He then began broadcasting Michigan State sports on MSC's radio station WKAR in a position arranged for him by Spartans head coach Charlie Bachman.

Wismer soon began doing a ten-minute daily radio show covering the Lions in addition to his PA duties, while continuing as a student at Michigan State.

[citation needed] After the 1936 season, Wismer was encouraged by Richards to abandon his studies and come to work for WJR on a full-time basis as the station's sports director.

[6] In 1947, he was named one of 10 outstanding young Americans of the year by the U.S. Jaycees, along with congressman John F. Kennedy, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and physicist Philip Morrison.

[7] However, a subsequent management change at ABC led to a new regime that was hostile to sports, and Wismer became a free-lancer, selling his service to the highest bidder.

[citation needed] In 1953, Wismer was involved in an early attempt to expand football into prime time network television, when ABC, now with a renewed interest in sports, broadcast an edited replay on Sunday nights of the previous day's Notre Dame games, which were cut down to 75 minutes in length by removing the time between plays, halftime, and even some of the more uneventful plays.

(While this format was not successful in prime time, a similar presentation of Notre Dame football later became a staple of Sunday mornings for many years on CBS with Lindsey Nelson as the announcer.)

[citation needed] Unfortunately for Wismer, his own team, despite being located in the nation's largest city, was probably the most problematic in the league in its initial years.

Since 1956, the NFL football Giants had been playing across the Harlem River in prestigious Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, and the New York media for the most part was derisive and dismissive of the Titans, when it deigned to mention them at all.

[citation needed] Although professional sports were already quite popular in the U.S., even the "established" major leagues were still far from the lucrative industry they were shortly to become, and teams in this era still generated most of their income from ticket sales.

[citation needed] During this era, even NFL teams (especially those whose owners lacked substantial business interests outside football) survived only by carefully managing their finances.

Wismer, who had long tended to live "hard-and-fast", began to drink even more heavily, and eventually ruined his relationships with all of the other AFL owners, even Adams.

[13][14] When Werblin signed University of Alabama star quarterback Joe Namath in January 1965 for a package worth a then-unheard of value of roughly $430,000, the Jets, and the AFL, were made.

Wismer's brother John, a Port Huron radio station owner, claimed ever afterward Harry had been thrown down the stairs by mobsters, though for what reason wasn't clear.

Today Wismer is remembered primarily as something of an eccentric rather than as a crucial founder of the AFL and one of the creators of professional football's modern era through shared broadcast revenues.

The Musical, a bonus feature on the DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Simon Helberg mentions his character Moist's fear of stairs, commenting "That's how Harry Wismer died."

While pulling the New York Titans and the AFL together, Wismer was approached by writer George Plimpton, who asked to join the team's training camp for a Sports Illustrated profile.