On December 10, 1935, the Downtown Athletic Club of Manhattan awarded its inaugural trophy for the most outstanding college football player in the United States to Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago. The award was renamed the Heisman Trophy the following year in honor of the club's athletic director, John Heisman, and has since become the most prestigious individual honor in American college sports.
Jay Berwanger, a triple-threat halfback for the University of Chicago Maroons, was an unlikely first recipient of what would become the most famous trophy in American college sports. Chicago was a middling football program even then, years away from abandoning the sport altogether, but Berwanger's versatility as a runner, passer, and defender made him the standout player of the 1935 season in the eyes of the Downtown Athletic Club's selection committee.
The club, based in Manhattan, had created the award to honor the best college football player east of the Mississippi, later expanded nationally, and presented it to Berwanger at a ceremony in New York on December 10, 1935. The trophy itself, a bronze statuette of a player in a stiff-arm pose, had been sculpted based on another player entirely, but it became instantly iconic.
John Heisman, the club's athletic director and a legendary coach in his own right, died in 1936, and the award was renamed in his honor shortly after. Berwanger, notably, never played professional football; he was drafted by the Chicago Bears but the money offered was less than he could earn selling foam rubber, so he went into business instead, making him perhaps the most obscure Heisman winner in the trophy's storied history.