Tim Mara was the founder the New York Giants. He paid $500 to purchase the team in 1925, and pro football quickly become popular in America’s biggest city. Mara, whose Giants won four NFL Championships, owned the franchise until his death in 1959 while the Giants remain in the Mara family. Born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1887, Mara became a newspaper delivery boy and a theater usher and later a bookie and a fight promoter. In 1925, Joe Carr, the president of a struggling NFL, traveled to New York to offer Billy Gibson, a fight promoter, a franchise. Gibson refused, but referred the president to Mara – and the resulting transaction would shape the professional game thereafter.