I have, from time to time, reported on the goings-on in American Football in the early twentieth century. Needless to say, the game was extremely dangerous and, despite reforms in the 1906-1907 period, in 1909 players were still being maimed and killed. Indeed, the cancellation of the 1909 Army-Navy game was announced on Nov. 3, 1909:

[F]inal decision having been reached to-day by the athletic authorities of the Naval Academy to grant the request of the Superintendent of the Military Academy to cancel the game owing to the death of Cadet Eugene A. Byrne as a result of injuries received Saturday in the game with Harvard.

Later in the issue is a letter to the editor on this point:

We are told that football promotes alertness in the brains of the players, teaches them to make quick decisions, compels them to implicit obedience to authority, and holds them to strict training while the season lasts. The finer the men physically the better for them, it is said, is the moral and spiritual development they gain from playing this particularly perilous game.

There is another side which many women and a few men see with clear vision. Is this sport or any other worth the death of young men just at the time when they are stepping into maturity? A few days ago it was a midshipman in the navy who died of a fractured vertebrae, and this morning is is a cadet at West Point whose death is reported of a twisted spine. Apart from the heartache to parents, the wound to love and the disappointment to circles of kindred, can the Nation afford thus to sacrifice the flower of its youth? If these boys died as heroes die, in saving lives, as firemen sometimes die, in the rescue of victims from burning buildings; if they died on the battlefield in a good cause, there might be consolation for the bereaved and added glory to the Nation whose sons they are. Simply to die in an athletic contest that is shockingly brutal is a waste to the Nation and a stab to the home that is without excuse.

And another story discusses ending a program:

SCRANTON, Penn - Announcement was made to-day by the Faculty of St. Thomas de Aquinas College that the football schedule for the remainder of the season had been canceled, owing to the numerous fatal accidents which have occurred. It was also stated that the college would not be represented by another eleven until the game is modified.