Everything About Michigan's First Football Game Was Bizarre

Ann Arbor — If you've ever been to Chicago, there's a good chance you've walked through Millennium Park and taken a picture in front of the famous silver "Bean."

It's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the Midwest, but if you're a Michigan football fan, you may not have known this park holds a little extra significance for you.

Over the last century and a half, the University of Michigan has built one of the most storied college football programs in the country, winning 12 national championships, producing three Heisman Trophy winners, and bringing generations of fans to the Big House year after year.

No college football team has won more games.

But the first football game wasn't played at the Big House, or even in Michigan at all. It was played in downtown Chicago in May of 1879, where Millennium Park and the Bean stand today.

And not only was this the first game in Michigan football history, but it was also one of the craziest. Here's the story:

In the fall of 1878, Racine College, a school in Wisconsin, challenged Michigan to a football game. U-M agreed to play, and this would be the first time the university had ever put together a real team to compete against another school.

Football was still relatively new in this part of the country, and the game looked completely different from the sport we know today. Most teams didn't even have a coach, games were played in two 45-minute "innings," and just about everything else was different too.

Michigan only agreed to the match if it was pushed to the following spring, giving the university enough time to put a team together and prepare.

Neither school had a suitable football field, so they mutually agreed to play the contest somewhere in the middle, in Chicago.

The big game was set for May 30, 1879, at Lakefront Park, where the Chicago White Stockings used to play. The baseball grounds sat right along the downtown lakefront, exactly where Millennium Park is now. Tickets cost 50 cents, and around 500 people showed up to watch.

Football was more like rugby in those days, and points could only be scored by kicking a field goal, which was worth one point. And you only got to attempt a field goal if you scored a touchdown.

Michigan won, 1-0, and the game featured what is likely the wildest touchdown in college football history.

Michigan ended up scoring the only point of the game with a kick by team captain David DeTarr, giving the program its first-ever victory.

Now, about that touchdown.

That was scored by a man named Irving Kane Pond, who went on to become a legendary architect. He was an Ann Arbor native and a senior studying civil engineering.

Toward the end of the first “inning,” Pond got the ball and started running down the field with basically the entire Racine team chasing after him.

So, naturally, he decided the best way to avoid being tackled was to leave the field entirely and literally start running through the bleachers.

Pond ran along the bleachers until he got close to the goal line, then jumped back off the bleachers and right into the end zone. There was nothing in the rulebook at the time saying you couldn't run through the bleachers with the ball, so the touchdown counted.

Pond later wrote about that play in his autobiography.

“I played only for the fun of it,” he said. “My touchdown was made towards the end of the first half and involved a long-distance run... To avoid being tackled I was forced to mount the bleachers and run eastward along them until I was opposite the goal.”

Pond said he then stopped and, “fearing that a touchdown in the bleachers would not count,” jumped over the heads of the players chasing him and back onto the field.

And after all that, DeTarr missed the damn field goal. It wasn’t until late in the game when Michigan scored another touchdown (a far less dramatic one) that DeTarr made the winning kick.

No matter. Irving Kane Pond had become a Wolverine legend by scoring Michigan’s first-ever touchdown, all by running through the bleachers at White Stockings Park in downtown Chicago.

And even after making history on the football field, Pond's connection to the University of Michigan was far from over.

After graduating just a few weeks later with a degree in civil engineering, Pond went on to become a very famous architect, and he even designed two of the most prominent buildings on the University of Michigan campus. He and his brother Allen formed the architecture firm Pond and Pond, and more than 40 years later, the two designed the Michigan League and the Michigan Daily building, both of which are still standing and serving students on campus today.

But still, Pond's greatest contribution to the university will always be giving its football program the first, and craziest, touchdown in its entire 147-year history.

So if you're a Michigan football fan, the next time you're in Chicago, stop by Millennium Park, take your picture with the Bean, and let out a "Go Blue!"