Pushball: The Forgotten Sport That Used a Ball the Size of a Small Elephant
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Somewhere between 1894 and the First World War, a sport briefly existed that involved two teams of eleven men throwing themselves at a leather ball six feet in diameter, weighing around 70 pounds, on a pitch the size of a football field. The sport was called pushball. It was invented by a man who hated football. It was taken seriously by Spalding, Harvard, the British military, and the Yorkshire Post. It crossed the Atlantic, toured the north of England, mutated into a version played on horseback, and briefly spawned a terrifying car-based variant in the 1920s. Then it more or less vanished. Here's the full story.
The Man Who Hated Football
Moses G. Crane was a Massachusetts-based inventor and electrical engineer who is primarily remembered today, if at all, for his work on the fire alarm system. A search through his patent filings from the late 19th century shows a restless, curious mind: there's an egg-beater, an ice-cream freezer, a method of making pliers, a restyled bicycle, an electro-mechanical gong, and a gun-barrel scraper. But the invention that consumed him toward the end of his life was a sport.
Crane had three sons who played football at Harvard. He wasn't a fan. His particular complaint was the ball. It was too small, too brown, too easy to lose sight of on a crowded, often equally brown field. As he later explained: "If the ball were only made large, yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill."
In 1894, having apparently failed to persuade anyone that this was a reasonable position, he decided to simply build the ball himself. He commissioned a leather-covered sphere six feet three inches in diameter, built over a wooden frame. It weighed around 70 pounds. It cost him $175, which is roughly $6,000 in today's money. His local sporting club, the Newton Athletic Association, had promised that if he built such a ball, they'd find something to do with it, and they kept their word.
Moses Crane died in 1898, just as pushball was starting to attract wider attention. He never saw how far his oversized idea would travel.
How the Game Actually Worked
Pushball's official rulebook was published and distributed by the Spalding sports equipment company, which became the game's biggest commercial backer. According to Spalding's rules, the game was played by two teams of eleven: five forwards, two left wings, two right wings, and two goalkeepers. The pitch was 140 yards long and 50 yards wide. At each end stood an H-shaped goal: two posts eighteen feet high, planted twenty feet apart, with a crossbar seven feet from the ground.
Scoring worked on a tiered system. Getting the ball under the crossbar and through the posts earned five points. Managing to heave the entire six-foot ball up and over the crossbar earned eight.
There was also a two-point "touchdown" rule for safety plays behind the goal. Tactics were taken seriously enough that plays had names, "the flying wedge" being the most notable, and referees were employed to adjudicate tackles.
In practice, photographs from early matches show something closer to a human avalanche. Twenty-two men running at full speed into a giant leather sphere, climbing on top of it, getting buried under it, attempting to push it collectively through a goal while the opposing team tried to redirect it in the other direction. It was, by any measure, ridiculous. It was also apparently enormous fun to watch.
The Harvard Debut and the Hay-Stuffed Disaster
Crane's son Edwin helped develop the rules and introduced the game to Harvard in 1895. The official debut came on 3 November 1895 during the half-time break of a Harvard versus University of Pennsylvania football match. Twenty thousand people were in the ground. Most of them had no idea what was about to happen. Edwin captained the Harvard team for the demonstration.
Early matches were sometimes undermined by the basic problem of sourcing a ball. The official Spalding version was expensive and inconvenient to transport. On Thanksgiving Day 1902, a promoter named W. Carsey staged a match at Equitable Park in New York between the Metropolitans and the All Americans. Rather than purchasing an official ball, he hired a shoemaker to make a replica. The shoemaker stuffed it with hay. The ball was too large to fit through any doorframe, so it was left outside overnight. That night it rained. By morning, the fifty-pound hay ball had absorbed enough water to balloon to over five hundred pounds. The match proceeded anyway. History doesn't record the outcome, but the photograph of the remains of the hay-stuffed ball, published in Spalding's 1903 handbook, speaks for itself.
The British Invasion
By 1895, the British press was already reporting on pushball as a "Yankee invention," noting that "the ball itself is a great curiosity. It can be moved with very slight pressure. Indeed, a good wind will send it rolling across the field at a lively rate." But the game didn't properly arrive in Britain until 1902.
The man responsible was a British entrepreneur named E. V. Hanegan, who saw a spectator sport opportunity and moved decisively. Hanegan's contribution to pushball history was twofold. First, he commissioned his own version of the ball, made from the hides of nine horses. It was so large that it took two and a half hours to inflate using a specially modified pump. Second, he had a gift for promotional copy. "Pushball is a game for giants," he declared. "Such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played without great loss of dignity."
The first official British match was played at Crystal Palace on 23 August 1902, watched by 4,004 spectators. British rules differed slightly from the American version, with teams of eight rather than eleven. From Crystal Palace, Hanegan took the game on a nationwide tour: Hull, Halifax, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Sheffield, Glasgow, and Cork all hosted matches. The Yorkshire Post covered the sport with genuine enthusiasm. Thousands turned up at each stop. The moment when a team managed to lift the ball above their heads and tip it toward the opposing goal was apparently the crowd-pleaser, drawing cheers every time it happened.
Hanegan's promotional material specifically targeted rugby and football clubs, suggesting they use pushball as a summer training tool to "keep their players in the pink of condition." It didn't take. But the sport found a different and more committed audience in the British military, which had the large parade grounds and organisational discipline that pushball seemed to demand.
Horses, Cars, and the Perturbation of Several Cows
Almost as soon as pushball was established as a sport, people started trying to play it in ways it wasn't designed for. Horseback pushball was introduced at Durland's Riding Academy in New York in 1902, the same year the British tour was happening, and quickly crossed the Atlantic. In England it was played at the Royal Tournament. The horse version had no restrictions on riding style. Players propelled the ball using their horses' knees and chests, and a skilled rider could apparently direct the animal to punt the ball the full length of the field. A newspaper account of a 1904 horseback match noted that the game was played "to the perturbation of several cows" grazing nearby.
By the 1920s, someone had decided that horses weren't dangerous enough. Auto pushball involved two teams of three cars attempting to direct the giant ball toward the opposing goal using their bumpers and bodywork. A period advertisement promised that "in it one gets many a thrill." This was, presumably, an understatement. The sport doesn't appear to have survived long. The story of auto polo, in which men with mallets played polo from moving cars, gives a sense of how little the era worried about the safety of novelty sports.
Pushball at University: Class Wars by Any Other Name
The sport found its most committed home in American universities, where it filled a specific social role. At Miami University in Ohio, the early 1900s saw freshmen and sophomores conduct annual battles for class status. Through the 1880s and 1890s, these had taken the form of brutal capture-the-flag contests that led to genuine injuries, multiple hospitalisations, and eventually an outright ban around the turn of the century.
Pushball arrived in 1909 as the approved replacement. The rules were loosened considerably for university play: rather than the standard eleven per side, Miami University fielded thirty students per class. The Student newspaper's account of the 1910 contest described the ball arriving from the University of Michigan, 240 miles away, at a cost of $150, and being described by the students as either "the plaything of the gods" or, more prosaically, "a ball from Michigan." At the starting pistol, sixty young men rushed the ball simultaneously. Sides were disputed before the game even started, with each class insisting the other had two extra players. After three recounts, a pistol shot launched the melee.
Boys climbed on top of the ball. Boys got pinned beneath it. Both years of recorded Miami University matches, 1910 and 1911, were won by the sophomores. Both teams, including girls who came to watch, posed for photographs in front of the ball and Stoddard Hall afterwards. By 1912, however, the impracticality of borrowing a ball from a university 240 miles away had worn thin. Tug-of-war replaced pushball. When the First World War began in 1914, what remained of the sport's momentum largely dissipated.
Emory University in Atlanta kept the tradition going considerably longer, playing annual pushball matches from 1923 until 1955, when the game was finally retired on the grounds that it had become too rough. Macalester College in Minnesota has played it since 1914, traditionally involving both students and faculty.
Pushball and the Blinded Soldiers
One of the more unexpected chapters in pushball's history involves its use as rehabilitation. After the First World War, the sport was adopted as a training and therapy exercise for soldiers who had been blinded in combat. The logic was sound: a ball six feet in diameter is impossible to miss, and a game built around physical contact, noise, and group coordination didn't require sight to participate meaningfully. It's one of the stranger coda stories in sports history, a novelty sport that briefly became a tool of medical rehabilitation.
Why It Died
Pushball's fundamental problem was practical. The ball was expensive to manufacture, difficult to transport, impossible to store indoors, and catastrophically vulnerable to rain. The hay-stuffed disaster of 1902 wasn't an isolated incident. Leather balls left outside in wet weather became sodden and unplayable. A proper Spalding ball cost more than most sporting organisations could justify for a game that hadn't yet established a regular competitive structure.
Spalding's own catalogue declared in the early 1900s that "there is every indication that the game will occupy a permanent place among the sports of America." It didn't. The professional leagues never materialised. The university games were fun but logistically awkward. The British military took to it, but military enthusiasm for novelty sports doesn't tend to outlast the novelty. The horseback version survived longest, eventually evolving into modern "horse soccer" and related equestrian ball sports that are still played today. But pushball itself quietly faded.
It's worth noting that the Edwardian sporting landscape was genuinely crowded with strange competitive pursuits that didn't survive. The 1908 Olympics famously included duelling pistols as a competitive event, and the era produced dozens of sports that were photographed, documented, and then abandoned. Pushball just happened to be bigger than most of them.
What It Left Behind
Pushball doesn't have much of a physical legacy. The Spalding rulebooks survive in archive collections. The photographs from Miami University, the Library of Congress, and Headingley are in the public domain and freely viewable online. There's a short newsreel of Dutch women playing pushball from around 1927, and a 1933 clip of Loyola students in Chicago competing for a prize keg of beer via pushball. The Crystal Palace where Hanegan launched the British version burned down in 1936.
Modern inflatable pushballs do exist, sold primarily as corporate team-building props and festival novelties rather than sporting equipment. They're lighter, cheaper, and much easier to inflate than Hanegan's nine-horse-hide monster. They also aren't really the same thing. The original game was built around the specific weight and resistance of a 70-pound leather ball that pushed back, that could trap you, that required genuine collective strength to move. An inflatable beach ball six feet across moves in a puff of wind, which is precisely the thing Moses Crane was trying to avoid.
Crane wanted a ball you couldn't miss and couldn't easily move. He got one. The sport he built around it lasted about thirty years, gave thousands of people something chaotic and entertaining to watch, and then left almost nothing behind except some excellent photographs and the word of a Yorkshire Post reporter who thought, for a moment in 1902, that this might really be something.
SOURCES
1. Public Domain Review: "Plaything of the Gods": Photographs of Pushball (early 1900s) — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/pushball/
2. Sport and Society Research Network: Pushball, a Game for Giants that Bewitched Britain — https://sportandsociety.com/news/pushball-a-game-for-giants
3. Atlas Obscura / Slate: The Best Sport of the Early 1900s Involved Pushing Around an Elephant-Sized Ball — https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-best-sport-of-the-early-1900s-involved-pushing-around-an-elephantsized-ball
4. Sportsavour: Pushball, the Long-Forgotten Game of Pushing-Around-the-Ball — https://www.sportsavour.com/pushball-long-forgotten-game-pushing-around-ball/
5. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica / Wikisource: Pushball — https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Pushball
6. BFI / Replay: Field Pushball — https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/17af3d30-f9a5-5e8f-942a-ef95d8a8a240
7. NSLM Blog: Men, Horses, and a Big Ball — https://nslmblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/men-horses-and-a-big-ball/
8. Spalding's Athletic Library: Push Ball, History and Description (1903 edition via Internet Archive) — https://archive.org/details/pushballhistoryd01newy
