With George Clooney’s film Leatherheads opening this weekend, taking us back to football of the 1920s, it seems like a good time to return to the time machine here as well.

As I’ve shared before, I love digging through century-old magazines, and one of my favorite essays from that period is this one by Elbert Hubbard, which was printed in the March 1903 issue of The Cosmopolitan, a magazine we’ve visited here before.

If you attack football in this country today, you might as well be attacking Mom and apple pie, but things were obviously different 105 years ago, as reflected in “A Gladiatorial Renaissance,” which was published in the magazine’s “Men, Women and Events” section.

Check out the excerpt below to learn just how many men were killed playing football in 1902, and how many driven mad.

He continues on to say—

But the point I make is this: football makes no man better; makes no man more useful; helps no man to do better work.

A man may be a pretty good fellow in spite of football, but no man is more of a man because he plays football.

And here are Hubbard’s final words on the matter, as he predicts that football will eventually fade away: