(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — As another football season gets underway, a new book provides a closer look at what's been billed as “pro football’s missing origin story.”
“It's a lost story,” said Gregg Ficery, the author of “Gridiron Legacy: Pro Football’s Missing Origin Story.”
His new coffee table book looks at the state of professional football pre-NFL. Specifically, it’s an era that ran from 1892 to 1920, when competing athletic clubs in western Pennsylvania challenged each other for civic pride and bragging rights.
“I really connect a lot of dots and detail for posterity — the game's birth story — sort of the ‘Book of Genesis’ for pro football, as Jerome Bettis said in a quote he was nice enough to provide,’ Ficery said.
Although Bears fans know George Halas was an NFL pioneer, Ficery said many came even before him.
“How did it start?” Ficery said. “Basketball has James Naismith and the peach basket. Baseball has Abder Doubleday … in any case, there's lore, but football didn't even have any lore. So what if I had things that nobody had to bring the lore to light? So I did.”
It turns out that pro football's pioneer era was full of small town teams, scandals, disorganization and rugged battles on the field, much of it in western Pennsylvania.
Ficery also told WBBM he uncovered lots of what he called “gridiron treasures” while writing the book.
“I discovered, in 2012, the first known pro football championship trophies in an old club in Pittsburgh called Homestead, from 1900 and 1901,” he said. “My great-grandfather played for that 1901 world championship team. So they're on display in Canton [at the Pro Football Hall of Fame] and they call them the holy grail of pro football. So that was sort of the prize in my mythological hero's journey, if you will.”
Ficery’s book is now on sale.
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