A FEW REFLECTIONS FROM PRO FOOTBALL'S OLDEN DAYS

When we plunk ourselves down on the living room couch these days and tune into the current Sunday or Monday night NFL matches, played in gigantic stadia with barely ever an empty seat, it’s almost impossible to imagine how relatively humble the pro game used to be during those long years of infancy and adolescence. The ball seldom if ever bounced very high a great many moons and decades ago.

We’re not about to embark on a lengthy history of our favorite sport here, since that would require a virtual encyclopedia. Our purpose is merely to present a few selected snapshots of professional football’s struggle throughout its earliest days. The contrast between the then and the now seems absolutely unbelievable.

The first recorded play-for-pay game took place in 1894, when a Latrobe, Pennsylvania team challenged a squad from the nearby hamlet of Jeannette to a single contest, and came out a 12-0 winner. Essentially speaking, that was page one in pro football’s Book of Genesis.

This sport, which had already achieved some popularity on the eastern college gridiron fields at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania, et al, could hardly avoid attaining professional status in due course. The aught and teen years of the twentieth century found a number of loosely organized teams bashing it out across the northeast and midwest (particularly the latter) from one autumn to the next.

What had made this all happen? Did cheering fans pack the stands to capacity week after week? Were fat pay checks being doled out to the players, supplementable by endorsement fees for shaving cream or athlete’s foot remedies? Did the star performers reign as heroes in the cities their teams represented? Did mass hysteria prevail over each new season?

Well, not exactly. In fact, we have to say not in the slightest. Where, then, did the motivation originate?

The answer could only be an inherent love of taking the field and giving out with one’s best. Not unlike kids assembling on vacant lots for an afternoon match, these were grown men with established grid skills seizing an opportunity for organized combative exercise, in return for a couple bucks to the extent club funds became available.

In 1920, the inevitable result occurred, when a small group of men gathered at a Canton, Ohio automobile agency and sat on running boards as they conceived an official league, with franchises offerable to interested civic leaders anywhere at a whopping $100 price. Their venture proved fruitful. The game’s New Testament had begun.

Fourteen memberships were readily acquired in the American Professional Football Association, to be rechristened later as the National Football League. The 1920 season’s participating cities stretched from New York state westward to Illinois, via Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Altogether, after a long era of financial successes and failures, location switches, additional entrants, and otherwise, these “original colonies” expanded to encompass 61 different metropoles, smaller towns, entire states, or major regional areas having seen fit to support their gridiron warriors at one time or another. At present, just 32 survivors remain, carrying out their fall schedules before excited fans numbering in the millions.
The ultimate event each year, or professional football’s Book of Revelations, is the classic Super Bowl, whose spectator frenzy has reached a stage comparable to if not exceeding baseball’s world series, the quadrennial international Olympiad, hockey’s Stanley Cup, the British soccer finals, and perhaps all the rest combined.

It’s been a glorious history indeed, so full of highlights over the past century and a quarter that volumes would be needed to cover them adequately. However, we’ve chosen instead to focus briefly on two much dimmer bulbs from the 1920s and 1930s-1940s, to which little or no due credit has ever been accorded.

We’re talking about a pair of clubs that have always held a certain fascination for this writer, namely the Canton/Cleveland Bulldogs from 1920 until their demise following the 1927 season, and the Brooklyn Dodgers (later renamed the Tigers), who reigned in relative obscurity from 1930 to 1944.

In the years 1922 through 1924, the Bulldogs’ record amounted to 28 victories against a single defeat and four ties. They were a decided forerunner to the subsequent age Bears, Browns, Packers, Cowboys, Patriots, and other dynasties which have made their own highly prominent splashes. Still, who remembers these early day stalwarts’ prowess, or has even heard of them?

Some degree of appreciation certainly seems to be in order. The Canton and Cleveland location lineups during that three-year period included:
· Guy Chamberlin, one of the finest ends the game has known;
· Wilbur “Fats” Henry, generally acclaimed to this day as great a tackle who ever lived, the
Roosevelt Browns, Jim Parkers, and Bob Lillys of latter years notwithstanding;
· Roy “Link” Lyman, still another superb tackle in the eyes of many.

This team truly deserves more recognition than it has ever been granted.

The 1933 season found the league broken down into two separate divisions for the first time, with a playoff game at the end between the respective leaders. Only ten teams existed then

In the Eastern Division were the:
· Boston Redskins, later to migrate to Washington, D.C.;
· Brooklyn Dodgers, later to be called the Tigers;
· Philadelphia Eagles;
· Pittsburgh Pirates, later to become the Steelers;
· New York Giants.

In the Western Division were the:
· Chicago Bears;
· Chicago Cardinals, eventually to move to St. Louis and finally Arizona;
· Cincinnati Reds, doomed to extinction shortly afterward;
· Green Bay Packers;
· Portsmouth Spartans, due to become the Detroit Lions the following year.

With eight of those clubs continuing to thrive today, and the Cincinnati Reds having vanished from the scene, that leaves the never-too-well-fated Dodgers/Tigers on whom we’ve decided to turn our spotlight. For 1933 and the next eleven years, they plugged on as well as they could, but consistently ended up as no more than bridesmaids. The reason we’ve chosen to single them out for recognition is that their rosters over this period featured a bevy of players who rate among the game’s greatest in history. What a shame it was that a franchise whose ranks included those shown below never managed to reach division championship status. Nevertheless, we wish to salute them, especially these highly exemplary performers:
· End Perry Schwartz;
· Tackles Frank “Bruiser” Kinard and Bill Lee;
· Guards Herman Hickman and Grover “Ox” Emerson;
· Sterling tailback Clarence “Ace” Parker.

This may not be the most inspiring article on pro football you’ve ever read, but at least it’s been an enjoyable one to write.