Buried deep in the dusty annals of football lore is a name long forgotten. His accomplishments were unrivaled. His claim to history is unique.
Before there were draft experts and the draft craze; before Madden helped create a culture obsessed with the sport and its tactics; before college kids were made instant millionaires; there was John Jay Berwanger.
His career was illustrious, marked by accolades and accomplishments. But he is eternally immortalized by two firsts.
Berwanger was the winner of the first Heisman Trophy (then called the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy), and the first player ever selected in the NFL draft.
He never played a down of professional football.
Football was a different game when Berwanger arrived on the college scene in 1932. It was fresh off a competition for superiority with rugby and mere decades removed from the adoption of the forward pass.
The Chicago Bears won the NFL championship over the Green Bay Packers, Portsmouth Spartans, Boston Braves, New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Cardinals, and Staten Island Stapletons. The Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Eagles and Cincinnati Reds would join the league the following season, while the Stapletons would cease operations.
Berwanger was a blue-collar kid from Dubuque, Iowa. A six-foot, 195-pound halfback, he was recruited by a host of Big Ten teams before signing with a perennial power: Chicago University.
Coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg—for whom the division three national championship game is now named—the Maroons were the original owners of the moniker “Monsters of the Midway.”
While donning the maroon and white, Berwanger accumulated more than mere numbers and accolades. He commanded respect.
“In a poll of the 107 opposing team players he faced during his senior year, 104 said… Berwanger was the best halfback they had ever seen.”[1] Even future president Gerald Ford—who played for Michigan at the time—remembered the talented runner: “I remember him fondly as one of the greatest athletes I’ve ever known.”
A star who could run, pass, and kick, Berwanger earned All-American honors in 1935, and claimed the first ever Heisman Trophy. He made history that February, when the Philadelphia Eagles made him the first player to ever be selected in the NFL draft.
After a contract dispute with the team, his rights were dealt to the Chicago Bears where another disagreement about salary led to Berwanger to leave football. He became a foam-rubber salesman instead.
Though he never returned to the sport, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954, forever immortalizing his exceptional career. However, despite his status in football tradition, there was always more to life than the sport.
“I am glad I was an All-American,” Berwanger noted in a 1936 article for the Saturday Evening Post. “I am much gladder that I was picked to lead the 1935 Chicago football team. But what makes me gladdest of all is that I and a group of other fellows, working together, managed to make a lot of people in the Middle West sit up and say, ‘Why, there’s life in the old Maroon yet.’”[2]
[1] “University of Chicago Athletics History-Jay Berwanger,” University of Chicago.
[2] Jay Berwanger and Bob Graf Jr., “I Was So Scared…,” Saturday Evening Post, 1936.
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