STL All Sports

Football, first played in the United States in 1869, has become the nation's No. 1 autumn sport. Hundreds of colleges and thousands of high schools play each Saturday. The National Football League, had grown to 14 member clubs in the early 1960s, played a schedule of 14 season games following a pre-season list of five contests each. It was divided into two conferences and the winners of these groups met for the championship, usually on the first Sunday after Christmas. These championships were carried on coast-to-coast television and had an audience estimated near 50 million.

Millions more watch college and professional games on television each week. For the fourth time since the birth of the N.F.L., another league, this time the American Football League, was attempting to challenge the parent league. Previous leagues had been the American Football League of 1926, built around Harold "Red" Grange; the American League of 1936-37; the All America Football Conference of 1946-49.

Professional football was blessed with an endless supply of able players produced by the colleges at no expense to the professional teams. In return, the N.F.L. had always stuck to a policy of refraining from luring football players away from school until each player's class had graduated. This maintained a friendly relationship not enjoyed by professional baseball which had made a habit of breaking up the education of many young baseball players.

Players range from the 270-pound tackles in the professional league to the undersized 7-year-olds using a home-made football on the sandlots. Professional salaries range as high as $100,000 a year, with the average in the neighborhood of $20,000.

Football, as we know it today, is a far cry from its parent game, soccer, which originated in England about the 11th Century. Where football may have been played earlier, if at all, is left to the guesswork of historians.

One of that group reached the conviction that the ancient Greeks played football under the name of harpastum. That's about as much as the guess embraces. Nothing is said as to the rules or form of play. The game is supposed to have originated in Sparta, have been adopted by the Romans and banned by a ruler of Rome about the dawn of the Christian Era.