The scene is almost surreal: boys in collared shirts chasing a giant ball across a field. In one picture, the ball fills a horse-drawn cart; in another, it blots out an entire human being, save their foot and hat. This is pushball: in the early twentieth century, it was charged with separating university-aged men from the boys.

Pushball had been devised in the 1890s by a Massachusetts inventor named Moses G. Crane. He was dissatisfied with American football in part because he found it hard to follow the progress of a tiny brown ball across an often-brown field. “If the ball were only made large”, he thought, “yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill”.

In 1894, he commissioned the first pushball: a leather-covered wooden frame, six feet three inches in diameter, which weighed around 70 pounds (32 kilograms). It cost him $175 ($6,775 in today’s money). His son Edwin helped devise the rules and the next year introduced it to Harvard, where he was at college. Twenty thousand people unwittingly attended an exhibition match on November 3, 1895, played during the half time of a football game between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania; Edwin, of course, captained the Harvard team.

Other early matches were met with technical difficulties. On Thanksgiving Day, 1902, one W. Carsey, manager of New York’s Equitable Park, staged a pushball match between the Metropolitans and the All Americans. He skimped on procuring an official ball, however, and employed a shoemaker to make a replica instead. This ersatz pushball was stuffed with hay and left outside overnight, as it could not fit through a doorframe. On match day, after an evening of steady rain, the fifty pound ball had ballooned in weight to over five hundred pounds.

According to the official rulebook published by the Spalding sports equipment company, the game was played by two teams of eleven men each: five forwards, two left wings, two right wings, and two goalkeepers. The name of the game was to get the ball through the opposing team’s goalposts — eighteen feet in height, placed in the ground twenty feet apart, with a cross bar seven feet above. Getting it under the crossbar earned five points, while managing to heave it over got eight. Plays were devised, with names like “the flying wedge”, and referees employed to adjudicate the legality of tackles.

This new sport, often conveniently played on a football pitch, met American colleges’ unquenchable hunger for more forms of competitive amusements; so popular was it that Spalding declared that “there is every indication that the game will occupy a permanent place among the sports of America”. It had even crossed the Atlantic and eventually found its way to Australia. The British, however, proved less committed to the struggle of man against man, and by 1904 were playing pushball on horseback and even in cars. British entrepreneur E. V. Hanegan did much to propagate the mythic proportions of this new game and created his own version of a pushball, which required the hides of nine horses.“Pushball is a game for giants”, he proclaimed. “Such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played without great loss of dignity”.

At Miami University in Ohio, however, pushball responded to a pressing need for a less violent way for the students to dominate each other. In the 1880s and the 1890s, the contest was a brutal bout of capture-the-flag, whose excesses would lead it to be banned at the turn of the century. Yet something had to replace it: an unsigned editorial in the October 1903 edition of The Student bemoaned the lack of “class distinction” that resulted from the outlawing of the event. “Let us at least have something”, one student begged, “that will compel the members of the classes to unite for the sake of their common cause.”

In 1909, pushball answered the call. Contrary to the directions laid out in the Spalding’s official playing rules, a maximum amount of esprit de corps would be generated by letting each class field thirty students. The Student’s report from the following year’s event is worth quoting at length:

In times past, the Sophomores and Freshmen were wont to settle their troubles by the water method. . . . Now a great ball, taller than any man, is secured: some say it is the plaything of the gods, others mere [sic] prosaic, that it comes from the University of Michigan, and costs one hundred and fifty dollars. Be that as it may, it arrived on the athletic field Friday morning and was used at 10am by the Sophomores and Freshmen to settle their differences. It looked quite large enough to take care of all their troubles.

The ball was placed in the middle of the field and thirty men from each class lined upon the goal lines. At this point the Sophomores swore the Freshmen had thirty-two men, while the Freshmen were equally positive that the Sophomore [sic] had thirty-four. After counting three times, officers were adjusted, and Cap. Stone fired the pistol which, while not heard around the world, produced a tremendous amount of muscular energy and activity in a short period of time. Matters started with a rush, as did the Sophomores and Freshmen. It is difficult to tell who hit the ball first and what’s the use any way? They all hit it soon enough.

The pictures do indeed show them all hitting it, a great mass of boys trying to run each other over with God’s great ping-pong ball. At one point, they manage to lift it over their heads, and at another, a boy clambers on top. Both years, the sophomores took home the trophy, and both teams, girls included, posed with the monstrosity in front of Stoddard Hall.

Nevertheless, pushball didn’t have staying power, maybe simply because it was impractical to borrow the ball from the University of Michigan, some 240 miles (380 km) away. By 1912, tug-of-war was back, and with the beginning of the war in 1914, enthusiasm seems to have waned for the contest entirely. Today, Miami University’s “Traditions” page keeps mum on turn-of-the-century battles.

Below you will find photographs of pushball from: the 1903 and 1907 editions of a history of the sport by Spalding (Internet Archive); 1910 and 1911 matches in Ohio (Miami University); and assorted American competitions (Library of Congress).