Before 1905, American football was pure brutality — no forward pass, no strategy, just organized violence. The NCAA's 1905 legalization of the forward pass introduced beauty, strategy, and the breath-holding drama of a deep ball. Without that rule, there's no Monday Night Football, no Super Bowl, no $23 billion business.
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The first game of American intercollegiate football, played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, involved 25 players per side, a round ball nobody could pick up, and a goal of kicking it through the opponent's posts — essentially soccer with chaos. The sport was imported from English public school culture and rapidly became a prestige activity for America's elite universities, even as it remained extraordinarily dangerous. By 1905, the body count had reached 19 fatalities in one year, including a serious injury to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., prompting President Roosevelt to call a summit of university presidents and threaten to ban the game unless reforms were made. Out of that summit came two world-altering decisions: the founding of the NCAA (created specifically to regulate college football safety) and the legalization of the forward pass. That single rule — a safety measure — introduced the strategic and aesthetic counterweight to football's brutality: the beauty of the long ball, the held breath before a catch, the slow-motion arc of a perfect spiral. Without the forward pass, there is no Monday Night Football, no Super Bowl, no $23 billion business.
The NCAA was founded in 1905 specifically to regulate and codify collegiate American football safety, after President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to outlaw the sport following 19 fatalities.
The forward pass was legalized in 1905 following Teddy Roosevelt's safety summit, fundamentally differentiating American football from rugby and soccer and introducing the strategic and aesthetic beauty of the modern game.
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Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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