January 1, 1970

Whilst football continued to grow in Britain, across the Atlantic a very different type of football, or gridiron, was becoming increasingly popular.

Taking rugby as its inspiration, American football developed during the late nineteenth century from a rugby-soccer hybrid (which was called the ‘Boston Game’ at Harvard) to the game we know today. Integral to this evolution was Yale’s Walter Camp who helped to redefine the sport’s rules (introducing a new scoring system of a six-point touchdown and reducing the number of players to eleven and establishing a system of downs).

The sport was not without its dangers however and eighteen players were killed playing the game in 1905 alone. In 1920 the American Professional Football Association was formed, but this only lasted two years before the National Football League (NFL) was organised in 1922.

The sport continued to grow and in 1939 the game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles became the first match to be broadcast on television. Over six hundred NFL players fought for their country in the Second World War and twenty-one were killed.

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This film shows inmates at Sing Sing Prison taking part in an American Football match in 1931.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fOjrFtV-Ybc

copyright: British Pathé