Why is Football Brown? An In-Depth Exploration

0:00And that's the end of the first half, as the team said to the locker room, the Spartans lead the Bulldogs by a score. You guys stink. Jeez, Coach, we're only down a couple of points. No, I mean, you guys really smell. You need to hit the showers. And here, I got every one of you new bars of soap from the Sterling soap company. Each bar is artisan crafted using natural ingredients and essential oils. They also have shaved soaps, cologne, beard, balm, and a whole lot more. Now get in there. But Coach, we have another half to play. I don't care. I can't stand to be around you a few minutes later. All right, bring it in tight. You guys are still playing terrible, but you're smelling great out there. Now listen, you're going to need to stock up for the rest of the season. We got a lot of tough games left. So go to sterlingsoap.com after the game. That's STIRL-I-N-G soap.com. You got that? Yes, Coach? Great. Sterlingsoap.com on three. One, two, three. Sterlingsoap.com. Why is a football brown when a baseball and a soccer balls are more of a white color?

1:06And basketballs are orange. Why is our games sports ball at different color of brown? We're going to try to answer these questions and more as we go through the evolution of the football, the basic essential game piece itself that we love of our favorite sport. We're going to, my name is Darren Hayes, everybody. And I am from PricscanDispatch.com. I've been doing football history for decades now, trying to bring you the preservation of the game and help with, have a better understanding for the enjoyment of the casual fan and the historians to appreciate those who have come before us in the events, the people, and the games and events that really make this game so special. And today talking about this football itself is really quite interesting. And we've talked about this multiple times. We've had Timothy P. Brown, a football archeology.com join us to talk about the ball. We've had other guests talking about the football. But we want to know in this case, why is it the difference in color from these other sports that are also made of traditional leather application, just like the football.

2:09Why is the football brown and these other ones different colors? So I guess first of all, let's answer the question of why is a baseball white? Well, back in the 19th century, baseballs when they first came out, they were also brown because the brown leather that comes, you know, like you see on your leather shoes, it's naturally a brownish color when it's tanned properly. You know, the tanning processes are all different and they can change the colors of them at will. But that was sort of a traditional thing, was a brown leather thing. You think about saddles for cowboys. They were mostly brown or baseball mitts and the old days, they were mostly brown. Those were just tanned the leather, you know, the leather jackets that your parents or your grandparents might have had. Most of the time, they were a leather, you know, a dark brown or a brown. But baseball, with that being brown, it was hard for the batters in the fielders to see the ball. You know, you have a small ball that's moving, you know, 90 to 100 miles an hour.

3:10You want to see where that sucker is. So our ancestors on sports were smart enough to know they had to change that color a little bit and they were all daygames back then in 19th century. So eventually they ended up making them white, whether they bleached them or painted them or however the process was to make that white covering. We're not going to get into the history of the baseball here too much. But they made them white and they had white stitching. They played around with the different colors of stitching and eventually by the early 20th century, I believe in the 1930s, they end up coming up and make it standard for there to be red stitching on a white leather ball. That way that you can see the strings, see which way that ball was turning when you're a batter. See what spins on it? Is it a curve ball? Is it a fast ball? If you can see it, that fast one's something projectiles coming at you, you know, 100 miles an hour. I don't know that I can, but there's probably some talented batters out there they can and obviously there are because they're good hitters out there. But that's how the baseball became white for the visibility of it for its players.

4:12Night games started to come in and it brought a whole different, you know, feature to it, including the practices in the late afternoons when they were playing under the lights. And Timothy Brown was on a previous episode and he has this to say about it. By 1903, Amosalons of Stag was painting the ball white when they were using it at night. So, you know, Chicago's pretty tough school guys were in class till late and so he had to practice late. So he installed lights fairly early on and used a white football for practice. And then, you know, typically when people were played early night games, they used either a white or yellow painted ball. And that was kind of the case until the 1930s. And the 30s when striping first came to be at least as far as I can, you know, I've been able to determine. And the actually the first game that I know was striped was a 1936 BYU and then what's

5:18now in Northern Colorado. But that wasn't it because the night game was because they were kind of arguing over whether they should use a white ball when one of the team when BYU is going to wear white jerseys in Northern Colorado was going to wear brown pants so they didn't want to wear use a brown ball. So they agreed on a brown ball with white stripes. And because otherwise, you know, they were concerned about hidden ball tricks and those kinds of things. All right. So we just don't, you know, don't really think about anymore. Yeah. Some interesting stuff and some great points by Tim on that back on that episode back in 2022 when he was talking about the football team has a great book by the way on the history of the football as well as those other books, but it's history of the football book. We have, when down in the show notes, you have a link directly to that with our Amazon Associates account. So Tim makes a, gets a good sale on the book. It helps pigs can dispatch out a little bit and we appreciate your patronage and so just Tim to check that book out on the football history.

6:19It's a really great book. And so we started getting into the night games, right about the time of, you know, putting all this is going on with these different colors of ball. And you know, as far as the white ball and the yellow ball, it sort of takes me back and reminds me of, you know, like high school science teacher, you know, think about a classroom full of high school students, you know, you're already a little bit giddy and thinking everything's funny, especially certain words. And he was teaching us about the solar system and, you know, called out the word, you know, the planet Uranus. Well, of course, that brought laughter and everything else that, you know, the young, young people do and laugh at and still do to this day, I'm sure. So he decided to correct it and say, you know, we're not going to call it that anymore. We're not going to call it Uranus. We're going to call it Uranus. And I'm not sure, so sure that that helped matters anyway because that was kind of a funny word to say it too.

7:19We should just told us to call it Charlie or something like that, who knows. But anyway, that's sort of the way the football is. When you have a yellow and a white football or discolored football and, you know, you have some of the leagues that have come up over the years. I've had some different colored panel balls. It's not the same. We are traditional game. We are a football. We love the brown football at different tents of brown and tan and orangeish colors. But basically, we love that football color and that's all part of it. So the football shape, you know, as Tim has told us multiple times, you know, it came from a rugby football. That came from Europe in the 19th century. That ball they were playing way back in 1869 in a game they called football, the first football game. But basically, it's the first American intereclegic sport game. There's more of a game of soccer between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, 25 people to the side. And the ball there was that ball where it's a pig's bladder covered in a calf skin.

8:21You know, and imagine, you know, you can't get that to be round. You can't get it to be perfectly oval. It's going to be something in between. And that's basically what you had. So every game was a little bit different. The ball deflated all the time. You had to unlace it, you know, pull out the end of the pig's bladder. You could blow into some brave soul, you know, put their lips on that rotten piece of flesh and blow it back up, tie it up, put it all back together, you know, probably the ball is deflated by the time you get to that point. That's the way the ball was until the evolution of science and technology to galvanize rubber that you can make a rubber core, a bladder, a rubber bladder that can fill up with air. Just to blow that up by mouth, as Tim has told us multiple times and tie that up. And you know, lace it all back up in the ball. You know, we have, in our book, the Jeffrey Payne and I wrote, you know, here in Maroon in the background, you see it, and you see the 1925 Apostle Maroon's image that I was given by Timothy Brown, who helped us on that book.

9:24You know, we have a scene in there with Joe Zacho, the longtime sports salesman, the sporting good salesman, who sold the uniforms in the balls and everything else, the equipment for the possible Maroon's and other teams around Eastern Pennsylvania. Well, he would assemble the game balls. They'd have a new ball for every game that the Maroons would play back in the 1920s. And he would, you know, get it, it came disassembled. You got a rubber bladder, you got the case leather, and you got the laces, and you had to sort of stuff them all together and it was an art form to put it all together, lace it up, blow it up, inflate it to take it to the game and you play the football game with that. That was the way it was for many, many years. It wasn't like buying them out of the case, you know, like we get today, you know, where you get this ball coming out, you know, looking fresh and almost ready to play, maybe you got to pump it up a little bit for a couple of PSI into it. But that's the way footballs come now. We're spoiled. We have the modern world, everything's put together for us.

10:26But the, you know, the footballs back in the, even the 1905, they made some drastic changes when football rules were changing, where the introduction of the forward pass, you couldn't put your hands around, too many people couldn't get their hands on that, the giant watermelon shaped football that they had back in the early 20th century for a few years. So they slim the ball down a little bit, so somebody could get their fingers on it and throw some semblance on the forward pass, you know, Tim's talked multiple times about how they were trying to figure out how to throw it, you know, grenade launching and underhand it and, you know, basket throws and everything like that. Eventually, they got it down to the overhand, overhand spiral, and they summed the ball even more back in the 1930s when the NFL was starting to get their own rulebook and things like that. And, you know, finally, we got to the point where the ball was shaped and slimmed even more to increase the velocity that you get in the accuracy of the passing game and became

11:27the pro-late spheroid standardization of the ball that we know so well. That's the technical term, that's what the scientists call it, you know, we call it, you know, the football shape and that's the way it goes there. But the, you know, the leather itself is interesting and Tim had this story to tell us about, you know, a couple of brothers and how they made the leather footballs that we see on the NFL and college football games today. I understand. Back in, like, 1892 or so, a guy named Isadora Horween immigrated from what's now Ukraine and ends up in Chicago at the time of the 1892 World's Fair and he had been a Tanner in back in the Ukraine or Ukraine, I think it's not the, but anyways, he was a Tanner and so he gets, you know, he gets involved in that business here in the States and he

12:31ended up, after, you know, maybe five, six years, he ends up starting his own Tanner. And I think pretty much immediately built a reputation for providing, you know, just high quality, tanning goods, you know. And so, you know, it kind of, this guy shows up in Chicago and if you remember the jungle from your high school reading, you know, Chicago had all these stockyards and so therefore they had a lot of leather processing, you know, with tannery and whatnot. Isadora ends up producing a successful business, right? He's running a really nice shop. He's able to send his sons to high quality school in the Chicago area and then he may have had other family, you know, other children, but he had two sons, one Ralph and the other Arnold and they end up being, you know, really good athletes, they play high school football and then they end up both going to Harvard and playing football there.

13:34It's really a classic American story, you know, right? I mean, it's just like, just great stuff. So, you know, this immigrant guy and his kids are playing at Harvard and their team captains and all this kind of stuff. I mean, they're really, you know, excellent players. So then they finish their careers and they go back to Chicago and that's when the NFL is getting started. So they end up playing for the Chicago Cardinals. They play like two years for them and they apparently had to keep their playing professional football hidden from their parents and especially their grandmother apparently and just because that's not something that gentleman did. But then Arnold ends up becoming the player coach for the Cardinals and they 23 and some. Then, you know, they couldn't plan to the assume names that they played under before and Arnold, he went back to Harvard and was their head coach for five years.

14:35And then he returns to Chicago and basically got, you know, kind of took over the business. Yeah, successful business. They're producing leather for, you know, some of the finest shoe manufacturers in the country. And still, that's still the case today. You know, it's an active, it's an active business. They still, they produce the leather for Wilson and the NFL balls. They produce the leather for all the NBA balls. They produce a lot of the leather that's used in major league gloves. And then, you know, Timberland and, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of brands of, you know, foreign and, you know, nearly fine shoes that use Corween leather. So anyways, part way through, I think it was in the early, so they had a bunch of leather contracts, you know, to provide leather to all kinds of different, you know, sporting goods manufacturers. But they didn't have the Wilson contract.

15:37And George Hallis at one point was complaining about the leather that the NFL used. I mean, no one had really good leather for the balls is what it came down to. You know, they got waterlogged and yeah, yeah. So he basically asked, I don't know, hey, can you do something about this? Can you come up with a system or a new form of leather? And so, you know, maybe it took a little bit of time, but Corween ended up creating initially what they called grip type. And now, I think it was just a branding thing. But then they switched to using a term, tanned in tack. So the tackiness is tanned in, whereas at the time, and maybe still for other people, the other manufacturers, they sprayed the ball with some kind of substance to make a tacky. So anyways, you know, then that leather became the leather that was used by Wilson.

16:41And I want to say it was like 52 is when that happened. So anyways, you know, that's when the Duke football came along, all that kind of stuff. And so then they've been the sole supplier of leather to Wilson for NFL footballs ever since. I mean, that's just fascinating stuff that the family business is still going strong after all these years. From those two brothers that played the game of football and, you know, did it well. And we're even coached in the NFL for God's sakes and played in the NFL. Well, you know, but so how did the football get to be this oranges tanish color or darker brown as we get into the games? Now, how did all this happen and why is that? Well, there's, you know, some things that I've read and seen are, you know, there's different techniques. So after the Halloween leather is cut and sewn and put together in footballs and able to hire at the Wilson factory, they ship the balls to another place. And they get conditioned and part of the conditioning is, you know, they have these guys go out and get some mud out of a certain river in New Jersey.

17:47Lord only knows what the hooks and the rivers and New Jersey, but pick colors of football to what we like to see. And they take this ball and they take it and they rub the mud in and massage it and, you know, do all these crazy things to the football to get that color. Even putting some motions and ointments and saves or whatever to to moisturize the leather and to give it, you know, that not only the tacky appearance that they're already putting some tackiness into the Halloween leather process. But they're also putting it into making some weather proofing into this into colorization is all as well. That makes the football that special color that basketballs are not baseballs are not soccer balls are not. And that's the way we like it. That's the game of football. And that's why the color brown is a color of football. Hope you've learned a little bit something today. Hope you enjoyed us. Catch us on more on YouTube. Our podcast, Pigskin Dispatch on your favorite podcast provider and on Pigskin Dispatch.com till next time everybody have a great career day. That's all the football history we have today folks join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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