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Douglas Tilden: The Football Players, c. 1894; photographed outside the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, California and Mason Sts., Nob Hill. Photograph from The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire Digital Collection: Selections from the Huntington Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.


The Football Players


Author
Nina Zurier

Decade

1890s


Tags

Mark Hopkins
Public Art Sculpture Sports



In 1898 the mayor of San Francisco, James Phelan, offered a highly regarded statue called The Football Players by renowned sculptor Douglas Tilden as a prize to whichever school—Cal or Stanford—won two of the next three Big Games. Since Cal had won in 1898, another Cal victory in 1899 would bring the prized statue to Berkeley.

The 1899 Big Game was played on Thanksgiving Day at a stadium at 16th and Folsom Streets in San Francisco, with fifteen thousand fans in attendance. Cal’s teams trounced Stanford and The Football Players came to the Berkeley campus. It was installed on campus between Strawberry Creek and the Valley Life Sciences building and dedicated on May 12, 1900.


Dedication ceremony of The Football Players, 12 May 1900 on the UC Berkeley campus, between Strawberry Creek and the Valley Life Sciences building. Photograph from Douglas Tilden, Papers, BANC MSS 89/124 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Souvenir program from the Big Game, 1899, showing Douglas Tilden’s sculpture—the coveted prize for the winner.


“Douglas Tilden was born in Chico, California. When he was five years of age he lost his hearing through an attack of scarlet fever. He was educated at the State School for the deaf at Berkeley, entering the University of California afterwards. He then returned to the Berkeley Institute to teach, remaining there for eight years. He took three months’ tuition at the California School of Design, under Virgil Williams, and also took lessons in modeling from Marion Wells. He then went to New York, where he studied under Ward and Mowbray at the National School of Design and Gotham Art League. After this he went to Paris, exhibiting his “Baseball Players” in the Salon. [In 1894 he exhibited a plaster version of The Football Players at the Salon.—Ed.] Returning to California in 1894, he organized the modeling class in the California School of Design (Mark Hopkins Institute), where he is at present Professor of Modeling.”

—excerpt from Catalogue of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art
(San Francisco Art Association, 1901), SFAI Library archive

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