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You know, I think that in the end, Southron Rules Football will be considered the greatest legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt. (A fascinating what-if would be, What if his father didn't commit suicide in despondency over the Yankee defeat, and his Georgia-born mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, didn't return to her plantation with young Theodore? Could he have become a success in *Yankee* politics? Or what if Theodore had been born after December 20, 1860 and had thus been ineligible under Article II, section one, paragraph seven of the Confederate Constitution http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp [1] to become President?)

We are so used to thinking of college football as *the* characteristic sport of the South that we forget that in the early twentieth century, there was so much uproar over casualties that it seemed the game would be abolished. Politicians and newspapers complained that the game amounted to the "suicide of the white race." In this crisis, President Roosevelt acted, summoning representatives of Virginia, Georgia Tech, Jefferson Davis, and other major colleges to Richmond and urging them to take the needed steps to save the game. Thus was born the Confederate Collegiate Conference ("the KKK" as some wags liked to call it) and the reforms that led to Southron Rules football--reforms which were of course rejected in the North. ("Maybe Southerners need to be mollycoddled," sneered Yankee President Joseph Foraker, long Roosevelt's arch-enemy. "After all, they've been looked after by their colored slaves, pardon me, that's 'apprentices for life,' since birth. We prefer a manlier game here up North.")

It's ironic that the game of football, which Roosevelt did so much to save, also proved in the end to be his downfall. His inviting the Indian athlete Jim Thorpe to dine with him at the presidential mansion turned out to be his political suicide.

[1] "No person except a natural-born citizen of the Confederate; States, or a citizen thereof at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, *or a citizen thereof born in the United States prior to the 20th of December, 1860*, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the limits of the Confederate States, as they may exist at the time of his election."' (Emphasis added.)
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