The Man Who Built the National Football League: Joe F. Carr

by Chris Willis

  1912: fourth down added to series to make a first down

  1912: the field was made 100 yards long with two 10-yard end zones

  Professional football was a direct offspring of independent football, so titled by the press because of their independence from any college or university. The game was played mostly by local athletes in small blue-collar towns or cities in eastern Pennsylvania and Ohio. At the end of the nineteenth century, teams developed in other towns as far east as New York, as far west as Davenport, Iowa; as far south as Louisville, Kentucky; and as far north as Duluth, Minnesota.

  Usually played on Sunday afternoons, the pro game didn't venture to the far south because the Baptists' and Methodists' influence didn't allow the game to be played on the Sabbath. Blue laws in Massachusetts, New York City, and parts of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh-Philadelphia) hindered the progress of the pro game on the East Coast. But the small towns in eastern Pennsylvania and throughout Ohio were filled with blue-collar workers who slaved for six days a week and didn't mind shelling out the fifty cents to a dollar admission to see a professional football game on their one day off. The Sunday game had arrived.

  Initially independent football was played by local athletes with maybe one or two "imports" brought in to play in crucial games. Most players played for the love of the game and would only make money based on the gate receipts. Over time teams would hire and pay imported players to help win the big game; this turned the independent player-team into "semi-professional." Most imported players were paid "ten and cakes" for their play on the field. Sometimes the team would pay for their travel. Eventually the whole team would be paid, and the transition to professional football was complete.

  In eastern Pennsylvania the professional game would really take off. Strong local rivalries were the lifeblood of the early pro game as competing towns would build their teams up in order to defeat their chief rival. In 1892 an intense rivalry was growing between the Allegheny Athletic Association (AAA) and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club (PAC), and it led to the first documented professional football player. Former Yale All-American William "Pudge" Heffelfinger was paid $500 by the AAA to play against the PAC ($500 was an incredible amount at that time and not matched for decades) and thus became the first "pro." On November 12 the AAA won the game 4-0 when Heffelfinger picked up a PAC fumble and ran thirty-five yards for a touchdown.

  The early pro game didn't quite look like the wide-open style we see today. The game didn't have any hash marks, and the ball was placed at the sideline if it was run out of bounds, making the next play very predictable with a run toward the middle. The ball used was a rugby type, very round and used more for kicking or drop-kicking than for passing, since passing wouldn't be legalized until 1906. The power running game or ball carrying dominated the sport and play was brutal at times. In 1888 the low tackle was legalized and the result of this rule tended to make the game more physical and dull. Until then teams used plenty of "open play," stressing laterals and backward passes to the halfbacks who were set out like a modern wingback. However, once it became legal to cut a man down at the knees, teams moved their halfbacks in behind the line and concentrated on power over trickery.

  Starting in 1869, football's scoring system went through major changes, too:

  1869: all goals count one point each

  1883: safety worth one point; touchdown, two; goal after touchdown, four; goal from field, five

  1884: safety worth two points; touchdown, four; goal after touchdown, two

  1898: touchdown worth five points; goal after touchdown, one

  1904: goal from field worth four points

  1909: goal from field worth three points

  1912: touchdown worth six points

  Professional football at the beginning of the twentieth century was still played in small towns and was very much "unofficial." No football league was formed, as most teams would just compete to win their city or state championship, although there was no true way of declaring any type of champion. An informal number of sportswriters, team managers, and fan opinions would usually determine a "champion."

  In the early days of professional football, with no league, no standings, no stadiums, no set rosters, and schedules done week-by-week, the team managers were vital to the success of a pro team. Team managers had to do everything; they had to find the players, arrange the schedule and travel plans, hire officials and security, advertise the game, sell the tickets, and disperse the gate receipts. A very competent team manager was the key to survival for early pro football teams, and this survival would be year to year for most pro teams.

  At this time pro football would gravitate from eastern Pennsylvania to the state of Ohio and cities such as Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, and Massillon would field the strongest teams, eventually gaining the nickname "the Cradle of Pro Football." The rivalry between Canton and Massillon would grab national headlines and launch the sport to a new level. The popularity was just starting to take off but a couple of problems would affect the game for years to come. If those problems weren't bad enough, the play on the field was getting more violent.

  n 1905 the sport of football was at a crossroad. For the past forty years the game was played mainly at the collegiate level, and it was played with brute strength. But now colleges and universities were being criticized by the public, school presidents, and press for its rough play and the proper role it had in the educational structure. In that year alone the sport saw eighteen fatalities and another 150 serious injuries. Even President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid sportsman who enjoyed football, put his two cents in and asked for reform.'

  Since college football had a governing body that established rules and regulations, professional football managers followed their lead. The college officials started to think about what would make the game a little more wide open and not so brutal. In 1882 the college game set a rule of three downs to gain a first down and keep the ball. Thirteen years later (1895), they changed the rule where seven men had to be on the line of scrimmage, and that helped calm down the rough play a little. Then in 1906 they shortened the game to sixty minutes (in 1910 they set the game to be played in four 15-minute quarters) and came up with the most important rule change: they made the forward pass legal, although with some restrictions-for example, the forward pass had to be thrown five yards behind the line of scrimmage and an incomplete pass in the end zone would turn the ball over to the defense.

  The forward pass opened up the game just enough to help curtail some of the criticism to abolish the sport, but it didn't change the basic fundamental play on the field. The game became more refined and less brutal, but it still was a sport built on strength and the power running game. The strategy of the game would develop over the next decade, and the sport started to become more of a science for coaches. Men such as Walter Camp, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Glenn "Pop" Warner, Fielding Yost, and John Heisman would become legendary coaches at their schools and dominate the sport on and off the field. Nothing about the sport would be adopted without their knowledge or blessing.

  The professional game was a different story. The pro game was played by the college rules because there was no governing body or no official football league that established any rules and regulations that each team had to follow. Because there was no league, there were no season-long standings to follow, like Major League Baseball, and no world championship game to decide who was the best team (like the World Series, which started in 1903). Much of the public and media looked down on the early pro game, thinking it was just a sport played by vagabonds or, worse yet, by young collegians who played under fake names for a quick dollar. With no rules, three big issues would affect the early years of the sport:

  1. Playing under assumed names while still in college. Young athletes would play for their college on Saturday and then play professionally on Sunday. This upset coaches and school officials at many colleges and universities around the country, and most of the time, college football showed no support of or
cooperation with professional football.

  2. Rising salaries. Because pro football at this time was built on local rivalries, team managers would recruit the best players they could and pay rather large salaries. Usually the managers would spend ten dollars up to $100 a game for top players to field their team and try to win. Then the big game might only attract a thousand fans and the team would go broke by the end of the season.

  3. Hopping from one team to another. Because team managers would entice players to play in the big games for good money, some players would hop from one team to another to go with the highest bidder.

  These three issues would plague professional football in some way for the next fifteen years. For early pro football managers, these were big problems to overcome. Adding to the dilemma was the fact that the majority of team managers (who were mostly ex-players) during this era were guilty of all three issues, sometimes bragging about it. If you were going to win on the field you had to get the best players and usually that meant stealing a player from another team or recruiting a college player to play. So the sport continued this pattern, and it would take some time before they really solved the situation.

  The Canton-Massillon football scandal of 1906 didn't help the pro game either. Joe Carr was not surprised by the fall-out of the gambling scandal, but there was one good thing for him and his dreams of being involved in football: the state of Ohio was now the place to be for the pro game. The best players and best teams still resided in the Buckeye state. Most of the teams in the state called themselves the "Ohio League," although the teams never met to establish rules or create an official way of declaring a champion. Cities such as Akron, Columbus, Cleveland, Dayton, Canton, Massillon, Shelby, Elyria, Toledo, and Youngstown would all build and operate successful professional football teams that would carry the sport to new heights over the next two decades.

  This was the pro game in 1907, and Carr thought he was ready to tackle the sport head on. Was he ready to handle it? Although he wasn't a rookie in running a sports team, spending the last several years running the Panhandles baseball team, Carr was about to enter a sport that didn't have the direction and stability of baseball. After Carr talked to Ted Nesser about his playing experience with the Massillon Tigers, the two got to chatting more about starting a football team with the railroad. Once at the shops, Joe asked Ted who he thought would play on the team. "Well, there's six of us Nessers. We ought to be able to pick up a half dozen others in the shops. You go and see if you can get us a practice game and I'll see who might be interested."2

  Sometime in the early fall of 1907, the twenty-seven-year-old Joe Carr approached the Panhandle Athletic Board to ask if he could reorganize the Columbus Panhandles football team. He said some of the employees wanted to play, and he thought he could make it work this time. He would put in the time and energy needed to make it successful, and he would do it for free. The team would just make money on how many fans came out for the game. The gate receipts would be the only way the team would make any money. The athletic board gave him the go-ahead. It was now official-Joe Carr had his very own pro football team.

  He didn't have a salary (although he had left the newspaper he was still working as a machinist), and he didn't have any money to spend on acquiring players. He had to pick his squad from the employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Panhandle shops. What a trade-off; you can field a team, but you have to get your players, not from the colleges and universities, but from the work shop at the railroad. Good luck. Of course, the athletic board didn't know that Carr had the nucleus of his team right there, a group of brothers that would make him famous. In 1907 there were five Nesser brothers working in the Panhandle shops as boilermakers, which was the toughest job physically in the shops. They all were very accomplished athletes, and Carr put his faith in their abili ties. Carr would say that the Nesser brothers are "a family I will match for athletic ability against any in the land."3

  The Nessers, like the Carr family, were very well-known in Columbus and had a long history with the capital city. Their father, Theodore Nesser, was born on January 20, 1850, in a small town in Germany called Kirsch, near Trier, Alsace-Lorraine, which used to be the border region between Germany and France. In 1870 at the age of twenty, he fought with the German army in the Franco-Prussian War and didn't care for all the fighting. Papa Nesser eventually got a job with the German railroad as an apprentice boilermaker, and the German government-which operated and controlled all the railroads-sent him to Metz, where he worked for twelve years as a boilermaker.'

  Sometime around 1873 he met Katherine Steinbach and the following year the two were married and wasted no time in creating one large family. Theo and Katherine had five children in a six-year span while in Germany: John (April 25, 1875), Anna (April 17, 1876), Peter (October 22, 1877), Erminna (May 5, 1879), and Philip (December 10, 1880). By 1881 Theo had grown weary of the wars in Europe and looked to give his family a fresh start in America. That year he signed a contract to work with the Pennsylvania Railroad in the United States in exchange for boat fare. He left his family behind-until he could raise enough money to send for them-and agreed to work for three years to help the Pennsy develop improvements to their locomotive's fire box.

  Theo came to America and the railroad sent him to the small town of Dennison, Ohio, to start working. In 1882 he finally had enough money to send for Katherine and the five children. While in Dennison, the Nesser family grew again as two more kids were born. Theodore Nesser Jr. (April 5, 1883) and Catherine (May 27, 1885). (Later on tragedy would strike the Nesser family, as Catherine would pass away in 1900, at the age of fifteen.) In 1889 Theo left the railroad, moved his family to Columbus, and opened up his own plumbing and pipe-fitting business.

  While in Columbus the Nesser family continued to grow, and five more children were born: Fred (September 10, 1887), Frank (June 3, 1889), Mary Rose (May 7, 1891), Alfred (June 6, 1893), and Raymond (March 22, 1898). The grand total for the Nesser's reached eleven. Eventually seven of the eight Nesser boys would follow their father to work as boilermakers at the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1905 the large family moved into a modest home at 1608 Harvard Avenue on the east side of the city within earshot of the Panhandle shop whistle.

  Out of the eight boys, six of them would go on to play for Joe Carr and the Columbus Panhandles. The Nessers and Joe Carr made a great team. "The Nessers and my grandfather had a unique type of relationship. There was a great deal of mutual respect here and that carried onto the football field. They both respected what each other did," says James Carr, grandson of Joe Carr. "They called him Gentleman Joe. All of the Nesser brothers respected Joe Carr. They had great respect for him. They considered him more, I believe, as a friend than a manager. There was a close-knit relationship between the two," says Irene Cassady, niece of the Nesser brothers. "He and the Nessers were all good friends. When I talked to the Nesser family they all told me what great friends Joe Carr and the Nesser brothers were," says James Carr.'

  Growing up the Nesser boys knew who was the boss of the houseMomma Nesser. She allowed the unruly boys to play rough in the backyard, until one of them drew blood, and then she would take a broomstick and break up the fisticuffs. The brothers were very physical in everything they did, whether it was playing sports or working as boilermakers in the railroad shops. The Nessers' raw strength and power was the key to the Panhandles success for years to come, and the whole family would enjoy everything about the sport.

  There's a famous story that when the football team was going strong, Theodore served as water boy and Katherine washed and ironed the team's uniforms. The first part is probably an exaggeration, although Theodore may have gone onto the field a couple of times during timeouts to give his boys hell if they were losing. The second part of the story has to be true to some extent. Even if Mrs. Nesser (who worked sometimes as a seamstress) cleaned and repaired only her own boys' uniforms, she was practically laundress for the team since there were six of them playing. "Grandpa
Nesser was about five feet seven and Grandma was just over five feet tall. Who would of thought that these two German immigrants would raise six big, tall, talented, tough football players," said Irene Cassady, niece of the Nesser brothers.6

  The six Nesser brothers were all different in their personalities and playing abilities (described here in order of age):

  John Nesser (five feet eleven, 195 pounds) was the midget of the family. He usually played quarterback, a position that called primarily for blocking and tackling ability in those days. He might have been the best all-around athlete of the brothers, once winning a medal as the allaround athlete of the Pennsylvania Railway System. Nicknamed "the Wolf," John would play eighteen years for the Panhandles, until the age of forty-one.

  Phil Nesser (six feet, 225 pounds) was primarily a tackle, although he did carry the ball sometimes on end-arounds. Phil was probably the most unsung of the Nesser clan. His solid line play didn't make headlines-in eighteen seasons of playing with the Panhandles, he scored only four career touchdowns. "My father was a gentle giant. I never heard an excited word come out of his mouth. He was just very stoic," says Kate Benson, daughter of Phil Nesser.7

  Ted Nesser (five feet ten, 230 pounds) was called "the greatest of the Nessers," playing seventeen seasons with the Panhandles. He would go on to play every position on the field and play each one well. When he played halfback, his best position, he had an uncanny ability to take a hit and stay on his feet. In an article published in the Ohio State journal on December 7, 1917, Jim Thorpe was quoted as saying that Ted was "one of the great players of the pro game." But Ted did have a knack of putting his face right into the action a little too much. "My dad had his nose broken at least eight times. Dr. Turner [family doctor in Columbus] said, 'There's no use to set it. I'm not going to set it anymore; you'll just break it again.' After that he would say he had Knute Rockne's nose," says Babe Sherman, daughter of Ted Nesser.8