page_title: Bradbury Robinson
section_title: 1904: Transfer to St. Louis, the Olympics and a perfect, unscored upon season
hierarchical_section_title: Bradbury Robinson / 1904: Transfer to St. Louis, the Olympics and a perfect, unscored upon season
caption_attribution_description: English: Team photo of the 1904 St. Louis University football team that is credited with winning the 1904 Olympic Football Championship. American football was featured as a demonstration programme in the 1904 OG at St. Louis.
context_page_description: Bradbury Norton Robinson Jr. was a pioneering American football player, physician, nutritionist, conservationist and local politician. He played college football at the University of Wisconsin in 1903 and at Saint Louis University from 1904 to 1907. In 1904, through personal connections to Wisconsin governor Robert M. La Follette, Sr. and his wife, Belle Case, Robinson learned of calls for reforms to the game of football from President Theodore Roosevelt, and began to develop tactics for passing. After moving to Saint Louis University, Robinson threw the first legal forward pass in the history of American football on September 5, 1906, at a game at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He became the sport's first triple threat man, excelling at running, passing, and kicking. He was also a member of St. Louis' "Olympic World's Champions" football team in 1904.
  Robinson graduated from Saint Louis University in 1908 with a medical degree and practiced as a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
  In World War I, he was commissioned a captain of infantry in the U.S.
context_section_description: Absent the apology, as a matter of honor, Robinson chose to leave Wisconsin, enrolling as a medical student at St. Louis, where he played the 1904 season, although he sat out many games with a broken shoulder blade. More than half the St. Louis squad consisted of future medical doctors.
  Soon after arriving in St. Louis, Robinson met 31-year old sportswriter Ed Wray, beginning a professional friendship that would last for the rest of Robinson's life. Wray was sports editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat from 1904 to 1908, which encompassed all of Robinson's playing years. Wray left that post to rejoin the staff at the rival St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he had worked as a sports reporter from 1900 to 1904. He remained at that paper as a sports editor and columnist until his retirement in 1955. As an eyewitness to what he considered football history, Wray wrote extensively about Robinson and the development of the forward pass, both contemporaneously and in retrospective columns published over the next four decades.
  Dr. David C. Todd, an instructor at the SLU Medical Department, served as an official for most St. Louis area games of the period. He remembered that, "Robinson spoke to me about the pass the fall he joined St. Louis University (1904)." Wray described Dr. Todd as "a factor in St. Louis University athletic circles" who, along with SLU athletic director Father Pat Burke, set out to build up the football program at St. Louis in the early 20th century.  In an interview with Wray, Todd remembered that Robinson, "came to me and told me he thought the forward pass was going to be a great asset.  He told me that he had tried it and found he could throw the ball like he could a baseball. I spoke to Father Burke about it in the presence of one of your reporters, also named Burke (the late Miles Joseph Burke), and he was interested."
  St. Louis (under head coach Martin J. Delaney) went 11–0 in 1904, outscoring its opponents 336 to 0 that year—including a win over Kentucky by the score of 5–0, the 17–0 victory over Missouri and a 51–0 defeat of Arkansas.
  Some argue that St. Louis University won the Olympic gold medal in American football in 1904, with the sport being featured in the demonstration programme.
  Both the third Olympic Games of the modern era and the World's Fair were held in St. Louis – and Blue and White games were played before Exposition crowds. The Spalding Athletic Almanac of 1905 offered this commentary:
  The (Olympic) Department knew perfectly well that it would be unable to have an Olympic Foot Ball Championship, though it felt incumbent to advertise it. Owing to the conditions in American colleges it would be utterly impossible to have an Olympic foot ball championship decided. The only college that seemed absolutely willing to give up its financial interests to play for the World's Fair Championship was the St. Louis University and there is more apparently in this honor than appears in this report. There were many exhibition contests held in the Stadium under the auspices of the Department wherein teams from the St. Louis University and Washington University took part and competed against other teams from universities east and west of the Mississippi River. The Missouri–Purdue game was played in the Stadium on October 28 ... The Olympic College Foot Ball Championship was won by St. Louis University, St. Louis, Mo., by default.
caption: St. Louis University's 1904 "Olympic World's Champions", from the Spalding's Official Foot Ball Guide for 1905 [5]
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