MARA’S ONE GIANT LEAP
A journey from paper boy to patriarch of football’s first family
In 1900, in the thickly populated Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young man named Timothy James Mara began to carve out a life. He was thirteen years old, tall and pale and husky, a cop’s son living with his parents and an older brother in a neighborhood dominated by Irish expatriates. Mara attended public schools and worked a newspaper route that took him straight up Broadway from Wanamaker’s to Union Square, through crowds of newly arrived Chinese, European, and Jewish immigrants.
Although the city was full of young men with similar backstories, Mara would never be lost in a crowd. Outgoing and irrepressible, he had a glib tongue, quick mind, and wry smile that seldom faded as he worked the city’s nooks and crannies. Decades later, his grandson, John Mara, said, “He was one of those people who filled up a room.”
That was true even as he delivered papers as a youth. His route took him into bookmaking parlors and Tammany Hall political meetings, where he met the wealthy, famous, and connected. He did not cower from them, awestruck. He thrust out his hand and introduced himself.
As with young George Halas in Chicago, sports helped Tim shed stereotypes as a son of immigrants; he became part of America’s cultural mainstream through horse racing, one of the country’s popular diversions at the time. While on his newspaper route, he met and befriended legal bookmakers who operated out of hotel rooms and storefronts, taking bets on races. Mara noticed they seemed to “live best and work the least,” he later said. The bookies liked him, and several hired him to “run” bets. While delivering papers in the morning, he took his customers’ wagers and passed the money on to the bookies. That evening, he distributed any winnings. The job required him to be organized, sharp, and, above all, honest. Some customers tipped him when they won or gave him a nickel for every bet he toted.
When Mara was fifteen, in 1902, his father died suddenly, and he quit school, which seldom interested him, anyway. He ushered at the Ziegfeld Theater, sold peanuts and programs at Madison Square Garden, and worked at a lawbook bindery. But he craved action and soon was booking bets himself. He already knew the fundamentals of the trade. He studied the horses, set odds, paid off the winners, and pocketed the rest. His clientele swelled. “He didn’t have a lot of education but he had street smarts,” his grandson said. “His father dying young impacted him greatly. He was forced to grow up, and he met a lot of Damon Runyon-like characters and developed certain instincts that served him well for his whole life.”
In 1910, when anti-gambling legislation shut down New York horse racing for four years, Mara, operating out of a hotel suite, took bets on races in other states. In 1921, he set up a stand in the betting enclosure at Belmont Park — a hall where bettors shopped among a row of bookies for favorable odds in the frantic minutes before a race, then bet directly with the bookie they selected. Mara sat on a high stool with a fistful of bills in one hand, an odds board in the other, and a noisy jumble of bettors around him, winking at customers, making jokes and change as he constantly recalculated odds. The work introduced him to the glittering world of wealthy racing families such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Whitneys. They befriended Mara and invited him to their parties, quite a leap for an Irish kid from Lower Manhattan. In the summers, he followed them upstate to the races at Saratoga, where he opened another betting stand.
If horse racing was his favorite sport, boxing was his second favorite. He rooted for Gene Tunney, the champion heavyweight and light heavyweight who, like Mara, had Irish roots and had made a name in New York. Mara longed to get into the fight game. One of his best customers at
the racetrack was a wealthy building contractor who had been a childhood friend of Al Smith, the governor of New York. That connection helped Mara obtain licenses to stage Tunney’s fights and several others at Madison Square Garden and the Polo Grounds. While promoting fights, Mara became friendly with Tunney’s manager, Billy Gibson, a prominent figure in New York boxing.
Gibson had previously managed a lightweight champion and other successful fighters, and had provided some of the financial backing for a pro football franchise that flopped in New York in the early 1920s.
The football team was known as Brickley’s Giants. Charlie Brickley, a former Harvard star, now in his early thirties, was the head coach, coowner, and only well-known player on the roster. College fans recalled him as a dropkick specialist who had once booted five field goals through the uprights as Harvard defeated Yale, 15–5. After graduating, Brickley coached at Johns Hopkins, Boston College, and Fordham while occasionally playing semipro ball. Optimistic about the future of “paid” football, he organized the Giants and joined the APFA in 1921. Unfortunately, New York’s first pro football team was badly outmanned. Brickley’s Giants played only two official league games, losing both by a combined score of 72–0. “Little can be said for the brand of football displayed,” the New York Times reported. The only interesting moment was a drop-kicking contest between Brickley and Jim Thorpe, now with the Cleveland Indians, at halftime of one of the games. The Giants dropped out of the APFA and played a few exhibitions before folding in 1923.
In the summer of 1925, Joe Carr, president of the enterprise now known as the National Football League, came to New York to convince Gibson to invest in pro football again. The NFL was flailing. The league’s roster of teams, located mostly in midwestern and eastern factory towns, changed significantly every year. After watching so many clubs struggle and fail in his three years as the league’s president, Carr believed the whole enterprise would collapse if it could do no better than the Duluth Kelleys and Kenosha Maroons and failed to develop fans in metropolitan areas.
When Carr traveled to New York, the start of the 1925 season was two months away. On a summer afternoon hot enough to make the men grateful for ceiling fans, Carr sat down in Gibson’s office, having brought along Dr. Harry A. “Doc” March to help twist Gibson’s arm. A pipe-smoking, white-haired physician, originally from Canton, Ohio, March was a man of many interests. He ran a musical troupe, March’s Musical Merry Makers, which toured the East and Midwest. He had been the team physician for the Canton Bulldogs in Jim Thorpe’s day. Football was his true passion — not playing it but running a team. He now lived in New York and wanted a role if the NFL put another team there. But he did not have money to buy the franchise. “Doc March was looking for an angel,” Mara said later, “and I was it.”
When the meeting began, only Gibson, Carr, and March were in the room. It is not known whether Mara showed up coincidentally or had been invited by Gibson; he may have come to ask for a piece of Tunney, his favorite fighter. Regardless, he knocked on the door and joined the meeting, unaware of how much the next hour would shape the rest of his life.
Despite the heat, Mara was formally dressed down to his derby hat, and he was more wealthy and prominent than he ever could have imagined when he was delivering newspapers on Broadway at the turn of the century. He was thirty-eight years old and devoutly Catholic, with a wife, Lizette, and two sons, Jack and Wellington, ages sixteen and nine. His bookmaking business was booming. He also owned a coal company, Mara Fuel, and a lawbook bindery, the latter serving primarily to facilitate racing bets from lawyers and judges. He promoted boxing matches and would soon also try his hand at stock trading and selling scotch. “I never passed up the chance to promote anything. Not just for the profit, but for the challenge,” he would say later. Decades later, Mara’s grandson shook his head and smiled at the thought of his grandfather’s multifaceted business world. “I’m not sure you can still live the kind of life he did, get involved in so many things, take so many chances. I’m not sure that works today,” John Mara said.
In a bookie’s vernacular, Tim Mara was the longest of shots to join a pro football league. He did not follow college football and barely knew the sport was played professionally. “He knew about boxing and horse racing, but nothing about football, that’s for sure,” John Mara said. When he sat down with Carr, Gibson, and March, Gibson had just rejected the idea of funding a new NFL team in New York. Gibson had lost money on Brickley’s Giants and was not about to place another bet on such a risky proposition.
“Say, maybe you’d be interested in this, Tim. These men here have something you may want to buy,” Gibson said. “What is it?” Mara asked. “A professional football franchise in New York,” Gibson said.
“How much does it cost?” Mara asked.
No one knows who replied, though it was probably Carr, and the answer was either $500 or $2,500, depending on which version of the story one believes. “I was told it was $500, but it doesn’t matter,” John Mara said.
Mara initially balked. What did he know about football? The other men tried to persuade him, with Gibson offering to become a minority investor. Carr admitted Mara “might lose money at first” but eventually would turn a significant profit because “the future of pro football is tremendous.” Carr’s honesty and optimism were persuasive. Mara soon came around.
“I’ll take it,” he said, reportedly adding, “Any franchise in New York ought to be worth $500.” Then he paused and said, “Now what do I do?”