Professional Football

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Robert C. Cottrell

Thanks to television's impact on the viewing public, football threatened to supplant baseball as America's favorite professional sport as the 1950s wound to a close. The December 28, 1958 National Football League championship game, which witnessed the Johnny Unitas-led Baltimore Colts' defeat of the New York Giants 23-17 in overtime, set the stage for professional football's enormous popularity during the years ahead. Some 30 million television viewers watched the stirring contest, which helped the pro game to join the same league, finally, as both the national pastime and college ball.

Emerging at the close of the nineteenth century, professional football remained less highly regarded and considerably less popular than the college game. By 1889, charges were leveled that Ivy League players had been given financial inducements. Then, on November 13, 1892, Yale All-American guard Walter "Pudge" Heffelfinger and Princeton end Ben "Sport" Donnelly received $500 and $250 respectively, plus expenses, to join the Allegheny Athletic Association for a contest against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Other players, many from the college ranks, including Bucknell's Christy Mathewson, were soon hired by various teams throughout western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and Ohio. Football thrived in the Midwest, with teams from Akron, Canton, Columbus, Dayton, and Massillon fiercely competing in the Ohio League. After its 32-game winning streak was broken by Canton in 1906, Massilon won the rematch; more importantly, sportswriter Grantland Rice highlighted the games, allowing pro ball to attain a measure of national attention.

During the 1910s, college athletes like Notre Dame's Knute Rockne, Brown's African American halfback Fritz Pollard, and Rutgers's black All-American end Paul Robesoncompeted alongside the greatest star of pro football's earliest days, the Canton Bulldog Jim Thorpe, who received $250 a game. An All-American halfback at Carlisle, Thorpe had competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, where he captured both the decathlon and pentathlon. Following revelations that he had been paid for playing baseball in the Carolina League, Thorpe's gold medals were taken away. Led by Thorpe, its stellar performer and gate attraction, Canton dominated the Ohio League, considered the pro game's premier league, from 1916-1919. Thorpe, Robert W. Peterson suggests, "lifted professional football out of the minor sports among the truss ads on the nation's sports pages to a position of some respectability." Yet pro football long proved unable to win the kind of fan allegiance reserved for college football, baseball, or boxing.

On September 17, 1920, representatives from 11 teams, including Thorpe and George Halas, player-coach of the Decatur, Illinois, Staleys, gathered in Canton. They agreed to form the American Professional Football Association and named Thorpe league president. While $100 fees were called for, Halas later acknowledged "that no money changed hands." Sixteen-man rosters were generally employed, thus requiring players to play both offense and defense. Decatur's linesmen averaged 206 pounds, their backs only 174. Players had to provide much of their protective gear, while some teams offered helmets, socks, and jerseys. Stars averaged about $150 a game, with quarterback Paddy Driscoll of the Chicago Racine Cardinals receiving $300. Akron, with an 8-0-3 record, was awarded the Brunswick-Balke Collender loving cup in April 1921 for having captured the "world's professional football championship."

Franchise shuffling abounded, but three teams appeared that provided a foundation for the league's future: Halas's Chicago Bears, Curly Lambeau's Green Bay Packers, and the Chicago Cardinals. In June 1922, team managers renamed their organization the National Football League. Professional football's success remained problematic, however, as the Packers performed on an open field and had to pass a hat among their fans at halftime. Then, in 1925, the pro game received a great boost from Halas's signing of University of Illinois All-American Red Grange. After wrapping up his collegiate career, Grange appeared in a Thanksgiving Day game against the Cardinals, attended by 36,000 fans. Barnstorming tours followed, enabling Grange, managed by C.C. Pyle, to pull in over $200,000 from gate receipts alone. A knee injury in 1927 ended Grange's broken-field running, but new stars were arriving, including Duluth's Ernie Nevers and Cleveland's tailback Benny Friedman, who immediately established new passing records; on Thanksgiving Day, 1929, Nevers scored all of the Chicago's Cardinals 40 points in a rout of the Bears. As the decade closed, the top teams were Timothy J. Mara's New York Giants, now quarterbacked by Friedman, and the Packers, led by halfback Johnny Blood. The Packer's three year title streak was ended in 1932, when the Bears, relying on running backs Bronko Nagurski and Grange, defeated Portsmouth 9-0 in the NFL's first playoff game.