On September 17, 1914, a pivotal gathering occurred in Canton, Ohio, wherein a confluence of football team owners convened to establish the nascent framework of professional football, an event that would ultimately culminate in the formation of the National Football League. This episode delves into the disorganized state of American football prior to this meeting, characterized by rampant player poaching, spiraling salaries, and a complete lack of structure. We explore how Ralph Hay, an automobile showroom owner, recognized the urgent need for order amidst chaos and took it upon himself to invite other team owners to collaborate on a solution. The ensuing discussions led to the establishment of foundational principles aimed at regulating player contracts and ensuring the integrity of the sport. As we recount the birth of what would become a $200 billion industry, we reflect on the profound legacy of that fateful meeting and the enduring impact of the structures instituted by those early visionaries.

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There weren't enough chairs for everybody to sit, and there was cigar smoke as thick as the eye can see.

And they sat on running boards and drank beer out of buckets.

It was Prohibition, but they didn't care.

None of them knew it.

But they were about to change the way we thought about football and turn what would become the National Football league into a $200 billion a year business.

This is a story of how professional football was organized and born.

In a showroom next to Hubmobiles and Jordan touring cars.

This is where it all began.

It belonged to the colleges.

Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Notre Dame.

These were the names that filled the sports pages.

College games drew 50,000 to sometimes 80,000 fans on a Saturday afternoon.

The professional game was.

Well, it was a disorganized afterthought.

A circuit of town teams, factory clubs and sandlot squads scattered across Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and western New York, playing in front of crowds that sometimes numbered maybe in the hundreds.

And the professional game had three problems, each feeding the others like a fever.

First, they were spiraling salaries.

With no league to enforce contracts, players jumped from team to team, chasing the highest offer, sometimes switching allegiances between Saturday and Sunday.

A star halfback might play for Massillon one week and Akron the next, wearing a different jersey each time.

Second, there was a college poaching scandals that were going on.

There was so many times where the professional teams would pay players under assumed names that were collegians.

They were trying to make an extra buck just to get through school.

Newt rocking himself later, the legendary Notre Dame coach reportedly played for multiple professional teams under fake names while still a student.

The college's fake fumed but could not stop it.

Third, there was no order.

No fixed schedules, no standings, no championship, no rules that bound anyone to anything.

Season started when a team felt like starting, ended when it ran out of opponents or money, and championships were claimed by whoever shouted the loudest.

Something had to give, and the man that did it was an automobile showroom owner, a man named Ralph Hay.

Ralph Edward Hay was not a football visionary.

He had saw what was happening.

The salary wars were bleeding owners dry.

The college scandals threatened to poison the sport entirely.

If professional football was going to survive, someone had to bring Order to the chaos.

The Akram Pros, the Cleveland Tigers, and the Dayton Triangles.

Four men, four teams.

One afternoon, they hammered out three principles that would change the sports forever.

First was no signing of college players until after graduation.

Secondly, no bidding on players that were playing for another team.

Third, maybe a salary cap.

There would be a maximum for what players could be paid by teams to try to keep the playing field a little bit even for all of the franchises.

They called themselves the American Professional Football Conference, and they agreed.

One more thing.

This had to be bigger than Ohio.

Hay was tasked with reaching out to every other major professional team in the country, and he did.

Letters went out to Hammond, Muncie, Rock Island, Decatur, Racine, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit.

Eleven teams were invited, and all of them said yes.

A second meeting was set.

Same city, same building.

But this time, Hay's office would not be big enough for what was about to happen.

Fifteen men arrived by rail and bus that Friday evening, more than Hay expected.

His second floor office in the Odd Fellows building could not hold them.

So they moved down to the ground floor into the automobile showroom.

The room was large enough for four cars, automobiles and Jordans, the pride of Hayes dealership Chairs were few and.

And George Hallis, the young player coach of the Decatur Stalers, sat on a running board.

Others perched on fenders, leaned on hoods or stood in the smoke.

Halas later wrote in his autobiography, quote.

The showroom, big enough for four cars, occupied the ground floor of three story old brick Odd Fellows building.

Chairs were few, and I sat on a running board.

End quote.

Hey, place buckets of beer on the floor.

Cigars were lit, and the minutes were taken on a typewriter somewhere in a haze.

And over the course of that evening, those 14 men did the following.

They renamed their organization the American Professional Football association.

They set a 100 membership fee per team.

In a detail that would later become legend.

Hallis later confessed, I can testify that no money exchanged hands.

The fee was theater, in an attempt to project legitimacy.

And then they made the most inspired publicity move in the history of professional sports.

They elected a president, and his name was Jim Thorpe.

No American athlete had ever been so famous as Jim Thorpe was.

He was a budding superstar, a star at Carlisle in football and baseball.

And he was probably right.

He had led the Carlisle Indian school to one of the greatest upsets in college football history.

In his playing days, he had played major league baseball for the New York Giants and his name was on the marquee.

It really meant something.

So when the owners of the APFA looked around that smoky showroom and asked who should lead their fledgling league, the answer was obvious.

Thorpe was elected unanimously.

Jim Thorpe was the face of the league, and yet he barely played in it.

He was a president name only, a ceremonial figure whose job was to make the APFA look respectable.

The real organizing work fell to men like Ralph Hay, Joe Carr, the Columbus Panhandles, and George Hallis, who understood that the survival of pro football depended not on star power but on structure of a league.

Thorpe would suit up for a few games with Canton Bulldogs that season, but his presidency was a symbol.

And symbols matter.

Especially when you're trying to convince a skeptical public that your sport is not just a collection of mercenaries playing under fake names.

The APFA now had a name, a president and a hundred dollar fee that nobody had paid.

What it did not have was a schedule, a championship, or any real idea what it just had created.

Each team arranged its own schedule.

Some played 13 games, others played one.

The Muncie Flyers played exactly a single league contest, a 45 to nothing loss to Rock island on October 3rd.

They never played another APFA game and they folded at the end of the season.

This was the reality of the first professional football league.

Survival was not guaranteed.

This was the reality of professional football.

The Racine Cardinals, named after the Chicago street and and not the Wisconsin city, became the Chicago Cardinals.

Later the St. Louis Cardinals, the Phoenix Cardinals and today are the Arizona Cardinals, the oldest continuously operating franchise in professional football.

Then there were the Decatur Stales, you know that George Hallis team.

They, they were a team sponsored by A.E.

Staley, a factory team for his starch company.

And you know they went, they were founded in Decatur, Illinois, later moved to Chicago.

The franchise given fully over to Halas who later turned them into Chicago Bears.

Just a few years later.

The Dayton Triangles defeated The Columbus panhandles 14 to nothing.

And Lou Partlow of Dayton scored the first touchdown.

In league history, a crowd of roughly 4,000 watched the game.

No one recorded the exact number, and no one really knew that it would matter.

The championship race was just as chaotic as a schedule.

No standings were officially kept, and by December most teams had given up hope of a title.

Some had already dissolved, but four teams remained in contention.

Akron, Buffalo, Canton Indicator.

A series of late games among them settled nothing definitively except that the Akron Pros had finished undefeated with eight wins, zero losses and three ties.

They had only allowed seven points the entire season.

Seven.

And on the roster was a man named Fritz Pollard, a 5 foot 9, 165 pound Dynamo halfback out of Brown University who had been named an All American in college and a first team all Pro in his inaugural season.

Pollard and Bobby Marshall of the Rock Island Independence were the first two black players in what would become the NFL.

The trophy, the Brunswick Ball Calendar cup, was presented at a meeting and it was the only year the trophy was ever used.

Decades later, it went missing and really hasn't never been found.

They thought they had formed a professional association, a loose agreement of to stop poaching players and bring some order to scheduling.

They had no idea that they just planted a seed of one of the most powerful sports leagues in American history.

The numbers make the point more dramatically than any narration could.

A century later, the super bowl is watched by more than 120 million people annually and the NFL generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue.

But the deeper legacy goes far beyond that.

It's structural.

Every principle those men debated in that showroom.

Salary, rules, player contracts, and keeping kids in college playing football, those are practiced today.

And the laws were expanded and rules were more defined as things went on.

And that will bring a little bit more clarity along with some other ones that we'll have coming up here.

They were making it up as they went, but what they did was really set the playing field level to make growth happen in a sport that would be attracted to millions around the world.

The presidency of Jim Thorpe, well, that was handed over to a man named Joe Carr that we talked about of the Columbus Panhandles that organized that team.

And he really put structure and organizational skills into play into the National Football League, setting rules, setting that hard line when it had to be, and making schedules and player contracts be official.

Ralph Hay never made it to the hall of Fame, at least not yet.

And neither did most of the men in that room.

But every Sunday in autumn, when 70,000 people fill a stadium and millions more watch from their living rooms, they're living inside a house that 14 men built between a hut mobile and a Buick in a dealership in Canton, Ohio.

A galloping goes to Illinois, who turned professional football into an experience that fans really wanted to encapsulate and witness.

So make sure you check that out next week.

We'll have some shorts on and Visit our timeline pigskindispatch.com Till next time, everybody.

Have a great gridiron day.

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