NFL History | Latrobe Memorial Stadium — The Plaque, the Legend and the Wrong Score

The plaque here has the wrong score, and the boy in the photograph is not sixteen. On Tuesday 3 September 1895 the Latrobe YMCA team played the Jeannette Athletic Club. Stores closed. The mines and mills gave a half-holiday. Both teams walked behind Billy Showalter's cornet band down Ligonier Street, newly paved, to the ball park, and the game kicked off at four in the afternoon. Latrobe's quarterback had a prior commitment to play baseball that day. The manager, a young newspaper editor named David Berry, sent for John Brallier, who had quarterbacked the Indiana Normal college team. Brallier declined an offer of expenses. Berry added ten dollars on top. Brallier arrived the evening before, practised with the team under a street light, and by the Professional Football Researchers Association's account said afterwards that the thing which struck him was seeing his first paved street. Latrobe won. Russell Aukerman, the YMCA's physical instructor and the team's coach, scored both touchdowns; Brallier kicked both goals after them. That is 12–0, which is what the PFRA reconstructs from the contemporary newspapers. The bronze plaque dedicated at this stadium in 1960, with Art Rooney Sr. of the Steelers present, records 6–0. Under the scoring of the day, 6–0 is exactly the score after Latrobe's first touchdown and conversion. Brallier was eighteen, not sixteen, and he came from a college side, not a high school team. The schoolboy version ran in every history of the sport until the 1960s. What he actually was is the first player to admit being paid, and he was proud enough of it to keep saying so, which is the only reason the admission is on the record at all. Heffelfinger had taken $500 three years earlier and said nothing. Brallier died on 17 September 1960, the date the league observes as its own birthday. The Allegheny ledger page that displaced him came to light shortly afterwards. Latrobe's surviving claim is a team claim rather than an individual one: the club is credited with the first roster made up entirely of paid players across a full season. The Hall of Fame's own timeline dates that to 1897 and gives Allegheny a two-game all-professional side in 1896, so even this one needs its date attached before it is repeated. Coordinate: Latrobe Memorial Stadium, where the 1960 plaque stands. The 1895 game was played on the YMCA grounds, and the published record does not establish that field's site, so the pin marks the monument rather than the match. Precision ±80 m for the stadium. Cover: the 1895 Latrobe team, the ball inscribed LATROBE '95. Unknown photographer, 1895; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, from the Latrobe Area Historical Society. Second image: John Brallier in playing kit, about 1895, from a Latrobe studio. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The portrait shows why the schoolboy legend stuck.