Jim Foster is the founder and first commissioner of the Arena Football League. He is also a former NFL and USFL executive and was later the principal owner of the Iowa Barnstormers. Foster derived the basic concept of Arena football while watching a game of indoor soccer being played at Madison Square Garden on February 11, 1981. He drew it out on a manila envelope. The AFL began league play in 1987. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Jim Foster. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Foster