David Hackett Fisher's wonderful, Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America, observes that a combination of Puritan zeal and English customs resulted in what was called The Boston Game.
That was the game we now know as American football.
It began as a descendant of a family of English folk games that were held, surprise, surprise, on Christmas Day, New Years Day etc plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The contest often involved a leather ball that members of two teams from the same town - or two teams representing different towns - tried to move the ball to the opposite ends of the town.
The contests were viewed by the locals and the teams were made up of men and women and the games we're violent with a lot of kicking, punching, and encroachment in the neutral zone.
The old folk games were reproduced in New England with local elected officials acting as, well, officials.
One suspects that is when cheating first began because it was Boston...
One William Bentley moralised in his diary that the game was violent and disgraceful to high education; and then he donned a beaver hat, his swallow-tailed coat and with his musket began taking long range pot shots at the local indians still then living dangerously close to town.
However, it wasn't too long before speculators took over the game, named it The National Football League and developed sophisticated tests to determine whether or not the football equipment was safe.
Here we see George "Papa Bear" Halas, Curly "Lady Marmalade"Lambeau, along with the safety scientist, Bob "Bagel" Einstein, who developed the prototype helmet, watching a local idiot testing the new equipment.
