RECORD OF PAYMENT FOR FIRST PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER
It’s just two lines on a loose-leaf page: “Game performance bonus to W. Heffelfinger for playing (cash) $500.00.” But that entry for the November 12, 1892, game between two Pittsburgh teams, shown in this photo, marks the first time a player was openly paid. That makes William “Pudge” Heffelfinger the first pigskin professional. Considering the average American was making around $700 a year at the time, it was an excellent payday for the all-American guard from Yale, who was recruited to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association as a ringer against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. The ploy worked: Heffelfinger scored the game-winning touchdown. He helped at the box office, too; at the time, he might have been the most famous player in the country.1
To put his pay in context, consider that it accounted for almost half the day’s total expenses ($1,062) and almost as much as the day’s profit ($621). Those figures look comically small; the day’s revenues totaled just $1,683.50. But the beginning of any enterprise is as much an act of imagination as of economics, and that is what this receipt represents.