From Rags to Riches.

At the beginning of the 1920s professional football was in disarray. The play-for-pay sport was twenty-five years old in 1920, but few people took notice. Tickets to games could hardly be given away. Players met in the lobby of a hotel on a Sunday morning, discussed some plays, and then put them into the game that afternoon. A teammate in one game might be an opponent in the next. What league organization existed was merely a loose confederation. Four men changed the game into a popular, rapidly growing spectator sport before the decade was over: Joe E. Carr, Tim Mara, Red Grange, and George Halas.

The National Football League.

On 17 September 1920 the American Professional Football Association was founded in Ralph Hays's automobile agency in Canton, Ohio. The great former Olympian and football star Jim Thorpe was elected president; Stanley Cofall, the...