession and services. A coffin was provided… and a grave was dug.”[6]
11 years later, in 1871, the game was brought back to Harvard University, although in a more organized form. Interest in football-like games had picked up among other Ivy League schools, including Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton and Yale. The other schools wished to establish an intercollegiate set of rules that would have more closely resembled modern soccer, but Harvard resisted, wishing to preserve the ability to pick the ball up and tackle opposing players.[7] Harvard eventually found a school with a common style with which it could play against in McGill University of Montreal, Quebec. In 1874, the two teams met in what many consider to be one of the first games “recognized as the legitimate predecessor of modern football.”[8]
References[edit]
- ↑ "Nine Survivors of Class of 1860 Will Hold Reunion in Holworthy 2 for the Sixty-Fifth Time". The Harvard Crimson. June 15, 1925. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
football match
- ↑ "Bloody Monday at Harvard" (PDF). New York Times. October 6, 1903. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ Bunk, Brian (2014-11-13). "The First Football Funeral and the Origins of the College Sport". Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ "Death Ends Career of General Apted". 1941-06-06. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ Smith, Ian. "The oldest footage of college football between Princeton and Yale taken in 1903 by Thomas Edison". Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ "Harvard-Yale Football Series a History of Two Waves of Victory". 1928-11-24. Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ Paisner, Richard (1968-03-16). "The History of Harvard Sports". Retrieved 2018-11-28.
- ↑ "The Cycle of Harvard Football: 'Bloody Monday,' Haughton Era, Rose Bowl – and De-Emphasis,"". Retrieved 2018-11-28.
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