Football

Few, if any, of the hundreds of Georgia Tech University football fans who filed into Atlanta’s Grant Field on October 7, 1916, expected a nail-biter for that afternoon’s game with tiny Cumberland College. “Local Eleven Should Have Easy Sailing in Today’s Game,” read the headline ...read more

1. One team wasn’t part of the National Football League. In June 1966, the venerable National Football League (NFL) signed an agreement to merge with the upstart, seven-year-old American Football League (AFL) after the completion of the 1969 season. In the interim, the two rival ...read more

On a bitter December day in which the Windy City lived up to its billing, Bronko Nagurski lowered his leather helmet like a battering ram and plowed through both the fierce Chicago snow and the fearsome Green Bay Packers. As the Chicago Bears fullback smashed through the defense ...read more

The 14 men huddled inside the Jordan and Hupmobile automobile showroom in downtown Canton, Ohio, on the night of September 17, 1920, were finally ready to strike a deal. They had come to Ralph Hay’s dealership not in search of a new set of wheels, however, but a new professional ...read more

Watching football on Thanksgiving might seem like a modern tradition, but Americans have been taking to the gridiron on Turkey Day since the 19th century. President Abraham Lincoln first declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, and the earliest Thanksgiving Day football ...read more

The sport we in the United States know as football is more properly called gridiron football, for the vertical yard lines that mark the field. Closely related to two English sports—rugby and soccer (or association football)—gridiron football originated at universities in North ...read more

Long before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, Jim Thorpe was America’s original crossover athlete. He was raised a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and excelled in nearly every sport he tried. Thorpe was a two-time college football All-American at the Carlisle Indian Industrial ...read more

On January 1, 1890, members of the Valley Hunt Club paraded their flower-festooned horse-and-buggies through the streets of Pasadena, California, and spent the afternoon competing in foot races and tug-of-war contests. In the years following that first Tournament of Roses parade, ...read more

At the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killing fields. The college game drew tens of thousands of spectators and rivaled professional baseball in fan appeal, but football in the early 1900s was lethally brutal—a grinding, bruising sport in which the ...read more

First held on January 15, 1967, the Super Bowl might never have existed without Lamar Hunt. In the late 1950s, the Arkansas-born sports entrepreneur failed to secure a license from the National Football League to start a Dallas team. So he founded a league of his own: the ...read more