Scouting a North Carolina-Georgia game in 1895, Heisman said he saw the first forward pass in history when a bungled punt attempt led a desperate punter to illegally fling the football over the line to a teammate who ran for a touchdown. Heisman walked away convinced it was the play that would save football from itself. As Heisman wrote, violent scrums based around bruising running plays were “killing the game as well as the players.”

In 1904-5, 44 players had been reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries. Heisman said the forward pass “would scatter the mob.”

As Wiley Lee Umphlett wrote in his 1992 book, “Creating the Big Game,” Heisman began to forcefully lobby Walter Camp, shepherd of the national rules committee. When Camp did not act swiftly enough, Heisman rallied other coaches and newspaper reporters to pressure Camp and the committee. In 1906, the forward pass was legalized with several constraints that limited its effectiveness. Heisman pressed on, and the restrictions were eventually lifted.

Heisman’s 36-year coaching career, after more stops at Penn, Washington & Jefferson, and Rice, concluded in 1927 with a 190-70-16 record. He happily retired to New York, where he owned part of a sporting goods company. When the newly opened Downtown Athletic Club recruited Heisman to be its athletic director in 1930, he started a popular touchdown club. Five years later, the club came up with the idea of an annual award recognizing the best college football player in the land.

The club would give away a trophy, and it wanted to name the award for Heisman. Although he had never been shy about self-promotion, Heisman vociferously declined. He did not like the idea of an award singling out one player in a team game. The 1935 trophy was named the Downtown Athletic Club award. Two months after Heisman’s death, the club renamed the award. For the next 28 years, until her death in 1964, Edith Maora Heisman received a bouquet of flowers from the Downtown Athletic Club during the week of the award announcement.

At the Forest Home Cemetery, where Edith and John Heisman are buried, the current sexton and his longtime predecessor said that a few people stop by every December looking to visit the gravesite.

“It was never anyone famous,” said Richard Winquist, who retired as the sexton in 2003 after 32 years and whose father had been the sexton for 14 years before him. “One time, it was a couple of newlyweds on their honeymoon. The woman wasn’t too happy about it, but the bridegroom said he was a big college football fan and he knew Heisman was buried here, so he stopped to have his picture taken. Like I said, she wasn’t too happy. But he was.”