Massillon Tigers

On this edition of our deep dive into the early pro teams of football we discuss the famous early pro team called the Massillon Tigers with author Gregg Ficery as well as many more legendary stories about his Great Grandfather, Bob Shiring who once captained the squad.

The Massillon Tigers are a team that comes up quite prominently in early professional football. Though they never were a member of the APFA or the NFL their impact is forever felt in the professional ranks of the gridiron. Author Gregg Ficery has an interesting take on this great team, as his Grandfather was one of the franchise's lead players.

The Massillon Tigers franchise were the first football team in Ohio to go pro when they did so in 1903 according to a 1989 PFRA Annual article titled, PFRA Birth of Pro Football which was researched and written by gridiron historians Beau Riffenburgh and Bob Carroll. In the post, it is written that Massillon gridders met on September 3, 1903, at the town's Hotel Sailer to create a new team, which was organized with Jack Goodrich as manager and Ed Stewart as coach. E.J. Stewart was an amateur quarterback, Massillon Gleaner Newspaper sports editor, and city clerk. Stewart and Goodrich, with the support of Massillon businessmen, formed the organization, raised a bit of cash, and started the team. When the city's sporting goods store could supply only jerseys with striped sleeves, the town adopted the nickname "Tigers." 

The PFRA excerpt tells of that first Massillon season and the Tiger's quick rise to power;

"After losing its opener 6-0 to Wooster College, Massillon rapidly became one of the best teams in the state, winning its next four games. Then the

Tigers easily disposed of Canton 16-0 before beating a team from Cleveland. At that point, Massillon challenged the Akron state champions to a game for the state title. The championship the Tigers were pursuing was not official. In a method dating back to the 1890s, the championship of the state was awarded by popular acclaim at the end of the season. All games played were considered, but some games were more important than others." 

Gregg Ficery, author of Gridiron Legacy: Pro Football's Missing Origin Story, starts his story in parallel as his Grandfather, Bob Shiring, was playing football near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the Homestead Athletic Club and later the Pittsburgh Pros. Shiring played in what many consider the first Professional World Championship games of the gridiron in the late 1890s and early 1900s as his Pittsburgh area squads matched up against the best pro teams of that era, including a tough Philly team and their star, the former Penn Quaker legend, Blondy Wallace. A few years later, Pennsylvania pro football lost some popularity and transferred to nearby Ohio as Wallace became a member of the Canton Bulldogs in 1905, and Shiring, along with 3 Pittsburgh teammates, was hired on in 1903 by the Massillon Tigers, who later captained, so the rivalry of these two early stars continued on into a new era of pro football, the fabled Ohio League.

The 1905 and 1906 seasons were competitive between the Tigers and their rivals from the next town over, the Bulldogs. This fierce rivalry came to a head in a game between the two, which is labeled as the Ohio Championship by many in the know. The game is forever shrouded in deceit as members of both teams became embroiled in a bitter alleged betting scandal. To get the details on this, let's wait for Gregg's book to come out because he tells us that this scandal is at the heart of his book and the revelations he found a century later to all but prove what an honorable player his great-grandfather was. Let's just say there were off-field events that took place, such as newspaper accusations, subpoenas, and bar room brawls over this.

This scandal shocked the town of Massillon, and the franchise did not play a game for years. The Canton team re-surfaced after a few years of obscurity in the semi-pro ranks in 1912 with the help of a young man who watched the Tigers/Bulldogs games growing up, Jack Cusack. This new version of the Bulldogs even recruited a player who would become a football legend, Jim Thorpe, soon after he won Gold in the 1912 Olympics. This signing rejuvenated the spirit and fervor of pro football in the Eastern Ohio area once again. Eventually, the Massillon Tigers regrouped as well and brought in solid players like Knute Rockne to play for the team in 1915. Besides the players we already mentioned, other early stars of the Tigers were Tiny Maxwell, Peggy Parratt, Ted Nesser, John Nesser, and Walter East. If you remember, in our conversation with Chris Willis on the Columbus Panhandles, Ted and John were members of that famous Nesser family of brothers who were the gridiron stars of the era. 

The Massillon franchise played as an independent when, in the early 1920s, they were invited to join the predecessor of the NFL, the APFA. The Tigers carefully considered joining, but due to the size of their town and the financial burdens it would place on the team, they had to regretfully decline membership into the new League. According to reports, they never did join, nor did they even play an independent game against the APFA or NFL teams. In 1922, mainly because of a financial decision based on a lack of community support, the franchise folded. The name of the Massillon Tigers lives on, and years later, the local Massillon High School adopted the mascot name.

Some say that the town of Massillon to this day still has some bad feelings towards Canton. Massillon has their own football museum, the Paul Brown Museum and the Massillon Tigers High School's biggest rivalry game each season is with, you guessed it, the Canton McKilnley Bulldogs. Look for more on this great high school rivalry in the next few months as historian George Bozeka will go through the high school rivalry in the Pigpen.

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