| Football was almost exclusively a college sport for a
quarter century, but beginning in 1925 – beginning, to be precise, with the day Red
Grange turned pro – its excellence and evolution have been embodied increasingly in
the National (professional) Football League. Organized by George Halas and others in
1919 as a jumped-up semi-pro league, the NFL floundered for awhile, then gained instant
legitimacy and renown when Grange, its first bright star, joined Halas’ Chicago Bears
a few days after his last college game for a wintertime coast-to-coast barnstorming tour.
For the first time, fans across the nation knew that pro football existed. For the first
time, talented college players knew they had a future in cleats after graduation.
Since Grange, annual infusions of new talent plus the NFL’s marked willingness to
experiment, to improve and to evolve have meant that, across most of the century, the pros
have not only had the best players but also the best game.
And since Grange, the growth and development of that game have been generated in large
part by successive All-Pro athletes gifted with far-reaching individual brilliance. The
exploits and significance of many of these transcendent athletes are in this chapter set
down variously: as essays, personality profiles or interviews.
1. Red Grange, Galloping Ghost
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 ...
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