The Origins of Football

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[From the archives of the Museum of Modern American Culture.]

The time:  The 1890s.  The place:  Oklahoma City.

Some urchins on the wrong side of the trolley-tracks  were too poor to afford a nice round and proper ball -- but they managed to salvage a discarded and half-deflated one from a trashcan out back of the whorehouse that doubled as an abortion clinic.   Scraping off certain fluids  scarcely to be identified, they beheld their prize:  in shape, something between a limp blimp and a sat-on hoagie.  They attempted to hurl the thing through the air, but that proved impossible;  so they kicked it, savagely, along the gutters.  Thus was “FOOTBALL” born.

Later, a team of Mafia engineers perfected the shape, arriving at the familiar “pinched ends” under the influence of the well-known passages in Ecclesiastesicus (“Yea, why is the rat’s turd  tapered at both ends?” -- “Verily, so that his ass-hole doth not snap shut.”)

For obvious reasons, this pastime soon died out, and is all but unknown in our day.