Massillon Tigers

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Massillon Tigers were born on the 3rd of September 1903, at a hotel meeting attended by 35 area businessmen who had grown tired of losing to their cross-county rivals in Canton. What those men set in motion that evening at the Hotel Sailor would shape the entire landscape of professional football in America. The jerseys they chose were borrowed in color and stripe from the Princeton Tigers, orange and black, because local vendors simply had no other style in sufficient quantity to outfit a full team. A newspaper editor named Ed J. Stewart was named the first coach. Jack Goodrich, who expected to play halfback, was named manager. Within three years, this unlikely club from a small Ohio city would win four consecutive Ohio League championships, recruit players from across the country, and land at the center of the first known game-fixing scandal in the history of professional sport. The questions that follow are not just about one team's wins and losses. They reach into how professional football moved west from Pennsylvania to Ohio, how salary wars brought entire leagues to their knees, and why a charter meeting in a Canton car dealership ultimately counted Massillon as present even though the Tigers never played a single game in the new league.

• 2. The Tiger Name

  ›

  J.J. Wise, who served as the Massillon Clerk of City Council, led the committee responsible for outfitting the new club. The committee needed jerseys and a football, and they needed them in matching colors. When the local vendors were consulted, only one jersey style existed in enough quantity to dress an entire team. Those jerseys were orange and black stripes, imitating the look of the Princeton Tigers. The name followed from the fabric. It was a practical decision made under supply constraints, not a romantic choice, yet the name would outlast the team itself. When the Massillon Tigers eventually folded in 1923, the name was formally transferred to Massillon Washington High School, which still carries it today.

• 3. Pittsburgh Ringers and Ohio Dominance

  ›

  Charles "Cy" Rigler, who would later become a famous major league baseball umpire, started at tackle in the Tigers' first season. Baldy Wittman, a 32-year-old cigar store proprietor and part-time police officer, was elected team captain at end despite, by local belief, having never played the game at all. The Tigers lost their very first game, a 6-0 defeat to Wooster College, blaming a biased official. Then they won four straight, including a 16-0 victory over Canton. On the 5th of December 1903, with several star players injured heading into the championship game against the Akron East Ends, Massillon's management brought in professionals from the Pittsburgh area, including Bob Shiring and Harry McChesney, who had played in 1902 with the Pittsburgh Stars. Massillon won that game 12-0, though the Akron Beacon-Journal reported that most of the Tigers' 75% gate share went straight to those Pittsburgh players. That model, pay-per-game Pittsburgh professionals serving as reinforcements for Ohio teams, became standard practice across the region. By 1904 at least seven Ohio teams were hiring ringers on a per-game basis, with no written contracts. Ted Nesser, of the famous Nesser Brothers, was hired away from the Shelby Blues for one game and stayed in the Tigers lineup for the next two seasons. The Tigers defeated a club from Marion 148-0 that same year, a score that must be understood in context: a touchdown counted only five points until 1912, and Marion never regained possession after the opening score because Massillon kept recovering kickoffs under the rules then in force.

• 4. The Game-Fixing Scandal

  ›

  By 1905 the Tigers and the Canton Bulldogs, also known at the time as the Canton Athletic Club, were acknowledged as two of the top three teams in the country alongside the Latrobe Athletic Association. Canton had formed its team in 1905 with the specific goal of defeating Massillon. Both clubs spent lavishly on ringers and in the off-season before 1906, Canton coach Blondy Wallace signed the entire backfield of the Tigers to his own roster. Massillon installed Sherburn Wightman, a player who had trained under Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago, as their new coach. The 1906 season ended with the first major scandal in professional football, and the first known case of gamblers attempting to fix a professional sport. The Massillon Independent alleged that Wallace and Tigers end Walter East had agreed to engineer a specific outcome: Canton wins the first game, Massillon wins the second, forcing a third game with the highest possible gate, which would then be played legitimately for the championship. Canton denied everything and accused Massillon of manufacturing the story to damage the Bulldogs' reputation. Massillon could not prove that Canton had thrown the second game. The scandal was never resolved; to this day, the historical record contains only charges and counter-charges. What is not disputed is the result: the scandal tarnished both franchises and effectively killed professional football in Ohio until the middle of the following decade.

• 5. Salary Wars and the Collapse of Profit

  ›

  When the Tigers returned in 1915, backed by local businessmen Jack Donahue and Jack Whalen, the bidding wars that had plagued the earlier era resumed almost immediately. Massillon raided the Akron Indians roster of its key players, prompting Canton manager Jack Cusack to respond by signing the legendary Jim Thorpe. One anonymous Massillon official revealed that it cost between $1,500 and $2,000 just to field the lineup that faced Canton in the final game of 1915, a group that included three players from Muhlenberg College whose college eligibility was stripped when their professional participation was discovered. Canton signed Thorpe at $250 per game, and the ripple effect was severe. Players of considerably less talent began holding out for $100 or $125 a game. In 1916, despite record crowds for two Bulldogs-Tigers games, Massillon lost money on the season while Canton barely broke even. The 1917 Tigers roster included names like Knute Rockne, Charles Brickley, Gus Dorais, Bob Nash, Stan Cofall, and future Hall of Famer Greasy Neale, yet the team's backers dropped $4,700 at the gate that year alone. The problem was structural: Massillon was smaller than Canton, with a smaller potential audience, and the city lacked a decent ballpark. The team suspended operations entirely in 1918 because of the flu pandemic and the First World War, and when it returned in 1919 it came in second to Canton again and lost over $5,000. At a the 14th of July 1919 managers' meeting at Canton's Courtland Hotel, the assembled clubs agreed to stop raiding each other's rosters, but Massillon backer Jack Donahue rejected any proposal to cap salaries, insisting it was a manager's prerogative to pay whatever price the market demanded.

• 6. The NFL Meeting and a Peculiar Absence

  ›

  On the 20th of August 1920, during the first gathering aimed at establishing what would become the National Football League, representatives hoped that F.J. Griffiths of the Massillon steel industry would step forward to revive the franchise. He never did. In late August and early September of that year, Ralph Hay and Jim Thorpe both tried and failed to find a backer. Then came an unexpected complication. Vernon Maginnis, who had managed the unsuccessful Akron Indians in 1919, arrived at the charter meeting held on the 17th of September 1920 at Ralph Hay's Hupmobile dealership in Canton, wanting to field a traveling team and call it the Massillon Tigers. Hay and the other managers turned him down. They refused to let the Massillon name be used for a road-only attraction. Hay considered himself the Tigers' spokesman and, once the meeting began, stood up and announced that Massillon was withdrawing from professional football for the 1920 season. He then specifically instructed the assembled managers not to schedule any other team claiming the Massillon name. Maginnis's representative was not admitted to the meeting at all. The result is a peculiarity of league history: Massillon is generally counted among the ten charter members of the American Professional Football Association by technicality, because Hay was present and spoke on the franchise's behalf. The Tigers never played a game in the new league, and they never played against any NFL team even during the years they operated as an independent club through 1923. When the franchise finally folded, the Massillon Tigers name passed to the local high school, where it has remained ever since.