First Admitted Professional Football Player
Just before the start of the season, Latrobe quarterback Eddie Blair found himself in a scheduling conflict. Blair, who also played baseball in nearby Greensburg, discovered that the team's first football game against the Jeannette Athletic Club conflicted with a prior baseball commitment. Berry was now given the task for replacing Blair, for the game. He heard of an Indiana Normal quarterback named John Brallier. Berry contacted Brallier at his home in Indiana, and offered him expenses to play for Latrobe. However Brallier was reluctant to play since he would be playing for Washington & Jefferson College within just a few weeks. This led Berry to offer Brallier $10 to play for Latrobe against Jeannette, plus expenses, with the promised several future games. Brallier, accepted the offer and became the first player to openly admit to being paid to play football player. The quarterback arrived in Latrobe the night before the game and practiced with the team.
While Brallier was considered the first professional football player and deemed a national icon for many years, it wasn't until after his death in 1960 that evidence proved John Brallier was not in fact the first professional football player, but merely the first one to openly admit that he was paid. William "Pudge" Heffelfinger of the Allegheny Athletic Association is now considered the first professional player.
Read more about this topic: Latrobe Athletic Association
Famous quotes containing the words admitted, professional, football and/or player:
“To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have been weakened in our resistance to the professional anti-Communists because we know in our hearts that our so-called democracy has excluded millions of citizens from a normal life and the normal American privileges of health, housing and education.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)