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• Leatherheads

Fritz Pollard during his football days at Brown University.

The wild, fly-by-night nature of early professional football depicted in "Leatherheads" isn't just Hollywood hokum. Plenty of Indiana teams were part of the history that led the National Football League to become the dominant entity that it is today.

Despite what you might think, the Colts were not the state's first NFL team. More than 60 years before the Colts' 1984 arrival from Baltimore, the Hammond Professionals and Evansville Crimson Giants were part of the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL in 1922.

Originally called the Clabbys, the Hammond team was renamed the Professionals, or just Pros, in 1920 when team physician Alva Young acquired ownership from Paul Parduhn, according to the Hammond Historical Society. The team played a road game at Wrigley Field, the first professional football game held in Chicago.

The Pros disbanded after the 1926 season. The Crimson Giants lasted only two years, 1921 and 22.

As depicted in "Leatherheads," pro football in those days was a largely lawless affair. Teams sprang up and folded from year to year, some playing only a single game per season. Players were paid in cash, getting a percentage of ticket sales. Injured players were generally dropped from the roster without compensation.

"You would even have situations where a team would show up and the other team would notice one of their players and make an offer to them in the pre-game warm-ups. And they'd end up playing for the other team," said Dale Ogden, chief curator of cultural history at the Indiana State Museum and author of "Hoosier Sports Heroes."

Records from the Pro Football Archives show Indianapolis having three teams in 1924 -- the Ferndales, Southpaw Vets and YPC. Fort Wayne had four teams that year: the Tanks, Yales, St. Joe A.C. and Pyramids.

Other Indiana teams of that era include the Muncie Congerville Flyers, South Bend Arrows, Marion Eagles, Gary Techs, Kokomo Ramblers and Wabash Athletics Association.

The Wabash team is referenced in the film. The fictional Duluth Bulldogs, upset over new rules, lament that they can't win without trick plays.

"We played Wabash clean last year," one player says. "They only had nine men!" is the retort. "Yeah, but still," the first player says.

The Hammond Pros can also lay claim to having some of the first African-American players in pro football history, including Mayo "Ink" Williams, according to an article by Lance Trusty, professor emeritus of history at Purdue University Calumet.

Fritz Pollard, a star player from Brown University, joined the Pros as a player-coach in 1923 and was head coach in 1925.

"Technically, Fritz Pollard was the first black coach in the NFL," Ogden said. "People think it was Art Shell," hired by the Oakland Raiders in 1989.

Some might argue with that assertion, since the NFL lacked formal schedules and unified rules until the 1930s. The early years of pro football were much like baseball's barnstorming days. Most American professional sports went through a rogue period like that in "Leatherheads," Ogden said.

"Professional sports was a pretty disreputable way to make a living."