On Thursday, Nov. 15, 1906, operatives of the Central Union Telephone Company began stringing wire around Mahaffey Park in Canton, Ohio, preparing a little trial in turn-of-the-century technology. The idea was, a Central Union agent would stride up and down the stadium's sideline the next day, telegraphing accounts of the action between the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers to newspaper offices throughout the country. This experiment took into account two national preoccupations: the fascination with anything modern—especially electrical—and professional football.

This would be the first of two games (with a third if required) to decide the championship of the world. Pro football had been slow to gain favor, being alternately deadly and dull, but by 1906 it had grown into a fairly important pastime, especially in the hinterlands of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The bigger cities, with grander ideas of themselves, clung to the more refined entertainments, such as opera and baseball, leaving football to the blue-collar towns, where few felt the need to apologize for their tastes in recreation.

Still, even city sophisticates were beginning to take notice of this new phenomenon. Grantland Rice, sporting editor of the Cleveland News, had been obliged to divert his attention from second baseman Nap Lajoie's comparatively balletic Cleveland Naps to account for the popularity of football skirmishes, a kind of choreographed mayhem. Rice was particularly attuned to the heated rivalry to the south, in Stark County, where football had been fully professionalized and was being played with eye-opening zeal.

Had Rice understood that the 1906 championship series had been developed as a civic comeuppance, a way to indulge a municipal grudge, he might have been more careful with his mythologizing. For that matter, he might have guessed how this would end. But like everybody else, he was caught up in the excitement of the new, however unholy. And so Rice wrote, "The comin...