ROUSES_SeptOct2019_Magazine

We Were Robbed no flag and we paid the penalty by Creg Stephenson "How do I smell from here?” — unnamed referee in a probably fictitious Jerry Clower story, after marking off a 15-yard penalty when a coach told him, “You stink." The penalty flag is largely unique to football among major American team sports, being as it is a colored handkerchief filled with sand or other pellet-like substances and thrown to the ground to indicate an infraction of varying severity. In-game rules violations in baseball, basketball and hockey are indicated simply by verbal warnings, hand signals and/or the blowing of a whistle. Soccer has its yellow and red cards, but those are quickly transferred from the official’s breast pocket to his or her hand and then back into the pocket after being shown to the offending player. and understated. It’s something between a javelin toss and a child playing with a toy parachute. And nothing can kill the buzz of celebratory football fans like a televi- sion or public address announcer intoning, “There’s a flag on the play…” after an apparent touchdown. But where did the penalty flag come from, anyway? It all began in that noted cradle of football, Youngstown, Ohio. According to a story published on the official website of Youngstown State Univer- sity, the penalty flag’s inventor was Dwight “Dike” Beede, who coached at the school from 1937 to 1972. Beede introduced the penalty flag for an Oct. 17, 1941, game against Oklahoma City University, tired as he was of officials using various horns and whistles to indicate a penalty. “I thought perhaps if there was some visual signal given which wouldn’t be heard Only in football is a penalty — be it offsides, holding or illegal use of the hands — marked by an official pulling and tossing the flag from his pocket in a fashion that’s simultaneously conspicuous

It’s unclear how quickly Beede’s innova- tion spread throughout the country (there was a war on, after all), but by the late 1940s they were common enough to be mentioned casually in newspaper stories. The American Football Coaches Associa- tion formally adopted the penalty flag in 1948; the NFL followed suit for a Green Bay Packers-Boston Yanks game at Fenway Park that September. Officials still use their whistles to stop and start play, and often blow the whistle in conjunction with throwing the flag. (A noted exception to this was in the legendary 1967 “Ice Bowl” between the Packers and Dallas Cowboys, when a referee’s whistle froze to

by the players it would be helpful,” Beede said in a 1972 interview with WKBN TV of Youngstown published by the Associated Press. “So, I thought that if a flag could be thrown, or a handkerchief, to designate that the play would go on until the whistle was blown on the part of the referee, which officially stopped the game.” Beede tasked his wife, Irma, with sewing the first flags together out of cloth from his daughter’s old Halloween costume. He initially chose white fabric with red stripes, so that the penalty markers would stand out in the muddy grass on which football was usually played in those days. The penalty flag was an immediate sensation, with official Jack McPhee saying, “It’s been a big help.”

McPhee later used the flags at an Ohio State-Iowa game, where Big Ten commissioner John Griffith took note.

his lip, so officials used verbal commands

to get players’ attention.) College penalty flags remained red – Clower refers to the flag as a “red rag” in the comedy routine refer- enced in the opening of this story – until the 1970s. The NFL, which had used white penalty flags, switched to the bright yellow color we recognize today in 1965. After initially being made from literal whole cloth, flags are now generally fashioned from nylon. And after everything from fishing sinkers to BBs were used to weigh down flags, it was determined that sand worked best, so most flags now contain a small bag of sand in one end.

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SEPTEMBER•OCTOBER 2019

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