who was not always scrupulous in his selection of players. Hugo Bezdek, one of the 1904 Monsters of the Midway, was identified as a professional boxer named “Hugo Young” by a rival from the University of Illinois. Years later, Bezdek recalled to the Detroit Free Press that his Illini accusers had plotted his exposé at “some saloon,” adding: “I don’t know anything about the Illinois teams hiring the iceman to play for them . . . I don’t know whether they really were a gashouse gang or not. They may have been genuine Illinois students.”
So, college football players can do business at “some saloon”? Icemen and gashouse workers can be hired to play college ball? The prestige of a university can hang on victory over a rival at sport? It sounds like a recipe for a Hollywood comedy. It was.
THAT 1932 COMEDY IS CALLED Horse Feathers and forms a wicked footnote to a Carnegie Foundation report that had blown the whistle on a generation of collegiate shenanigans: “College football is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes . . . are commanded by professional coaches. . . . The great matches are highly profitable enterprises,” the report stated. In the flick, Groucho Marx plays Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the brand-new president of Huxley College. Groucho’s son Frank, played by Zeppo, had been an undergraduate football player at Huxley for twelve(!) years. Groucho tells Zeppo that Huxley hasn’t won a ball game for decades and that the college’s reputation is on the line. The only way to save Huxley is to hire two hulking football players who hang out at a ’32 speakeasy—“some local saloon,” as in Stagg’s Chicago. Alas, as luck would have it, the president of Darwin College, Huxley’s archrival, had got to the saloon before him, and the two real hulks were gone. Groucho had to settle for two saloon regulars: Chico, a boot-legging iceman; and Harpo, an iceman and dogcatcher (shades of the Illini gashouse). Back on campus, university president Groucho took on the additional tasks of football coach, guidance counselor, locker-room trainer, and biology professor. Meanwhile, Chico and Harpo, like Cardale Jones today, went on to do what they were hired to do: to play FOOTBALL and to show that “classes are POINTLESS”:
GROUCHO (as a biology professor): Let us follow a corpuscle on its journey . . . Now then, baboons, what is a corpuscle?
CHICO: That’s easy! First is a captain . . . then a lieutenant . . . then is a corpuscle!
The climax of the film, as expected, comes at the annual Thanksgiving football game, which pits Huxley against Darwin. All four Marxes are suited up, Groucho the president dons helmet, knickers, and cleats and goes on to make a tackle from the sidelines. It’s a tight match, but Huxley has a selective advantage in this struggle for life. In the final quarter, bearing several concealed footballs, the four brothers are carried into the end zone in a chariot: Harpo’s horse-drawn garbage wagon. Huxley wins 31–12: Brain beat Brawn in Academe, but it’s only a flick. That image of four comedians riding across the goal line, Ben-Hur–style, was featured on the cover of Time magazine. It made the point that, in 1932, you could buy football players at a saloon and that the Carnegie Foundation was right: “The great matches are highly profitable enterprises.”
THE FOOTBALL ENTERPRISE is perhaps even more profitable these days. There’s that $7.3 billion contract signed between the NCAA and ESPN. As for the athletes, I’d argue that they should be rewarded for their Brawn and not be forced into the realm of Brain. Footballers in Division 1—as in the Big Ten—are on a professional career path and should be unionized; they should also be permitted to major in football itself. Like the Olympians who trained in the groves of Plato’s Academe, the players have “no free time for anything else” and should not be forced to go to classes the principles of which they can acquire on the field. If you can major in Turfgrass Management, well . . .
Cardale Jones had it just right after the championship. He told the New York Times, “I don’t think it’s going to be based on your athletic ability. It’s going to be based on your ability to process and diagnose information.” Shades of Huxley—Thomas Huxley, the Darwinist, that is. I’d argue that a Division 1 football player should be free to pick any class he chooses that can teach him anything more valuable than “to process and diagnose information.” As for the rest of us in Academe, how about the seven liberal arts for a start?
Apply Directly to the Forehead: Holmes, Zola, and Hennapecia
There is nothing men will not do, there is nothing they have not done, to recover their health and save their lives. They have submitted to be half-drowned in water, and half-choked with gases, to be buried up to their chins in earth, to be seared with hot irons like galley-slaves, to be crimped with knives, like cod-fish, to have needles thrust into their flesh, and bonfires kindled on their skin, to swallow all sorts of abominations, and to pay for all this, as if to be singed and scalded were costly privilege, as if blisters were a blessing, and leeches were a luxury.
—Dr. Oliver Wendell Homes (1871)
WERE DR. HOLMES TO OBSERVE bodily mischief today, he’d still find needles thrust without cause into flesh and bonfires needlessly kindled on the skin. But nowadays the injuries are far less likely to be inflicted on the sick in search of health than on the vain in search of fashion. Botox bruises the foreheads of matrons, collagen scars the lips of barflies. Steel grommets hang from the navels of nymphets, bolts pierce the lips of perps. Perhaps the broadest practice, however, is the application of henna directly to hair and skin. This global assault has produced rock concerts that resemble the coming of age in Samoa and turned South Beach into the South Pacific. Warriors of the NFL sport body tattoos that put Papua to shame, while trendy folk in SoHo flaunt the umbilical baroque. If the Belle Époque was the Age of Gold, ours has become the Age of Tool and Dye.
Yet the medical literature documents that neither body piercing nor henna is all that safe. Injuries provoked by cosmetic intrusion spare no age, no gender, no color, no class. Even the very young fall victim, as reported in a 2007 news item headlined “Scarred Children”:
Michelle Lolk, of River Edge, took her 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son to a tattoo shop this past summer for their first-ever temporary tattoos. Young Ethan got a cross on his arm. His sister, Olivia, got a dolphin on her belly. A day later, Olivia complained of severe pain. “It looked like she was branded with a poker,” Lolk said.
Skin branding of this sort (bonfires kindled on their skin, as Dr. Holmes might say) is due to acute contact dermatitis induced by henna’s active agent, lawsone (2-hydroxy-1,4-naphthoquinone) and an added ingredient, PPD (para-phenylenediamine). Henna is a shrub (Lawsonia inermis, or Egyptian privet) cultivated in India, Sri Lanka, and much of North Africa. The dried leaves are mixed with various solvents and applied directly to the skin or hair. PPD is often added to red henna powder to produce the “black henna” preferred for tattoos. But PPD also renders the mixture more allergenic and sometimes virulently toxic: see the 1996 Lancet paper “A Woman Who Collapsed after Painting Her Soles.” Temporary henna tattoos—the sort applied at rock concerts and kiddie festivals—are intended to persist for only a few weeks, but the incidence of acute inflammation, permanent scarring, and keloid formation has become epidemic in the last decade and a half. PubMed lists only three reports of reactions to henna tattoo in the two decades between 1975 and 1995—but 259 papers since 1995! A number of these cases were caused by henna without added PPD. Hair dyes come in all sorts of proprietary formulations: a 2006 study from Korea reported that of 15 henna samples tested, PPD was present in 3, nickel in 11, and cobalt in 4.
Henna has been recognized as an occupational hazard in hairdressing salons. At various doses the dye induces hemolytic anemia in lab animals
