November 6, 1929: The NFL's 1st Night Game

The site of Kinsley Park, 2020

November 6, 1929: With the field at the Cycledrome -- a 10,000-seat bicycle racing track with a football field almost fully squeezed into it -- so waterlogged that the referees will not permit play, the Providence Steam Roller, defending NFL Champions, move their scheduled game with the Chicago Cardinals to their former home, Kinsley Park. This 6,000-seat stadium has floodlights, and so, this becomes the 1st night game in NFL history.

The Cardinals win, 16-0, but the gate receipts from the sellout crowd count the same. And, with the stock market having crashed a few days ago, the Steam Roller -- that's how their name was always written, as 2 words, and no S on the end -- need all the help they can get.

As it turns out, it's not enough: The team gets through the 1930 and '31 NFL seasons, drops out, holds on in another league through 1933, and folds, a victim of the Great Depression. Kinsley Park was torn down in 1933, and no trace of it remains.

November 6, 1929 was a Wednesday. Why they were playing on a Wednesday, I don't know. But they had already played on November 5, a Tuesday; and would play on November 9, a Saturday, and November 10, a Sunday. No wonder the Steam Roller only went 4-6-2 that season: They were exhausted. They didn't win any games between October 13 and November 17, going 0-4-2 over that stretch.

At any rate, no other NFL games were played on that day. Baseball season was over. The NBA hadn't yet been founded. And the NHL season didn't start until November 14. So there were no other scores on this historic day.