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took place back in November 1906, in the midst of an early attempt to organize a professional football league. During a two-game series between the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers in Ohio, Blondy Wallace, the head coach of the Canton team, and Walter R. East, a key Massillon player, made a deal in which Canton was to win the first game and Massillon was to win the second, forcing a third game—with the biggest gate—to be played legitimately. Several gamblers involved with Wallace and East had also offered a $5,000 bribe to the Massillon coach and members of his team, but without success.
    When the rumors of the attempted bribery became widespread, East, who had boasted of fixing a college football game the year before, as well as a baseball game that same year, was fired from the Massillon team. The Canton-Massillon incidentbecame the first known case of professional gamblers’ attempting to fix a professional sport.
    Professional football had emerged during the early part of the twentieth century in small towns and cities without major colleges. In the large cities, college football was still king. The American Professional Football Association (APFA) was officially formed on August 20, 1920, during a meeting at the brick, three-story Odd Fellows building that housed the Hupmobile and Jordan automobile dealership of Ralph Hay, the general manager of the Canton Bulldogs in Canton, Ohio. By the beginning of its first season, the association consisted of fourteen teams from five states. 1 Each owner was required to pay $100 for his franchise.
    Among those initial teams created in 1920 were the Racine (Avenue in Chicago) Cardinals, organized in 1899 by South Side Chicago contractor Chris O’Brien. Another was the Decatur Staleys, sponsored by a manufacturing company and represented by twenty-five-year-old ex-sailor George Halas. Formerly a New York Yankees right fielder, Halas’s baseball career had been cut short by a hip injury. Later, after receiving loans from his mother and Chicago businessman Charles Bidwill, an associate of the Al Capone mob, Halas bought the football team from his employer, A. E. Staley. In 1921, Halas moved his team to Cubs Park in Chicago where it became the Chicago Bears.
    The legendary Jim Thorpe, whose mentor had been coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, was elected the first president of the association. Four years earlier, while Thorpe was playing for the Canton Bulldogs, he and a fan of the rival Massillon Tigers had a heated exchange about which team was better. Just hours before a game between the two teams, Thorpe slapped down a blank check and filled it out for $2,500, challenging the fan, a wealthy local businessman, to respond in kind.
    A local newspaper, which reported the betting incident, took the matter in stride. “Massillon had plenty of money to stake on the outcome of the game,” the paper reported, “while many of the Canton bugs were rather shy. They evidently feared the hoodoo which Massillon has been in former years. Now that the jinx has been chased the wagering in years to come is likely to be more lively.”
    One of Thorpe’s star Bulldog players, Joe Guyon, recalled, “Gamblers tried to buy us off. They would approach us at the hotel, where we stayed on the weekend … They didn’t fool withme … But there were guys who took their money … We had one guy. Oh, he was a high traveler. A halfback. We saw his contacts at the hotel. Then we saw his play. He was detailed to cover a man, and when he didn’t, why, we said it was an accident. But the second time, it was too obvious. I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I went over to the bench and said, ‘He didn’t cover his man, Jim. This guy is not covering his man.’ Jim braced him right there. He fired him.” 2
    Thorpe was replaced as the president of the professional football league in 1921 by Joe Carr of Columbus, Ohio, a highly