STL All Sports

The findings of Professor Giles must be astonishing to other historians. First of all, he credits natives of exactly one town in ancient China indulging in the game. China, neither ancient nor modern, ever gave much of its time to games that were combative. The Chinese, even in these days, while indulging in a few competitive games, generally skip the combative. It is, seemingly, an inherited dislike, come down through the centuries. Yet Professor Giles had Chinese indulging in football at a time when no other nation was devoting itself to the game, if one excludes the fanciful play credited to Greece.

What makes the Giles "discovery" most remarkable is that he learned about something that was going on in China through at least 8 centuries (300 B.C. to 500 A.D.), which has escaped the thousand and one men who devoted themselves to search into the past history of China. Giles, and Giles alone, found football in China. Can Giles be right-and all the others wrong?

The professor does not say why football disappeared from China without a trace-and lacked a trace, during those 800 years, that eluded all other searchers. There is nothing in Chinese art, literature or anything else come down from ancient centuries as proof that the Chinese ever played at football, which is a game of no interest to the modern Chinese.

Authentic history has it that some few years after the Danes vacated England, which they had occupied from about 1016 to 1042, workmen, excavating an old battlefield, uncovered a skull that undeniably was that of a Dane. These men, like all English, still smouldering with memories of Danish imperialism, kicked at the skull to show their feelings. Then all the others took to kicking the skull back and forth, and work actually was neglected while the boot was being applied to the defunct Dane's head.

Boys, seeing this, sensed a new form of diversion. They dug around and also found a skull. Some boys were barefoot; others wore shoes none too stout. The concussion caused by kicking voided their anticipated pleasure, but they retained the idea, and shortly thereafter one of the boys appeared with an inflated cow bladder and, thus, the basic principle of football was born.