Boston prides itself on being a city of firsts: the first subway system in the United States. The first public school. The first public park.
At that park, Boston Common, there’s a monument that highlights another first the city is widely considered responsible for: the country’s first football club.
But which kind of football? That’s been up for debate for years.
As Boston hosts seven FIFA World Cup games over the next two months, some sports historians say the club’s historical connections to the soccer form of football are often overlooked. That’s in part because of the monument and the revisionist history associated with it, the historians say.
When people walk by the marble tablet that looks like a big tombstone, they see an inscription reading, “On this field, the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865.”
Above that inscription, there’s an engraving of a ball. As sports historian Mike Cronin pointed out: “This is where the whole thing gets a bit silly.”
When the monument was first erected, it was an engraving of an American “pigskin” football. Then it was changed to a soccer ball. Now, it’s back to an American football.
The ‘Boston Game’
Cronin, who co-wrote a book about the Oneidas, says they consisted of about 50 teenagers from wealthy families that were Boston Brahmins. Modern-day soccer and football didn’t exist yet, so the boys created their own game. They played it with red handkerchiefs tied around their heads and called it the “Boston Game.” It involved elements of what today is rugby, football and, yes, soccer.
“It’s a round ball. They talk about passing and kicking,” Cronin said. “They talk about some players dribbling — literally taking the ball around a player at their feet.”
The playing formations, too, were more akin to a free-flowing game like soccer than the positionally rigid American football, Cronin said. Still, there were times in the game when players were allowed to pick up the ball and run with it.
Over the next few decades, gridiron football and soccer evolved into official sports with codified rules. However, the two sports catered to different people. In the United States, soccer was mainly played in working-class communities and among immigrants — while American football was popular more broadly, including among the wealthy.
Kevin Tallec Marston, a soccer historian who co-wrote the book about the Oneidas with Cronin, said in the 1920s, the surviving members of the club were motivated to take credit for American football.
Most of them were Harvard alumni, and they were irked that their rival, Yale University and one of its former players, Walter Camp, were widely credited with creating modern football. At the same time, many of the Oneidas’ families had lost influence in Boston as an influx of immigrants settled in the city in the early 1900s.
Tallec Marston said erecting the monument on Boston Common in 1925, carving the football on it and calling themselves “the first organized football club” was a way for them to reassert their prestige.
“They are using this to essentially write themselves into history. But they know they’re fudging it,” he said. “They know their ball was round and that they were not playing American football as it is in the 1920s.”
Tallec Marston, who’s reviewed correspondence, memoirs and other archival writings from the Oneidas, said one of the founding members of the club, James D’Wolf Lovett, even wrote a poem acknowledging that the monument skews the truth.
In the poem, Lovett recounts an imaginary conversation with the ball the Oneidas played with. Just as the club did in the 1860s, Lovett calls the ball a football even though it was round. He tells the ball a monument has been erected with “his likeness” on it. The ball then asks if it really is “his likeness.” Lovett responds, “Sure…a good likeness too.”
“Yes, I know just shameless lying but there’s this upon my side: — if it made the football happy was I not justified?” Lovett wrote.
More revisions of history
Tallec Marston and Cronin noted that the surviving Oneidas chose to disregard their connections to soccer because it wasn’t as prestigious in the United States. But over time, that began to change as professional soccer became more mainstream. Then in 1994, the FIFA World Cup held in the United States electrified fans across the country.
The National Soccer Hall of Fame seized on the story of the Oneidas amid the sport’s rising popularity, arguing that the game they played was more like soccer than American football. The Hall of Fame led a successful effort to change the football engraving on the monument to a soccer ball.
“The idea was this promotion would elevate soccer — which, of course, would redound that people would now want to know more about the history and end up coming to the Hall of Fame,” said Jack Huckel, who worked at the hall back then.
But the change irritated Tom McGrath, a Boston resident at the time who ended up embarking on a mission to restore the original legacy of the Oneidas. By 2017, he succeeded, and the monument was updated, once again displaying an American football.
“I’m a historical preservationist,” McGrath said. “The soccer hall of fame tried to revise history when it says football.” He dismissed any argument that the Oneidas, themselves, misrepresented history.
The result of changing the engraving back to an oblong ball is that when people pass by the monument, they’re likely to associate it with American football. That was the case one recent afternoon even for Ellie Malesiada, who’s Greek and said she usually thinks of soccer when she sees the word, “football.” Once GBH News told Malesiada the full story of the Oneidas, she had two words to sum up the monument.
“It’s misleading,” she said.
Soccer historians say the Oneidas and their monument demonstrate how easily history can be manipulated. But despite all the debate, there is one aspect of their story that everyone can agree on.
The game they played evolved into football — both kinds.
