Class 2000
Albert Goodwill Spalding
Albert Goodwill Spalding was born in 1850 in Illinois. As a young boy he enjoyed the then relatively new game of baseball, and after his school courses were completed he was recognized as a very talented player and offered an annual salary of $2,500 to play professionally, a fabulous sum at that time. His mother was not in favor of sports though, and he went to work in several small businesses. None of them was especially successful, so he decided to pursue a profession as a ballplayer after all. Spalding had an amazing initial career as a pitcher for Boston from 1872 to 1875. However, at that time the game of baseball itself was slowly self-destructing. Collusion, drinking, rowdyism, and other negative behaviors were common, so he took it upon himself to make it respectable again, and almost single-handedly returned the sport to its position as America’s national game.
Albert organized baseball tours around the world, was a prime mover in organizing the National League, and retired in 1875 to work with his brother in developing a sporting goods business. Starting with only $800, they opened their first store outside Chicago, and over the succeeding years became the largest and best-known company in the field. In 1900 he was honored by President McKinley and appointed Commissioner of the Olympic Games in Paris. Throughout his life he remained a strenuous fighter for honesty and decency in every branch of athletic competition.
A.G. Spalding in Chicopee (now Spalding Sports Worldwide) is easily the oldest sporting goods company in the United States. It is a major manufacturer of golfing equipment, its Top Flite balls being the number one-selling brand of golf balls for several years. It was the first U.S. manufacturer of golf clubs, and Spalding is also the official basketball of the NBA. Although the company manufactures products in plants all over the world, its home operation is and always has been in Chicopee.
A.G. Spalding died in 1915, truly a giant in the game of baseball and a giant business executive, who ranks today as one of the greatest and most successful entrepreneurs ever connected with the “World of Sports.†He clearly deserves to be among the premier class enshrined in the Western Massachusetts Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame.