1895 Shepardsville, MI Football Club

[Denis Crawford]

Can someone assist me with a question asked by a friend:

There is a plaque in Clinton County, MI stating that the first professional team may have played on July 4, 1895. They were called the Michigan Rushers. My understanding is that members of the team split gate receipts but did not have signed contracts. Is this enough to qualify them as the first professional team as opposed to the 1896 Allegheny Athletic Association?

If any of you specialize on this era, please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you.

DC

[JohnTurney]

Can someone assist me with a question asked by a friend:

There is a plaque in Clinton County, MI stating that the first professional team may have played on July 4, 1895. They were called the Michigan Rushers. My understanding is that members of the team split gate receipts but did not have signed contracts. Is this enough to qualify them as the first professional team as opposed to the 1896 Allegheny Athletic Association?

If any of you specialize on this era, please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you.

DC

I am no expert, but here is what Pro Football Hall of Fame lists on their site, "1896 - The Allegheny Athletic Association team fielded the first completely professional team for its abbreviated two-game season."

They use---"Completely" professional

they also list previous increments before that---

link
https://www.profootballhof.com/football ... -football/

Maybe someone here has a more educated opinion . . . I don't know.

[TanksAndSpartans]

I found the plaque here: https://www.readtheplaque.com/plaque/fi ... tball-game, but I'd be interested in seeing what their proof is. I'd also be interested in their schedule to see what level of competition they were playing. Maybe it shouldn't matter, but to me it matters whether they were competitive at least with the other top teams in their geographic area. I didn't see them on Michigan's schedule for example, but I couldn't find a Detroit AC schedule.

For the 2 games the AAA played in '96 cited on the HOF website, what actually happened was that due to an AAU investigation, the AAA didn't field a team that season and the players went elsewhere. Late in the season, a team was put together but my understanding is that it was a rogue team that likely didn't have the support of most of the club. It consisted of mostly players who had played a complete season in Chicago and they played a couple more games in Pittsburgh under the AAA name (which I think was fine because the AAU had not banned them from playing football yet - that happened before the start of the '97 season though). Are we supposed to believe that Chicago didn't already pay these players for the '96 season which occurred before the '96 AAA team took the field? I don't.

The HOF claims Latrobe as the 1st fully professional team, but even this seems a bit arbitrary to me - if you look at their schedule, they were still playing AAU sanctioned teams, so the AAU considered them amateur or they wouldn't have been allowed to compete. I'd be interested to hear from others as well how professionalism is proved 100+ years later. In the case of some of the Pittsburgh teams, the HOF has actual artifacts - a ledger, contracts, etc. In the Latrobe case, I think the proof is oral history - interviews with players (thinking of Brallier), etc. or maybe even extracted from contemporary newspapers. I'm not sure what the standard of proof is though. The OP mentions:

My understanding is that members of the team split gate receipts but did not have signed contracts. Is this enough to qualify them as the first professional team

I believe the AAU allowed the players to accept money for expenses and even if they were given jobs, the team could still compete as "semi" professional, but I'm not sure of the exact standard for professionalism.

I'm actually working on a short article right now regarding the possibility of professionalism on the 1890 Orange AC team. They had a team good enough to tie Princeton and in my opinion, that probably didn't come cheap

[TanksAndSpartans]

I reached out to Alan March who is the great-grandson of Dr. Harry A March, author of the very first pro football history - Pro football, its "Ups" and "Downs": A light-hearted history of the post graduate game. He had this to say:

In the context of the pre-NFL era, it seems the concept of professional was a bit different from today. Anyone who got any physical reward for playing, be it a fistful of cash, a watch, or a trophy, was clearly a professional. The same for anyone who got any compensation for playing. In that era, being a professional athlete was not considered an upstanding vocational choice. Pro athletes were nothing more than mercenaries whose loyalties went to the highest bidder. The Eastern Colleges and Universities decried anyone playing for more than the joy of the game and to honor alma mater. (It is my opinion they were really protecting their turf more than protecting the integrity of the game. They simply didn't want the competition. But again, that is the perspective of a man who grew up with pro sports as an accepted aspect of life.)

In the mind-set of those who were "influencers" a century or more ago, what was a professional athlete? The German Turner movement of the mid-19th Century came to the US after the failed 1848 revolution in that country. Among its key concepts was fitness as an end toward becoming a good person. So, fitness, and more broadly any athletics for the good of man, are virtuous. Being paid to be fit, and play, was not necessary. Sport-for-pay was just un-refined ruffians who had no other way to support themselves. Baseball players had been openly paid to play for nearly 30 years when the "Modern Olympics" were organized (1896). This was a reaction to professional sport, as opposed to sport for sport's sake. In the "Golden Age," the USA was becoming a world power (which would again be proven by the Span-Am War in 1898). Americans were feeling powerful....and virtuous. So, a man playing for his school or city team was building community spirit. He was not doing it for pay. He was being virtuous. (The concept of virtue was a key characteristic admired by our Founding Fathers.) Somehow, pro baseball was accepted...as long as it wasn't played on Sundays. Sunday "blue laws" protected the virtue of our culture by honoring the Christian Sabbath, while allowing us to watch baseball the other six days of the week.

So, accepting any compensation for playing a sport was looked upon with disdain. So, the decent men who were skilled enough to be paid to play, hid that fact. Pudge Heffelfinger never admitted being paid, or even being given train fare (in fact, he denied it in his memoirs).

[RyanChristiansen]

I reached out to Alan March who is the great-grandson of Dr. Harry A March, author of the very first pro football history - Pro football, its "Ups" and "Downs": A light-hearted history of the post graduate game. He had this to say:

In the context of the pre-NFL era, it seems the concept of professional was a bit different from today. Anyone who got any physical reward for playing, be it a fistful of cash, a watch, or a trophy, was clearly a professional. The same for anyone who got any compensation for playing. In that era, being a professional athlete was not considered an upstanding vocational choice. Pro athletes were nothing more than mercenaries whose loyalties went to the highest bidder... accepting any compensation for playing a sport was looked upon with disdain. So, the decent men who were skilled enough to be paid to play, hid that fact. Pudge Heffelfinger never admitted being paid, or even being given train fare (in fact, he denied it in his memoirs).

Thank you for this. Yes, there is "professionalism," which is pretty clear-cut, and there is "professional," which is more of a sliding scale that takes into account not only whether or not money is involved but whether there is a coach, a systematic approach, regular practices, ticket sales, etc. A professional team in 1890 is not the same as a professional team in 1910 is not the same as a professional team in 1930, and so on. Are they a professional team compared to other teams at the time? I think that's the question we need to ask.

There's a series on Netflix titled "The English Game" about association football and the rise of professionalism in Britain. It's a really great look at the attitudes of amateurism versus professionalism.

[TanksAndSpartans]

There's a series on Netflix titled "The English Game" about association football and the rise of professionalism in Britain. It's a really great look at the attitudes of amateurism versus professionalism.

Thanks Ryan - you're the second person to mention that series to me. I'll have to check it out.

Are they a professional team compared to other teams at the time? I think that's the question we need to ask.

IMO, if this Michigan team was splitting gate receipts, I would say yes. If word of that had gotten out in Pittsburgh or even worse NY metro area where the teams stayed officially amateur for years despite having former All-Americans in the line-up, I think it would have meant trouble for their amateur status.

[TanksAndSpartans]

One last update on this - the HOF knows about it. Marc Maltby had this to say in 1987:

The Michigan Rushers' pro game of July 4, 1895, later
spurred Leo Grove to campaign unsuccessfully for the recognition of Shepardsville as the birthplace of professional football. At the time of Grove's efforts, Latrobe's John Brallier was considered the first pro, a claim that has since been supplanted with the knowledge of Pudge Heffelfinger's compensation in 1892.

Footnote [61] points to 2 sources. Both are in Canton:

Don Champney, "Nation's First Professional Football Game Played Near Shepardsville on July 4, 1895," Semi-Pro Teams, Michigan file. Pro Football Hall of Fame Research Library, Canton, Ohio;

"The First Pro Football Game," PIC Magazine (November 1952), 24-25 in Semi-Pro Teams, Michigan file, Pro Football Hall of Fame Research Library, Canton, Ohio.

[RyanChristiansen]

I think when we take a step back and look at everything at once, it's pretty clear that the Ohio River Basin is the birthplace (maybe "cradle" is a better term) of professional football. Most of early pro football of any significance was played on the north side of the river within that basin, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then it expanded from there. What I'm finding out in my research in Minnesota (Heffelfinger's home state) is that there was quite a bit of professionalism there, too, from around 1900 or so. It seems the idea that immigrants in industrial areas should play football spread quite quickly, and "side bets," ringers, sponsorships, etc., came along quite rapidly. It seems wherever there were humans playing the sport there was professionalism.

The more I think about this, the more I think that whether or not a team was professional should be defined by whether a) the team was sponsored, for the purpose of promoting something, or b) the home team or venue charged admission - either way, with the idea that the whole enterprise is put on to gain something from the people who watch the game, not just bragging rights from winning. I don't think that players getting paid is enough. That's just "professionalism."