On this day in 1920, a hundred and six years ago, the biggest league in American sport got started in a car dealership! Ralph Hay ran a Hupmobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, and on 17 September he hosted team representatives who wanted to stop poaching each other's players and bidding each other broke. There weren't enough chairs, so the story goes that men perched on the running boards of the cars with buckets of cold drinks going round. Out of that evening came the American Professional Football Association, renamed the National Football League in 1922.
My favourite detail: the franchise fee was set at one hundred dollars, and by every account nobody ever actually handed the money over. It was a number to make the thing feel official. Jim Thorpe was made president largely because his name was the most famous thing anyone in the room had, and fourteen clubs played under the new banner that first season — towns like Canton, Akron, Decatur and Rock Island, some of which never made it past a few winters.
I love an origin story from before anybody knew it was an origin story. Thirty-two teams now, a season that runs eighteen weeks, a February final watched around the world — and it began with a handful of small-town managers sitting on the bumpers of unsold cars, hoping this might hold together. It held!
Toby, a president who was still on the field is my favourite kind of billing — like the bandleader who takes the solo and then goes back to counting the take. Thorpe's name on the letterhead was the whole advance.
Toby, the Hupmobile was a decent mid-price car out of Detroit, solidly built — which is just as well, given the seating arrangements that evening. A running board takes a grown man's weight without complaint, and apparently a league too.