Book Reviews

Nevertheless, Oberlin's heyday as a football power was short-lived. In a revelation never discussed by Heisman or mentioned in any Heisman biography, Brandt produces evidence from Oberlin newspapers showing that Heisman eloped with a student from Oberlin's academy after the Penn State game. For reasons that are still unclear, the marriage was apparently annulled and Heisman never returned to Oberlin. While the team continued to post respectable seasons periodically (including victories over Ohio State as late as 1921), Heisman's departure also marked Oberlin's departure from the ranks of football's powerhouses. Now a perennial dweller at the bottom of the North Coast Athletic Conference's rankings, Oberlin has long since returned to its early renown as a premiere liberal arts college, its extraordinary football heritage largely forgotten by all but a few college football history mavens.

Although the story of Oberlin's brief day in the football sun is interesting in itself, it is made warmer by the author's doting treatment of the subject. Nat Brandt, a former editor of both the New York Times and American Heritage magazine, writes with obvious affection for the college and its past glories. His gentle sentimentality is never maudlin, though, and actually enhances the charm of the book. Neither does his bias stand in the way of sound historical research of the subject. Brandt uses ample primary sources from Oberlin, Michigan, and Ohio State archives, as well as the full range of secondary sources available for this relatively arcane topic. He also includes several solid chapters putting Oberlin's experience into the larger contexts of the origins of American football, the American physical education and "Muscular Christianity" movements, and the deeply-rooted struggle between academic and athletic achievement at American colleges and universities. If there is a weakness, it is probably in Brandt's almost play-by-play description of numerous football games. Although these can be tedious at times, not everyone will be put off by them. Indeed—in an era when football conversation often dwells on the issues of salary negotiations, NCAA investigations, draft picks, and steroid use—some might welcome the rare glimpse at a sport in its infancy that these game accounts provide. Brandt certainly does not argue that the 1890s were some sort of halcyon days of gentlemanly competition. To the contrary, he points out numerous examples of chicanery, including corrupt officiating, violently unsportsmanlike conduct on the field, and the use of illegal players (including Heisman himself). Nevertheless, it was also a time when football was still evolving and off-the-cuff, when teams agreed right before the game how long they would play, when brand-new plays were created by accident, when "the game itself was just a sport played for the fun of it" (175). For these insights and others, When Oberlin Was King of the Gridiron should be required reading for any serious fan of the college game.

Kevin Kern
University of Akron
Akron, Ohio

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