David Rosenthal

These are teams, not leagues.

So these are barnstorming teams that would go around like there's no organized schedule of play.

But they're viewed not only just as second rate to the college game, they're like dirty.

Yeah, it's even more than that.

Many people, especially the elite, viewed professional football as actually immoral because it was profaning this thing with money.

The gripe that they had against it was the money.

It wasn't the game.

It wasn't how the game was played.

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.