Throwback Thursday: First Pro

I grew up knowing and accepting that William "Pudge" Heffelfinger was the first professional football player. In an 1892 game against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, the Allegheny Athletic Association went out and bought themselves a "ringer". Pudge was paid to play football so that Allegheny could gain an edge over their hated rival. The game was cut short due to darkness but not before Pudge scored the lone touchdown to lead his employer to victory. Nearly seventy years after that game, a page from the A.A.A. 1892 account book was discovered. Today, that page is one of the most treasured artifacts at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It showed that William "Pudge" Heffelfinger was paid $500 to play against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. He became the first professional football player. It's important to note that he's the first proved to have been paid to play football. It's possible, even likely, that earlier players were paid. Probably for nowhere near that amount as Pudge was considered the most dominant football player of his time. The town teams of that day were always looking for an edge, looking for "ringers" to gain any advantage against their neighbors even if it cost some of their cash.

All my life, I've known this story to be true. So, it was a great surprise to learn that this story is relatively new. Up until the early 1960s, every professional football history started with quarterback John Brallier playing for the Latrobe football team in 1895. As a 16-year old kid, Brallier was hired away from his high school team for ten bucks. This kid had been accepted as the first professional football player for about seventy years. Pudge for only the last fifty. It's amazing how accepted history can change like that. I guess that's why we should never stop looking. Since paying people to play football was frowned upon back then, these transactions were generally kept very hush hush. The amateur way was generally considered the right way, the only way. That's why Pudge's and other possible contracts were closely guarded secrets. It took about seventy years for the Pudge contract to come to light. The reason that everyone knew that Brallier was paid was because he saw no reason to hide it. He may have seen it that way because by 1895 it was pretty clear that professional football couldn't be stopped.