Bradbury Robinson
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Bradbury Norton Robinson (Born February 1, 1884 in Bellevue, Ohio - Died 1949 in Florida) was a college football player for St. Louis University who threw the first legal forward pass in American football history.
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[edit] The pass
On September 5, 1906, Robinson threw the first pass in a game against Carroll College (Wisconsin) at Waukesha. Jack Schneider was the receiver for the Blue & White (St. Louis would not adopt "Billikens" as a nickname for its sports teams until sometime after 1910).
Jack Schneider, receiver (left) and Bradbury Robinson, passer (right)
circa 1906
Because Robinson was St. Louis' premier passer as well as a runner and a kicker, he is regarded by some as the first Triple threat man in football history, although that term would not be used regularly by sportswriters until the 1920s.
[edit] An Offensive Concept Ahead of Its Time
The power teams of the East, who dominated the attention of national sportswriters in the early 1900s, were slow to adopt the forward pass. However, the 1906 Blue & White squad under coach Eddie Cochems (1877-1953) built its offensive strategy around what was then a newly legalized play.
Robinson and Schneider practiced running "pass routes" in the months leading up to the 1906 season. Their passes were not the awkward heaves typical of the era, but overhand spirals that hit the receiver in stride. Robinson credited his uncanny ability to throw long and accurate passes in part to a crooked little finger on his throwing (right) hand that was the result of a childhood injury. The finger imparted a natural spiral to his tosses.
In his memoirs, Brad Robinson recalled that he and Schneider pushed their coach to emphasize the pass. And, according to archives at St. Louis[1], Cochems (coke-ems) didn't start calling pass plays in the Carroll game until after he had grown frustrated with the failure of his offense to move the ball on the ground.
In that historic 1906 game, after an earlier Robinson-to-Schneider attempt fell incomplete (which resulted in a turnover to Carroll under the rules at that time), Cochems called for his team to again execute the play he called the "air attack".
Robinson took the fat, rugby-style ball and threw a 20-yard touchdown pass to Schneider. The play stunned the fans and the Carroll players. St. Louis went on to win, 22-0.
[edit] Total dominance
Decades later, in interviews with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ed Wray (1873-1961), Robinson gave Cochems the credit for creating the St. Louis offensive scheme that resulted in the Blue & White cruising to an undefeated (11-0) 1906 season in which they led the nation in scoring, annihilating their opponents 402-11.
The highlight of the season was St. Louis' shocking 31-0 thrashing of Iowa. Writing in his book The Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, which was published posthumously in 1994, College Football Hall of Fame coach David M. Nelson (1920-1991) reports that "eight passes were completed in ten attempts for four touchdowns" in the Iowa game. "The average flight distance of the passes was twenty yards."
Nelson continues, "the last play demonstrated the dramatic effect that the forward pass was having on football. St. Louis was on Iowa's thirty-five-yard line with a few seconds to play. Timekeeper Walter McCormack walked onto the field to end the game when the ball was thrown twenty-five yards and caught on the dead run for a touchdown."
"Cochems said that the poor Iowa showing resulted from its use of the old style play and its failure to effectively use the forward pass", Nelson writes. "Iowa did attempt two basketball-style forward passes."
"During the 1906 season [Robinson] threw a sixty-seven yard pass... and... Schneider tossed a sixty-five yarder. Considering the size, shape and weight of the ball, these were extraordinary passes."
Brad Robinson was also a standout in baseball and track and field for the Blue & White.
[edit] Medical career
Robinson earned his medical degree at St. Louis and eventually opened The Robinson Clinic in St. Louis, Michigan, where he twice served as mayor.
Dr. Robinson was an advocate of naturopathic and holistic medicine. He was a frequent author on medical matters.
[edit] Warnings against use of DDT
In the mid to late 1940s, Robinson became one of the earliest to warn of the dangers of using the pesticide DDT in agriculture. This was a radical view at the time, since, beginning in 1944, DDT had been researched and manufactured in St. Louis by the Michigan Chemical Corp. (later purchased by Velsicol Chemical Corp.). DDT had become an important part of the local economy.[2].
It would be more than a decade before the dangers of DDT would be the subject of Rachel Carson's 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring. DDT's use in agriculture would be banned worldwide in the 1970s and 80s.
The Gratiot County, Michigan Landfill just outside of St. Louis, in which some of the chemicals from the DDT-producing plant had been disposed, became a Superfund site in the 1970s[3].
[edit] Death in Florida
Dr. Robinson died in Florida in 1949 from complications after routine surgery.
A World War I combat veteran, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Brad Robinson was inducted into the St. Louis Billiken Hall of Fame[4] in 1995.
[edit] References
- St. Louis University archives
- Boyles, Bob & Guido, Paul, 50 Years of College Football, 2007
- Nelson, David M., Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, 1994
- Scrapbook of Bradbury N. Robinson
