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.





“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

 NZ 



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