The Second Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

Author:John Lloyd & John Mitchinson [Lloyd, John & Mitchinson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307951748
Amazon: 030795174X
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-10-11T07:00:00+00:00

Why did sportsmen start going into huddles?

It had nothing to do with team-building.

The huddle was invented at Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington DC, as a way of hiding hand signals from other deaf teams.

In American football, the ‘line of scrimmage’ is an imaginary line across the pitch where the two sides face each other before commencing the next part of the game, or ‘play’. Until the 1890s, the signal caller on each team shouted out his team’s strategy for the next play. Nothing was hidden from the opposite team’s defence.

When the forerunner of Gallaudet College (founded in 1864) started playing American football with an all-deaf team, their quarterback, Paul Hubbard, used American Sign Language (ASL) to call a play at the line of scrimmage. His team therefore had a distinct advantage when they played non-deaf colleges, but other deaf schools could easily read his intentions. So in 1894 Hubbard began concealing his signals by gathering his attacking players into a cluster before each play.

This worked brilliantly and became a regular habit. In 1896 the huddle started showing up on other college campuses and it is now considered an essential part of the game.

Gallaudet was the first University for deaf people, set up by Edward Milner Gallaudet, the son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787–1851), the man who brought sign language to America. Because Thomas Gallaudet (who wasn’t deaf himself) based American Sign Language (ASL) on the French sign language that he had learned in Paris, American and French sign languages share 60 per cent of the same gestures.

This has the strange result that it is much easier for a deaf American to make himself understood in Paris than in London.

STEPHEN Do you know where the sports huddle originated?

JACK DEE Glenn Huddle?

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