He Didn't Know His Face Was the Heisman for 48 Years

Every December, a bronze statue gets carried onto a stage in New York: a football player frozen mid-stride, arm locked in a stiff-arm, the most recognized trophy in American sports. Almost nobody watching knows whose face is actually on it - and for 48 years, neither did he.

A Favor for an Old Friend

In 1934, a sculptor named Frank Eliscu was working on a commission for the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan. He needed a football player to pose.

Eliscu turned to someone he already knew: Ed Smith, a fullback at NYU and his former classmate at George Washington High School.

Smith showed up at Eliscu's studio near Washington Square in full gear - leather helmet, canvas pants, high-top cleats - and struck a stiff-arm pose over several sessions.

He wasn't paid. He didn't ask what the sculpture was for. "I was just doing a favor for a friend," Smith later said.

Two Pro Seasons, Then Elevators

Smith went on to have a solid football career of his own. He was the 20th player picked in the very first NFL draft in 1936.

He played a season for the Boston Redskins, then another for the Green Bay Packers under coach Curly Lambeau.

The pay was thin, about $200 a game, so Smith walked away from football and took a steady job in the elevator industry instead. The statue he'd posed for went on to become the trophy first handed out to college football's best player in 1935 - renamed the Heisman a year later, after the club's athletic director, John Heisman. Smith had no idea.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

For nearly five decades, nobody connected Ed Smith to the trophy handed out every year to college football's best player.

That changed in 1982, when a researcher working on a Heisman documentary went looking for Eliscu's original model. The trail led to Smith, by then living quietly in Lynbrook, New York.

A sportswriter and Eliscu himself confirmed it: the face on college football's most famous trophy belonged to a nearly-forgotten fullback nobody had thought to ask.

His Own Trophy

The Downtown Athletic Club didn't just thank Smith. In 1985, the club presented him with his own bronze Heisman, a replica of the statue he had unknowingly given his likeness to five decades earlier.

The following year, Smith and his family were invited to the televised Heisman ceremony. Looking out at that year's finalists, Smith joked that whoever won would be stuck "looking at my ugly face for a long time."

Vinny Testaverde won that year's award. Ed Smith kept his own trophy until his death in 1998, when it passed to his son.