The Peddie School and Blair Academy football teams will mark a century of rivalry in game on Saturday, Nov. 8.
By: Kyle Moylan
Like most of the years at the start of the last century, 1903 was one of many firsts.
The Panama Canal opened, the Wright brothers made the first successful airplane flight, the first World Series was played, and the Peddie and Blair football teams faced off against each other for the first time.
This Saturday at 2 p.m. The Peddie School and Blair Academy football teams will meet for the 100th time. Prior to the game, a panel of former players will discuss the rivalry from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Caspersen Campus Center. The two teams then will dress up in vintage uniforms and take to the field.
With the speed and convenience provided by flight and the Panama Canal, it comes as no surprise they are still embraced by the world today. With the sporting events, on the other hand, the firsts could have very easily been among the last.
Since they came into popularity in the second half of the 19th century, both baseball and football were trying to establish an identity. Rules were often whatever the two teams agreed to use. Professional sports were determined by wherever one could be paid to play.
Many different leagues gave professional baseball a try. When they weren’t paid or if they wanted more pay players often would jump from one league to another. College players also got in on the act, playing in these leagues or for small town teams spread out across the country. As major league baseball players went on barnstorming trips in the 1920s and 1930s, most towns still could field a team to play against them.
By 1903, however, the National and American had emerged as the two strongest baseball leagues. The Pittsburgh Pirates (the National League champs) and the Boston Red Sox (American League champs) decided to play for an overall title (dubbed the World Series). It was a magnanimous gesture from Pirates’ owner Barney Dreyfus, who was the one who suggested the series. In addition to being from the more established league, Dreyfus had just recently lost two of his best players including future Hall of Fame pitcher Jack Chesbro when they jumped to the American League.
John McGraw, the manager of the New York Giants, was not so forgiving. When his team won the 1904 National League pennant, McGraw refused to play Boston, who had repeated as American League champs and had won the first World Series. After just one year, the World Series appeared finished.
Football at the time didn’t even have a professional league. What is now known as the NFL came into existence in 1920. Prior to that, professional football existed in whatever towns that were willing to pay the players.
The first college game featured Princeton and Rutgers on Nov. 6, 1869. As one can probably guess from the 6-4 final score (Rutgers won), it was a very different game than the one now played.
Rutgers and Princeton elected to play this game with 25 players each and a scoring system similar to soccer. Under rules set down by Columbia, Princeton and Harvard in 1876, teams were limited to 15 players on the field at a time. Yale refused to join until the number of players was limited to 11 on a side.
In 1883 a new scoring system was put in place. A safety was worth 1 point, a touchdown 2 points, a goal after a touchdown 4 points and a goal from the field was worth 5 points. Gradually touchdowns were given more emphasis and by 1903 were worth 5 points and an extra point was just that. Field goals remained 5 points.
While limiting the number of players on a team helped, the scoring system did nothing to prevent the brutality of the game. Played at the turn of the 19th century without helmets and very little if any padding, football games often resulted in deaths. In fact, when he saw a picture of an injured player and a report that 19 people were killed and hundreds more seriously injured in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to ban football if it didn’t change its rules immediately.
Much like baseball and football, The Peddie School spent most of the second half of the 19th century and the start of the 20th looking to form an identity and struggling for survival.
When the school was first founded in 1864, it was the Hightstown Female Seminary. The school, however, would elect to go co-ed the following year and it changed its name to The New Jersey Classical and Scientific Institute.
Neither variation was very successful. In debt, the school offered up naming rights for a fee of $25,000. Thomas B. Peddie, the mayor of Newark at the time and a future congressman, took the school up on its offer.
Peddie took on its current name in 1872, but continued to struggle financially. It even had to declare bankruptcy in 1878, but another donation from Thomas B. Peddie allowed the school’s property to be repurchased for $10,000 at a sheriff’s sale.
While the school’s existence would never be threatened again in such a manner, it still was facing an identity crisis. Peddie desperately wanted to find a way to increase male enrollment at the school.
Many scholars now believe sports were embraced by the generation after the Civil War as a way to prove their manhood. It also explained the often violent nature of the games. Following the lead of numerous colleges and high schools, Peddie started up a baseball team in 1885, a football team in 1886 and a basketball team in 1899. No girl sports were played. In fact, by 1908 female students were not even allowed at what once was the Hightstown Female Seminary.
Peddie’s first football game was a 10-0 loss to The Pennington School on Nov. 13, 1886. Basically, the two teams gathered in two big piles of bodies and did their best to drag or push away the ball carrier from the goal line. Uniforms of the time often even included straps so teammates could pull the ball carrier along.
It wasn’t until 1905 that rules made tackling out of bounds, piling on after a play had been ruled dead or striking the ball carrier in the face illegal. It was also at this time that the forward pass was legalized, but with many restrictions. Incomplete passes or those completed into the end zone were viewed as turnovers.
Even talking about the style of play used in the 1930s, Peddie graduate and Heisman Trophy winner Larry Kelley noted, "I don’t think people would be too familiar with the football we played. When we were in bad field position, we often punted on first down."
One thing going for Peddie players at the start of the last century was the fact they were hardly boys playing a man’s game. John Plant, for example, entered Peddie in 1900 and played for the varsity team through the 1905 season. By the time of his graduation in 1906, Plant was 29 years old. On top of that, Plant had been a professional basketball player before enrolling at Peddie.
It’s unlikely Plant was even the oldest player on the field for the 1903 Blair-Peddie game. Teachers played for football teams at Peddie and Blair until as late as 1906.
Blair began to play football in 1893, but the two teams didn’t face each other for 10 years out of practicality. There was no easy way to get back and forth between the two schools. Even today, the bus ride is so long that the two schools agree to hold all their fall sporting events on the same day.
In 1903, one could own a steam, electric or gasoline powered car. With assembly lines capable of mass production still in the works, however, they were rare and expensive. More likely, fans and players arrived via trains, horse and carriage or merely walked.
A menu among Peddie archives shows students from the school going to Blair on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1920 were offered a special menu of chicken gumbo, loin lamb chop, baked potato, stewed corn, custard and coffee, tea or milk for $1. No records exist stating what Blair players and fans had to eat on the way to or from Peddie in 1903.
Tickets for the Blair-Peddie game on Oct. 31, 1903 were 15 cents. With the football field then located in the center of campus, it was also possible to watch the game by looking out the window of one of the buildings.
Peddie students and fans didn’t like what they saw that day. According to a report in the Peddie Chronicle, Blair had the far bigger players. It also won the game, 17-6.
In 1904, an undefeated and unscored-upon Peddie squad got its revenge with a 32-0 win over Blair, though.
Through the years, the rivalry has survived the transportation problem, the rule changes, the presidential threat to cancel football and even a polio epidemic in 1944 (the one year since 1903 the two teams have not played) to form the longest ongoing football rivalry in the state of New Jersey. In 99 previous meetings, Blair has won 48 games, Peddie 46 and there have been 5 ties.
As for the World Series? As is often the case in professional sports, money made the difference. Knowing his players were missing out on their share of gate receipts for World Series games, John McGraw allowed his Giants to play Philadelphia Athletics in 1905. The Giants won, 4 games to 1.
Obviously, no one who played in the World Series or the Blair-Peddie game in 1903 is still living. That is, of course, with the exception of days like this Saturday. After all, over the years, the Peddie-Blair rivalry just like the World Series has taken on a life of its own.