page_title: Bradbury Robinson
section_title: "There's the pass, boy"
hierarchical_section_title: Bradbury Robinson / Taking full advantage of the new rules / "There's the pass, boy"
caption_attribution_description: English: "View of an unidentified baseball player, of the American League's Chicago White Sox, running to first base from home plate and unidentified baseball players, of the American League's St. Louis Browns, playing defense and standing in position on the field at an American League ballpark in St. Louis, Missouri, during a baseball game between the White Sox and Browns. Crowds are sitting in grandstands and bleachers in the background."
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: Some credited Robinson with throwing an all-time record 87-yard missile to Schneider earlier that season in St. Louis' 34–2 win over Kansas before a crowd of 7,000 at Sportsman's Park. The distance was not reported in contemporary newspaper accounts but the 1933 Spalding's Football Guide listed the throw as official ... 87 yards in the air from passer to receiver ... as the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported in its November 12, 1933 issue:
  Parke H. Davis (Football Guide editor and pre-eminent football historian) still insists that the longest forward pass ever thrown in a football game traveled 87 yards ... it was from Bradbury Robinson to John Schneider ... and it helped St. Louis to beat Kansas in the merry year of 1906 ...
  A detailed account of the play was given by New York Evening World sports editor and cartoonist Robert W. Edgren as quoted by columnist Joseph "Roundy" Coughlin of the Wisconsin State Journal in 1934:
  St. Louis had a mighty good team in those days and in this particular game with Kansas, determined to go out on the field and push over a few touchdowns without using the forward pass, just to prove that they could do something besides toss the ball. They kept the ball down on the ground during the first half and rolled up a lead of two or three touchdowns.
  This didn't sit very well with Kansas and one of their ends named Bruner who was playing opposite Robinson, thought he would get Robinson's goat. "I thought you could pass," he said. "I heard you were a passing team, but all you do is buck the line. Show us a pass; just show it to us once."
  Robinson looked him in the eye and said they would pass soon enough, and more than that, he would tell Bruner when it was coming. With the ball on its own 25-yard line, first down, St. Louis called for a pass on the first down.  Robinson went back into punt formation and shouted to Bruner that they were going to show him the pass and to warn the rest of his team, because they were going to see something.
  And they did!
  Brad Robinson got hold of the ball, waited for Schneider to run down to the goal line (Robinson could take his time because Kansas had pulled all but five men in the backfield and these five were smothered by the St. Louis forwards) and then let fly. Nobody paid any attention to Scheider because he was so far away from the passer that such a throw seemed impossible. All the Kansas team could do then was to look skyward as the ball soared from one end of the field to the other, to plump into Fullback Schneider's arms on the goal line.
  
  "There's the pass, boy," remarked Robinson. "How do you like it?"
  According to The New York Times, Edgren was "(e)ven tempered always, well informed in all sports and ... always told the truth ...", lending credence to his account.
  J. B. Sheridan's game summary the next day in the Post-Dispatch also indicates that St. Louis did not pass at all until well into the second half. His description of Robinson's long throw matched Edgren's account in many details, although there was no mention of verbal exchanges with Bruner.
  One pass in particular made by Robinson to Schneider, which resulted in a touchdown, was a marvel of distance, accuracy and result. Standing on the 40-yard line, Robinson waited long. Then he threw right in the goal mouth to Schneider, who was tackled instantly, but fell across the touch line for a score. It was a wonderful play. How they handled the clumsy football on the throw, just as if it were a baseball, surprised me.
  Sheridan chose to close his article by citing this "marvel" of a play – after making reference to earlier 20 and 40-yard passes by St. Louis. If Robinson was standing at his own 40 yard line when he made the throw, with the 110-yard field of the day, the pass would have traveled about 70 yards in the air.
  Dan Dillon's "How the Game Was Played" in the Post-Dispatch the next morning gave no yardage details but he wrote that, "(a)t this magnificent exhibition of the spectacular forward pass the crowd went wild and Kansas was plainly up in the air on account of the machine-like method with 
caption: Sportsman's Park hosting a St. Louis Browns baseball game in 1907
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