The Pittsburgh (or Pittsburg) Stars were a professional American football team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1902. The team was a member of the first National Football League, which has no connection with the modern National Football League. The league was a curious mixture of baseball and football, with two of the three teams (Philadelphia Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies) sponsored by the major league baseball teams of the same names, and the Pittsburgh team suspected of being secretly financed by baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates. The Stars were managed by Dave Berry, previously the manager of the Latrobe Athletic Association professional football team.
The Stars won the league championship in the league's only season of existence.
History
Team origin
The Stars, and the league, began as a part of the baseball wars between the National League and the newly formed American League, which began in . Across the state in Philadelphia, two major league teams fought for control of the city's baseball market. These teams were the Athletics, which were represented in the American League and the Phillies of the National League. The interleague fighting began when the Athletics lured several of the Phillies' players from their contracts, only to lose them again through court actions.
In 1902, Phillies owner John Rogers decided to start a football team, he therefore took control of the "Philadelphia Football Club" team and renamed them the Philadelphia Phillies. The Athletics owner, Ben Shibe, followed suit and fielded, named a team named Philadelphia Athletics, which was made-up of several baseball players as well as some local football players. He appointed his baseball manager Connie Mack as the team's general manager and named former Penn player, Charles "Blondy" Wallace as the team's coach; however, both Rogers and Shibe knew that in order to lay claim to a "World Championship", they needed to have a team from Pittsburgh, which was the focal point of football at the time, in the new league. They called on pro football promoter Dave Berry, the former manager of football's first fully professional team, the Latrobe Athletic Association, to raise a Pittsburgh-based team for the two Philadelphia teams to face. Berry met with the two Philadelphia owners and agreed to establish a team. Due to the animosity between Rodgers and Shibe, Berry was then elected as league president.
Fielding the team
Berry constructed his team from many of the key players that played for the Homestead Library & Athletic Club, on their professional football championship teams in 1900 and 1901. He then became the team's owner and manager; however, Berry's modest income showed that he couldn't possibly have the money to cover the salaries of the top pros the team employed, all by himself. Suspicion fell on William Chase Temple, the steelman who'd formerly backed both the Duquesne Country and Athletic Club and the Homestead Library & Athletic Club and who was still an officer with the Pirates, and Barney Dreyfuss, the Pirates' owner. Both denied any connection to the team's finances (Temple's denial was plausible given that he had failed to stem the Duquesne club's decline), and Berry insisted he was the team's sole owner, a claim treated with skepticism both at the time and as late as 1980. Whoever was helping Berry fund the Stars remains unknown.
Regardless of who the team's owner was, Berry still made all the management decisions. And right away he alienated many potential fans in Pittsburgh when he decided to have his team train in Greensburg, 40 miles away. Berry stated that Greensburg's Natatorium provided better facilities than what could be found in Pittsburgh, but the public outrage continued. Even the benefits of breathing Greensburg's clear, country air failed to impress Pittsburghers who were used to constantly breathing highly polluted air in city during the early 1900s. Wrote one historian: "As far as the fans were concerned, Berry had deserted Pittsburgh and deprived them of the fun of watching practices for free." Berry then added another error by announcing that his team would play a couple of games in Greensburg, coming to Pittsburgh itself only for "big-money" games. As a result, the Pittsburgh Press took to calling them "the Greensburg team".