Increasing Popularity of Professional Football
Growth of the Game Is Closely Linked With the Story of Dr. Harry A. March, Who Brought It Into the East With the Backing of Tim Mara
IN the office of Tim Mara, owner of the New York Giants professional football team, there hangs a framed photostatic enlargement of an editorial that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune: “An enthusiastic supporter of intercollegiate football could not watch a game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants without coming away with the feeling that he had been witness of the game in its most highly developed form, an exposition of all those things which undergraduates sweat for, strive for, and are never quite able to attain. Here was football at its peak. Here were all the elements which go to make it a game that low temperatures, the worst of bad weather and everything else fail to discourage and dishearten.”
The story of professional football is closely linked with the story of Dr. Harry A. March. You can see him any Sunday bouncing up and down the side-lines, following the play of the Giants in the Polo Grounds in New York City. Dr. March might be called “an alumnus of post-graduate football,” who lives for Sunday afternoons like any old captain who ever sat on the Yale Fence lives for Saturday afternoons.
Back in 1924, a mail-carrier named Findley complained to Dr. March: “Working-men like me can’t get off on Saturday afternoons to see college football even if we had the money and the pull to get the tickets.” Out in Ohio, where Dr. March came from, they had been playing professional football on Sunday afternoons for a long time. Why not in the East? thought Dr. March. With the idea thoroughly worked out in his own mind, Dr. March went looking for a backer. As Tim Mara puts it, “Doc March was looking for an angel, and I was it.” So well did Dr. March do his work that Mr. Mara had invested $25,000 in the idea before he ever saw a professional game.