NFL History | Nickerson Field, Boston — The AFL Began in a Ballpark's Leftovers

The American Football League's first game was played on a gridiron laid along the first-base line of a National League ballpark that had lost its team seven years earlier.

Braves Field opened in Boston in 1915. The Braves left for Milwaukee after the 1952 season, Boston University took the site, and in 1955 the grandstand, the left-field pavilion and the small bleacher section known as the Jury Box came down. What survived was the right-field pavilion, squared off on the west side and filled in on the east where the foul pole and the bullpens had been.

That surviving pavilion is the stand still in use here. The press box on top of it, the lighting, the sod and the additional seating all date from 1960, when the university spent more than $300,000 to partner with a professional club in a league nobody had heard of.

On the evening of Friday 9 September 1960 the Denver Broncos beat the Boston Patriots 13–10 in front of 21,597 people, in the first regular-season game the AFL ever played. Gino Cappelletti kicked the league's first points, though sources give the field goal as 34 or 35 yards. The Patriots' owner Billy Sullivan had spent years as the Boston Braves' public relations director, so the choice of ground was partly a homecoming.

It is worth sitting with how provisional the whole enterprise was. The AFL had signed its television contract with ABC three months earlier and had already lost Minneapolis, whose owners accepted an NFL franchise instead. In 1963 alone the Patriots opened their home season at Boston College's Alumni Stadium and played the rest of it at Fenway Park. A converted right-field pavilion was not a temporary indignity for this league. It was the operating model.

Nickerson Field is still in use for university sport. The professional football is long gone, most of the ballpark is gone, and the stand is the same stand.

Coordinate: Nickerson Field, Boston University. Wikidata, OpenStreetMap and the GPS on a photograph taken at the site agree to within about 100 m. Precision ±60 m.

Cover: the surviving Braves Field right-field pavilion, now the main stand at Nickerson Field. Photo: Greenstrat, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Second image: the same structure photographed from outside. Public domain via panoramio, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.