NFL History | 201 Cleveland Avenue SW, Canton — Two Meetings, Two Names, One Birthday

There were two meetings on this corner, not one, and the league that came out of them was not called the National Football League for another two years. Ralph Hay sold Jordans and Hupmobiles from a showroom at Cleveland Avenue SW and Second Street SW, and had bought the Canton Bulldogs in 1918. Professional football in Ohio was losing money and losing players to whoever bid highest on any given Saturday. On 20 August 1920 representatives of four clubs — Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Dayton — met here and formed the American Professional Football Conference. They agreed to stop bidding against one another for players, to cap what they paid, and to leave college undergraduates alone. Hay was made secretary and told to write to everyone else. He set the second meeting for a quarter past eight on the evening of Friday 17 September. His office could not hold the men who came, so they moved into the showroom and sat on the running boards of the cars. It ran about two hours and produced the American Professional Football Association. Frank Nied of Akron took the minutes on Akron team letterhead; the two typed pages are held by the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Jim Thorpe was made president. Accounts differ on which of the two meetings elected him and on how many people were in the room, and the post was a name on the letterhead rather than an administration. The retellings mention beer, which in September 1920 was illegal. The minutes do not. What the new association did not do was keep standings. Clubs arranged their own schedules, played non-members, and the 1920 title was awarded retrospectively at a meeting the following April. Anyone quoting a 1920 record as though it were compiled the way a modern season is compiled is quoting a reconstruction. The name National Football League was adopted in 1922. The showroom is gone. The Frank T. Bow Federal Building stands on the site and carries a plaque to Hay and Thorpe; a statue went up in 2014 and a stretch of Second Street was renamed Ralph Hay Way. Hay sold the Bulldogs before the 1923 season, they won the title without him, and he has never been elected to the Hall of Fame that sits in this city largely because of what he organised. Coordinate: the Cleveland Avenue SW and Second Street SW corner, from the marker survey and from address geocoding, which agree to within about 10 m. Precision ±20 m. Cover: the Frank T. Bow Federal Building, standing on the showroom site. Photo: Roseohioresident, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the 1919 Canton Bulldogs composite team card, printed WORLDS CHAMPIONS in a season that had no league to award one. Unknown photographer, 1919; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.