Remembering the First SuperBowl - Part 1Harvey Frommer
A
lot of twists and turns, evolution and revolution, mistakes and major steps
forward, colorful characters, dedicated idealists and guys with an eye on
making a quick buck, - all of these and much more were part of the mix in the
history of professional football before it would finally find solid footing and
great success on the landscape of sports in the United States and become a
global phenomenon.
It was not until August 20, 1920 at a
meeting in Canton, Ohio at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom of the owner
of the Canton Bulldogs that a semblance of professional football as we know it
came to be.
At the meeting were seven men including the
legendary Jim Thorpe who would become the organization’s first president. There were delegates from the Bulldogs, the
Akron Pros, the Cleveland Indians and Dayton Triangles. They formed the new
league - the American Professional Football Conference. One hundred dollars was
the announced membership fee for that first season. It was reported that none
of those original teams actually paid what was then considered a hefty fee.
The initial
teams had a decidedly small town and Midwestern feel: Akron
Professionals, Canton Bulldogs, Chicago Cardinals, Cleveland Tigers, Dayton
Triangles, Decatur Staleys, Hammond Pros, Rochester (N.Y.) Jeffersons, Rock
Island (Ill.) Independents, and Muncie Flyers.
Teams would come and go over the league’s first years.
The idea of organized football was appealing, but there was a lot of challenge,
work and money involved. Only four clubs
survived that first season of 1920: Akron, Buffalo, Canton, and Decatur.
From the start
African-Americans were playing pro football. In 1920, Fritz Pollard, standout
halfback at Brown and an All-American, starred for the Akron Pros. He and Bobby
Marshall were the NFL’s first black players. The next year Pollard became the
league’s first black head coach. He also maintained his position as one of the
best players in pro football.
Approximately 13 African-American players appeared on NFL
rosters between 1920 and 1933. Paul Robeson, who would gain great fame as a
great singer, actor, civil rights leader, was encouraged by Pollard to play for
Akron in 1921. The following year Robeson had a stint with Milwaukee. Playing
football enabled the powerful athlete to pay his way through Columbia
University Law School.
In 1920, the Decatur
Staleys had a net profit of $1,800. All 22 members of the team shared in the
profits. “We practiced every afternoon, six days a week on a very well kept
baseball field owned by the Staley Company.” (Frommer, 187).
The next year the Decatur franchise moved to Chicago after
being sold to player-coach George Halas,
who went on to become one of the most important figures in the first half
century of pro football. Halas gave the Staleys a new name -- the Chicago Bears.
On June 24, 1922, the American
Professional Football Conference was re-named the National Football League.
Doing that eliminated the organization’s unwieldy name and its evocation of a
soccer league.
By the mid-1920s, the
struggling and cumbersome NFL included 25 teams each experiencing varying
degrees of success and hardship. On April 23, 1927, in a season where
professional baseball was king and the New York Yankees of Murderers Row were
the talk of the town, the NFL made some tough decisions. All weak and
struggling franchises were dropped. The NFL shrunk from 22 franchises to 12. It
also moved away from its Midwestern roots. The focus now would be placing teams
in populous cities in the east to solidify the league, make it more financially
solvent.
In 1932, the NFL recorded official statistics for the first time. That
was a good thing. A bad thing was the behavior of racist George Preston Marshall
who made his money in the commercial laundry business. Using some of that cash,
he became owner of the Boston football team. Marshall convinced other NFL
owners to institute a policy of total racial segregation. They didn’t have to
heed the suggestions of a bigot, but they did. No blacks played in the NFL
between 1933 and 1946.
Marshall moved his Boston Redskins to
Washington in 1937. Born in segregated West Virginia, the Redskins owner
opposed adding blacks to his team’s roster claiming that would alienate fans. "We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem
Globetrotters starts
signing whites," he snapped.
By 1962, the Globetrotters still did not have
whites, and the Redskins still had not fielded a black player for decades.
Change, however, loomed. The Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in
President John F. Kennedys’ cabinet, said he would evict the Redskins from
publicly funded D. C. Stadium if a
black player was not signed. Marshall gave in.
Ernie Davis, the black
Syracuse running back and Heisman Trophy winner was picked Number One in the
draft by the Washington Redskins. A week later Davis was traded to Cleveland
for Bobby Mitchell and Leroy Jackson, plus John Nisby was signed and Ron
Hatcher was drafted. The NFL (and the
‘Skins with four for a time) now had at least one African American player on
each team. Sadly, Ernie Davis never played in the NFL. He died in 1963 of
leukemia.
Although the NFL draft started in 1939, no
franchise selected an African-American player until 1949. Even during World War
II, when the NFL was so shorthanded, no blacks needed to apply. They knew
bigotry barred the door for them... Demand
for able bodied men for the war effort depleted NFL rosters. Many non-prime
-time players were brought in. Teams reduced rosters by five players to help
survive. In 1943, The Steelers of Pittsburgh and the Eagles of Philadelphia
became the Phil-Pitt Steeler-Eagles, called “Steagles” by fans. The Chicago
Cardinals and Steelers merged in 1944 in 1945 as Card-Pitt, a team so mediocre,
its own fans called it “Carpets.” Brooklyn and Boston franchises fused in 1945
becoming “Yanks.”
Jack Roosevelt Robinson in 1939 at
UCLA led the nation in rushing, a dozen yards a carry. The NFL was segregated.
Major League Baseball was segregated. So the man they called “Robby” played in
the Negro Leagues. And then with the help of Branch Rickey in 1947, Robinson
shattered baseball’s color line as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. There is
no telling how good a player he would have been in the NFL, but all estimates
are that he would have been very good.
The all white NFL Cleveland Rams moved to Los
Angeles in 1946. Their plan was to play games in the Memorial Coliseum, a venue
supported with public funds, one which could not be leased to a segregated
team. Under pressure,
the Rams signed former UCLA
standouts running back Kenny Washington and receiver Woody Strode. Both had
been teammates of Jackie Robinson at UCLA. It was reported that all hell broke
loose at the signing among NFL owners. The signing was revolutionary. Washington
and Strode were the first
African-American players after 13 years of whites-only in the NFL.
The
Chicago Bears were a whites only team their first 32 seasons. Although the New
York Giants came into being in 1925, the first blacks they signed were in 1948.
Pittsburgh’s Steelers featured only white players from 1934 until 1952.
On October 22, 1939
the first televised professional football game was transmitted in the New York
City area. NBC broadcast a game between
the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Eagles at Ebbets Field. According to the Pro
Football Hall of Fame, there were 500 television sets in the Big Apple then and
13,050 fans attended the game. Nevertheless, that primitive beginning
foreshadowed the future of promise.
Early
technology was primitive. “Television was a child of radio.” Said Curt Gowdy.
“We used on or two cameras, and we thought that was something.”
At the start television positively affected
the game’s popularity. Then the new medium had a negative effect on game
attendance. In 1950, the Rams televised all games – home and away. Attendance
plummeted. The next year, lesson
learned, the Rams televised just road games. Attendance boomed to over 234,000.
Lesson learned. In 1953, the courts upheld the NFL’s right to black out home
games.
Commissioner
Bert Bell allowed only the broadcasting of road games explaining: “When you
televise a road game, you are getting free advertising. When you televise a
home game, you are competing with your own ticket sales. The home gate must be
protected or the game will die. You can’t sell what you give away free.”
HOWARD COSELL: The blackout was the
single most important thing. You don’t give your product away. Football used
television properly.
A major turning point in
the history of professional football took place at Yankee Stadium on December 28, 1958. In
a game broadcast nationally by NBC, the New York Giants matched up against the
Baltimore Colts. Against
a backdrop of temperatures in the high 40s, Baltimore kicker Steve Myhra
powered a 20 yard field goal to make the score 17-17 and send it into sudden
death overtime. That had never taken
place before in NFL championship game history. A touchdown by Baltimore’s Alan
Ameche gave the Colts a 23-17 triumph.
The thrills and suspense of that
competition and mesmerizing effect on the millions who watched it play out
earned the contest the label: the “Greatest Game Ever Played.”
One of the viewers of that game was Lamar Hunt whose father Haroldson Lafayette
Hunt was the founder of Hunt Oil and one of then one of the wealthiest men in
the world.
The young Hunt, heir to
his father’s billions, had cast about for months jockeying back and forth and
trying to make up his mind about whether to attempt to purchase a major league
baseball franchise or a pro football team. By game’s end Lamar Hunt was sure.
One of the stars of the “Greatest Game Ever
Played” was New York Giants running back, Frank Gifford. He remembers what it
was like.
FRANK
GIFFORD: After the game, the sport had
it made. There were stories in the media. Advertisers became really interested
in football, the networks cared. That game enabled the sport to self-generate
itself nationally.
All of a sudden a line of
businessman got into the act seeking to own a team of their own in the National
Football League.
(to be continued*)
Much of the piece is excerpted from Harvey Frommer’s acclaimed When It Wass Just a Game.
About
Harvey
Frommer
One of the most prolific and respected sports journalists and oral
historians in the United States, author of the autobiographies of legends
Nolan Ryan, Tony Dorsett, and Red Holzman, Dr. Harvey
Frommer is an expert on all major sports. Cited by the
Congressional Record and by the New York State Legislatiure as a sports
journalist and historian, a
professor now for more than two decades in the MALS program at
Dartmouth College, Frommer was dubbed “Dartmouth’s Mr. Baseball” by their
alumni magazine. He’s founder of www.HarveyFrommerSports.com.
Mint, signed, discounted Frommer books are available from his
site.
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