The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-11-07

If baseball can boast Of the e&peh- allure of s17,0O0.OO0 in six months football can got 1t one better by call ing $10, 00O, ,Oo0 out of the pockets of the people in six weeks. That sport has not yet been found which Is as much of drawing card for the people and their money as football. With all It's wonderful and well deserved popular ity. baseball has never been able to draw a crowd of 10000 people through it's gate. With the gridiron 1t is dif- ferent, and more than once 1t has passed that mark. calling out enough enthusiasts to people city the size of Akron, Ohio; Brockton, Massachu- setts. or Dallas, Texas.
 All the roads of the football world lead to the great climax, the annual YaIe-Harvard game. Those two giants of the grldiron play other games, but they are all incidental to the great contest between themselves. As an in- dex to the cost of football through out the United States it is said that a cool million dollars changes hands on the result of this one game. To begin with, the two teams spend about $6O,- 900 getting themselves in readiness for the preliminary struggles with other teams and the final fray with one an- other. There Is the training depart ment, which calls for heavy outlays for coaches and trainers, of whom there is small army. Even the men who rub the players down come in for a thou sand dollar slice of the team funds. The training tables cost $400 week each and the doctors get about a thousand dollars from each team. The department of administration calls for $1O. 900 to cover advertising, printing. and other promotion expenses. Hotel bills. railroad fare, trophies and an endless variety of other things call for an outlay of thousand of dollars. Each team squeezes the life out of a full hundred footballs In the course of a single season.
 But these expenses of the teams themselves are nothing as compared with those incurred by the people who go to see this great classic of the foot ball world, Some men have travelled seven days. crossing the Atlantic Ocean. in order to enjoy the seventy minutes of excitement the game af lords. Many have travelled across the continent in order to root for their favorite team once more. The New Haven Railroad counts on an annual revenue of at least $60,00O from the game, and then there are the trS1ley lines, the hotels. the haberdasAers. any many OlueI interests CApcCN enough profits out of one days crowd to pay running expenses for several months. It was stated last fall that there were 10000 automobilists at the Yale-Harvard game at Soldiers Field. When the last play is over, and the last dollar has been spent 1t Is easy to justify the estimate of the Boston sta tisticians who assert that a million dollar fund dwindles down to about rk, penses have been paid and every wager satisfied.
 But however heartily the American people go in for the game of football we are verltable tyros in the matter of enthusiasm when compared with our English cousins. We could take the biggest crowd that ever attended an American football game. add to it the biggest crowd that ever witnessed a baseball game. and the resulting mass of people would be but few thousand larger than the crowd which has att tended a British football game. China is now having a taste of American foot ball. and in the Philippines they are plaving 1t with all the zeal and vigor that characterizes the American grid iron hero.
 Football holds the distinction of be- ing the only sport that ever became the subject of a conference at the White House. It was a few years ago when the mass play had reached its highest development, and the game had ceased to be little more than test of brute force. It was at this juncture that the President urged the rules committee to take steps to break up mass playing and to scatter the players more. They did so, and what threatened to be the end of football was averted.
 At the time of the crusade against the game, Walter Camp gathered a lot of information about football players He addressed a letter to nearly every football star in the country, asking him ta state what effect football had had on him. Out of the 337 inquiries sent