Hook-n-Ladder

On May 3, 1890, a group of Ohio State students rose early, boarded their horse-drawn wagons and made the 20-mile trip along the Olentangy River from Columbus to Delaware, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University, to play what that day’s Delaware Gazette described as “the first game of Rugby foot ball.” Ohio State and Ohio Wesleyan now occupy opposite ends of the college football spectrum. The Buckeyes, whose Columbus campus has an enrollment in excess of 52,000, play in a stadium that seats more than 100,000 and field a team of players with N.F.L. aspirations. The Battling Bishops, who draw from a student body of 1,850, play in a stadium less than a tenth the size and offer no football scholarships. But the universities’ football programs began together on that spring morning 118 years ago. The site of that first game was a mystery until last year, when Dick Gordin, a former Ohio Wesleyan athletic director who has studied the history of the university’s sports teams, uncovered a letter w