By Darin Who was the most dominant team in Pro Football history? The popular choices range from the 1972 Miami Dolphins and the 1948 Cleveland Browns, both undefeated champions of their respective leagues. Other selections might be Lombardi’s Packers or even the ‘85 Chicago Bears. All of these are excellent candidates, but what if there were a team in mainstream professional football that excelled beyond any of those mentioned above?
The 1903 Franklin All-Stars got closer to a perfect season in American football than anyone else in the sport’s professional history. A young merchant constructed the team in revenge for gambling losses and went undefeated, unscored upon, with opponents crossing the midfield stripe
only twice and had an offense more productive than the famed collegiate point-a-minute teams.
This book tells the story of a wealthy Pennsylvania town and the legendary mercenary players who carried out the mission to make Franklin the World’s Greatest Gridiron Team. It contains bonus links to additional audio content from Football Historians Ken Crippen, Joe Ziemba, and Timothy Brown.
Darin Hayes, a lifelong resident of Western Pennsylvania, has been interested in football and its rich history. Hayes took this passion from playing the game as a youth to officiating it at the high school level for over a quarter-century.
Later, he turned this energy into the Pigskin Dispatch website, podcast, and other sports history-related projects. Hayes has interviewed hundreds of sports history authors on his podcast and now takes his turn at non-fiction Gridiron history with the release of The World’s Greatest Pro Gridiron Team: The 1903 Franklin All-Stars.
NEW FOUND INFORMATION
One thing I struggled with while researching the Franklin book was the field’s location. I thought I had it nailed down on the other side of the river, in what is now Rocky Grove, Pennsylvania. About a year after the book’s initial release, my friends in Venango County asked me where I thought the field was located. I looked at it again with a fresh eye, and found proof that I and everyone else were way off.
I looked long and hard and found the exact news article that connected the dots of the whereabouts of Franklin’s Athletic Park, where the 1903 Franklin All-Stars played their games. I had the location wrong in my book, but tonight I found the smoking gun in its exact spot.
According to a remake of a little booklet I bought at the VHS titled “Fifty Years of the Baseball War Between Franklin and Oil City,” an article states that in 1902, a baseball advocate named General John A. Wiley and newspaperman William R. Smith secured a suitable spot to build Franklin’s Athletic Park a dual purpose field that was fenced in and had grandstands. The parcel of land they bought was on Liberty St, at the corner of 1st St., and ran from Liberty to Elk. They purchased the land from the James Bleakely Estate (500 feet of ground) and from George Allen (another 100 feet). After it was fenced in, the parcel was 320 feet wide x 610 feet long. After the fence and bleachers were erected, a ticket booth and dressing rooms were built on site.
This is the site of Franklin’s Athletic Park, where all of the 1903 All-Star games were played except the final two that were in the original Madison Square Garden.
