The Fevers of Reason. Gerald Weissmann

fittest spread rapidly from coast to coast. Colleges accustomed to recruiting for academic excellence (and family standing) soon turned to recruiting for athletic skill (plus or minus family standing). The turning point came when the University of Chicago hired Alonzo Stagg as the first professional college football coach in the country—only two years after the university was founded in 1890.

      Stagg, now honored as a patron saint of the coaching cult, founded an athletic dynasty at the University of Chicago. His brawny football team, the Maroons, earned its alliterative nickname “The Monsters of the Midway” by dominating its opponents in two out of three matches he coached. Entrepreneurial savvy came with football know-how. To boost sideline enthusiasm, the Maroons were first in the nation to wear varsity letters, and a mere two years after he was hired, Stagg gained national attention for the Maroons with a trip to Stanford, beginning the tradition of cross-country “Bowls.” Under Stagg, the University of Chicago was a founder of the Big Ten conference in 1895 and instrumental in putting together the NCAA in 1906. For half a century, Stagg’s business acumen carried the day. The modest athletic stadium of his day, first known as Marshall Field (“Marshall” as in the department store), was soon renamed Stagg Field, eventually holding as many as 50,000 weekly fans of the Midway Monsters. The Chicago temple of Brawn came to an end when football was abolished in 1939 by Chancellor Robert Hutchens, a champion of the seven liberal arts.

      A sidebar: The end of football at Stagg Field marked the beginning of the atomic age when, under the abandoned west stands, Enrico Fermi monitored the first nuclear chain reaction. Sic transit, as the Brains would have it.

      Alonzo Stagg’s legacy is huge. The billion-dollar football world of Cardale Jones and others today became what it is thanks to Stagg’s invention of that uniquely American institution, the football scholarship. It was called a “student service payment” in the 1890s and evolved to guarantee survival of the strongest on the field, if not the classroom. Poor kids, rich kids, and kids of any color or origin, one and all, could go to college as long as they had Brawn—plus or minus Brain. Before “student service payments,” tryouts for the team were open to any student who could handle a ball, as long as parents paid tuition. On to the era of Stagg, who was not always scrupulous in his selection of players. Hugo Bezdek, one of the 1904 Monsters of the Midway, was identified as a professional boxer named “Hugo Young” by a rival from the University of Illinois. Years later, Bezdek recalled to the Detroit Free Press that his Illini accusers had plotted his exposé at “some saloon,” adding: “I don’t know anything about the Illinois teams hiring the iceman to play for them . . . I don’t know whether they really were a gashouse gang or not. They may have been genuine Illinois students.”

      So, college football players can do business at “some saloon”? Icemen and gashouse workers can be hired to play college ball? The prestige of a university can hang on victory over a rival at sport? It sounds like a recipe for a Hollywood comedy. It was.

      THAT 1932 COMEDY IS CALLED Horse Feathers and forms a wicked footnote to a Carnegie Foundation report that had blown the whistle on a generation of collegiate shenanigans: “College football is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes . . . are commanded by professional coaches. . . . The great matches are highly profitable enterprises,” the report stated. In the flick, Groucho Marx plays Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the brand-new president of Huxley College. Groucho’s son Frank, played by Zeppo, had been an undergraduate football player at Huxley for twelve(!) years. Groucho tells Zeppo that Huxley hasn’t won a ball game for decades and that the college’s reputation is on the line. The only way to save Huxley is to hire two hulking football players who hang out at a ’32 speakeasy—“some local saloon,” as in Stagg’s Chicago. Alas, as luck would have it, the president of Darwin College, Huxley’s archrival, had got to the saloon before him, and the two real hulks were gone. Groucho had to settle for two saloon regulars: Chico, a boot-legging iceman; and Harpo, an iceman and dogcatcher (shades of the Illini gashouse). Back on campus, university president Groucho took on the additional tasks of football coach, guidance counselor, locker-room trainer, and biology professor. Meanwhile, Chico and Harpo, like Cardale Jones today, went on to do what they were hired to do: to play FOOTBALL and to show that “classes are POINTLESS”:

       GROUCHO (as a biology professor): Let us follow a corpuscle on its journey . . . Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?

       CHICO: That’s easy! First is a captain . . . then a lieutenant . . . then is a corpuscle!

      The climax of the film, as expected, comes at the annual Thanksgiving football game, which pits Huxley against Darwin. All four Marxes are suited up, Groucho the president dons helmet, knickers, and cleats and goes on to make a tackle from the sidelines. It’s a tight match, but Huxley has a selective advantage in this struggle for life. In the final quarter, bearing several concealed footballs, the four brothers are carried into the end zone in a chariot: Harpo’s horse-drawn garbage wagon. Huxley wins 31–12: Brain beat Brawn in Academe, but it’s only a flick. That image of four comedians riding across the goal line, Ben-Hur–style, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It made the point that, in 1932, you could buy football players at a saloon and that the Carnegie Foundation was right: “The great matches are highly profitable enterprises.”

      THE FOOTBALL ENTERPRISE is perhaps even more profitable these days. There’s that $7.3 billion contract signed between the NCAA and ESPN. As for the athletes, I’d argue that they should be rewarded for their Brawn and not be forced into the realm of Brain. Footballers in Division 1—as in the Big Ten—are on a professional career path and should be unionized; they should also be permitted to major in football itself. Like the Olympians who trained in the groves of Plato’s Academe, the players have “no free time for anything else” and should not be forced to go to classes the principles of which they can acquire on the field. If you can major in Turfgrass Management, well . . .

      Cardale Jones had it just right after the championship. He told the New York Times, “I don’t think it’s going to be based on your athletic ability. It’s going to be based on your ability to process and diagnose information.” Shades of Huxley—Thomas Huxley, the Darwinist, that is. I’d argue that a Division 1 football player should be free to pick any class he chooses that can teach him anything more valuable than “to process and diagnose information.” As for the rest of us in Academe, how about the seven liberal arts for a start?

       8.

       Apply Directly to the Forehead: Holmes, Zola, and Hennapecia

       There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover their health and save their lives. They have submitted to be half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded were costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were a luxury.

      —Dr. Oliver Wendell Homes (1871)

      WERE DR. HOLMES TO OBSERVE bodily mischief today, he’d still find needles thrust without cause into flesh and bonfires needlessly kindled on the skin. But nowadays the injuries are far less likely to be inflicted on the sick in search of health than on the vain in search of fashion. Botox bruises the foreheads of matrons, collagen scars the lips of barflies. Steel grommets hang from the navels of nymphets, bolts pierce the lips of perps. Perhaps the broadest practice, however, is the application of henna directly to hair and skin. This global assault has produced rock concerts that resemble the coming of age in Samoa and turned South Beach into the South Pacific. Warriors of the NFL sport body tattoos that put Papua to shame, while trendy folk in SoHo flaunt the umbilical baroque. If the Belle Époque was the Age of Gold, ours has become the Age of Tool and Dye.

      Yet the medical literature documents