Vince Papale of ‘Invincible’ fame got his start in pro football 50 years ago. It was not with the Eagles.

Fifty years have actually passed since Vince Papale first tried out for a professional football team in Philadelphia, but he can remember the whole thing as if it were yesterday.

That team, by the way, was not the Eagles.

Fifty years ago last month, two years before he became famous for making the Eagles as a 30-year-old free-agent wide receiver with no collegiate football experience, Papale was among 150 invited to a camp for the Philadelphia Bell of the new World Football League.

Papale, a native of Glenolden, Delaware County, made the Bell roster, dramatically altering the arc of his life story — though, for some reason, his 17 months in the WFL are not mentioned in Invincible, the well-received 2006 film starring Mark Wahlberg as Papale.

Papale, now 78, a motivational speaker with homes in Jupiter, Fla., and Queen Village, can’t exactly say why his time with the Bell was dropped from the version of his life story shown on the silver screen. He can hazard a guess, though.

“They didn’t want to diminish the drama of me making the team,” Papale, talking about the Eagles, not the Bell, says over the phone from Florida.

But his time with the Bell, it turns out, was quite an integral part of his Cinderella story. Asked if he would have tried out for the Eagles had he not played first for the Bell, Papale pauses, then says, “I’ve never been asked that question. I don’t think so. But I don’t know.”

He will say that his tenure with the Bell — he caught the first regular-season pass in WFL history — did help him gain confidence to do what he needed to crack coach Dick Vermeil’s first Eagles roster in 1976. Papale spent three seasons with the Eagles, becoming a special-teams ace, then a bona fide celebrity, a long shot determined to make it.

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“It is what it is,” Papale says of his WFL tenure. “I got a shot, and I took advantage of it.”

Not that Papale minded that much, but Hollywood used dramatic license while making the movie — “based on the life story of Vincent Papale,” as the opening credits say. Notably, Papale hardly jumped from those rough-touch sandlot football games straight to the NFL.

What actually happened in that gap not covered in Invincible is a pretty good story unto itself, he acknowledges. He pursued the Bell, in large part, because his foremost athletic dream, participating in the decathlon at the Summer Olympics, was not going to happen.

Papale had played football with some distinction as a senior at Interboro High School in Prospect Park, but he earned a full athletic scholarship in track and field at St. Joseph’s University — a far better option than enlisting in the Marine Corps or Air Force.

Then, as now, St. Joe’s had no football team. So he focused on track, another sport he did well as a senior at Interboro. Papale, who competed in the pole vault, triple jump, and high hurdles at St. Joe’s (and was the team captain), also earned a degree in marketing.

Papale became a full-time teacher and coach at Interboro High, but he chased the Olympics until, as he explains it, a conflict between the NCAA and the AAU over his eligibility squashed it. The time had come to utilize his speed, still blazing, on a football field.

He joined the Aston Knights, a Delco-based team in the minor league Seaboard Football League, and he was all but impossible for defensive backs to cover — “I was just killing the league,” he says.

Then he was told about the World Football League, which would have a local team, the Bell. The coach of one of the Knights’ opponents, Hugh Wyatt, would be the personnel director of the Bell. Papale was intrigued. Why not try out?

He says, “It gave me a chance to compete at a higher level of competition than semipro football, where you’re maybe playing for a six-pack of beer and a pair of Riddell shoes.”

He was also to be paid $16,000 — more in a football season than he was making as a full-time teacher, head track coach, and assistant football coach at Interboro.

He was, as in the movie, an avid Eagles fan, but the Bell were certainly far more attainable. Because of his accomplishments with the Aston Knights, he signed a tryout contract and was invited to what was called an “indoctrination camp” at Cherry Hill West High School.

Papale, then living in Ridley Park (the movie has him living in a South Philadelphia rowhouse), discovered he had the speed not just to fit in, but to excel. It helped, a lot, that he ran a 4.5-second 40-yard dash, impressing Ron Waller, the Bell’s rather intense head coach.

“When we did a seven-on-seven drill, to me, it was like playing back in the rough-touch league,” Papale says. “I was just blowing past these guys.”

That led to another Bell camp attended by about 100 players at JFK Stadium, where he ran into an old high school buddy named John Bosacco, who would become important later. “I said, ‘Hey, Johnny! What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m one of the owners,’ " Papale recalls.

Papale did well enough to be invited to the team’s training camp at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University. There, he began to grab headlines. The Inquirer’s headline: “Papale Hopes to Make It With Bell, Despite No Experience.”

Referring to the WFL in the article, Papale said, “I have no qualms about someone calling the league inferior. You have to start somewhere. I’ve never gotten the opportunity in the NFL.”

A half-century later, Papale recalls having a particularly strong performance in a preseason game against the New York Stars (although he did refer to them as the “Titans”), catching a few passes and throwing two knockdown blocks. He made the Bell roster.

And in the first play of the Bell opener, a 33-8 victory over the Portland Storm at JFK Stadium on July 10, 1974, Papale ran a hitch pattern and caught a short pass from James “King” Corcoran, a self-styled playboy who’d starred for the semipro Pottstown Firebirds.

“The brand of ball was a whole hell of a lot better than the WFL’s detractors wanted us to believe,” Bill Lyon wrote in the next day’s Inquirer.

Papale remembers that Tony Bennett sang the national anthem before the game, and that Papale posed for photos with former students and teachers from Interboro High on the field after the game. He says of the night: “It was crazy. I didn’t know anything from anything.”

But the game was not the most notable news of the night. The announced attendance became the story: 55,534. There would be an enormous catch: The figure had been “papered,” inflated by free tickets. Borrowing from the Watergate scandal, it became known as Paper-Gate.

At the next home game, a 17-15 loss to New York on July 25, the Bell announced a crowd of 64,719. But Frank Dolson, in an Aug. 4 Inquirer article headlined, “Bell’s Attendance Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be,” cited figures turned into the city for tax purposes to report that only 20,855 of 120,253 at those games had paid for their tickets.

“Instead of the hottest ticket in town, the Bell is actually the freest ticket in town,” Dolson wrote.

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Paper-Gate did not kill Papale’s — or the Bell’s — interest in football, but it did punch a hole in the public’s interest. The team began reporting actual attendance figures. Merely 12,396 came to the next home game, a 46-15 victory over the Memphis Southmen, whose lineup included three former Miami Dolphins: Larry Csonka, Paul Warfield, and Jim Kiick.

The Bell won nine of 20 games and were far from a lousy WFL team, but interest cratered. The WFL’s kooky plan to use pants color-coded by position was quickly scuttled. By that Oct. 16, only 750 attended a 30-25 loss to Shreveport, played on a muddy JFK Stadium field that had been left uncovered during a two-inch downpour the day before.

The actual attendance was more like 400, Phil Jasner wrote in the Daily News, “but give them this much,” he wrote of the Bell, “they gave away no tickets.”

Papale finished with nine catches for 121 yards, according to WFL records, and recalls having a lot of fun that season, which ended with an 18-3 playoff loss to the Florida Blazers. (Even though the Bell had not actually qualified for the playoffs, they were handed the berth because the Charlotte Hornets, who’d finished with a better record, could not guarantee selling enough tickets).

Papale had gotten into a spat with Corcoran, who’d stopped throwing him the ball when he was knocked out cold by three players while unsuccessfully trying to catch a pass on a slant pattern: “Back then, you didn’t get concussions,” Papale says. “You got a ding, D-I-N-G.”

But Papale did become a better special-teams player, which would help him earn a spot on the 1976 Eagles. Meanwhile, Corcoran was replaced for the 1975 Bell season with Bob Davis, who’d played in 40 games with three NFL teams. The Bell moved to Franklin Field.

By then, the 30-year-old Bosacco had become the energetic face of the franchise, but nothing he did worked. Willie Wood, the Hall of Fame defensive back, was named as head coach — pro football’s first Black head coach in the “modern era.” The first five home games of the 1975 season drew 16,677 fans, total. The Bell won only four of 11 games.

And then it was over. On Oct. 22, 1975, the WFL announced that it was terminating operations. Papale recalls attending a Ladies Day happy-hour gathering of players at a Philadelphia bar with Davis when Davis got a call from his agent with the bad news. They turned on the 6 o’clock news at the bar for confirmation.

“This was merely a form of euthanasia,” Bosacco, who’d lost more than $2 million of his own money, told the Daily News.

The team’s practice facility was closed to the players, but the players did get paid — which had become unusual for the WFL. Papale realized he had a bigger problem: “Here I am. I’m without a job,” he says. “I call Interboro and say, ‘Hey, hey, hey! Here I am.’ "

But Interboro had replaced him. This is roughly where Invincible starts: He became a substitute teacher, a bartender, even a “doorman” at a nightclub with his pal, the late Dennis Franks. He pursued a master’s degree at West Chester. You pretty much know the rest.

Papale does not keep up with WFL people, because, as he put it, “a lot of them aren’t on the board anymore” — meaning that Waller, Wood, Corcoran, and Bosacco and so many others are gone. So are Lyon, Dolson, and Jasner.

His story has made him famous and his life comfortable, but Papale, not surprisingly, still keeps quite busy. He is still happily married to his sweetheart, Janet (portrayed in the movie by Elizabeth Banks in a somewhat fictionalized role). He says he loves keeping up with their two children, Gabrielle and Vinny, a wide receiver for the Memphis Showboats of the UFL.

He was delighted to be asked to remember the days when he was just a hustling, 28-year-old wannabe from Delco. Millions know his Eagles story. But the Bell really teed it up.

“I was a pioneer in some respects,” Vince Papale says of the WFL days, “but I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone but myself — that I could play at that level.”