The Times they aren't a changing: Fatball

One needn't be able to touch one's toes to score a touchdown. Nevertheless, football players have long been wrestling with their weight -- both how to put on the pounds and how to take them off -- ever since the sport's earliest days.

In today's Times Jere Longman tells of an unsettling new trend that high school athletes feel they must gorge themselves in order to make the team.

Putting on Weight for Football Glory

By JERÉ LONGMAN

BATON ROUGE, La., Nov. 29 — When the Desire Street Academy football team plays in a Louisiana state semifinal playoff game Friday night, the Lions will feature three starting linemen who weigh at least 300 pounds and two others who weigh 270 and 280 pounds, reflecting a trend in which high school players are increasingly reaching a size once seen almost exclusively among linemen in college and the N.F.L.

For more than a century coaches have fought with players over their weights, although there has been some disagreement as to whether or not more is more.

March 20, 1905
NO FAT MEN FOR FOOTBALL

Heavyweights for Harvard’s Team Put to Work in Gymnasium

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 19.—Whatever else may be said of Harvard’s football team next year, “Dill” Reid, the new head coach has determined that it shall not be call a “team of fat men.” Reid has put all the heavyweight candidates to work in the Hemenway gymnasium, pulling on weight machines and lifting heavy dumbbells to reduce their girths. The move is without precedent in Harvard’s history, for although football demands more of its men than any other game, little or no preliminary training has been considered necessary.

The more extreme view is that football is a game designed for the overweight. An article published on February 10, 1910 under the headline “A game for fat boys,” quoted Yale athletic adviser Walter Camp expressing the benefits of fatness in football:

Perhaps one point has not received its full emphasis. The game has furnished an opportunity not offered in any other sport for the big, overgrown fat boy, who before the introduction of the game had no field in which he could shine, and hence too little incentive to exercise.

Incensed that Camp would call for the elimination of the forward pass in order to help obese players, the writer lashed back:

Mr. Camp seems to have much solicitude for fat boys and perhaps he has an underlying concern for the principle of crude selection.

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