Scott Adamson, Author at Adamsonmedia.com

The Canton dynasty

A hundred years ago professional football was still in its infancy, with the National Football League (known as the American Professional Football Association until 1922) entering just its fourth season of operation.

But 1923 was also the final year of the Canton Bulldogs “dynasty” – one that crumbled when the two-time champions were bought out and redistributed to Cleveland before the future Hall of Fame City had a chance at a three-peat.

**Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Threads @sladamson1960 and Adamsonmedia on Facebook.**

The Bulldogs were already well-established, having won championships in the Ohio Football League before professional football consolidated into one major league.

Their first season in the APFA – 1920 – ended with a 4-4 record, and they improved to 5-2-3 in 2021, good enough for fourth place.

In 1922 the NFL started with 18 teams. Along with the Bulldogs, there were the Akron Indians, Buffalo Bisons, Chicago Bears, Chicago Cardinals, Columbus Tigers, Dayton Triangles, Evansville Crimson Giants, Green Bay Packers, Hammond Pros, Kenosha Maroons, Louisville Colonels, Milwaukee Badgers, Minneapolis Red Jackets, Oorang Indians, Racine Tornadoes, Rochester Jeffersons and Rock Island Independents.

Guy Chamberlin took over as head coach, player and part-owner of the Bulldogs in 1922. The former Nebraska All-American had played for the unbeaten Ohio League Bulldogs (coached by Jim Thorpe) in 1919, and returned in multiple roles after starring for the Decatur/Chicago Staleys for two seasons.

Chamberlin made quite an impact in his first season at the Canton helm, leading the team to a 10-0-2 record that included nine shutouts.

Chamberlin – an end and wingback – led the team with seven touchdowns and the Bulldogs outscored their opposition, 184-15.

There was no playoff system then, but Canton was declared champion by virtue of having the best record in the league.

A year later, with Chamberlin still running the show, the Bulldogs did it again – even better than before.

Going 11-0-1, they were an offensive juggernaut, tallying 246 points. Chamberlin was still a solid contributor on the field with three touchdowns, but tailback Lou Smith set the pace with seven scores while fullbacks Doc Elliott and Ben Jones each had six TDs.

The defense gave up just 19 points in registering eight shutouts.

Once again there were no playoffs, but Canton took a pair of victory laps after retaining the crown.

First it traveled to Philadelphia on December 15 and defeated the Frankford Yellow Jackets, 3-0, on the strength of Pud Henry’s 11-yard field goal. The exhibition game came against a team that would join the NFL a year later.

The Bulldogs then blanked Melrose Athletic Club, 27-0, in another exhibition contest played a day later in Atlantic City.

The report in The Morning Call newspaper on December 17 called Canton “the greatest collection of football stars ever assembled on any gridiron here.”

The Bulldogs’ 25-game unbeaten streak from 1921-23 is still an NFL best, and they are the only team to go undefeated in consecutive seasons.

A chance to continue their dynasty appeared on track as the calendar turned to 1924.

In April Chamberlin was reappointed Canton head coach, and signed most of the stars from the previous two seasons. And in July, the Bulldogs had already mapped out their schedule for the upcoming season.

But everything changed on August 3, 1924.

“The greatest deal in the history of professional football was consummated here Saturday when Sam Deutsch, backer and manger of the Cleveland professional eleven, purchased the Canton Bulldogs, professional champion of America for two years, buying franchise, players and even uniforms,” the Dayton Herald reported in its August 4 edition. “Deutsch has also retained Guy Chamberlin, who successfully coached the Canton eleven, to coach the team, which will now be known as the Cleveland Bulldogs.”

Adding insult to injury for Canton fans, the article also noted that, “Deutsch expects to sell the Canton franchise to another Canton syndicate, which will try to keep Canton on the football map with a cheaper team, some of which possibly will be the players Deutsch and Chamberlin will not need on the Bulldogs.”

Cleveland’s Bulldogs did, in fact, win the 1924 league championship with a 7-1-1 record (although they were trounced by the Bears, 23-0, in a postseason exhibition game on December 7).

The Canton franchise sat out the year and reformed for 1925.

In a sense, the first year the franchise spent in Cleveland was, in fact, a three-peat; they were basically the same Bulldogs, just housed in a kennel 60 miles away. The NFL, however, officially considers it a completely different team.

But for Canton – which lost its NFL club for good following the 1926 season – 1923 was the last year the city was home to a championship team in football’s biggest league.

The counselor

The old man raised up, squinted, and tried to make out the person sitting in the chair across from his hospital bed. With carrot red hair and skin so pale it was almost transparent, the younger man had a distinct look.

And when the patient – Estus Marble – noticed his guest wearing a bright purple polo shirt and yellow slacks, he wondered if maybe he was being visited by a clown.

“Who are you?” Estus asked.

“Name’s Dearil Javaraya,” said the visitor. “I’m here to talk you through and walk you through your situation.”

It took only a second for Estus to figure out his “situation.” The last thing he remembered – before seeing Dearil – was his wife holding his hand and sobbing while his two daughters looked on with tears in their eyes.

“I guess you’re the Grim Reaper,” Estus said, matter-of-factly.

Dearil displayed an exaggerated frown.

“You hurt me, Estus,” he said. “That name sounds so … ominous. Look at me – have you ever seen the Grim Reaper look so pale yet dressed so colorfully?”

Estus shook his head.

“I don’t guess I’ve ever seen the Grim Reaper at all … until now,” he said. “But you have to be him. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m dead.”

Dearil got up, scooted his chair closer to the bed, and sat down again.

“Really, Estus, I’m more of a counselor than anything else,” he said. “When it’s your time to go, you always get one. I’m yours.”

As Estus got a better look at Dearil, he realized his face was familiar, although he couldn’t quite place it.

“Are you somebody I know, or used to know?” Estus asked.

“Kinda,” Dearil said. “I guess I’m what they call in the movies a composite character. The guy with the red hair? That was the kid back in grammar school – 1959 I think it was – that you gave the eraser to. And this fish-like skin? It was that older woman you helped out in the pool when she passed out. That would’ve been around 1964. The purple and yellow clothes are in honor of that Minnesota Vikings fan you used to work with – the one you’d invite over to watch games because you thought he didn’t have many friends.”

Estus managed a slight smile.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I barely remember any of those things. And that thing with the eraser … I don’t remember at all.”

Dearil pointed at Estus and wagged his index finger.

“See, that’s what I need to help you with,” he said. “You were a good guy, Estus. You did a lot of really nice things … things you didn’t think about, but things that meant a lot to other people. People always seem to overlook the little things in life. Ultimately, they make up the big picture.

“The world was a better place with you in it. But you spent way too much time thinking about your mistakes. It made you miserable, and I don’t want you to be miserable.”

Estus sighed.

“I did a lot of bad things, too,” he said. “I didn’t deserve to have the good life I had.”

Dearil rolled his eyes.

“OK, this is the point where I tell you that life is one big book,” Dearil said. “But it’s not a bunch of chapters with the same plot from start to finish. It’s more like a compilation of short stories – they’re all different, it’s just you happen to be a character in each one of them.

“Sometimes you’re the hero, sometimes you’re the villain, sometimes you just have an uncredited role. It’s true for everybody. But I’m telling you, if somebody read that book from cover to cover, they’d have a pretty high opinion of you at the end of it. Your good outweighed your bad.”

Estus felt a sense of relief; if this was what “crossing over’ was like, it wasn’t so bad at all.

“So,” Estus said, “when you come get people, you show them friendly faces and tell them about their best selves?”

Dearil scoffed.

“Oh, good grief, no,” he said. “I show them who they were … and what they did – usually with one or more familiar faces, but not always. Fred Rogers, for example, saw the faces of all the people he made a positive impact on, most whom he never met. As you might imagine, I put in a lot of overtime for that one because it took days to get through.

“But then you have somebody like Adolph Hitler. He was shown more than six million different faces – and I made sure he got to take a long look at each one of them.”

Estus raised his eyebrows.

“So, you’re more than the Angel of Death,” he said. “I guess you tell us where we go next … I mean, what direction we go.”

Dearil chuckled.

“Not at all,” he said. “I have no control where you go next. In fact, I have no idea what happens after I leave here – it might be nothing, it might be everything – not my circus, not my monkeys. All I know is I’ll wind up at a hospital or an accident scene or in a war zone. And I’ll have the first conversation with someone who just passed away.

“As I said, I’m mostly just a counselor. And in your case, I needed to help you realize how much you mattered.”

And then all of a sudden, Dearil was gone. So was the hospital bed, the chair and Estus himself – at least his old body.

Instead, he found himself perched on the edge of the bed at an assisted living facility where his wife was being cared for.

He was dressed in all blue – her favorite color – and wearing a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses she used to make fun of during the early years of their marriage.

He was happy that she would see a familiar face after she slipped away … and even happier that he could tell her the world was a better place with her in it.

NFL vs. the world

Fifty years ago, Pete Rozelle began plotting the future of the National Football League.

The commissioner already oversaw a blossoming 26-team circuit – one that grew by 10 three years earlier when the merger with the American Football League became official. And the NFL was coming off a season that produced the league’s first (and so far, only) perfect team – the 17-0 Miami Dolphins.

But there was still plenty of room to grow, and in early September, 1973, Rozelle announced that nearly two dozen cities were in the running for a future NFL franchise.

In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Rozelle said an NFL committee was doing market research on possible NFL sites “within this decade.” The targets included: Anaheim, Birmingham, the Carolinas, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, central and north central Florida (Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville), Honolulu, Indianapolis, Louisville, Mexico City, Nashville, greater New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Portland, San Antonio, Seattle and the Tidewater area of Virginia.

Exotic locales such as Honolulu and Mexico City were in the running, but Rozelle said the league had no interest in going north of the border.

“There are a number of negatives,” he told the USN&WR. “One is the weather. The Canadian football season really ends around Thanksgiving because of the cold weather. And there is also concern that if we moved into one of the major Canadian cities, we could be helping contribute to the death of the Canadian Football League, which we would not want to do.”

All that was big news as the NFL prepared to start its 54^th season. And if Rozelle was paying attention (and you know he was), he might’ve noticed that other groups were out to grab a slice of the pro football pie, too.

In fact, 1973 was also the year that not one, not two, but three World Football Leagues were being organized – all with designs on competing with the NFL.

Louis P. Roberts was the first to unveil WFL plans, and he was followed later in the year by Tony Razzano and Louis S. Goldman’s circuit as well as Gary Davidson’s – the latter the only World Football League that made it off the drawing board and onto the playing field.

According to a Philadelphia Inquirer piece from February 27, 1973, Roberts – an insurance executive based in Anniston, Alabama – was looking to convince several millionaires to invest in a 10-city World Football League. The inaugural franchises in 1974 would be selected from Birmingham, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Honolulu, Jacksonville, Jersey City, Los Angeles, Memphis, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle, Tulsa and Wichita.

“The cost of a team will be at least $5 million,” Roberts told the Inquirer. “But we prefer the man to have $10 million in backup capital. We expect to line up eight to 10 teams in the next few months and sign the articles of association.”

Roberts had actually been seeking investors since 1972, so give him credit for being the WFL early bird.

Then on October 6, a story broke announcing that Davidson was ready to go with his World Football League for 1974. Chicago was getting the first franchise and Boston, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and Toronto were expected to join soon.

“We plan for at least eight and possibly 12 teams operating the first season,” Davidson said to the Associated Press. “We currently are negotiating with 19 groups for franchises covering 15 cities from Mexico City to Vancouver.”

(For the record, Roberts told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1974 that Robert Schmertz, owner of the WFL New York Stars and John Bassett, who owned the Memphis Southmen, stole his idea and Davidson ran with it.)

Finally, there was the WFL proposed by Razzano and Goldman, which had to change its name to Universal Football League since Davidson beat them to the WFL punch when he held the first press conference.

“We had originally settled on the title of World Football League for our organization, and then when this other group made the announcement, we had to change ours,” Rozzano told the New Castle News for an October 9 story.

Its gimmick was to utilize some key CFL rules (12 men to a side, three downs to make 10 yards, etc.), plus kickoffs from the 20-yard line and field goals of varying point values.

Inaugural franchises were planned for Anaheim, Birmingham, Chicago, Mexico City, Memphis, New York, Phoenix, Tampa, Toronto and Seattle.

As you know, only one of the three pretenders to the NFL throne ever got beyond the idea stage.

They never had a franchise outside the United States, but Davidson’s WFL did make it to market – although its colorful history was short and marked by financial disaster.

Of course, we all know the next wave of NFL expansion came in 1976 when the Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Bandits joined the league. And over time, six of Rozelle’s targets were hit – either through expansion or relocation.

Anaheim, for example, was home of the Los Angeles Rams for 15 seasons (1980-94).

Indianapolis infamously became an NFL city when Mayflower moving fans took the Baltimore Colts to Indiana in 1984.

Phoenix (or at least the Phoenix ‘burbs) tasted the gridiron big leagues when the St. Louis Cardinals headed West in 1988. They were the Phoenix Cardinals for six seasons (1988-93) and have been known as the Arizona Cardinals ever since.

The Carolinas got in the NFL in 1995 with the addition of the Charlotte-based Panthers, and Jacksonville joined them that same year with the birth of the Jaguars.

And Nashville was the new playground of the Houston Oilers after that franchise relocated to Memphis for the 1997 season and made a permanent move to Music City a year later, ultimately rebranding as the Tennessee Titans.

When it comes to the rest of Rozelle’s list, most found homes in upstart leagues – but not in the NFL.

(Birmingham, Columbus, Orlando and San Antonio did get consolation prizes, though, in the form of the NFL-funded World League of American Football). Regardless, it’s fun to look back on what was an active planning year in professional football half a century ago – even though many of those plans were never fully realized.