{"id":493,"date":"2026-06-11T12:12:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T12:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=493"},"modified":"2026-06-11T12:12:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T12:12:02","slug":"as-american-as-the-forward-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=493","title":{"rendered":"As American as the Forward Pass"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The sentry box <\/span>at the royal governor\u2019s residence in Boston was a too-inviting target for young Americans with an urge to kick, throw, or swing at something British. The regiments who occupied the city to enforce the Crown\u2019s taxation were accustomed to dodging snowballs, oyster shells, and burning coals. Then, one January day in 1769, a gang of boys found a novel form of harassment: They launched an unruly game of \u201cfoot-ball\u201d in the street facing the sentry box. As the boys played, the action came ever closer to grazing the redcoat on duty. What happened next infuriated Royal Governor Sir Francis Bernard, a meaty-faced, tilt-chinned baronet. Somehow, probably by piling into it, the boys toppled the sentry box onto the street.<\/p>\n

Read more When Both Parties Try to Out-Macho Each Other<\/a><\/p>\n

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That foot-ball game was more than just a \u201clittle rude boyish trick,\u201d as a newspaper account, often attributed to Samuel Adams, put it. It was a barrier-crashing act, an early sign of a belligerently rule-testing national character. To Bernard, it was \u201canother Proof of the Necessity of Regular Troops, to keep the Inhabitants in Order.\u201d<\/p>\n

But keeping young Bostonians in order wasn\u2019t so easy. In February 1770, another throng of boys, which may have included Paul Revere Jr., amused themselves in the street by practicing their aim with rocks and snowballs, which they threw at a Loyalist merchant\u2019s windows. When their stones began hitting people inside<\/i> the house, a British customs agent fired a shotgun at the boys, killing an 11-year-old named Christopher Seider. Just a week later, another street altercation resulted in the Boston Massacre, immortalized in Paul Revere Sr.\u2019s engraving. \u201cAs Boston simmered on the eve of Revolution,\u201d the scholar Daryl Leeworthy has observed, \u201ceven little things like footballs kicked at soldiers could bring the city dangerously close to the edge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Viewed from the present, these young athlete-patriots seem to possess a quintessentially American mix of pride, irreverence, and subversion. The Sons of Liberty channeled these energies in the fight for independence from England, but the energies hardly dissipated with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. Instead, our rebellious, rambunctious approach to athletic endeavor became part of the American ethos. You can see it in the sports we play and the way we play them. You can even see it in the way we spectate and celebrate. Victory is marked by the scaling of lampposts (Philadelphia), drunken parading through the streets (and a river, in Boston), and light property damage (everywhere). To understand America as it marks a big birthday, you could do far worse than consider its long history of sport, and of fandom.<\/p>\n

Long before the <\/span>war <\/span>for independence began, colonists played with a streak of exploratory defiance, rebelling against the constraints of their own Puritan governors. The first mention of an athletic contest in colonial America comes from the separatist Pilgrim leader William Bradford, whose journal records that in 1621\u2014just a year after the Mayflower landed\u2014he disciplined a group of young men for evading work on Christmas to instead engage in games such as \u201cpitching the bar,\u201d a contest to see who could throw a heavy rod the farthest.<\/p>\n

Settlers may have been inspired to new forms of play by their encounters with members of the Wampanoag Nation, who had occupied coastal Massachusetts for some 12,000 years. In 1634, a colonist named William Wood wrote about their exuberant, rugby-like games of \u201cfooteball\u201d that could last for a mile along the flat beaches, in which they displayed \u201cswift footemanship\u201d and \u201ccurious tossings of their Ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1735, rowdy games of foot-ball were already associated with political rivalries in Boston. During elections, these games were used to express \u201cthe animosities of several contending parties,\u201d The New England Weekly Journal <\/i>reported. The newspaper added, \u201cWhilst these opposite sets of angry men are playing at football, they will break all the windows and do more hurt than their pretended zeal for the nation will ever make amends for.\u201d The statement could apply today.<\/p>\n

Once the Revolution was launched, even General George Washington had difficulty containing the games of his troops. According to soldiers, including the painter John Trumbull, who served during the siege of Boston in 1775, Continental Army officers offered small rewards (usually alcohol) for the retrieval of any cannonballs fired from British batteries at the American lines. This set off daring races to pick up the ordnance. During a British cannonade at Roxbury in July 1775, it became something of a spectator sport to watch Yanks vie to pick up the balls and carry them to officers. \u201cIt is diverting to see our people contending for the balls as they roll along,\u201d one witness wrote. Soon, however, the game became dangerous, as soldiers began trying to stop the cannon shot with their feet, like soccer balls. This led to terrible wounds. \u201cSeveral brave lads lost their feet, which were crushed by the weight of the rolling shot,\u201d Trumbull related. The reward offer was withdrawn.<\/p>\n

Washington himself was a formidable athlete. According to a French officer who visited the general\u2019s headquarters, Washington \u201csometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours\u201d with his men. On at least one occasion, he joined them at Valley Forge in a game of \u201cwicket,\u201d a kind of poor man\u2019s cricket that didn\u2019t require a groomed lawn or special equipment. And he was apparently a champion at pitching the bar. The artist Charles Willson Peale related that one day, before the outbreak of the war, Washington was strolling around Mount Vernon when he came upon some young men playing the game. Washington asked where the farthest throw was marked and then, without taking off his coat, smiled and heaved the bar. It \u201cwhizzed through the air, striking the ground far, very far, beyond our utmost limits,\u201d according to Peale. As the other players gaped, Washington said, \u201cWhen you beat my pitch, young gentlemen, I\u2019ll try again,\u201d and strolled away.<\/p>\n

With Washington\u2019s encouragement, the men of the Continental Army became sports-mad. Diaries and letters refer to a dizzying variety of contests they played to break up the tedium of camp. A lieutenant named Ebenezer Elmer made repeated references to \u201cball play\u201d and to a contact game called \u201cwhirl,\u201d in which another man gave him \u201ca severe blow on my mouth which cut my lip, and came near to dislocating my under jaw.\u201d One of Nathan Hale\u2019s diary entries for 1775 simply recorded, \u201cClean\u2019d my gun\u2014pld some football, & some checquers.\u201d<\/p>\n

These pickup games seem to have exemplified the spirit that the British poet W. H. Auden would later describe as \u201cthe peculiar American mixture of Puritan conscience and democratic license\u201d: They were conducted according to agreed-upon rules, yet those rules were highly flexible depending on the players\u2019 surroundings and the implements at hand. As the scholar Thomas L. Altherr wrote in an authoritative work on early American sport, \u201cA Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball,\u201d the games were makeshift affairs that married old English-village games to the New World landscape. Americans played \u201ctip cat,\u201d which involved using a long stick to flip a short piece of wood in the air and bat it. They played \u201clong bullets,\u201d a bowling contest. They played rounders, trap ball, base, baste, three o\u2019cat, sting ball, barn ball. Game equipment was fashioned from whatever was available\u2014tree branches; broom handles; planks; rocks; stumps; stakes; and balls of rags, feathers, or buckshot covered in leather.<\/p>\n

By 1779, Washington had grown concerned that his men were finding excuses to avoid duty in order to play. Inspecting a camp near West Point during what were supposed to be drilling hours, he discovered that scores of them were instead rampantly chasing after balls. Washington issued an order saying that soldiers could not shirk military duty by claiming inadequate shoes or clothing when they had just been \u201cemployed at games of exercise much more violent.\u201d Washington was late to notice what Abigail Adams already had. \u201cThis continent has paid thousands to officers and men who have been loitering about playing foot-ball and nine pins, and doing their own private business whilst they ought to have been defending our forts,\u201d she wrote to her husband in 1777.<\/p>\n

American games didn\u2019t <\/span>evolve <\/span>into the more formal exercises we now recognize, with demarcated fields, written rules, clocks, and sophisticated strategies and counterstrategies, until the late 19th century. With the West largely closed, and with machines outstripping bodies, how could American men prove their manhood? One answer: maul each other.<\/p>\n

Beloved of boys and young men on Boston Common in the 1860s was \u201cpunk,\u201d a version of dodgeball in which they hurled a semisoft homemade ball at fellow competitors with the intention of \u201cplugging\u201d someone, and scrimmaged for the ball until a new possessor turned on another human target.<\/p>\n

Then there were the mass \u201crushes\u201d that were early forerunners of American football, in which whole classes at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton battled for possession of a field. From 1862 to 1865, about 50 boys who frequented Boston Common belonged to a short-lived institution called the Oneida Football Club, most of them Brahmin sons bound for Harvard. For three years they reigned supreme on the Common, and they have been identified by some scholars as perhaps the first organized ball team in America. One of their balls is preserved in Boston. It doesn\u2019t resemble anything used in any other game; it\u2019s seamed, but neither truly round nor oval.<\/p>\n

Even basketball began as a game in which young men pushed others aside to reach a goal. James Naismith first presented it as a winter-semester activity at Springfield College during a blizzard in 1891. Growing up in Ontario, Naismith had played \u201cduck on a rock,\u201d a game that involved tossing a rock in high, arcing throws at a target stone set on a tree stump. Naismith improvised a version of it for Springfield students by nailing up two peach baskets in the gymnasium, dividing the class into two teams, and telling them to throw a ball into their opponent\u2019s basket. But as soon as he blew the whistle, \u201cthe boys began tackling, kicking, and punching in the clinches; they ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor,\u201d Naismith recalled in a radio interview toward the end of his life. \u201cBefore I could pull them apart, one boy was knocked out, several of them had black eyes, and one of them had a dislocated shoulder. It certainly was murder.\u201d Naismith had to ban running on the court until he could develop some rules to curb the violence.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s \u2018Anti-Weaponization\u2019 Payouts May Not Be Dead After All<\/a><\/p>\n

In the 20th century, there was an unmistakable sense of accelerated growth in American play that mirrored the country\u2019s expansion. This was an era of empire. Every nation uses sport as an identity-forming exercise, but only modern Americans play with such an aggressive sense of clearing out space. The deepest point of the center-field home-run fence at Boston\u2019s Fenway Park, built in 1912, is 420 feet\u2014150 feet deeper than the boundary of a cricket ground.<\/p>\n

Cricket had never taken hold in America. According to James D\u2019Wolf Lovett, a Boston athlete of the Civil War era, \u201cSomehow American soil is not congenial\u201d for it. But it was more than just the dirt: The length of a cricket match, which could last two days, was utterly impractical for hardworking, efficiency-minded Americans, especially as the nation\u2019s modern economy emerged.<\/p>\n

More congenial to the American mindset was football. In 1903, Harvard Stadium was completed; it used a new technique of reinforced concrete to accommodate crowds of 25,000 or more. In 1907, in the ultimate act of seizing ground, the forward pass was developed by the marvelously experimental Pop Warner\u2013coached teams of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened the field to ever more creative strategy, and made football more popular. Every form of football, from Gaelic to Australian, involves gaining ground, but only in our version can a competitor gain 50 yards at a time by flinging the ball downfield\u2014the forward pass, in all its wild optimism, is a purely American invention.<\/p>\n

In 1908, all of America went aloft when the federal government contracted with the Wright brothers to produce the fixed-wing aircraft. At the same time, Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile with the first mass-produced Model Ts. This laid the groundwork for the great rituals of the American stadium experience: the parking-lot tailgate and the military flyover.<\/p>\n

Before Game 1 of the 1918 World Series, between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, 60 U.S. Army biplanes roared over Comiskey Park, in what is believed to be the first such demonstration ever performed above a stadium. It was intended to bolster Americans\u2019 morale, show off their combat strength in World War I, and evoke a fighting spirit. It succeeded: As Babe Ruth worked on a shutout for the Red Sox, feelings ran so high that the entire stadium joined in singing \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner\u201d during the seventh-inning stretch, long before singing the song at the ballpark was de rigueur. (Later in the series, soldiers at Camp Devens, near Boston, were so anxious for updates that a flyover of another sort was employed: Military carrier pigeons flew between Fenway and the camp, relaying the score.)<\/p>\n

The first American tailgate may well have been at the Battle of Bull Run, in 1861, when civilians packed picnics to watch Union and Confederate troops fire on each other. But Ford\u2019s invention was what made it into an American pastime. The New York Times<\/i> described the pregame crowd at the 1906 Harvard-Yale football game: \u201cSmall parties of automobilists eating tempting viands that had been brought in hampers spread out in picnic fashion on a table cloth on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

By mid-century, the mass stadium spectacle was a firmly established American ritual\u2014for white Americans, at least. The breaking of the color line in the major pastimes, and the desegregation of bleachers, concessions, and bathrooms, was slow and painful work, sometimes slowest in the oldest cities.<\/p>\n

Players themselves were instrumental in pressing their teams, leagues, and cities to live up to the nation\u2019s founding ideals. While delivering 11 NBA championships for the Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969, Bill Russell led boycotts, marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., protested segregation in Boston schools, and endured the vandalizing of his home; intruders smashed his trophy case, spray-painted epithets on his walls, and defecated in his bed. When the Celtics named him to succeed Red Auerbach in 1966, he became the first Black head coach in a modern major American sport.<\/p>\n

Today, American stadiums <\/span>have become immense, many of them too large to be situated in the cities that their teams represent, moored instead on suburban plains or on the outer, warehouse-populated margins. It\u2019s therefore remarkable, the degree to which they\u2019re still hothouses of cultural memory, and not just through quaint reenactments, such as the New England Patriots\u2019 \u201cEnd Zone Militia\u201d: men in tricorn hats firing muskets after touchdowns at Gillette Stadium (in suburban Foxborough). More is going on in the parking-lot tailgates than just swilling by hardy fans huddled around weak charcoal-grill fires as they get day-drunk headaches. In 2025, attendance at Major League Baseball games was more than 71 million; 22 million at NBA arenas; and about 19 million at NFL stadiums. Why do so many of us go to such trouble and expense? A strong desire to relive our national story seems to be one answer.<\/p>\n

American sports enact \u201cthe liturgy of empire,\u201d Tim Suttle, a Kansas pastor and essayist, has written. The modern stadium spectacle is rife with enormous flags, salutes to service members, and flyovers by supersonic warplanes. Fans feel they are active participants in the quest for victory. Roaring spectators are more involved than the word fan<\/i> allows; we fervently believe that we\u2019re \u201ccontributing psychic and emotional energy to a prospective victory,\u201d as the scholars Tonya Williams Bradford and John Sherry have put it. Any fan of an opposing team who has dared to fly their colors at a stadium in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York can attest to this.<\/p>\n

So can anyone who followed the celebrations after the Philadelphia Eagles\u2019 Super Bowl triumphs in 2018 and 2025. Even in victory, Eagles fans are their bellicose selves. Light poles were scaled (and traffic lights torn down) and windshields busted. During the team\u2019s most recent processional, up Broad Street toward Ben Franklin Parkway, general manager Howie Roseman was hit in the head by a beer, leaving a half-moon cut on his forehead.<\/p>\n

Something else distinguishes our forms of play, too: the extent to which the contests lend themselves to retellings. American sports have \u201ca special, intensified narrativity,\u201d in the phrase of the NFL player turned historian Michael Oriard. Play in soccer, rugby, and cricket is continuous, often indeterminate. American games tend to have neat structures with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and stakes that ratchet accordingly, with a \u201cmore pronounced rhythm or pace, and a dramatic structure (situation, rising action, climax, and denouement),\u201d Oriard writes in his book Reading Football<\/i>. In a sense, they\u2019re stories that we tell ourselves about who are\u2014or would like to be.<\/p>\n

But the simple truth is that American sports began as wildflowers. They were the products of seeds blown on the wind and buried in the mud until strange green shoots jumped up out of the ground. They were initially cultivated by men with foaming seas at their back and seemingly endless forests in front of them, who had an instinct to swat something\u2014hard enough to sail over rail fences and into that unending wood.<\/p>\n

This article appears in the <\/i>July 2026<\/i> print edition with the headline \u201cThe Rebellious Origins of American Sports.\u201d When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/i>The Atlantic.<\/small><\/p>\n

Read more Trump Once Played Soccer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To understand the history of the nation, look to the history of its sports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nAs American as the Forward Pass - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=493\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As American as the Forward Pass - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To understand the history of the nation, look to the history of its sports.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=493\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-11T12:12:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"15 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"As American as the Forward Pass\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-11T12:12:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493\"},\"wordCount\":3011,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/88c56fac73cabd9cabebc16f8362e547.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=493\",\"name\":\"As American as the Forward Pass - 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