TextĪt the end of the 1926 season, Jacques 'Jack' Creasy, at the age of 25, purchased the equipment of the Studebaker Presidents - an amateur football team that had enjoyed moderate success and ignited the excitement of football fans in Portsmouth - and sought out the financial backing of the city’s two largest employers: the Selby Shoe Company and the Whitaker-Glessner Company, owner of the Portsmouth Steel works in New Boston. Together, Creasy and Thorpe would help give rise to the Portsmouth Spartans (and what is now the Detroit Lions). Jack Creasy, on the other hand, was the Portsmouth native and high school athletic star who managed the Shoe-Steels and brought Jim Thorpe out of retirement to play for Portsmouth.
Jim Thorpe’s one season in the city as the player-coach of the Shoe-Steels (the precursor of the Spartans), helped build the local support needed for Portsmouth’s entrance into the National Football League (NFL). In Portsmouth, Ohio, the birth of professional football involved one of America’s greatest athletes of all time - Jim Thorpe - and one of the city’s most forgotten civic leaders - Jack Creasy.
