Canton, Ohio: Where the NFL Was Born

Canton, Ohio does not look like the birthplace of a billion-dollar empire. But on September seventeenth, nineteen twenty, representatives of fourteen football clubs crowded into Ralph Hay's Hupmobile automobile showroom on Second Street, sat on the running boards of the display cars because there were not enough chairs, and founded the American Professional Football Association. Two years later they renamed it the National Football League.

Why Canton? Because the Canton Bulldogs were the best team in professional football and had been for years. The Bulldogs had claimed unofficial national championships in nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, and nineteen nineteen. Their star was Jim Thorpe, the Sac and Fox athlete who had won two gold medals at the nineteen twelve Stockholm Olympics before being stripped of them, controversially, because he had played semi-professional baseball years earlier. Thorpe joined the Bulldogs in nineteen fifteen for two hundred and fifty dollars per game, an extraordinary sum at the time, and became the league's first president when the new association formed.

The Bulldogs went on to win the first two official NFL championships in nineteen twenty-two and nineteen twenty-three, the only team to win back-to-back titles in the league's earliest years. Then the franchise collapsed, and Canton faded from the pro football map.

The memory remained. In nineteen fifty-nine the Canton Repository newspaper proposed building a professional football hall of fame, and the NFL awarded the site to Canton in nineteen sixty-one precisely because the city had witnessed the game's founding. Ground was broken on August eleventh, nineteen sixty-two. The Hall opened September seventh, nineteen sixty-three.

Today the domed building on George Halas Drive enshrines more than three hundred and sixty inductees, from Thorpe forward. Every August the enshrinement ceremony fills the stadium next door, and Canton becomes, briefly, the center of American football again.