by John Fox
As deep as Ohio’s football roots run, the most intimate connection between the game and the Buckeye state is to be found right here in Ada. I arrived in town on a cool September day to trace the path of the football, from the feedlot to the gridiron, and to meet the modern-day heirs to Lindon’s legacy. There was a buzz of cheerful anticipation in the air. Students at Ohio Northern University, Ada’s other anchor institution, were arriving for the fall semester—“the onslaught,” as the waitress at Little Mexico Café cheerfully described it. Football season was about to kick off and the Ada High School Bulldogs were coming off a 12–1 season as Northwest Ohio Conference Champions.
It didn’t take long to locate the factory. The town water tower, which loomed a few blocks east of Main Street, reads ADA on one side and WILSON NFL on the other. I found the unimposing one-story brick factory at the tower’s base and entered the fake wood–paneled plant office. Dan Riegle, the 57-year-old plant manager who’s an honest to god Mike Ditka look-alike, got up from behind a large metal desk to greet me. Dan’s been punching the clock here for 28 years, which it turns out makes him a relative newcomer.
He handed me a pair of protective glasses and we stepped onto the factory floor.
“We’ve produced every football used in the NFL right here since 1955,” Dan shouted over the rhythmic din of machinery. “Every Super Bowl touchdown, every interception, every great moment in football history for over fifty years has been with a ball made where you’re standing.”
I paused to let his nearly casual statement sink in. The ball Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts drove 80 yards in 13 plays to win the 1958 NFL championship against the New York Giants in the “Greatest Game Ever Played”: made in Ada. The ball Dwight Clark caught on a high impossible leap off a Joe Montana pass to win the 1982 NFC championship for the San Francisco 49ers: made in Ada. The cursed (for this Pats fan) ball that Giants wide receiver David Tyree inexplicably pinned against his helmet off a 32-yard Eli Manning pass with less than two minutes left in Super Bowl XLII, which led to a come-from-behind upset of the undefeated New England Patriots: made, tragically, in Ada.
Dan broke my reverie and held up a large cowhide that he’d pulled from a stack of 20 or so. “There’s the head. There’s the butt. There’s the legs,” he pointed out, perhaps assuming a city boy like me wouldn’t otherwise be able to make heads or tails of it.
“Every NFL football starts its life on a feedlot in Nebraska, Iowa, or Kansas,” said Dan.
“So, are these from grain-fed or grass-fed cows?” I asked, jokingly.
“Pure grain-fed American beef cows,” replied Dan.
“Wilson might want to consider producing organic, grass-fed footballs,” I mused. “Could be the next big thing.”
Dan looked at me stone-faced. “I suppose.”
Unlike Spalding Inc., started by A. G. Spalding both to promote and capitalize on the popularity of baseball, Wilson was founded, rather ingloriously, to make a few extra dollars off cow parts. Incorporated in 1913 by the Chicago meatpacking firm Sulzberger and Schwarzchild, the company was first established to make creative use of slaughterhouse by-products. It started with cow gut tennis strings, violin strings, and animal suture and expanded from there into footballs and basketballs.
From the feedlots, the cowhides are treated at a plant in Chicago where the hair is removed, the skins are stamped to create the signature stipple pattern found on every ball, and a tack is applied using a proprietary formula that gives quarterbacks a better grip. From there they make their way to Ada, where 150 workers perform the alchemy of transforming cowskin into pigskin.
One of those workers is Sharon Mullins, who’s worked here for 40 years. I watched her use a metal form and a large press to punch oval panels out of a skin, avoiding holes or other imperfections. Typically, 10 footballs can be made from a single cow. In every NFL game the teams go through around 40 regular balls and 12 kicking balls. That’s five or so cows to service a single NFL game!
Down the line is Peg Price, a spry 43-year veteran who’s worked every part of a football you can work. Today, she’s a “splitter,” which means her job is to split the thick skin panels on a machine to make them lighter. Like everyone else in the Wilson plant, Peg is paid by the piece, so she cranks along at a lightning pace, not missing a beat while she talks.
“I make sure to work on all the Super Bowl balls,” she told me, “ ’cause I want to be sure they’re done right!”
“The specs for NFL footballs haven’t really changed in my twenty-eight years here,” said Dan. “We could probably engineer a ball you could easily kick eighty yards, but you have to protect the integrity of the game.”
I find it comforting to know that despite all the cheating scandals involving videotaping and signal stealing, the piece workers of Ada are keeping the game honest by making balls with technology that, for the most part, wouldn’t be out of place in Lindon’s cobbler shop.
The NFL takes patriotic pride in the fact that every one of their balls is “Made in the U.S.A.” by skilled workers who’ve been at it for decades. (By contrast, it’s only fair to note, 70 percent of the world’s stitched soccer balls are made in the Pakistan city of Sialkot, where workers make around $5 a day and where child labor was still rampant as late as the 1990s.)
Further along the football assembly line we met Glen Hanson, a bookish-looking gentleman in his early 60s, hunched over an industrial sewing machine with protective glasses and ear muffs. He was busy stitching the four panels of a football together, just as he’s been doing for 36 years.
I asked Dan if he’s concerned that most of his experienced workers are close to retirement age.
“You bet!” he responded, pointing to Glen, who was guiding a ball by hand as the machine hammers out stitches. “How am I going to find a young person willing to spend six months training and then sit every day and stitch footballs? No one’s interested in working that hard anymore.”
Once the ball’s stitched up it’s time to turn it right-side out again. As we approached the ball turner, Dan pulled me aside. “I wouldn’t ask him too many questions. He’s kind of grumpy.”
Footballs ready to be “turned” at the Wilson Football Factory in Ada, Ohio.
After watching his routine for a few minutes I could see why—it was hard, mind-numbing work turning footballs right-side out all day long. The turner took one ball at a time, placed it in a little steamer box for a few minutes to soften the leather. He then used a metal rod to turn it right-side out, making sure to stretch it out properly. He stuck a polyurethane bladder inside and sent it along to be laced by hand, put into a metal mold, and inflated to 13 psi, the mold ensuring that the final product is the same consistently sized prolate spheroid as every other ball.
Once the balls are turned and inflated, they get inspected by Barbara, the strong safety of the production line. She is the last line of defense before the ball leaves the plant and makes its debut on the gridiron. Barbara weighs each ball on a scale to make sure it’s between 14 and 15 ounces, and she uses a tailor’s measuring tape to check that it’s 21 inches around the middle, 28 around the ends.
According to Dan, in all his years on the job he’s never had an NFL ball sent back. “Of course,” he added, “some quarterbacks are harder to please than others. . . .”
“Like who?” I pounce eagerly, looking for some dirt.
“Not naming names, but let me put it this way: if the quarterback throws for three hundred yards and four touchdown passes, it’s all him. He’s amazing. If he gets intercepted a few times in the same game, it’s all the ball. Too slippery, not inflated right, or some other excuse.”
Barbara spun a finished ball in her hands, eyeing it down its length to see if it was ready for prime time. “After a while you just get a feel for whether a ball’s ready for game time or not,” she said, scrutinizing a finished ball. “You can throw me a ball and I can tell by catching it whether it’s off by an ounce.”
The radical
innovation of the Ada production line—with stampers, splitters, stitchers, turners, inspectors, and managers each playing their role to improve quality and output—is the science of specialization. That, along with some relatively basic machinery, enables the 150 workers of the Wilson Football Factory to produce more than 700,000 identical, top-quality footballs a year. As Michael Mandelbaum has pointed out, the same principles of production and division of labor are at the very core of the way football is organized and played.
As the game was assuming its modern form in the late 19th century, the science of organizational management and specialization was first being championed by industrialists like Frederick Winslow Taylor, who codified what he called the four principles of scientific management:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb approaches with work methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select and train each worker rather than leaving them to train themselves.
3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.
Walter Camp, every bit a product of his industrial age, understood exactly how Taylor’s principles might apply to the game of football. Even as a young man, he approached the game, as Michael Oriard has put it, from a uniquely “managerial and technocratic perspective.” Growing up in Yale’s backyard in New Haven, Connecticut, Camp had a natural knack for sports, competing not only in football but in baseball, rowing, swimming, and track and field.
When Camp first started playing for Yale in 1876, football was still emerging from the preindustrial chaos of the scrum, a disorderly “shoving match,” as he characterized it. As the hard-working captain of the team during his junior and senior years, Camp imposed a “method, not men” strategy. When he struggled to hold on to the large, watermelon-shaped ball in a game, he took to carrying it around to classes all day. When his teammates twice bucked his strategy and broke curfew, he resigned the team, rejoining only after they pledged their loyalty to him and his program for winning games.
By the age of 19, Camp was already a thorn in the side of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA), the governing body of college football, submitting proposals for major changes in the game’s rules. For two years he lobbied to reduce the number of players from 15 to 11, a move Yale had been pushing for ever since Eton’s visit years earlier. This change, he argued, would open up the field and allow for a faster-moving, more strategic game with greater scoring potential. It would also have the benefit of making the game consistent with soccer and rugby, each of which fielded 11 on a side. The committee rejected his proposal twice. When they met again in October 1880, Camp finally broke down their resistance. And he was just getting started.
At that same meeting, Camp proposed and pushed through a second concept that would revolutionize American football, severing its ties to other forms of football once and for all. It was called the scrimmage. Although the term—in common use from at least the early 1800s—was just an etymological tweak on the more familiar “scrummage” of rugby, the change itself was momentous. It effectively ended the tyranny of the scrum by introducing the radical notion of possession into the game. Here’s how the original amendment was inscribed in the IFA’s rulebook:
A scrimmage takes place when the holder of the ball, being in the field of play, puts it down on the ground in front of him and puts it in play while onside, first, by kicking the ball; second, by snapping it back with his foot. The man who first receives the ball from the snap-back shall be called the quarterback, and shall not then rush forward with the ball under penalty of foul.
Prior to the amendments, when a man was tackled, possession was literally up for grabs. The ball was placed on the ground in the tangled mass of the scrum where the players would push and shove and try to heel it out to a teammate on the periphery. With the introduction of the scrimmage, the ball was now snapped back with the heel (and later the hand) to the quarterback who—not yet allowed to rush or pass it forward—could hand it off to a teammate to run with. In other words, possession could be retained by one team long enough to execute an offensive strategy. Camp saw this invention as the decisive turning point for his sport, describing the scrimmage as “the backbone to which the entire body of American football is attached.” He went on to elaborate on the significance of the break with football’s rugby past:
What is, therefore, in the English game a matter of considerable chance is “cut-and-dried” in the American game; and the element of chance being eliminated, opportunity is given for the display in the latter game of far more skill in the development of brilliant plays and carefully planned manoeuvres.
Camp was a pragmatist and knew all too well that the new rule would be meaningless if it wasn’t enforced—if there wasn’t a stiff penalty for breaking it. The line of scrimmage secured a firm hold the following year when the rules committee assigned an “offside” penalty for crossing it too early. The first or second time a team was offside, the snap would be replayed. If it occurred a third time, possession would turn over to the other team.
Of course, the danger of Camp and the IFA making the rules up as they went along is that each rule change brought with it unforeseen, and often unwelcome, consequences. While the scrimmage provided for possession of the ball, it failed to address the question of its surrender. Major problems with the new rule became clear when Princeton and Yale met in 1880 for a much anticipated matchup in two inches of wet snow at New York’s Polo Grounds. As described by Parke Davis, the second half began with the Yale offense aggressively pressuring Princeton’s goal. That’s when Princeton’s too-clever captain, seizing upon a loophole in the new rules, ordered his players to just hold the ball—no kicking, no passing. Princeton held possession for nearly the entire second half and the game ended with no score and 4,000 freezing cold and sorely disappointed spectators.
The “block game,” as this strategy was called, resulted in the most excruciating games in football history. One newspaper described the strategy as an “unmitigated evil.” Fans responded to the scoreless, plodding performances by throwing garbage on the field. Camp was as unhappy as anyone with the situation. One of his main complaints about early football had been what he deemed the “cowardly” team play that privileged defensive tactics over a strong offensive attack. The new abuses, he later wrote, “so disgusted spectators that it was absolutely necessary to make a change.”
The change came—not a moment too soon—in the 1882 rules committee. Camp persuaded his colleagues to adopt a system of “downs” that required the team in possession to advance the ball in a limited number of attempts—or relinquish possession. “If on three consecutive fairs and downs a team shall not have advanced the ball five yards or lost ten,” read the latest amendment, “they must give up the ball to the other side at the spot where the fourth down was made.” With the system of downs came the need for referees to measure the gain or loss of yardage. Camp then ignited fierce debate with his suggestion that the field be chalked with lines every five yards.
“But the field will look like a gridiron!” exclaimed the Princeton committee representative, E. C. Peace.
“Precisely,” responded Camp, and fields across the country got their familiar battle stripes.
After college, Camp took a job as a clerk at the New Haven Clock Company, a family business, where he worked for years while serving as the unpaid coach of the Yale football team. When his day job made him late for practice, which frequently happened, he’d send his wife Alice ahead to take notes that he’d review at home. Rising in the company to the position of president, Camp applied the familiar order and regimen of the production line to his coaching method and to the game he set about shaping.
As Mark Bernstein has pointed out, it’s no coincidence that American football was th
e first major sport to be played against a clock. When Princeton met Rutgers in that first intercollegiate game, the team that scored six points first won the match. By the 1880s, when the United States first standardized time zones, game periods were being timed and referees were armed with stopwatches. Ever since then, the outcome of game after game has been decided by minutes and seconds. It’s impossible now to imagine a football game where time is not the most unforgiving opponent on the field.
Having deftly crafted the chessboard and the rules of engagement, Camp next set about developing the unique capabilities of each piece arranged on it. “Division of labor,” he wrote, “has been so thoroughly and effectively carried out on the football field that a player nowadays must train for a particular position.” The “quarter-back,” he wrote in his groundbreaking manual, American Football, is a “position in which a small man can be used to great advantage.” Halfbacks and backs require “dash and fire,” while for the center, or snap-back as it was called, “brain and brawn are here at their highest premium.” In those early days of organized athletics, training was still a novel concept. Players showed up on campus in the fall, fat, tan, and happy, and started playing ball. But soon scientific regimens were introduced and preseason training became standard protocol.
In his manual, Camp dedicated several appendices to evaluating the merits of various training systems and diets. Following the “J. B. O’Reilly” system, for example, an athlete should rise at 7:00 AM, “get a good dry-rubbing, and then sponge his body with cold water.” His breakfast “need not always consist of a broiled mutton-chop or cutlet,” which, to my taste at least, leaves the door open to a wide array of possibilities. Dinner served at 1:00 PM was ideal, and “any kind of butcher’s meat” with vegetables was fine as long as there was no pastry served. Water was the only drink to be allowed the American athlete, though English athletes were forgiven in this area due to the fact that “the climate and the custom in England favor the drinking of beer or claret.” A light supper at 6:00 PM was great so long as it didn’t “consist of slops or gruel.” The athlete’s day should end with lights out at 10:00 PM in a room with an open window, with a “draught . . . if possible, though not across the bed.”
