HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: What it was, was football

Dec. 16—TRINITY — If you think football is a violent sport today, you should’ve been here 135 years ago, when a game got so heated that a player for Trinity College actually challenged an opponent to a duel.

Yep, that kind of duel, with guns and everything.

Talk about unnecessary roughness.

It happened during the fall of 1888, the first year football was played at Trinity College. The college, as you may know, was in Trinity at the time but would soon move from rural Randolph County to Durham and become Duke University.

On Nov. 29, 1888 — Thanksgiving Day, no less — Trinity played the University of North Carolina on a field at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, with a crowd of about 500 curious spectators looking on. Trinity defeated the Tar Heels that day, 16-0.

Despite the one-sided score, the game was intensely fierce — maybe this is where the infamous Duke-Carolina rivalry was born — so fierce that a Trinity player formally challenged one of the Carolina men to a duel after the game. The two students even selected what were known as “seconds” — trusted friends who would accompany them to the duel and ensure a fair fight — and they agreed on a time and place.

Fortunately, in this instance, a cooler head prevailed.

He was Trinity College President John Franklin Crowell, a football fanatic who had learned the sport at Yale — considered a football juggernaut at that time — and then introduced Trinity students to the game when he came south. Crowell convinced the two feuding players that “in the intensity of football playing, such misunderstandings were perfectly natural,” North Carolina sports historian Jim Sumner wrote of the incident.

No one recognized it at the time, but that near-duel may have been a harbinger of what lay ahead for Trinity College football. In that era — when players…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/high-point-confidential-football-trinity-001700100.html

Author : The High Point Enterprise, N.C.

Publish date : 2023-12-17 00:17:00

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