NFL History | Recreation Park, Allegheny — The Ledger Line That Moved Pro Football's Birthday

The document that moved professional football's birthday is a torn page from an account book. On 12 November 1892 the Allegheny Athletic Association beat the Pittsburgh Athletic Club on this ground in Allegheny City, a separate municipality until Pittsburgh annexed it in 1907. The 1893 Sanborn fire-insurance sheet labels the block the Allegheny Athletic Assoc'n Grounds, bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue, Allegheny Avenue, Grant Avenue and Boquet Street. Grant is now Galveston; Boquet is now Behan. Both clubs called themselves amateur and both were cheating. Pittsburgh A.C. offered William Heffelfinger, a three-time All-American guard from Yale then working as a railroad clerk in Chicago, $250 to play for them. He turned it down as not worth his amateur standing. Allegheny doubled the figure. Heffelfinger forced a fumble, recovered it and ran it in for the only score. The two clubs then spent the following week accusing each other of importing ringers, and the game was reclassified as an exhibition so that the betting would stop. None of that made him the first professional. Bookkeeping did. Decades later the Pro Football Hall of Fame obtained a page from an 1892 expense sheet kept by Allegheny's manager O. D. Thompson, carrying a line for a game performance bonus of $500 in cash to Heffelfinger. Until that page surfaced, every history of the sport opened in Latrobe in 1895. The score is not settled. The Pennsylvania state marker erected in 2005 and the reconstructed season record both give 4–0. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette prints 6–0. Nobody has reconciled them, which is a useful reminder that 1890s box scores are reconstructions rather than records. Nothing of the park survives. It was a velodrome by the turn of the century and had vanished from the city maps by 1903. The state marker stands a few blocks southeast, near the stadium the Steelers use now, rather than on the ground itself. Coordinate: the block bounded by Pennsylvania Avenue, Allegheny Avenue, Galveston Avenue and Behan Street, taken from the 1893 Sanborn sheet and from the published site coordinate, which agree to within about 100 m. Precision ±120 m. Cover: the park's double-decked grandstand as drawn for The Pittsburgh Press, 19 June 1892, five months before the game and laid out for baseball. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Sanborn-Perris Map Co., Insurance Maps of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, 1893, Sheet 54, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.