The Day Seattle Shut Out Port Townsend
A lopsided rugby-style football match between the Seattle Athletic Club and a raw Port Townsend squad reveals the growing pains of early Pacific Northwest sport.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Seattle Athletic Club's football team took another scalp yesterday, with Port Townsend the victim. It was not a remarkable game in any respect but a clean victory that afforded the team an opportunity to show up the weak spots of the home side. The members ran up the score to forty points and kept their opponents from scoring. Notwithstanding their defeat, the work of the Port Townsend team was remarkable considering the fact that only two of their number had ever played football or even seen a game of it before. Captain Cobb, who had to handle the team alone, is certainly deserving of great credit for what he has done with such raw material.
“The work of the Port Townsend team was remarkable considering the fact that only two of their number had ever played football or even seen a game of it before.”
This 1893 report captures the frantic, chaotic early days of collegiate and club football in Washington, decades before the regional rivalries of the Huskies or Cougars became a professional-grade civic obsession. It serves as a reminder that every massive modern sporting institution began with amateur teams and 'raw material' learning the rules on the fly.
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