Failed champion and university champion: which of the Russians played in the US National Football League

John Barsha

In 1920, the first championship of the American Professional Football Association was held, which was later renamed the National Football League (NFL). Among the founding members of the new league was the Rochester Jeffersons team from New York State, for which John Barsha, the first professional American football player of Russian origin, played for the fullback position.

His real name and surname is Abram Barshovsky. He was born in 1898 in Russia into a Jewish family and in childhood moved with his parents to the United States. In high school, he took on a new name, John Barsha, to hide his participation in an unofficial basketball game, which his team held without the knowledge of a coach. After school, Barsha entered Syracuse University, where he successfully played baseball, basketball and American football.

In 1920, Barsha spent three matches in the starting lineup of Rochester in the future NFL. He even managed to earn a touchdown. Then the athlete represented the Syracuse Pro club, whose participation in the second season of the football championship is the subject of controversy among historians - it is officially believed that this team did not join the American Professional Football Association, although it played games with the teams belonging to the organization. At the end of his sports career, John Barsha worked as a lawyer. Barsha died in 1976 at the age of 77.

Morris Glassman

Morris Glassman, born in 1900, became the second NFL player of Russian origin. Although he spent more matches on the field than Barsha, much less information was preserved in the history of him. Perhaps due to the fact that his Columbus Panhandlers team won only one match in 1921 and 1922, and ceased to exist in 1926. Glassman spent 15 games, with most of them starting in the starting lineup.

Ace gutowski

The 1930s star Leroy Erwin Gutowski, nicknamed the Ace, can rightfully be considered the best NFL player with Russian roots. He was born in 1909 in a family of Volga Germans. However, when he was only five weeks old, Gutowski ended up in the United States, where his family settled in Oklahoma.

In 1932, Gutowski began his professional career as an American football player and spent eight years in the NFL, playing for teams such as Portsmouth Spartans, Detroit Lions and Brooklyn Dodgers. As part of Detroit, he became the NFL champion in 1935, defeating the New York Giants in the final, and the following year became the season leader in the number of yards he ran in the attack and helped the team set a league record for the season, which lasted 36 years.

The descendant of emigrants from the Russian Empire was even credited with an absolute record of 3,478 yards in an attack over his career. However, in the early years of the NFL when calculating statistics, inaccuracies were often made, and it was subsequently established that in fact Gutovsky had only 3279 yards in his last match, which was not a record. However, in Detroit, Ace remained the absolute leader in this indicator until the 1960s.

After finishing his sports career, Gutovsky participated in World War II, and then went into the oil business - his father discovered huge deposits of “black gold” in Oklahoma in the 1940s. Ace died of cancer in 1976.

Max Padlov

Max Padlov was born in Russia in 1912 and was the eldest child in a Jewish family, who later moved to the United States. Other details about the first years of the life of another Russian NFL player did not save history. Like many athletes in those years, Padlov combined the game of basketball and American football. After graduating from Ohio State University, he began his professional career in 1935.

Padlov did not become an outstanding athlete. He spent two seasons in the NFL as part of the Philadelphia Eagles team that still exists, but took part in just four games as an end. Later, he played in the second-most important American Football League for two years, for the Cleveland Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals (namesake of the modern team) and other clubs.

Harry Schaub

Even less details remain about Padlov’s teammate and compatriot Harry Schaube. The directories on American football only mention that he was born in Russia in 1911, studied at a school in New York and graduated from Cornell University. Schaub spent one game with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1935 as a guard. In 1988, he died in Florida.

Vitaly Pisetskiy

A new wave of players from Russia to the NFL went only after the collapse of the USSR. The pioneer was Vitaly Pisetskiy, whose family emigrated to the United States in 1992. Before that, he was engaged in European football and showed certain hopes. In a new country for himself, Pisetskiy changed his sport and played for Wisconsin at the university level, with whom he won the prestigious Rose Bowl student cup in 1999.

But Pisetskiy left the NFL draft only a year later, when he disappeared from the radars of professional clubs. Nobody dared to spend their peak on the Russian player, and after the ceremony he signed a contract with Chicago Bears. As a result of a series of pre-season matches, Pisetskiy failed to gain a foothold in the team.

Sergey Ivanov

A similar story happened with Sergei Ivanov, only he went an even more difficult path. He proved himself in Europe as a talented young safe - a player on the defensive line who remains the last obstacle to the touchdown. After a training camp organized by the NFL for foreign players, Ivanov signed a contract with the Tampa Bay Bakkiers.

For American football, getting into a team without training at a local college is a rare occurrence, and a foreigner is even more so. But Ivanov failed to play in the NFL. He played in four pre-season matches and ended up in the training squad, from which it was possible to get into the main team only if half of the team of more than 50 people would suddenly fail. Ivanov spent one season, taking part only in training and theoretical classes, and at that his career in the NFL ended.