August 26, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before billion-dollar stadiums and television contracts, professional football was played on dirt lots by men who worked factory shifts by day and risked their bodies by night. Owners mortgaged their futures to keep teams alive, and few believed the sport would last more than a season or two. John Eisenberg, author of The League, traces how those uncertain beginnings gave birth to the NFL we know today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of how a scrappy sports league called the NFL
became well the NFL we know today.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Here's our own Monta Montgomery to get us started.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Football is a pretty big deal.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Pressure come step it up, looking throwing peek out field.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
It is.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Pick up by the Lions.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Inter step it coming back the other way, he fought
to Malifan Wu.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
This is gonna be Oliver.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
In so many ways. The NFL has just grown into
a behemoth really unlike any other No other sport can
touch it. I'm talking to other sports that are popular,
like baseball and basketball, and as popular as they are,
they don't come close to fifteen billion dollars in annual revenues,
and they said they'd like to go to twenty five billion.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
That's John Eisenberg. He's the author of the book The League,
which talks about the early days of football.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Let's get back into the story.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
It has become year round. You could turn on a
sports talk show any time of year and they'll be
talking football.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Because I think America is the land of second chances,
except for when it comes to this.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
To mister job at a hut, you fat slavely, that's what.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
He was with the ulplimate. What did the Panthers do
with quarterback? What are the Cowboys doing at receiver? It's
never stops. Even though they only played from September to
December and then the playoffs. They are just really, really
shrewd at. Continuing the narrative with the draft, the.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Kansas City Chiefs select Patrick Mahomes the second.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
The sixth time world champion New England Patriots.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
Select Mac Jones. The country comes to a halt on
Sundays and Mondays, and it all culmin hs with the
Super Bowl, which is a secular holiday. The football fawcet
never turns off in America, and the early days of
(02:21):
the NFL were just so different. It was struggling, and
I think most people today would look at the NFL
and say, how in the world is that possible? How
in the world did we get from point A to
point B? Was founded in nineteen twenty in Canton, Ohio,
(02:43):
at a hutmobile dealership.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Ralph Hay, who owned the Kansas Canton Bulldogs. He called
a meeting for Canton, Ohio in his automobile show, and
of course they weren't enough enough chairs for every So
we sat around on the running boards of the hupmobile cars.
(03:08):
That become a member of this football league and was
one hundred dollars and it was worth it.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
That's George Hallis who was one of the few original
men to take that one hundred dollars bet on the NFL.
In an era when the sport wasn't even on the
radar of most Americans.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
Baseball was far and away the most popular American sport.
Number one sport would have been Major League baseball, Number
two probably minor league baseball. It was very much the
national pastime, very popular, played in large cities, small towns,
and Babe Ruth and his glory and ty Cup very
much sort of a cultural phenomenon. Not unlike football today.
(03:49):
Baseball was extremely popular. The college football was becoming very
very popular. Dates built some stadiums and people were fascinated
with it. But it was an amateur enterprise. Football back
in the early early days was seen more than anything
else as a good way to take young men and
(04:12):
grow them from boys into men. All right. It was
considered sort of a right of manhood, a right of passage,
you know, put them on the field, teach them to
get hit and deal with pain and be tough and
grow up a little bit, all right. It was considered
a game, described by one turn of the century critic
as crude and barb barrick, with little chems of survival.
(04:37):
The idea of paying someone to do this A lot
of society was horrified by the idea. Why take something
that was so important for our young boys who are
being taught how to become better men. Why take something
like that and ruin it, spoil it with hey, that
was not the point so verrely on. The college coaches
(05:01):
were very much against it. Fielding Yost, a famous coach
University of Michigan, gave a famous speech where he said,
you know, we have to root this out, this pro
football scourge. We do not want to go down this road.
This could ruin football. If you got out of college,
why in the world would you go do that? You know,
you would use your brain, go get into some respectable
(05:23):
line of work. Football. Professional football was not considered a
respectable line of work. For the first years of the NFL.
A lot of the guys that played in the NFL
really had no choice. They didn't have many other options,
and they were happy just to do that for a
few extra bucks, and so pro football had a lot
going against it, and it showed in the quality of
(05:46):
the league and the teams. It was very much a
fly by night intermise in the beginning. Any sort of
sporting businessman that wanted to bring a team, if he
had a couple one hundred dollars and at a place
to put a team, they would take you. Tim Mehra
sort of stumbled into a meeting with the NFL a
(06:08):
couple of NFL guys that were trying to start a
team in New York and basically was talked into it.
Wasn't even invited to the meeting. He showed up and
they said, well, you can have a franchise for five
hundred dollars, and he said, well, at that price, why.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Not that team?
Speaker 3 (06:23):
The New York Giants. Other teams had more industrial roots.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
When George Hallis started the Decatur, Illinois Staley's, it was
a starch company, Ady Staley Company. Playing football was part
of the job. They recruited them to play football and work,
you know, in the factory. Playing football was sort of
a bonus.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Well, we had a great season in nineteen twenty because
we're the first team to practice every day. They all
had jobs with the Staley Company, and I talked mister
Stay and getting the players two hours a day off
for practice.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
A lot of them worked for maybe these factories that
owned a team, or they worked somewhere else. No, you
didn't make there was no money on the table. Some
of the games the crowd they would pass a hat
and ask the fans to put in a dollar or
a quarter or whatever they could so the players could
get paid. And some teams played in little stadiums, high
(07:30):
school stadiums a couple thousand fans. Some teams played in
public parks. The champion of the league, the Green Bay Packers,
played in a high school stadium and with no restrooms
by the way, so you were lucky to get a
couple thousand fans to a game. Players could jump from
team to team. And what's really interesting about early football
is how different the game itself was. The ball was rounder,
(07:53):
much rounder, and there was not much passing. The game
was just sort of a scare, a muddy scrum. Most
of the plays involved just a back plunging into the line,
which was just a tangle of arms and legs, and
really people just wrestling there at the line of scrimmage,
and you know, they have little pads on, and they
(08:16):
wore what they called They didn't call them uniforms. They
called them sweaters, team sweaters, and sometimes the teams had
the same color sweaters, and so the game was almost indecipherable.
Not much happened. Hunting was a much bigger deal than passing.
There was very little scoring. It wouldn't be surprising to
see a game with the final score of six to
(08:38):
two safety and a touchdown and a missed extra point.
It was an odd sport. Not that many people wanted
to see it. It didn't draw that many people because
it wasn't very exciting a franchise. Would it be worth
a million dollars for him?
Speaker 4 (08:56):
No, I didn't change. I always had to go to
the bank, to the abra and your loan to be
able to start the team off for the following season.
And it wasn't under nineteen fifty nine. It was the
first year that I didn't have to go into the bank.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
Georgella, God bless you.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And you're listening to John Eisenberg tell the story of
the NFL before it was the NFL, and hearing George
hallis the legend talk about the fact that finally, by
the late nineteen fifties, he didn't have to go to
the bank to keep his team afloat, and just the
working class roots of this guy's taking a couple of
hours off to practice so they could represent their factory.
(09:43):
When we come back, more of the story of how
the NFL came to be here on our.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
American stories, and.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
We returned to our American stories and the story of
how the NFL became the behemoth we now know today.
When we last left off, John Eisenberg, author of the league,
was telling us about how football used to be a
disrespected mess of a sport. John now turns to the
stories of the men whose decisions pulled the NFL out
(10:31):
from the muck. Take it away, John.
Speaker 5 (10:36):
They were all men who came to football from different places.
Some were successful in other lines of work. It really
just exemplifies an earlier time in America. Yeah, Tim Merhra
started out. I mean, it's straight out of Charles Dickens. Really. Yeah,
he's in you know, the Lower East Side of New
York and he's surrounded by you know, it's not a
(11:00):
wealthy family, and he didn't go to school. He started
running numbers for bookies. Just a little kid that you know,
he's just surviving with his street sense and so he
gets in with a bookie and has taught the game.
This was an era when horse racing was really really
popular and a lot of Americans bet on horse races.
(11:20):
And it was different than going to the racetrack today,
where there's a toe board and you bet basically with
the track. You would bet with an individual bookie. They
would be lined up on a row and people would
go and it would be an individual transaction. And he
got into that and he succeeded at it. It was personable.
It was a big Irish guy with an infectious personality.
And so he took from there into a number of
(11:43):
other lines of work. It's a type of life that
I don't think you could have anymore, you know. He
invested in all sorts of things. He did stocks, liquor, boxing,
He liked to promote boxing matches. He had an empire,
a small empire with all sorts of things. And he
didn't even really like football. And I mean Art Rooney
(12:06):
started the Pittsburgh franchise. Really never did you know? It
didn't work a job He was a horse player and
one of the great gamblers in the history of America.
Went on a run at Saratoga, a run of gambling
that you just can't even imagine this today. He needed
(12:29):
money and he'd gone to the races in New York
and he'd hit on some races. Then he went up
to Saratoga and he started betting, and he started winning big.
Over a period of days, he kept winning, and it
got covered in the newspapers and people would cheer for him.
Everybody says, oh, there's there's art from Pittsburgh, and they
(12:50):
would cheer him as he walked to the betting window.
It's this little guy with a stogy waddling around, you know,
making more money at the racetrack than people made sometimes
in their lifetimes. That is the definition of street smarts.
And he used that to fund his football team. And
I mean, he's crazy enough. He occasionally still played some
(13:10):
semi pro baseball. He was an athlete. George Preston Marshall
was the owner of the Washington Redskins franchise that was
known as the Redskins for so long, and he had
a theater background. He was a failed actor, but he
never lost He had a big, swept back, blonde hair
(13:31):
and a deep voice, and he dominated every room he
was in. It was almost like he was acting all
the time, very much a theatrical sense of most things,
and football was no different. And Bert Bell was the
only one who was really born into wealth. He started
the Philadelphia franchise. He was very wealthy. He was cut
(13:52):
off basically because he blew all his money. He was
so spoiled. Guys like this, that first generation of owners,
they were quite essentially American, and they doing what they
could to stay on their feet. And they're not succeeding
because they went to law school or mid school, god
went into a profession and rose through the ranks. They're
(14:12):
just having street smarts to keep from going under and
doing what you can. It's that sort of business sense.
Almost all of them were in that boat. They were
men of sport, and they were definitely rivals. They were
all have their own sort of competitive juices and they
wanted to win at something, but what they mainly wanted
to do was make their venture succeed. So it set
up this dynamic, which is the key dynamic of the
(14:36):
success of the NFL, and that is they were rivals
on the field, but they were partners in the business
of professional football. They knew that anything, any sort of
element that would make the game better was important, even
if it set their own team back. They all understood
that from the get go that the greater good would
(14:57):
always matter more, and the biggest example being the institution
of the draft. In nineteen thirty six, the Chicago Bears
and the New York Giants were completely dominant, and Burt Bell,
who had started the Philadelphia franchise, stood up at a meeting,
a league meeting and said, gentlemen, I'm going to be
out of business here in a year or two if
I don't start getting some better players. Before then, it
(15:21):
was just a free for all. The best teams could
go get the best players coming out of college. There
was no system for a signing talent coming out of college,
so the best teams were only getting better. Burt Bell said,
we have to have a draft where the weakest teams
get to pick first, and it will eventually level the
playing field and the owner George Hallis and Tim Merrill,
(15:44):
the owner of the Bears and the Giants, knew it
would end their rule of dominance, but they immediately said
you're right, and they voted for it. And that came
out of the notion that always the greater good would
prevail over any team's individual interest, and so they did
understand that dynamic. They were business men first, and aside
(16:07):
from leveling the playing field by the way, it also
cut down on cost. That was another reason they went
for it, because before there was a draft, every team
could bid on every player. Bidding wars erupted left and
right over all the best talents so and that drove
up prices, drove up salaries. But after the draft, only
one team had your rights and there was no bidding war,
(16:27):
and you took what they offered. Aside from just the draft,
they would share information. Today, the NFL draft and the
scouting of players is considered such a secret science, but
back then they would share a lot of information. Team
in Boston didn't have the money to go scout somebody
(16:50):
in Alabama, but maybe one of the teams that was
more Southern or team in Chicago would have the money.
That's not to say that they didn't try to one
up each other. I mean at the league meetings where
they would do the scheduling, the big joke was you
couldn't go to the bathroom if you were one of
the owners when you're at the league meeting, because while
you were in the bathroom, in five minutes, they would
(17:11):
schedule like six road games for you and make your
schedule tougher. You always had to be there, so they
weren't opposed to putting the screws to each other.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
There were also rules changes that brought about more passing
and brought the game a little further away from the muddy,
stagnant brawl that most passive observers were used to with
the sport.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
They made it much easier to pass the ball. They
created hashmarks so the offense started in the middle of
the field and could operate better. All this stuff just
opened the game wide open, almost immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Also, it's worth mentioning that George Marshall, the failed actor
who created the Washington Redskins, decided to do something truly
revolutionary treat the game like a Shakespearean drama.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
He invented the playoffs. If you can imagine, for the
first twelve years, the winner of the league champion was
determined by a vote of the ownership at a league
meeting several months after the season that's who decided who
the champion was. He says, let's have playoffs, very correctly
(18:23):
ascertained that the World Series was the biggest sports event
on the American calendar. Let's do the same thing. So
he created an Eastern Division, a Western Division, and had
a game that decided a championship on the field. An
unbelievable decision in the history of football to create a postseason,
which in the beginning was just one game, but nonetheless,
(18:45):
if the season was a theatrical production, and now it
had a climax, so yes, it was very much a
play and he brought in marching bands. There was so
much pop in college sports with the bands, and there
was a real show, and he just very quickly decided,
we have to bring that to the pros as well.
(19:06):
Let's give the fans more than just a boring football game.
Let's put a show on. But most importantly, in the end,
let's make the game better.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
When we come back more of the story of the
NFL here on our American story, and we returned to
(19:49):
our American stories and the final portion of our story
on how the NFL became what it is today with
John Eisenberg, author of the League left off. John was
telling us about the men who created the NFL. Let's
continue the story.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Once you've got a more modern era of offensive football
and you've got teams in big cities playing interesting football.
As of about nineteen thirty five, you start to see
stadiums with decent crowds, so a little more money on
the table, and it achieves a bit of tradition. These
(20:31):
teams have been around for a little while by this point.
The Chicago Bears were a force in Chicago, always popular.
New York was a baseball town, no question about it.
But the New York Giants had won some championships and
had a winning tradition, and they played at the Polo
Grounds Yankee Stadium, and fans came out to watch. They
(20:52):
liked it. These teams were beginning to establish tradition. They
had not folded, you know, the depth of the depression
they could have when the league was down to eight teams.
But it started to grow, and so players come out
of college. It could be well, maybe this is okay,
something good to do. Don Hudson, all right, it was
(21:14):
the star of the Rose Bowl for the University of
Alabama nineteen thirty five. He's the Rose Bowl. Star is
an end. He gets contracts offers from three teams he
with the league decides that he belongs with the Green
Bay Packers. So he goes with them, and he's immediately
(21:35):
a star, one of the athletic stars of America. And
so the esteem begins to grow. You just see a
few more college players make that transition, and it becomes
suddenly no longer just an embarrassing thing to do. It
becomes something that you can go on and play football
(21:55):
after college. And it was a good brand of football
and you can make a name for yourself and getting
the newspapers. And it began to change. And so just
by hanging in there and by doing what they could
to stay alive and to grow themselves and to grow
the league, they just created an entity that was more respectable.
(22:15):
It was no longer fly by night. You got paid
to play on a yearly contractual basis, and so it
was becoming legitimate and respectable. All these changes they'd made
really were distilled into the so called greatest game ever played,
which was the Giants and the Baltimore Colts in nineteen
fifty eight. It's a championship game that went into overtime
(22:38):
on national television. Forty million people watched it, and it
is the owner's bird bell was he was commissioner of
the league by then. He was up in the stands
crying because it was dramatic, it was entertaining, it was popular,
it was sports at its best. There were a few
moments before that game, though, coming out of World War Two,
(23:02):
the NFL was challenged by a rival league, the All
American Football Conference, and it was a well funded league.
They had some owners with money, oiled money, and they
put some decent teams on the field, and the NFL
took it on, and it was really four years of
a football war, and the NFL prevailed. By nineteen fifty,
(23:25):
the AAFC was out of business and the NFL brought
in the best teams in the AAFC Cleveland Browns, San
Francisco forty nine ers. So that added two more successful
franchises to the roster of NFL teams. So as you
head into the nineteen fifties, you're beginning to see a
league that is growing with stable franchises with history and quality.
(23:51):
And so the opening game of the nineteen fifty season,
it was the first game after the two leagues had merged,
and the champions of both leagues in nineteen forty nine
played each other. Champions of the AAFC where the Cleveland
Browns champions of the NFL where the Philadelphia Eagles. And
they met on the field in the opening game and
(24:13):
the Cleveland Browns won in a landslide. They won thirty
five to ten I think the score was, and that
was supposedly the best team in the NFL got routed
by one of the new teams and the game was
televised coast to coast. The COAXIALD cable had been laid.
People were able to sit in Omaha or wherever else
(24:33):
and watch this game. So large crowd saw this and
it was It just showed the sports world that you
look at this quality of football that's going on here,
and in many respects, it was beginning. It was beginning.
I mean college football had more tradition and history, but
it was beginning to become evident that for all the
(24:56):
doubts that had been about pro football, if these were
grown men, these were not kids, These were grown men.
But they could pass the ball better, They were faster,
the collisions were more dramatic, the hitting was harder. Everything
that was interesting about football was better in the pros
and the nation could see it on television. And it's
(25:17):
just a moment there, you know, that opening game in
nineteen fifty where everything just popped. It was like, wow,
look at this, Look what's on display here and set
in motion a decade where the games were really dramatic
and there were these quarterbacks, a generation of quarterbacks, Bobby Lane,
(25:38):
Norm Van Brocklin, they were stars. It was just a
better brand of football than college football. And after that,
I mean, baseball had a fight on its hands for
the most popular sport, and pretty soon pro football overtook it.
That's a book in itself. It's really interesting. Baseball was
not that great on television early on. They it took
(25:59):
a long time which was the more popular sport, but
they realized, boy, the ball is little. You can't really
see the ball, and unless you had like twenty cameras,
and nobody had the money to put twenty cameras on
a game, you couldn't really tell what was going on.
So it was that was really just sort of customer feedback.
You put a football game on, it's a contained area
one hundred it's almost like a stage right off the
(26:21):
bat that you could see the gay that was really important,
and you put it on and people watched it. I
mean they could tell what was happening, and the ratings
were much better for football. It just worked as a
television property. Then what happened to pro football in the
nineteen fifties. You had Johnny Unitas and Bobby Lane and
(26:46):
Norm van broccoln and autogram, these dramatic quarterbacks flinging the
ball all over the field and high scoring games, games
that came down to the last minute. It was just
very compelling. And plus, there's no question one of the
real draws of football over the years and to this
(27:07):
day is the violence. You saw people hitting each other
hard and people getting injured, and it was sort of
a spectacle. Baseball just didn't have any of that. Suddenly
football looked new and modern. Pro football I'm talking about
look new and modern, and yet it was it was
It was clear that there was some science behind it,
and it was sort of fascinating to people, and it
(27:30):
just was a moment where all those factors came together.
I think it's that there were periods of time in
the early eras of the NFL when the league might
not have made it. George hallis who really was the
only one of the five who was at the He
was at the Hupmobile meeting in Canton, Ohio, nineteen twenty,
(27:52):
and so he was the one that helped recruit some
of these other guys in He's really the conscience of
the early of the league in the early years, and
these other guys were as business partners, and even though
they were rivals on the field, you know, they understood
completely understood that we're not going to have anything here
unless we work together and just keep digging away at
(28:13):
this and believe in what we have. And so they
were individual team owners and they were cut throat in
some respects and wanted to beat each other. But they
are the ones who kept the league from going under,
and really with their constant rule changes on and off
the field, they set the league up to succeed, you know,
(28:39):
as takeoff as it did in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
which is another era of real growth when it became
so popular. So they are the pivotal figures in the
history of the league, because there may well have been
no league if not for these guys.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
And a terrific job on the production and editing and
storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery himself a diehard NFL
football fan, no diehard Detroit Lyons fan. And a special
thanks to John Eisenberg, he's the author of the League.
Go to Amazon or your usual suspects and buy the book.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
It's a terrific read. And what a story about.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
In the end, a bunch of mavericks who dared to
start this league. And my favorite story is Tim Marris.
He's a bookie. He doesn't go to college. He's a bookie.
Back when that's how you placed your bets for that
second big popular sport in America, horse racing. It was
baseball and horse racing and nothing else, maybe boxing. And
now it's the NFL. A NFL reigned Supreme. Without Tim Mahra,
(29:45):
without Art Rooney and all the men that we heard about,
there'd be no NFL. The story of how the NFL
came to be here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of how a scrappy sports league called the NFL
became well the NFL we know today.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Here's our own Monta Montgomery to get us started.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Football is a pretty big deal.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
Pressure come step it up, looking throwing peek out field.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
It is.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Pick up by the Lions.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Inter step it coming back the other way, he fought
to Malifan Wu.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
This is gonna be Oliver.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
In so many ways. The NFL has just grown into
a behemoth really unlike any other No other sport can
touch it. I'm talking to other sports that are popular,
like baseball and basketball, and as popular as they are,
they don't come close to fifteen billion dollars in annual revenues,
and they said they'd like to go to twenty five billion.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
That's John Eisenberg. He's the author of the book The League,
which talks about the early days of football.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Let's get back into the story.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
It has become year round. You could turn on a
sports talk show any time of year and they'll be
talking football.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
Because I think America is the land of second chances,
except for when it comes to this.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
To mister job at a hut, you fat slavely, that's what.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
He was with the ulplimate. What did the Panthers do
with quarterback? What are the Cowboys doing at receiver? It's
never stops. Even though they only played from September to
December and then the playoffs. They are just really, really
shrewd at. Continuing the narrative with the draft, the.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Kansas City Chiefs select Patrick Mahomes the second.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
The sixth time world champion New England Patriots.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
Select Mac Jones. The country comes to a halt on
Sundays and Mondays, and it all culmin hs with the
Super Bowl, which is a secular holiday. The football fawcet
never turns off in America, and the early days of
(02:21):
the NFL were just so different. It was struggling, and
I think most people today would look at the NFL
and say, how in the world is that possible? How
in the world did we get from point A to
point B? Was founded in nineteen twenty in Canton, Ohio,
(02:43):
at a hutmobile dealership.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Ralph Hay, who owned the Kansas Canton Bulldogs. He called
a meeting for Canton, Ohio in his automobile show, and
of course they weren't enough enough chairs for every So
we sat around on the running boards of the hupmobile cars.
(03:08):
That become a member of this football league and was
one hundred dollars and it was worth it.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
That's George Hallis who was one of the few original
men to take that one hundred dollars bet on the NFL.
In an era when the sport wasn't even on the
radar of most Americans.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
Baseball was far and away the most popular American sport.
Number one sport would have been Major League baseball, Number
two probably minor league baseball. It was very much the
national pastime, very popular, played in large cities, small towns,
and Babe Ruth and his glory and ty Cup very
much sort of a cultural phenomenon. Not unlike football today.
(03:49):
Baseball was extremely popular. The college football was becoming very
very popular. Dates built some stadiums and people were fascinated
with it. But it was an amateur enterprise. Football back
in the early early days was seen more than anything
else as a good way to take young men and
(04:12):
grow them from boys into men. All right. It was
considered sort of a right of manhood, a right of passage,
you know, put them on the field, teach them to
get hit and deal with pain and be tough and
grow up a little bit, all right. It was considered
a game, described by one turn of the century critic
as crude and barb barrick, with little chems of survival.
(04:37):
The idea of paying someone to do this A lot
of society was horrified by the idea. Why take something
that was so important for our young boys who are
being taught how to become better men. Why take something
like that and ruin it, spoil it with hey, that
was not the point so verrely on. The college coaches
(05:01):
were very much against it. Fielding Yost, a famous coach
University of Michigan, gave a famous speech where he said,
you know, we have to root this out, this pro
football scourge. We do not want to go down this road.
This could ruin football. If you got out of college,
why in the world would you go do that? You know,
you would use your brain, go get into some respectable
(05:23):
line of work. Football. Professional football was not considered a
respectable line of work. For the first years of the NFL.
A lot of the guys that played in the NFL
really had no choice. They didn't have many other options,
and they were happy just to do that for a
few extra bucks, and so pro football had a lot
going against it, and it showed in the quality of
(05:46):
the league and the teams. It was very much a
fly by night intermise in the beginning. Any sort of
sporting businessman that wanted to bring a team, if he
had a couple one hundred dollars and at a place
to put a team, they would take you. Tim Mehra
sort of stumbled into a meeting with the NFL a
(06:08):
couple of NFL guys that were trying to start a
team in New York and basically was talked into it.
Wasn't even invited to the meeting. He showed up and
they said, well, you can have a franchise for five
hundred dollars, and he said, well, at that price, why.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Not that team?
Speaker 3 (06:23):
The New York Giants. Other teams had more industrial roots.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
When George Hallis started the Decatur, Illinois Staley's, it was
a starch company, Ady Staley Company. Playing football was part
of the job. They recruited them to play football and work,
you know, in the factory. Playing football was sort of
a bonus.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
Well, we had a great season in nineteen twenty because
we're the first team to practice every day. They all
had jobs with the Staley Company, and I talked mister
Stay and getting the players two hours a day off
for practice.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
A lot of them worked for maybe these factories that
owned a team, or they worked somewhere else. No, you
didn't make there was no money on the table. Some
of the games the crowd they would pass a hat
and ask the fans to put in a dollar or
a quarter or whatever they could so the players could
get paid. And some teams played in little stadiums, high
(07:30):
school stadiums a couple thousand fans. Some teams played in
public parks. The champion of the league, the Green Bay Packers,
played in a high school stadium and with no restrooms
by the way, so you were lucky to get a
couple thousand fans to a game. Players could jump from
team to team. And what's really interesting about early football
is how different the game itself was. The ball was rounder,
(07:53):
much rounder, and there was not much passing. The game
was just sort of a scare, a muddy scrum. Most
of the plays involved just a back plunging into the line,
which was just a tangle of arms and legs, and
really people just wrestling there at the line of scrimmage,
and you know, they have little pads on, and they
(08:16):
wore what they called They didn't call them uniforms. They
called them sweaters, team sweaters, and sometimes the teams had
the same color sweaters, and so the game was almost indecipherable.
Not much happened. Hunting was a much bigger deal than passing.
There was very little scoring. It wouldn't be surprising to
see a game with the final score of six to
(08:38):
two safety and a touchdown and a missed extra point.
It was an odd sport. Not that many people wanted
to see it. It didn't draw that many people because
it wasn't very exciting a franchise. Would it be worth
a million dollars for him?
Speaker 4 (08:56):
No, I didn't change. I always had to go to
the bank, to the abra and your loan to be
able to start the team off for the following season.
And it wasn't under nineteen fifty nine. It was the
first year that I didn't have to go into the bank.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
Georgella, God bless you.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And you're listening to John Eisenberg tell the story of
the NFL before it was the NFL, and hearing George
hallis the legend talk about the fact that finally, by
the late nineteen fifties, he didn't have to go to
the bank to keep his team afloat, and just the
working class roots of this guy's taking a couple of
hours off to practice so they could represent their factory.
(09:43):
When we come back, more of the story of how
the NFL came to be here on our.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
American stories, and.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
We returned to our American stories and the story of
how the NFL became the behemoth we now know today.
When we last left off, John Eisenberg, author of the league,
was telling us about how football used to be a
disrespected mess of a sport. John now turns to the
stories of the men whose decisions pulled the NFL out
(10:31):
from the muck. Take it away, John.
Speaker 5 (10:36):
They were all men who came to football from different places.
Some were successful in other lines of work. It really
just exemplifies an earlier time in America. Yeah, Tim Merhra
started out. I mean, it's straight out of Charles Dickens. Really. Yeah,
he's in you know, the Lower East Side of New
York and he's surrounded by you know, it's not a
(11:00):
wealthy family, and he didn't go to school. He started
running numbers for bookies. Just a little kid that you know,
he's just surviving with his street sense and so he
gets in with a bookie and has taught the game.
This was an era when horse racing was really really
popular and a lot of Americans bet on horse races.
(11:20):
And it was different than going to the racetrack today,
where there's a toe board and you bet basically with
the track. You would bet with an individual bookie. They
would be lined up on a row and people would
go and it would be an individual transaction. And he
got into that and he succeeded at it. It was personable.
It was a big Irish guy with an infectious personality.
And so he took from there into a number of
(11:43):
other lines of work. It's a type of life that
I don't think you could have anymore, you know. He
invested in all sorts of things. He did stocks, liquor, boxing,
He liked to promote boxing matches. He had an empire,
a small empire with all sorts of things. And he
didn't even really like football. And I mean Art Rooney
(12:06):
started the Pittsburgh franchise. Really never did you know? It
didn't work a job He was a horse player and
one of the great gamblers in the history of America.
Went on a run at Saratoga, a run of gambling
that you just can't even imagine this today. He needed
(12:29):
money and he'd gone to the races in New York
and he'd hit on some races. Then he went up
to Saratoga and he started betting, and he started winning big.
Over a period of days, he kept winning, and it
got covered in the newspapers and people would cheer for him.
Everybody says, oh, there's there's art from Pittsburgh, and they
(12:50):
would cheer him as he walked to the betting window.
It's this little guy with a stogy waddling around, you know,
making more money at the racetrack than people made sometimes
in their lifetimes. That is the definition of street smarts.
And he used that to fund his football team. And
I mean, he's crazy enough. He occasionally still played some
(13:10):
semi pro baseball. He was an athlete. George Preston Marshall
was the owner of the Washington Redskins franchise that was
known as the Redskins for so long, and he had
a theater background. He was a failed actor, but he
never lost He had a big, swept back, blonde hair
(13:31):
and a deep voice, and he dominated every room he
was in. It was almost like he was acting all
the time, very much a theatrical sense of most things,
and football was no different. And Bert Bell was the
only one who was really born into wealth. He started
the Philadelphia franchise. He was very wealthy. He was cut
(13:52):
off basically because he blew all his money. He was
so spoiled. Guys like this, that first generation of owners,
they were quite essentially American, and they doing what they
could to stay on their feet. And they're not succeeding
because they went to law school or mid school, god
went into a profession and rose through the ranks. They're
(14:12):
just having street smarts to keep from going under and
doing what you can. It's that sort of business sense.
Almost all of them were in that boat. They were
men of sport, and they were definitely rivals. They were
all have their own sort of competitive juices and they
wanted to win at something, but what they mainly wanted
to do was make their venture succeed. So it set
up this dynamic, which is the key dynamic of the
(14:36):
success of the NFL, and that is they were rivals
on the field, but they were partners in the business
of professional football. They knew that anything, any sort of
element that would make the game better was important, even
if it set their own team back. They all understood
that from the get go that the greater good would
(14:57):
always matter more, and the biggest example being the institution
of the draft. In nineteen thirty six, the Chicago Bears
and the New York Giants were completely dominant, and Burt Bell,
who had started the Philadelphia franchise, stood up at a meeting,
a league meeting and said, gentlemen, I'm going to be
out of business here in a year or two if
I don't start getting some better players. Before then, it
(15:21):
was just a free for all. The best teams could
go get the best players coming out of college. There
was no system for a signing talent coming out of college,
so the best teams were only getting better. Burt Bell said,
we have to have a draft where the weakest teams
get to pick first, and it will eventually level the
playing field and the owner George Hallis and Tim Merrill,
(15:44):
the owner of the Bears and the Giants, knew it
would end their rule of dominance, but they immediately said
you're right, and they voted for it. And that came
out of the notion that always the greater good would
prevail over any team's individual interest, and so they did
understand that dynamic. They were business men first, and aside
(16:07):
from leveling the playing field by the way, it also
cut down on cost. That was another reason they went
for it, because before there was a draft, every team
could bid on every player. Bidding wars erupted left and
right over all the best talents so and that drove
up prices, drove up salaries. But after the draft, only
one team had your rights and there was no bidding war,
(16:27):
and you took what they offered. Aside from just the draft,
they would share information. Today, the NFL draft and the
scouting of players is considered such a secret science, but
back then they would share a lot of information. Team
in Boston didn't have the money to go scout somebody
(16:50):
in Alabama, but maybe one of the teams that was
more Southern or team in Chicago would have the money.
That's not to say that they didn't try to one
up each other. I mean at the league meetings where
they would do the scheduling, the big joke was you
couldn't go to the bathroom if you were one of
the owners when you're at the league meeting, because while
you were in the bathroom, in five minutes, they would
(17:11):
schedule like six road games for you and make your
schedule tougher. You always had to be there, so they
weren't opposed to putting the screws to each other.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
There were also rules changes that brought about more passing
and brought the game a little further away from the muddy,
stagnant brawl that most passive observers were used to with
the sport.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
They made it much easier to pass the ball. They
created hashmarks so the offense started in the middle of
the field and could operate better. All this stuff just
opened the game wide open, almost immediately.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Also, it's worth mentioning that George Marshall, the failed actor
who created the Washington Redskins, decided to do something truly
revolutionary treat the game like a Shakespearean drama.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
He invented the playoffs. If you can imagine, for the
first twelve years, the winner of the league champion was
determined by a vote of the ownership at a league
meeting several months after the season that's who decided who
the champion was. He says, let's have playoffs, very correctly
(18:23):
ascertained that the World Series was the biggest sports event
on the American calendar. Let's do the same thing. So
he created an Eastern Division, a Western Division, and had
a game that decided a championship on the field. An
unbelievable decision in the history of football to create a postseason,
which in the beginning was just one game, but nonetheless,
(18:45):
if the season was a theatrical production, and now it
had a climax, so yes, it was very much a
play and he brought in marching bands. There was so
much pop in college sports with the bands, and there
was a real show, and he just very quickly decided,
we have to bring that to the pros as well.
(19:06):
Let's give the fans more than just a boring football game.
Let's put a show on. But most importantly, in the end,
let's make the game better.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
When we come back more of the story of the
NFL here on our American story, and we returned to
(19:49):
our American stories and the final portion of our story
on how the NFL became what it is today with
John Eisenberg, author of the League left off. John was
telling us about the men who created the NFL. Let's
continue the story.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Once you've got a more modern era of offensive football
and you've got teams in big cities playing interesting football.
As of about nineteen thirty five, you start to see
stadiums with decent crowds, so a little more money on
the table, and it achieves a bit of tradition. These
(20:31):
teams have been around for a little while by this point.
The Chicago Bears were a force in Chicago, always popular.
New York was a baseball town, no question about it.
But the New York Giants had won some championships and
had a winning tradition, and they played at the Polo
Grounds Yankee Stadium, and fans came out to watch. They
(20:52):
liked it. These teams were beginning to establish tradition. They
had not folded, you know, the depth of the depression
they could have when the league was down to eight teams.
But it started to grow, and so players come out
of college. It could be well, maybe this is okay,
something good to do. Don Hudson, all right, it was
(21:14):
the star of the Rose Bowl for the University of
Alabama nineteen thirty five. He's the Rose Bowl. Star is
an end. He gets contracts offers from three teams he
with the league decides that he belongs with the Green
Bay Packers. So he goes with them, and he's immediately
(21:35):
a star, one of the athletic stars of America. And
so the esteem begins to grow. You just see a
few more college players make that transition, and it becomes
suddenly no longer just an embarrassing thing to do. It
becomes something that you can go on and play football
(21:55):
after college. And it was a good brand of football
and you can make a name for yourself and getting
the newspapers. And it began to change. And so just
by hanging in there and by doing what they could
to stay alive and to grow themselves and to grow
the league, they just created an entity that was more respectable.
(22:15):
It was no longer fly by night. You got paid
to play on a yearly contractual basis, and so it
was becoming legitimate and respectable. All these changes they'd made
really were distilled into the so called greatest game ever played,
which was the Giants and the Baltimore Colts in nineteen
fifty eight. It's a championship game that went into overtime
(22:38):
on national television. Forty million people watched it, and it
is the owner's bird bell was he was commissioner of
the league by then. He was up in the stands
crying because it was dramatic, it was entertaining, it was popular,
it was sports at its best. There were a few
moments before that game, though, coming out of World War Two,
(23:02):
the NFL was challenged by a rival league, the All
American Football Conference, and it was a well funded league.
They had some owners with money, oiled money, and they
put some decent teams on the field, and the NFL
took it on, and it was really four years of
a football war, and the NFL prevailed. By nineteen fifty,
(23:25):
the AAFC was out of business and the NFL brought
in the best teams in the AAFC Cleveland Browns, San
Francisco forty nine ers. So that added two more successful
franchises to the roster of NFL teams. So as you
head into the nineteen fifties, you're beginning to see a
league that is growing with stable franchises with history and quality.
(23:51):
And so the opening game of the nineteen fifty season,
it was the first game after the two leagues had merged,
and the champions of both leagues in nineteen forty nine
played each other. Champions of the AAFC where the Cleveland
Browns champions of the NFL where the Philadelphia Eagles. And
they met on the field in the opening game and
(24:13):
the Cleveland Browns won in a landslide. They won thirty
five to ten I think the score was, and that
was supposedly the best team in the NFL got routed
by one of the new teams and the game was
televised coast to coast. The COAXIALD cable had been laid.
People were able to sit in Omaha or wherever else
(24:33):
and watch this game. So large crowd saw this and
it was It just showed the sports world that you
look at this quality of football that's going on here,
and in many respects, it was beginning. It was beginning.
I mean college football had more tradition and history, but
it was beginning to become evident that for all the
(24:56):
doubts that had been about pro football, if these were
grown men, these were not kids, These were grown men.
But they could pass the ball better, They were faster,
the collisions were more dramatic, the hitting was harder. Everything
that was interesting about football was better in the pros
and the nation could see it on television. And it's
(25:17):
just a moment there, you know, that opening game in
nineteen fifty where everything just popped. It was like, wow,
look at this, Look what's on display here and set
in motion a decade where the games were really dramatic
and there were these quarterbacks, a generation of quarterbacks, Bobby Lane,
(25:38):
Norm Van Brocklin, they were stars. It was just a
better brand of football than college football. And after that,
I mean, baseball had a fight on its hands for
the most popular sport, and pretty soon pro football overtook it.
That's a book in itself. It's really interesting. Baseball was
not that great on television early on. They it took
(25:59):
a long time which was the more popular sport, but
they realized, boy, the ball is little. You can't really
see the ball, and unless you had like twenty cameras,
and nobody had the money to put twenty cameras on
a game, you couldn't really tell what was going on.
So it was that was really just sort of customer feedback.
You put a football game on, it's a contained area
one hundred it's almost like a stage right off the
(26:21):
bat that you could see the gay that was really important,
and you put it on and people watched it. I
mean they could tell what was happening, and the ratings
were much better for football. It just worked as a
television property. Then what happened to pro football in the
nineteen fifties. You had Johnny Unitas and Bobby Lane and
(26:46):
Norm van broccoln and autogram, these dramatic quarterbacks flinging the
ball all over the field and high scoring games, games
that came down to the last minute. It was just
very compelling. And plus, there's no question one of the
real draws of football over the years and to this
(27:07):
day is the violence. You saw people hitting each other
hard and people getting injured, and it was sort of
a spectacle. Baseball just didn't have any of that. Suddenly
football looked new and modern. Pro football I'm talking about
look new and modern, and yet it was it was
It was clear that there was some science behind it,
and it was sort of fascinating to people, and it
(27:30):
just was a moment where all those factors came together.
I think it's that there were periods of time in
the early eras of the NFL when the league might
not have made it. George hallis who really was the
only one of the five who was at the He
was at the Hupmobile meeting in Canton, Ohio, nineteen twenty,
(27:52):
and so he was the one that helped recruit some
of these other guys in He's really the conscience of
the early of the league in the early years, and
these other guys were as business partners, and even though
they were rivals on the field, you know, they understood
completely understood that we're not going to have anything here
unless we work together and just keep digging away at
(28:13):
this and believe in what we have. And so they
were individual team owners and they were cut throat in
some respects and wanted to beat each other. But they
are the ones who kept the league from going under,
and really with their constant rule changes on and off
the field, they set the league up to succeed, you know,
(28:39):
as takeoff as it did in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
which is another era of real growth when it became
so popular. So they are the pivotal figures in the
history of the league, because there may well have been
no league if not for these guys.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
And a terrific job on the production and editing and
storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery himself a diehard NFL
football fan, no diehard Detroit Lyons fan. And a special
thanks to John Eisenberg, he's the author of the League.
Go to Amazon or your usual suspects and buy the book.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
It's a terrific read. And what a story about.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
In the end, a bunch of mavericks who dared to
start this league. And my favorite story is Tim Marris.
He's a bookie. He doesn't go to college. He's a bookie.
Back when that's how you placed your bets for that
second big popular sport in America, horse racing. It was
baseball and horse racing and nothing else, maybe boxing. And
now it's the NFL. A NFL reigned Supreme. Without Tim Mahra,
(29:45):
without Art Rooney and all the men that we heard about,
there'd be no NFL. The story of how the NFL
came to be here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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