Photo illustration: Steph Davidson; Getty (3)
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When she was nine years old, Virginia McCaskey attended the first NFL playoff game, at Chicago Stadium in December 1932. The Chicago Bears, coached by her father, George “Papa Bear” Halas – the team’s founder and owner — beat the Spartans of Portsmouth, Ohio, by a score of 9-0 to become the then 12-year-old league’s champions.
Moved indoors because of a blizzard, the game, a precursor to the annual championship now known as the Super Bowl, was played in front of about 11,000 people on a 60-yard field using dirt and manure left over from a traveling circus. One punt hit the stadium’s organist. Two years later, a radio station owner paid $7,952.08 (about $180,000 in today’s dollars) to buy the Spartans and move them to Detroit, where they now play as the Lions.