When Was the NFL Founded? Canton and the First Season

Nobody had thought to bring enough chairs. On the evening of Friday, September 17, 1920, the representatives of ten professional football teams crowded into Ralph Hay's automobile showroom in downtown Canton, Ohio, and sat where they could, which for most of them meant the running boards and fenders of the Hupmobiles and Jordans that Hay sold for a living. By the time they went home they had formed a league.

That is the answer. The NFL was founded on September 17, 1920, in Canton, under the name American Professional Football Association, and it took the name National Football League on June 24, 1922. Jim Thorpe was its first president. Fourteen teams played in its first season, the Akron Pros were its first champion, and two of the clubs represented in that showroom, the Decatur Staleys and the Racine Cardinals of Chicago, are still members more than a century later as the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals.

September 17, 1920: the date the NFL was founded and the name it carried

The league counts from that Friday. Its Record and Fact Book opens the chronology of the organization in 1920, the 2019 schedule was sold to the public as the hundredth season, and every franchise history the league publishes measures a club's membership from the Canton meeting or from the date the club joined afterward.

What the ten clubs created that night was thinner than the word "league" suggests. They chose a name. They elected three officers. They set a membership fee of $100, accepted the offer of a silver cup for whichever club was judged champion, and resolved that each member would print "Member of American Professional Football Association" on its stationery. That last item is in the minutes, and it says something about what the owners thought they were buying. Standing, more than structure.

The list of things they did not create is longer. There was no schedule. There was no constitution, no standard contract, no rule for deciding a champion and no office. Nobody was hired. The minutes, kept by Art Ranney of the Akron club as the new secretary, run to a couple of pages, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame holds them today a few miles from where the showroom stood.

One resolution did have teeth, at least on paper. Every club was to mail the secretary, by January 1, 1921, a list of the players it had used during the season, so that each club would have first call on its own men the following year. It was a reserve list in embryo, borrowed from baseball, and it went straight at the habit that had brought the owners to Canton.

Three names in twenty-two months

At the first, smaller meeting in August the organization called itself the American Professional Football Conference. On September 17 "Conference" became "Association." Then, at a league meeting on June 24, 1922, the clubs voted to become the National Football League. George Halas, by his own later account, made the proposal; his team shared a ballpark with the Chicago Cubs of baseball's National League, and he thought the old name was a mouthful.

Nothing else changed that day. The same clubs went on playing under the same president and the same bylaws, which is why the league dates itself from 1920 and treats 1922 as a change of title.

• 10Teams at the founding meeting
• 4States they came from
• 14Teams that played in 1920
• 100Membership fee in dollars

Taken from the minutes of the September 17, 1920 meeting and the league's record of the season that followed. The fee was set but, by the participants' own accounts, never collected.

A careful answer therefore has two dates in it. Founded September 17, 1920. Named the NFL June 24, 1922. Anyone who gives 1922 as the founding year is describing the letterhead.

Two meetings in Canton, four weeks apart

Ralph Hay was a young car dealer in downtown Canton who had owned the Canton Bulldogs since 1918. The Bulldogs were the best-known professional team in the country and they were losing money, a combination that made Hay the natural host for a conversation about costs.

The first meeting was on August 20, 1920, and it was an Ohio affair. Four clubs came: Hay's Bulldogs, the Akron Pros, the Cleveland Indians and the Dayton Triangles. They agreed among themselves not to sign each other's players and not to use college men who still had eligibility, and decided to write to the stronger independent teams outside the state. The name they gave this arrangement was the American Professional Football Conference.

The letters worked. Four weeks later the room was full.

Club at the September 17 meeting	State	Represented by
Akron Pros	Ohio	Frank Nied and Art Ranney
Canton Bulldogs	Ohio	Ralph Hay and Jim Thorpe
Cleveland Indians	Ohio	Jimmy O'Donnell and Stan Cofall
Dayton Triangles	Ohio	Carl Storck
Hammond Pros	Indiana	Doc Young
Muncie Flyers	Indiana	Earl Ball
Rochester Jeffersons	New York	Leo Lyons
Rock Island Independents	Illinois	Walter Flanigan
Decatur Staleys	Illinois	George Halas and Morgan O'Brien
Racine Cardinals	Illinois	Chris O'Brien

Ten teams from four states. An eleventh name appears in the minutes only to be struck off: the first item of business records that the Massillon Tigers, Canton's old rival, had withdrawn from professional football for 1920. No Massillon delegate signed anything. The town that had done as much as Canton to build the professional game sat out the season in which the league was formed.

Running boards, a fee and a silver cup

The picture everyone remembers comes from Halas. Hay's office was too small for the crowd, so the meeting moved onto the showroom floor, and the delegates perched on the cars. Halas wrote decades later that it was a hot night and that someone had set out buckets of beer, a detail worth treating as a recollection, given that national Prohibition had been in force since January.

The business was brief. Thorpe was elected president, Stan Cofall of Cleveland vice president and Art Ranney of Akron secretary and treasurer. The fee was fixed at $100 a club. Halas's verdict on that was blunt: he doubted any club ever paid it, and no record survives to show that one did.

Then a representative of the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, a manufacturer better known for billiard tables, offered a silver loving cup to be given to the team the association judged its champion. The cup was awarded exactly once.

The three problems the founders wrote down

The clubs did not meet out of affection. Reports of the August meeting set out what was wrong with the business in plain terms, and there were three complaints: salaries were climbing, players were jumping from one team to another, and clubs were using college players who were still in school.

Salaries first. Professional football in 1919 was a business of weekly bidding. A good lineman was paid by the game, a star back might command several times what his teammates got, and because nothing bound him to a club beyond Sunday, any rival manager could raise the offer by telegram on Monday. Canton had set the tone five years earlier when it brought in Thorpe for a reported $250 a game, a sum that paid for itself at the gate and taught every other manager the wrong lesson. By 1919 the best teams were drawing well and still finishing the year in the red.

Jumping was the mechanism behind the salaries. With no contracts that anyone enforced, a player could appear for one club on a Sunday and for its next opponent a week later. Some did it under their own names. Others did not bother with their own names at all. Managers hired an opponent's best man away for a single big game, then released him.

The third complaint was the one with consequences outside the sport. College football was the major game in 1920, professional football its disreputable cousin, and college coaches such as Amos Alonzo Stagg at Chicago said so loudly. What gave them their best argument was the undergraduate who played for his school on Saturday and for a professional club on Sunday under an invented name. Every such case confirmed the colleges' view that the paid game corrupted the amateur one, and the colleges controlled the supply of players, the sports pages and a good deal of public opinion.

An agreement with nothing behind it

The owners' answer in 1920 was a gentlemen's agreement. Clubs would respect each other's player lists. Clubs would leave undergraduates alone. Nobody would be fined, because there was nobody to do the fining and no rule under which to do it.

It held about as well as that description suggests. Players still moved during the 1920 season, and the college problem came back within a year in two episodes the newspapers enjoyed. In November 1921 a small-town grudge game between Taylorville and Carlinville, Illinois, turned out to have been stocked on both sides with current Notre Dame and Illinois players, hired for the day. Weeks later Green Bay, in its first season as a member, was caught using Notre Dame men under assumed names and lost its franchise for it. The founders had identified the right problems in a car showroom. Fixing them took a different kind of president.

Jim Thorpe as president, and why Joe Carr replaced him

In 1920 Jim Thorpe was the most famous athlete in the United States. He had won the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, been an All-American halfback at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School under Pop Warner, and spent several summers in major league baseball, most of them with the New York Giants. Since 1915 he had been the reason people paid to watch the Canton Bulldogs.

That was the whole of his qualification, and the owners knew it. A new association of clubs from mill towns and railroad towns needed its name in newspapers that did not cover it, and a headline with Thorpe's name in it was one an editor in New York might actually run. He was in his early thirties, still playing, still coaching Canton, and he had no office, no staff and no evident wish to spend his weekdays on correspondence. In 1921 he was playing for Cleveland. The presidency was a letterhead job, and he treated it as one.

The sportswriter from Columbus

The change came at the league meeting in Akron on April 30, 1921. The owners elected Joseph F. Carr, who managed the Columbus Panhandles, a team built around railroad shop workers and a family of enormous brothers named Nesser. Carr had been a sportswriter and had worked around baseball for years. He understood something the car dealers and factory managers around him did not, which was how organized baseball made its clubs behave.

He imported the lot. Under Carr the association got a constitution and bylaws. It got a standard player contract modeled on baseball's, with a clause reserving a player to his club. Clubs received territorial rights, so that no member could put a team in another member's city. There were criteria for membership and, for the first time, official standings, so that a champion could be named from a table and not from the newspapers. He moved the league office to Columbus and ran it from there until his death in May 1939.

Carr also enforced what he wrote. When Green Bay admitted using college players under false names in 1921, the franchise was surrendered, and Curly Lambeau had to apply for a new one the following summer. After Red Grange went straight from his last college game to the Bears in 1925, Carr pushed through a rule barring clubs from signing any player before his college class had graduated. That one sentence did more to make peace with the colleges than fifteen years of protesting good intentions.

Thorpe is in the Hall of Fame as a player. Carr is in it as the man who made the thing work. Both were in the charter class of 1963.

The 1920 season: fourteen teams and no schedule

Four clubs that had not been in Hay's showroom joined before the season was out: the Buffalo All-Americans, the Chicago Tigers, the Columbus Panhandles and the Detroit Heralds. That made fourteen, spread across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, New York and Michigan.

They did not play a season in any sense a modern reader would recognize. Each manager booked his own games, by letter and telegram, and booked them against whoever would draw a crowd. Often that was another member. Often it was not. Akron opened against the Wheeling Stogies. Decatur opened against the Moline Universal Tractors. A game against a non-member counted in a club's record exactly as a game against a member did, and nobody had decided otherwise because nobody had decided anything.

The number of games varied just as freely. Decatur played thirteen. Muncie played one league opponent, lost 45-0, found its remaining bookings canceled, and is carried in the record at no wins and one defeat.

Club, 1920	Won	Lost	Tied
Akron Pros	8	0	3
Decatur Staleys	10	1	2
Buffalo All-Americans	9	1	1
Chicago Cardinals	6	2	2
Canton Bulldogs	7	4	2

Those records were assembled afterward. The association kept no standings in 1920, and the table printed in the league's record book is a later reconstruction from newspaper reports.

The first games

The first game involving a member club was played on Sunday, September 26, 1920, at Douglas Park in Rock Island, Illinois, where the Independents beat a non-league team, the St. Paul Ideals, 48-0.

A week later, on October 3, two pairs of members met for the first time. In Dayton, the Triangles beat the Columbus Panhandles 14-0 at Triangle Park. In Rock Island, the Independents beat Muncie 45-0. The league treats the Dayton game as the first between two of its teams and credits Dayton's Lou Partlow with the first touchdown, though with two games kicking off the same afternoon in different states and nobody holding a stopwatch for posterity, that is a convention more than a measurement.

The football itself would look strange now. Players went both ways for sixty minutes. The ball was fatter and harder to throw, and the rules of the day hemmed the passer in, a story told in our piece on how the forward pass was legalized. Scores were low and shutouts ordinary.

The Akron Pros, the first NFL champion, by a vote in April

Akron did not lose. That was its entire case, and it was enough.

The Pros were owned by Frank Nied and Art Ranney, coached by Elgie Tobin, and built around a backfield that included Fritz Pollard, an All-American from Brown and one of only two Black players in the association that year. The defense gave up seven points in eleven games. One touchdown, to Cleveland, in a 7-7 tie. Akron scored 151.

By December three clubs had a claim. Akron was unbeaten with one tie. Decatur had lost once, to the Cardinals by a point. Buffalo had lost once as well. The three then settled nothing on the field.

1. 1October 3Akron opens against the Wheeling Stogies, a non-league club, and wins 43-0.
2. 2Through NovemberThe Pros stay unbeaten. A 7-7 tie with Cleveland produces the only points scored against them all year.
3. 3December 5Akron and the Buffalo All-Americans play a scoreless tie in Buffalo.
4. 4December 12Akron and the Decatur Staleys play another scoreless tie, at Cubs Park in Chicago. Both clubs claim the title afterward.
5. 5April 30, 1921The owners meet in Akron and vote the championship to the Pros, the one club without a defeat.

The sequence as recorded in the league's history. No title game existed and none was proposed; the owners settled the matter by vote the following spring.

Halas argued for his Staleys, who had won more games. Buffalo argued for itself. The owners, meeting in Akron at the end of April, took the view that a team nobody had beaten was the champion, and that ties did not count for or against anyone. That second principle, ignoring tied games when working out a winning percentage, stayed in the league's arithmetic until 1972.

The cup that vanished

Akron was presented with the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Cup. Nobody knows where it is.

The trophy was meant to pass from champion to champion, and it never did. No later winner received it, the league adopted no replacement for years, and the cup dropped out of the documentary record so completely that researchers have been unable to say whether it was lost, kept by someone in Akron, or melted down. The league that now hands out a sterling silver trophy on live television every February mislaid its first championship prize within a season.

Akron's reign was short too. The Pros slid down the standings, renamed themselves the Indians, and played their last league season in 1926. Pollard became a co-coach of the team in 1921, which makes him the first Black head coach in league history, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2005.

Two clubs from that room are still playing

Of the ten teams represented on September 17, eight are gone. The two survivors both came from Illinois, and neither plays under the name its delegate used that night.

The Decatur Staleys were a company team. A.E. Staley made corn starch in Decatur, in the middle of the state, and in 1920 he hired a 25-year-old former Illinois end named George Halas to work at the plant, run its football team and play on its baseball team. Halas went to Canton as Staley's man. A year later, with the starch business in a slump and a factory town unable to support a professional payroll, Staley handed him the team and some seed money and sent him to Chicago. The club won the 1921 title as the Chicago Staleys and became the Bears in 1922.

The Racine Cardinals were older than anything else in the room. Chris O'Brien, a Chicago painting contractor, had started the club on the South Side in the 1890s, and it took its second name from Racine Avenue and not from the Wisconsin city. How a faded jersey gave the club that name is told in our guide to how NFL teams got their names. It became the Chicago Cardinals in the league's books, left for St. Louis in 1960 and for Arizona in 1988. Both moves, and every other one, are covered in our NFL relocation history.

Halas matters to this story beyond the Bears. He outlived most of the others in the showroom by decades, he lived until 1983, and a great deal of what is "known" about the founding meeting, from the running boards to the unpaid fee, comes from his memory of it. That is a reason to be grateful and a reason to be careful.

The Green Bay Packers were not there. They existed, having been founded in 1919, but they joined the association in August 1921, and the peculiar way they have been owned since is its own subject, set out in our guide to who owns the Packers. For the full order in which today's 32 clubs came into being, see our list of the oldest NFL teams.

From association to National Football League: Carr's cull of the small towns

The league grew before it shrank. Twenty-one clubs took part in 1921, and the number bounced around twenty for the next five seasons as franchises were handed out cheaply to almost any town with a field and a promoter. Tonawanda, New York, played one game. Clubs came from Evansville, Kenosha, Duluth and Pottsville. Many were road teams in all but name, traveling to the bigger cities because the gates there were worth more than anything they could draw at home.

In 1926 the membership reached twenty-two. Part of that was defensive. Red Grange and his manager, C.C. Pyle, had been refused a New York franchise and started a rival American Football League, and Carr wanted the NFL's flag planted in as many cities as possible so the new league could not claim them.

The rival folded after one season. Carr then did what he had been waiting to do.

Number of teams taking part in each season listed, from the league record book. The drop between 1926 and 1927 was deliberate.

Show the numbers

Clubs in the league, selected seasons from 1920 to 1936

Item	Teams
1920	14
1926	22
1927	12
1932	8
1933	10
1936	9

For 1927 the league dropped to twelve clubs. The financially weak members were pushed out or persuaded to suspend operations, and the survivors were weighted toward large cities with large ballparks: New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland. The process kept going after that. Pottsville went in 1929, Dayton's franchise was sold to Brooklyn in 1930, and when the Portsmouth Spartans left southern Ohio for Detroit in 1934, Green Bay became what it has been ever since, the last of the small-town clubs.

Carr's reasoning was commercial and it was right. A league of factory towns could never pay the salaries that kept players from jumping, and could never draw the newspaper coverage that only big-city dailies provided. The Depression finished the argument. By 1932 there were eight teams, a low the league matched only once, in the wartime season of 1943.

It is fair to add what was lost. The clubs Carr cut were the ones that had invented the professional game, and the towns that had carried it for thirty years were told, in effect, that they were too small for what they had built. Canton, where the league was founded, lost its franchise in the 1927 purge.

Titles settled by standings and votes: the 1921 and 1925 arguments

From 1920 through 1932 the league had no championship game. The title went to the club with the best winning percentage, ties thrown out, and where the table did not settle it, the owners did. Three of those thirteen championships were disputed at the time, and two are disputed still.

The first was 1921, and it involved Halas again, this time as the beneficiary. The Buffalo All-Americans beat the Chicago Staleys 7-6 on Thanksgiving Day and were still unbeaten at the start of December. Buffalo then agreed to a rematch in Chicago on December 4, which its owner understood to be an exhibition. Chicago won 10-7. Halas maintained the game counted. The owners agreed with him, and applied a principle that a second meeting between two clubs outweighed the first. The Staleys were champions at 9-1-1, Buffalo runners-up at 9-1-2, and in western New York the episode has been known ever since as the Staley Swindle.

Pottsville, 1925

The second is the one that still surfaces at league meetings.

The Pottsville Maroons, from the Pennsylvania coal region, beat the Chicago Cardinals 21-7 in Chicago on December 6, 1925, in a game billed locally as deciding the championship. Six days later the Maroons played an exhibition against a team of former Notre Dame stars at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was the protected territory of another member, the Frankford Yellow Jackets, who objected. Carr had warned Pottsville not to play, Pottsville played anyway, and Carr suspended the franchise.

The Cardinals, in the meantime, had added two late games against weak opponents to improve their record. One of them, against the Milwaukee Badgers, turned out to have included four Chicago high school boys in the Milwaukee lineup, which produced fines and a ban of its own. The league nonetheless awarded the 1925 title to the Cardinals at 11-2-1. Their owner, Chris O'Brien, declined to accept a championship won that way. The club claimed it in later years.

Pottsville's supporters have asked the league to reverse the decision more than once, and the owners have declined, including by formal votes in 1963 and 2003. The honest position is that both things are true: Pottsville won the game that was supposed to matter, and Pottsville broke a territorial rule that was the foundation of Carr's league.

The table of how titles were decided shows the turn clearly.

Seasons	How the champion was chosen
1920	Vote of the club owners the following April
1921 to 1931	Best winning percentage in the standings, tied games ignored, disputes ruled on by the league
1932	An extra game ordered between two clubs tied at the top
1933 to 1969	NFL Championship Game between division or conference winners, followed from the 1966 season by a meeting with the AFL champion
1970 onward	Conference playoffs ending in the Super Bowl

What made the league last: Grange, a title game and the draft

Nothing guaranteed that Carr's league would outlive him. Three developments between 1925 and 1936 did most of the work, and the first was a redheaded halfback.

Harold "Red" Grange played his last game for the University of Illinois on November 21, 1925. Within days he had signed with the Bears, and on Thanksgiving, November 26, he made his professional debut against the Cardinals at Cubs Park in front of a crowd reported at 36,000, an enormous figure for a sport used to a few thousand. The game ended 0-0. It did not matter. The Bears then took him on the road, and on December 6 the crowd at the Polo Grounds in New York was reported at around 70,000, a gate widely credited with rescuing Tim Mara's first-year Giants from heavy losses. A second leg through the South and the West followed over the winter.

Crowd figures from the 1920s are newspaper estimates and should be read that way. The effect is not in doubt. Grange proved that professional football could fill a major league ballpark in the country's largest city, and he did it for a league that most New York sportswriters had never seen play.

The game that created a championship

In 1932 the Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans finished level at the top of the standings once ties were discarded, and the league ordered an extra game to separate them. A blizzard made Wrigley Field unusable, so on December 18 the game was moved indoors to Chicago Stadium, onto a dirt floor left by a circus, on a field far shorter than regulation. The Bears won 9-0.

The owners drew the obvious conclusion: a deciding game sold tickets. For 1933 they split the ten clubs into Eastern and Western divisions and scheduled the winners to meet. The Bears beat the Giants 23-21 at Wrigley Field on December 17, 1933, in the first NFL Championship Game. The same offseason the league wrote its own rulebook for the first time instead of following the colleges, adding hash marks, moving the goal posts to the goal line and allowing a forward pass from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage. Those two divisions are the distant ancestor of the eight the league uses now.

1. 1April 1921Joe Carr is elected president and begins writing a constitution, a standard contract and territorial rights.
2. 2June 1922The American Professional Football Association renames itself the National Football League.
3. 3November 1925Red Grange signs with the Bears and draws big-city crowds the league had never seen.
4. 41927Membership is cut from 22 clubs to 12, and the survivors are concentrated in large cities.
5. 51933Two divisions are created, a championship game is scheduled, and the league adopts its own playing rules.
6. 6February 1936The first draft of college players is held in Philadelphia.

A sequence of decisions, each of which is documented in the league's own chronology. Dates are those of the meeting or the game.

A draft to stop the bidding

The last piece went back to the first complaint of 1920. Clubs were still bidding against each other for college seniors, and the richest clubs were winning. Bert Bell, whose Philadelphia Eagles were not among them, proposed that teams choose players in reverse order of the standings and hold exclusive rights to those they chose. The owners adopted it, and the first draft was held on February 8, 1936, at the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia. The first man chosen, Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago, never played a professional down.

The principle survived him. It is the same one explained in how the NFL draft works, and with the equal division of television money that came a generation later, it is the main reason a club in a small market can compete with one in a large market.

Professional football before 1920

The league was founded in 1920. The professional game was already 28 years old.

On November 12, 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association played the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, and Allegheny had a ringer in its line: William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, a former Yale guard and the best-known lineman in the country. Allegheny won 4-0, a touchdown then being worth four points, and Heffelfinger scored it after picking up a fumble. For decades the first professional was thought to be someone else, a Latrobe quarterback paid ten dollars in 1895. Then an Allegheny expense sheet came to light, now kept at the Hall of Fame, with a line recording a cash payment of $500 to Heffelfinger for playing. Nothing earlier has been documented.

Pay spread from the athletic clubs of western Pennsylvania outward. A short-lived circuit of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh teams in 1902, backed by baseball men, even called itself the National Football League. It lasted one season.

The Ohio League and the Canton-Massillon rivalry

By the middle of the 1900s the center of the paid game had moved to northeastern Ohio, and to two towns eight miles apart. Massillon fielded the Tigers from 1903. Canton answered with the Bulldogs in 1905. Both hired the best players money could find for their meetings, the stakes rose every year, and in 1906 the series collapsed in an accusation, never proved, that a game between them had been fixed. Crowds stayed away for years afterward.

What historians call the Ohio League was never a league. It was a loose understanding among the state's strong independent teams, Canton, Massillon, Akron, Columbus, Dayton and a few others, about who the champion was, reached mostly through newspapers. It had no officers and no rules. It did have the Canton-Massillon game, revived in the 1910s, and in 1915 Canton manager Jack Cusack signed Jim Thorpe to win it.

Thorpe did what he was paid for. Canton claimed the Ohio championship in 1916, 1917 and 1919, crowds grew, and so did every team's payroll as rivals hired their own stars to keep pace. Hay took over the Bulldogs from Cusack in 1918. Two years later he was writing to Akron, Cleveland and Dayton to ask whether they were losing money too.

Why the Pro Football Hall of Fame is in Canton

Canton's claim rests on September 17, 1920, and on a newspaper.

By the late 1950s the league was prospering and had no museum. Baseball had opened one in Cooperstown, New York, in 1939. Latrobe, Pennsylvania, had long pressed its own case as the birthplace of the professional game. Then, on December 6, 1959, the Canton Repository ran a headline across its sports section arguing that pro football needed a hall of fame and that Canton was the logical place for it.

The paper's argument had three parts. The league had been organized in Canton. The Canton Bulldogs had been the professional game's first great team, before the league and in it, winning back-to-back NFL titles in 1922 and 1923 without losing a game in either season. And Thorpe, the sport's first star, had made his name there.

What followed was a civic campaign of a kind a larger city might not have mounted. Local business leaders took the idea up, a fund drive among residents and companies raised the money for a building, and the city offered land beside its high school stadium. Canton made its formal bid to the league in early 1961, and on April 27 of that year the owners approved it. Ground was broken on August 11, 1962. The Hall opened on September 7, 1963, with a charter class of seventeen that included Thorpe, Carr, Halas, Grange and Curly Lambeau.

There is a mild irony in it. Canton lost its franchise in 1927 because it was too small for the league Carr was building, and it got the league's shrine 36 years later for the same reason: no bigger city wanted it as much. How members are chosen today, by a selection committee meeting before the Super Bowl, is described in our guide to the Hall of Fame selection process.

The showroom itself is long gone. Each summer the league opens its preseason with a game at the stadium next to the Hall, a few minutes' drive away, and the more than a century between a few men on running boards and the business described across our American football coverage is hard to hold in one thought. It started with ten clubs, a fee nobody paid and a cup nobody can find.