Latin and Football Revisited
One hundred years ago, H. Osborne Ryder, a Classics professor at Western Maryland College, published an article in The Classical Weekly about the unlikely relationship between the ancient language of Latin and the modern game of American football. In the article, he compares the process of translating a Latin passage to stages of a football game, explains how the disciplines of Latin and football operate according to a similarly prescribed set of rules, and points out some parallels between football and Greek and Roman culture. Ryder’s primary objective in “Latin and Football” is to encourage his colleagues in the classical community to look at the increasingly popular phenomenon of football not as an impediment to classroom instruction, but as a valuable pedagogical tool.
Even in 1916, Ryder’s suggestion of building a bridge between classical studies and football would have been contentious, as he himself fully acknowledges: “But I hear some say, Why do you compare Latin and football? Is not the abyss separating them too wide to be spanned?” Criticism of the brutality of the sport was already common. After an especially violent 1905 college football season in which 19 players were killed on the field, a number of prominent universities suspended their football programs. In response, a group of football apologists, including none other than President Theodore Roosevelt, stepped in to implement some much-needed safety reforms, rescuing the game from the brink of extinction.
A century after the publication of Ryder’s article, football remains a cherished institution of American life. As an ESPN radio host observed a couple of years ago, “Football is the most popular thing in America. Not the most popular sport. The most popular thing.” At the same time, football — from the Pop Warner level all the way to the NFL — has perhaps never been more controversial, especially in the wake of recent sexual assault scandals involving football players and coaches at schools such as Penn State , Baylor, and the University of Montana, revelations about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and concerns about the allocation of educational resources for athletic facilities and coaching salaries.
Do the ideas in Ryder’s article continue to hold merit, one hundred years after the fact? Is there still a connection between Latin and football, or has the abyss between them grown too wide to be spanned? It would be easy to summarily dismiss “Latin and Football” as an obsolete relic of a simpler time. But to do so would be a mistake. Although Osborne Ryder may not be able to show the Latin teachers of 2016 how to connect Latin and football, he is able to teach us how — and how not — to make an effective case for the relevance of the Classics.
Some of Ryder’s comparisons between Latin and football are still valid. He points out, for instance, that the ancient Romans enjoyed ball games, just like Americans: “A review of the history of athletics will conclusively prove how difficult it is to determine which antedates the other — Latin or football.” He argues that a substantial portion of the corpus of classical literature — everything from the historical writing of Livy and Tacitus to the poetry of Pindar and Vergil — celebrates the same “spirit of the out-of-doors” exemplified by football players. And he suggests that developing expertise in the disciplines of Latin and football requires similar patience and dedication: “Both cost [the student] the sweat of his brow, the ingenuity of his mind and the anguish of his soul . . .”
Aside from these platitudes about hard work and outdoor activity, however, Ryder’s parallels between Latin and football do not stand up well to 21st-century scrutiny. At one point, he compares the “methods of attack” of football and Latin. “The most common play should be to attack the sentence at the beginning,” he explains, suggesting that a simple, straight-ahead approach works best in reading Latin, just as it does in football. “I have no sympathy with that method of Latin teaching which directs us to find first the subject and then the verb.” This analogy would have made sense to football fans in 1916, when offensive “strategy” involved little more than plowing straight ahead into the line of defense. The forward pass had only been legalized as part of the post-1905 safety reform package, and it took decades for most coaches (and fans) to accept it as a viable and suitably masculine method of advancing the ball. Of course, in the years since the publication of Ryder’s article, football strategy has evolved considerably, and Ryder’s conservative “three yards and a cloud of dust” technique of reading Latin bears no resemblance whatsoever to the incredibly complicated schemes run by modern college and professional teams.
Another point in Ryder’s article that doesn’t hold up well in 2016 is his claim that both Latin and football are disciplines concomitant with honesty and fair play: “No cribbings [of a Latin text] of any sort whatever will be tolerated but only clean, straightforward reading, just as in the game no slugging, offside plays, improper language or other abuse will be permitted.” Football games are still officiated, and infractions are penalized accordingly. But in the multi-billion-dollar football industrial complex of the modern era, the reality is that most teams will do whatever they can to gain a competitive advantage. In an age of rampant NCAA violations, conspiracies of widespread academic fraud, and cheating scandals in the NFL (including, but certainly not limited to, the well-publicized “Deflategate” episode of 2015), Ryder’s insistence on the moral integrity of football seems naïve.
His assessment of the similarities between Latin teachers and football coaches is also flawed:
The coach should use words of sound advice as he instructs his team, and the Latin teacher will do well to heed those wise words of Rabanus Maurus: Qui docet vitabit omnia verba quae non docent [“he who teaches will avoid all words which do not teach”] — an excellent motto for every Latin teacher, or for any other teacher. We should conserve our teaching ability if we held this advice constantly before us.
In 1916, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to think of Latin teachers and football coaches as sharing the same instructional style and educational mission; the Western Maryland team that year, after all, was actually coached by an Associate Professor of History at the college. In 2016, however, Ryder’s comparison seems absolutely ridiculous. First, his claims of football’s economy of instruction in no way line up with the long hours modern football players spend analyzing game film and receiving direction from a small army of coaches. And second, there is the rather obvious matter of compensation: at the college level, chances are that even a tenured professor in a Classics department makes only a tiny fraction of the salary of the university’s head football coach. Even at the high school level — at least in certain parts of the country — there is likely to be a substantial disparity in the salaries of Latin teachers and football coaches.
An even more egregious deficiency of Ryder’s article, however, is his failure to mention what, in the year 2016, is the most obvious connection between football and the classical world — gladiatorial combat. Any classicist watching a college football game today is likely to be immediately reminded of the Roman amphitheatre — the ritualized public display of violence, the fanatical behavior of the spectators, the exploitation of the combatants, the pervasive panem et circenses atmosphere. Yet Ryder does not recognize any of these parallels. His description of football, in fact, depicts the game as more of an ethereal philosophical pursuit than a brutal physical bloodsport: “And after all, both Latin and football, when rationally considered, prepare us for a realization of the summum bonum, the largest possible unfolding of the inner life through the ideal of the full-orbed life . . .”
The summum bonum of Ryder’s article for us today, therefore, has little to do with his examples of the relationship between Latin and football, most of which are no longer persuasive. The game has changed dramatically and grown exponentially over the past one hundred years, and if Ryder were alive today and could see professional football players making millions of dollars a year, college football coaches wielding more power than university presidents, and an American citizenry that is more likely to watch the Super Bowl than it is to vote, he would probably see very little in common with the quaint pastime he observed on the sleepy campus of Western Maryland College in the early 1900s.
The broader point of Ryder’s article — that it is imperative for us, as Latin teachers, to do whatever we can to minimize “the chasm between the Classics and modern life” — is certainly as germane today as it was a hundred years ago. Ryder was perceptive enough to realize that football was becoming part of American popular culture, and instead of burying his head in the orations of Cicero and enforcing a strict division between study and sport, he tried to use it as a means of helping his students better understand and appreciate the Roman world. “If you do your duty as a Latin teacher,” he writes, “you will relate, in a vital manner, your instruction to the life and thought of those whom you are privileged to teach . . .”
Ryder’s goal is a noble one, and one shared by many professors today who work to make their work seem relevant in the twenty-first century. The problem with Ryder’s approach, however, is that by using football to capture the interest of his students, Ryder targeted his instruction to the life and thought of a single demographic on campus — the young men who either played on the team or supported it as fans.
Today, young women are no more allowed to participate in football than they were a hundred years ago — at least not in any meaningful capacity — but they are likely to be involved in peripheral activities, such as cheerleading and marching band. Regardless, many women today are serious football fans. According to research commissioned by the NFL, women make up almost half of its fan base. The league’s annual Octoberfest of breast cancer awareness, after all, is driven not just by a benevolent concern for public health, but also by marketing savvy.
In 1916, however, women were not associated with the game of football in any substantial fashion. On the college campuses of this era, student leaders often thought that the presence of women at football games would distract the male spectators, all of whom were expected to devote one hundred percent of their attention to the action on the field. At some schools, the women who did choose to attend games were even relegated to their own segregated seating areas within the stadium.
Ryder’s attitude towards the involvement of young women in the culture of football is certainly reflective of these early 20th-century values. In the second paragraph of his article, he asks his readers the following question: “Have you, as Latin instructors, ever considered how you can catch and hold the interest of practically all schoolboys by comparing Latin with football, especially in the fall of the year?” Note the specific reference to male students. He continues to use the terms “schoolboy” or “boy” throughout the article, never referring to students in general, and never once acknowledging the existence of female students.
There were, by the way, young women enrolled at Western Maryland College during this time period. As the 1915–1916 college catalog explains, “[Western Maryland College] was the first college in the south to offer equal educational facilities to both sexes. But it is not strictly co-educational. Although both sexes have the same course and the same instructors, they do not recite together and the two departments are kept entirely separate . . .” It is likely that Ryder would have had entire sections full of female students. Did he not consider them to be important? As he incorporated football into his lessons to motivate his male students, did he make any sort of effort to “catch and hold the interest” of the young women in his classes?
In the end, “Latin and Football” is still valuable today — not because it reminds us that we need to be creative in making the ancient world seem relevant to our students, but because it reminds us of the potential hazards of that approach. By using football to make Latin seem interesting and relevant, Ryder was only able to offer weak, vague, and oversimplified observations about the classical world. He ignored the inherent violence of football entirely. And by focusing on such a male-dominated pursuit, he automatically excluded a significant fraction of the student population. The ideal student of Latin is assimilated to the demographic that is interested in football.
As Ryder says, “In these days every possible method should be utilized for interesting our students in school and college work in the Classics.” But one of the jobs of a classicist is to analyze the mistakes of the past and be conscious that we do not repeat them. As we make a case for the relevance of Latin today, we need to be careful. Relevance is not an excuse for excluding, marginalizing, or alienating entire groups of students.
Ryan G. Sellers teaches Latin at Memphis University School. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Foreign Language Teaching Association and as the Co-Chair of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South Latin Translation Contest.
