History
The award was first presented in 1935 by the Downtown Athletic Club (DAC) in Manhattan, New York, a privately owned recreation facility located on the lower west side near the later site of the former World Trade Center. It was first known simply as the DAC Trophy. The first winner, Jay Berwanger, was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles but declined to sign for them. He never played professional football for any team. In 1936, John Heisman died and the trophy was renamed in his honor. Larry Kelley, the second winner of the award was the first man to win it as the "Heisman Trophy."
The first African American player to win the Heisman was Syracuse's Ernie Davis, who never played a snap in the NFL. He was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after winning the award and died in 1963. In 1966, former Florida Gators quarterback Steve Spurrier gave his Heisman trophy to the university president Dr. J. Wayne Reitz so that the award could be shared by Florida students and faculty. The gesture caused Florida's student government to raise funds to purchase a replacement for Spurrier. Since then, the Downtown Athletic Club has issued two trophies to winners, one to the individual and a replica to the school.
Several Heisman trophies have been sold over the years. O. J. Simpson's 1968 trophy was sold in February 1999 for $230,000 as part of the settlement of the civil trial in the O. J. Simpson murder case. Yale end Larry Kelley sold his 1936 Heisman in December 1999 for the sum of $328,110 to settle his estate and to provide a bequest for his family. Charles White's 1979 trophy first sold for $184,000 and then for nearly $300,000 in December 2006 to help pay back federal income taxes. The current record price for a Heisman belongs to the trophy won by Minnesota halfback Bruce Smith in 1941 at $395,240. Paul Hornung sold his Heisman for $250,000 to endow student scholarships for University of Notre Dame students from his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Eliscu's original plaster cast sold at Sotheby's for $228,000 in December 2005.
Read more about this topic: Heisman Trophy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)