Page 38 - On The Move - Volume 16, Issue 4

This article originally ran on the NADA Blog September 6th, 2019.

Ralph E. Hay was not only a great auto dealer, he was also a sports pioneer.

In fact, it’s safe to say that if it wasn’t for this entrepreneurial auto dealer, the By Sheryll Poe
NADA Contributor
National Football League wouldn’t exist, and it certainly wouldn’t be in its
100th season this year.

That’s because the National Football League came to life in Hay’s auto dealership birth of the National Football League.” The Hall of Fame (located in Canton to
in Canton, Ohio, in 1920. commemorate the birthplace of the NFL) owns the minutes from that meeting
and notes that they “are among the most precious documents in the Pro Football
Hay started his career as a salesman for a local dealership right out of high Hall of Fame’s collection.”
school. A few years later, he went into business for himself, selling Hupmobiles,
Jordans and Pierce Arrows at his own dealership on the corner of Cleveland Av- Representatives from 10 teams attended that September meeting. “They were
enue and Second Street SW. going to meet in Ralph’s office, but there were 15 men there and they couldn’t
get into his office,” Hay’s grandson, Dr. James Francis King, told ABC News. “It
Always the salesman and an innate marketer, Hay bought the local football was too small, so they went into his showroom and there were two Hupmobiles
team, the Canton Bulldogs, in 1918 to promote his business. And while pro there. They sat on the fenders and running boards. He had buckets of beer on the
football was gaining in popularity in the United States, there was no system floor, and there was a lot of cigar smoke in the room.”
in place to organize the fledgling sport. Players played on multiple teams and
demanded increasingly high salaries, which meant owners were losing money. Cars, beer and football. It doesn’t get any more American than that.

HAY’S IDEA: Get the team owners together to agree on terms and conditions And if you’re wondering what happened to the Canton Bulldogs, they did pretty
that would benefit them all. Hay invited the three other Ohio team owners to well in the new league. They were the first team to win back-to-back NFL titles
meet at his office on August 20, 1920 and formed the American Professional in 1922 and 1923, before Hay sold the money-losing team to focus on his suc-
Football Conference. A follow-up meeting a month later led to the formation of cessful dealership. “He knew the NFL would be big, but he never could have
a national league. dreamed the multibillion-dollar industry that meeting he organized inside of
his showroom would create,” King told ABC News.
“On September 17, 1920, a group of men gathered in Canton, Ohio, at the Hup-
mobile showroom of Ralph Hay, owner of the hometown Bulldogs,” according
to the Pro Football Hall of Fame website. “The result of the meeting was the

Ralph E. Hay
with Jim Thorpe

Background image: Ralph Hay’s automobile dealership on the
corner of Cleveland Avenue and Second Street in Canton, Ohio.
36 www.maada.com