David Rosenthal

It was the same game, often the same people who played in college.

Oh, I see.

Like it's supposed to be amateur.

It's supposed to be amateur.

This should not be a professional activity.

This is a rite of passage for young men.

So to the teens and 20s, like that was very much the attitude.

And for professional sports, there was one game in town and that was baseball.

Michael McCambridge has a great quote in The Beginning of America's Game where he says, "...to say that baseball was the number one sport in America is to imply a hierarchy where none existed.

Baseball towered above the sporting landscape like a colossus, the unquestioned national pastime, the only game that mattered.

Most fans had come to accept baseball's primacy as something imbutable, as much a part of the natural order of things as air and water."

Of course, this is the era of the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and all these storied parts of American history.

Baseball is very much a professional sport played for money where the goal of teams is to make money.

And the business model is they sell admission to the games.

Yep.

So it's not like professional sports were all looked down upon.

Not at all.

It was that football was this very special thing.

Yes.

So...