MONTREAL -- This week marks the 138th anniversary of the historic McGill-Harvard rugby-football confrontation. The two-game series, played at Cambridge, Mass., May 14 and 15, 1874, were the first formal games of North American-style football.
These contests were preceded by a Princeton-Rutgers football game in 1869 but that event was actually played under England's "Football Association" rules, better known in North America as soccer.
McGill's game, which featured an oval ball, permitted kicking the ball as in soccer, but the participants could also pick the ball up and run with it whenever they pleased.
Harvard's syle of play incorporated a round ball and a kicking style of play known as "the Boston game" and was also closely related to what we today call "soccer". However, a curious feature of that game was that a player could run and throw or pass the ball only if he were being pursued by an opponent. When the opposing player gave up pursuit he called out to the runner, who had to stop and kick the ball.
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