Red Grange, Galloping Ghost

Featured book excerpt
Football in America: Game of the Century
By Bob Oates

In the Roaring Twenties, Red Grange changed the future of spectator sports in America.

The most celebrated football player of the twentieth century, the most influential, the most popular in his own time, and perhaps the most controversial, was Harold (Red) Grange, a 1920s University of Illinois All-American halfback.

As a college junior in 1924, Grange caught the public’s attention with the most dramatic game-day accomplishment of the century: Against powerful Michigan, he scored four touchdowns in the first twelve minutes on four long runs. Awed sportswriters could only estimate the distances: ninety-five, sixty-seven, forty-five and fifty-six yards. As a coup, it still seems impossible.

A year later, Grange, known as the Galloping Ghost, parlayed the drama of his college life into his most historic achievement: putting the National Football League on the map.

Before Grange turned pro, the NFL was a back-page item in the newspapers, literally, and a financial failure at the gate. With its unique new star, the league became an overnight success.

There has never been an American sports idol like Grange, and it is sobering to reflect on what pro football was without him in an era when big games attracted three or four thousand spectators. Sometimes in those years before Grange, in places like Green Bay and other NFL franchise cities in Wisconsin and Ohio, the entire crowd, at gametime, stood along the sidelines. For several years, George Halas wrote all the game stories that appeared in any Chicago newspaper the day after the Chicago Bears won or lost.

Regularly, Halas, who doubled as club owner and All-Pro end, changed clothes hurriedly when the games were over and made the rounds of all the city’s newspapers, of which there were once seven. On the morning before a Bear game, Halas considered himself a lucky man if the Chicago Tribune kept a paragraph or two of the Sunday-advance story he had left with the editors. Some Chicago editors cut him more than that.

It was similar or worse in New York until suddenly, on December 6, 1925, Grange was there. Astonishing every newspaper in the city and alarming every college in the country, Grange, playing left halfback for the Bears against the New York Giants, was the magnet for an over-capacity crowd of sixty-five thousand New Yorkers who overflowed the Polo Grounds. He was then twenty-two years old. Playing another game that first week with the Bears, Grange drew another sixty-five thousand in Philadelphia; and eventually he topped that in Los Angeles, where Coliseum capacity was then 65,270. He sold every seat. His share of the Los Angeles gate receipts came to $49,000. He made about $1 million in his first three years with the Bears, when, for the first time, they also sold out their own stadium, the venerable Wrigley Field, then and now the summer home of the Cubs. The NFL was suddenly respectable – although, to his surprise, Grange wasn’t. He had dishonored himself in the eyes of millions of Americans. In particular, two groups of his countrymen complained that Grange had let them down: the nation’s church-minded, who said he had desecrated the Sabbath, and the amateur-minded, who said he had desecrated college football.

One week before Grange’s debut with the Chicago Bears, he had played his last college game against Ohio State, at tailback in the old Single Wing, dazzling the folks that day not with runs but passes. He had completed nine of twelve – which, this year, wouldn’t have been a bad day’s work for some NFL quarterbacks, let alone running backs. But this year, no young football player could have turned pro immediately after his final college game. Modern-day rules prohibit that.

The world was different in the fall of 1925, when, as Grange pondered whether to leave Illinois to take a pro offer, there was a national debate over whether he should. Insane as it might seem to today’s Americans, the controversy disrupted the country. Everybody appeared to be taking sides. To many citizens, turning pro was an act of immorality. To many others – to those who, for example, worked six days a week in the era of the ten-hour day – it was a chance to see Red Grange on Sunday.

But Sunday was for church and reflection, the devoutly religious said. Grange was denounced from pulpit to pulpit. He was also denounced by his own coach, the Illinois veteran, Bob Zuppke, for putting on a pro’s uniform. It wasn’t only church people who called turning pro immoral. It was the college people who said it loudest.

As of the mid-1920s, they and many of their countrymen had been influenced – some said brainwashed – by the amateur movement’s Olympic and college sports leaders, Avery Brundage prominently among them, who thought of pro football as faintly but definitely wicked, even un-American. In that faraway interval of the twentieth century, college football was revered, the pros detested and dreaded.

"Nobody today realizes how hard the colleges fought pro ball," Grange said in one of his last interviews after retiring to Florida in 1983. "The colleges were afraid that pro football would ruin college football. I’d have been more popular with some people if I’d joined Al Capone’s mob in Chicago instead of the Bears."

In Los Angeles, there were those who much preferred Capone. Leaders of the two Los Angeles universities, USC and UCLA, combined forces to enlist the newspapers and lobby the City Council in a campaign to keep the pros out of the publicly owned Coliseum for even exhibition games. The colleges had been negligent once: Underestimating pro football, they had shortsightedly allowed Grange to draw his sixty-five thousand to the only Los Angeles stadium that could hold that many.

So now, they vowed never to repeat that mistake. And with the help of the press of that day, USC and UCLA were wildly successful. After Grange’s one Los Angeles appearance, the college campaign, renewed annually, kept the pros out of California for twenty years. Thus in 1927, when the NFL placed a franchise in Los Angeles for the first time, the team was denied access to the Coliseum by a consortium including, among others, USC, UCLA, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Forced to play its entire schedule on the road that season, Los Angeles’ first NFL team gave up a year later and moved away.Not until 1946, when Cleveland Rams owner Dan Reeves orchestrated a successful Coliseum campaign of his own, did the pros regain the right that Grange had – the right to play in the city’s stadium on the afternoons when the colleges were absent ...