Our feature OKI Wanna Know is your opportunity to ask the question that's stymied you for ages. This week, we head to the gridiron for a sports history question with WVXU's Bill Rinehart.
The gridiron. That's the first question from Ray Schaefer of Maysville:
"I've never understood some of this football jargon, and the first thing that came to my mind was 'gridiron.' Where does that come from?" he asks.
The answer comes from the Professional Football Researchers Association, which publishes a magazine sharing some of its research into the history of professional football. Its president is George Bozeka.
"If you look at some of the early pictures of the early layouts of the football fields, not only did they have yard lines, but they also had lines going vertically and horizontally."
That makes up the "grid." The "iron" part of the term? That comes from a metal grid that was used in cooking.
The lines were eventually limited to just one way, but the name stuck.
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Bozeka says football has changed a lot since the game started. Teams and leagues have come and gone, including a team noticed by Brad Thomas of Over-the-Rhine.
"In 1941 we had an undefeated football team called the Cincinnati Pepsi-Colas," he says. "Whatever happened to them?"
A quick web search for the Cincinnati Pepsi-Colas shows in 1941 they were undefeated, winning all eight regular season games and holding their opponents scoreless in each one.
President George Bozeka says the Pepsi-Colas belonged to the Ohio Valley Football League.
"The first year they played in that league was '41," he says. "It looks like they went back, I saw something that mentioned like eight years. But again there was different names associated with the leagues — there was the Ohio Football League, or the Ohio Major Football League. You would see different names in different articles."
That was what the early days of professional football was like: Lots of regional and national leagues. Bozeka says Cincinnati had several different teams in several different leagues.
"There was the Models, there was the Blades, there was the Treslers," he says. "Actually the original Cincinnati Bengals were named after Bengal Ranges: stoves. There was a company that did that. That's what they were named after."
The Pepsi-Colas played in the Ohio Valley League, against Dayton Dakotas, the Dayton Merchants, the Middletown Merchants, and the Columbus Avondales.
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Cincinnati's home games were at the Carthage Fairgrounds, known today as the Hamilton County Fairgrounds.
"They were quite successful. They basically dominated the league." Bozeka says. "They were 9-0. They outscored their opponents 208-6. They were a dominating team."
Bozeka says the league split the season into two halves.
"They won the first half, obviously went undefeated. They go into the second half. Again, they're undefeated. On December 7, 1941, they play the Dakotas in a game that if they win, they're the champs. If they lose, the newspaper article said that they probably would have to have a playoff," he says. "Well, obviously we know what else happened December 7, 1941."
The Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. The Pepsi-Colas won their game, 20-6, the only time any team scored on them that season.
Bozeka says news articles from the time indicated the team would be looking for new opponents. He says he found no mention of the Pepsi-Colas after that. Another article from early 1942 reported the League was talking about expanding to other cities, but apparently nothing came of it.
He says the record gets a little confusing from there.
"Their name starts popping up again around '45, '46, which is obviously around the time the war ended."
He says the team was never as successful as it was before the war.
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Bozeka says there's one member of the Pepsi-Colas with a familiar name: Harry Francis Rose, father of Pete Rose. Together they were known as Big Pete and Little Pete.
"He, I guess, was just one of the best semi-pro football players in the Cincinnati area during this timeframe," he says. "He played until he was 43 years old."
Bozeka says the elder Rose played for the Pepsi-Colas in 1939 and 1940, for the Cincinnati Treslers in 1936, and according to an obituary, before that he was with the Cincinnati Bengals in the early '30s.
He says the Pepsi-Colas likely got their name because that's who they were sponsored by. He says his research also turned up baseball, basketball, men's and women's, and bowling teams with the name Pepsi-Cola. And there were Pepsi-Cola teams in Lexington and Indianapolis, too.
