Ten Thousand Losses - Bonus 23 Preview: History of Football Pt. 3 - ft. Sicko Jordan from the Sickos Committee

Episode Date: March 2, 2025

It's finally here! Jordan from the sickos committee returns to cover the history of professional football from the wild days of the early 1920s up until the first ever Monday Night Football in 1970. Yes, that means there will be a part 4! If you want to listen to the whole episode, you'll need to be a patreon over at https://www.patreon.com/c/tenthousandlosses. You'll also find all of our other bonuses and access to our discord there too.   Follow the Sickos Committee at https://x.com/SickosCommittee or https://bsky.app/profile/sickoscommittee.org 

Yo, what's up? It's your cousin Dave from Delco. I've got a lot of time. I got an appointment to steal car batteries out of King of Prussia Mall parking lot. So anyways, it's a preview of 10,000 losses bonus episode. If you like it, go patreon.com so I have 10,000 losses. And sign up. It's only a dollar a month. You can pay more for one or two though. I mean, Liam don't really need the money, but Tyler's got student loans. Alright, I got balance about the Merch. Do a blue root with Dianne Turson. Peace! emerge the blue root with I ain't hurting. Like it's wild that I'm a professional shit poster, I guess at this point. I'm saying but like because I get paid like people pay me to do this. And so that is that is professionalism is that first time you get paid to do something. And we got to talk about then if we're talking about professional football, we got to talk about then if we're talking about professional football,

we got to talk about the first person that was we know that was paid. And here's our problem. Because no one admitted to it for a long time. Because it was like on gentlemanly or Yes, right. I mean, this is this is the big rugby split rugby in the UK for so long. I forget if it's a league or union. Someone's going to roast me for this. Like they didn't get paid until the 90s because it wasn't seen as gentlemanly to get paid to play sport in Ireland, hurling and Gaelic football. They don't get paid.

Yeah, it's just national pride. That should be enough for you. And so the first person we know that was paid in football was a dude by the name of Pudge Heffelfinger. That's not real. Pudge Heffelfinger. He was a Yalee, a son of Eli. He's from Minnesota.

A guy so racist he got kicked out of the East India Company. Don't let his ethnic last name turn you the wrong way. Pudge Heffelfinger is a Yalee just like the rest of the boys. Someone who'd went to Yale saw him play. He was supposed to go to Minnesota to play football there, but someone saw him and was like, no, you need to go play from Yale. And there was this story of Pudge. And apparently when Pudge showed up to Yale in 1888,

the captain of the varsity team, a guy by the name of Pa Corbin, spotted him on the field and gave him a position on the varsity line. He was good, but he was not ferocious enough. And so basically, the coach did everything possible by word and deed to arouse Hef so that he finally gave it his all. Finally at his wit's end, the coach decided he would try the sight of blood to stir up

Hef's dominant bell-closed spirit. What? He wrote with a pen dipped in blood from an animal, one of the sharpest, strongest letters, letting every reasonable form of expression to get Hef out of his lethargy. Hef, not knowing the nature of the gore, certainly must have been stirred, for this week afterwards he received the letter he played the best game ever against Princeton." Dude, that is definitely 19th century shit. That's insane. You know what's going to stare his lines?

The life's blood of another creature. That will convince him to play according to his ability. When's the last time you wrote something in pig blood? I haven't done it in ages. In a while, right? In a while. This Pudge was the first guy ever to get paid on November 2nd, 1892. At that point, professional football or football, the center of it was basically Western PA.

And it was a big fight between the Allegheny Athletic Association, the 3 A's, and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. And Pudge never admitted to getting paid until way later in life. But Pudge was currently in Chicago. So he just sort of showed up for the game. Everyone was like, why the fuck is this guy here? Even unless he's getting paid.

It was originally 250, but then when he got there, he was like, 250 is not enough. It's gotta be 500. And the 3A's were more than happy to give them the 500. Allegheny won the game, 4-0 on a recovered fumble. This is when touchdowns were worth four points because any college football, any school football score before 1912 or so

is just garbage numbers, ignore them. They're not real. And then the next week, it worked so well, Allegheny paid another player, Ben Sportdonnelly, to play alongside Pudge for $250,000 in a game they played against Washington and Jefferson College, and Allegheny lost that one. And $250, I'm like, I'm like trying to find in 1913 that would have been eight grand. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money for what 1890?

Ish. Yeah. Yeah. And this was sort of where the sport was centered for a long time was in PA. And the first completely professional game that we know about was September 3rd, 1895, between the Latrobe Athletic Association and the Jeannette Athletic Club. The glass-lined tanks of old Latrobe.