2. Bronko Nagurski, Football’s First Big Winner
In the days when football was played largely on the ground, everyone was in awe of
another Chicago ballcarrier.
Of the All-Pro football players who stirred America in the twentieth century, Bronko
Nagurski joined Red Grange and Sammy Baugh in the first wave. And to sports fans, each
symbolized something different.
Baugh was a precision passer, Grange a matchless open-field runner, Nagurski the
ultimate power symbol.
As a physical specimen, Nagurski, of the three, was the most masterful. In a time when
the game wasn’t as intellectually demanding as it was to become, Nagurski took charge
as a famously feared power runner who seemed to be the essence of what football was all
about. Even so, ironically, in his two biggest games, this embodiment of football’s
brute force helped demonstrate the tactical superiority of the forward pass. In
championships won as a passer, Nagurski equaled Baugh: two each.
A 225-pound fullback standing six-two, Nagurski, who in 1933 led the Chicago Bears to
victory in the National Football League’s first championship game, is identified in
his hometown as the greatest football player of all time. The town is International Falls,
which is in the far north of Minnesota.
There the leading hotel, a new Holiday Inn, opened a Bronko Nagurski Room one July in
the big fullback’s final years. A tinted, life-size Nagurski photo was unveiled when
the room, a banquet hall, was dedicated, and everybody was there – almost everybody
in Kouchiching County, that is – except Nagurski, who refused to come.
"That’s Bronko," a friend said that summer. "He’s a shy one.
Always has been."
In his seventies, Nagurski was then residing on the U.S.-Canada border at Rainy Lake,
just four miles up the Rainy River from International Falls (population 6,940). With his
wife, the former Eileen Kane, with whom Nagurski raised six children, he had moved into
the lakeside cottage during the years when he was playing three positions – tackle
and linebacker as well as fullback – for the 1930s Bears.
Numerous Kanes and Nagurskis lived in the neighborhood in those years and still do.
It’s a neighborhood that is alternately a winter wonderland and a domain of brief,
joyous summers. And the summer Bronko was seventy-five, his relatives and in-laws held a
family reunion, with Bronko and Eileen as guests of honor.
Eileen enjoyed herself as usual, but Bronko, of course, wouldn’t come.
"He’s reclusive," Dave Siegel, a reporter for the International Falls Daily
Journal, said. "We’ve been trying to get an updated file picture of Nagurski for
ten years, and we hung around the reunion all day, but no luck."
He was easier to shoot in the 1930s, when, at one time or another, almost every Chicago
cameraman caught Nagurski ferrying an opponent or two across the goal line on his back.
For decades, his name summoned the raw energy of football. And to this day, they point out
the brick wall in Chicago that Nagurski cracked when he ran into it carrying a football
one fall afternoon in Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs and, then, the Bears. Scoring the
winning touchdown in that game – at the south end of a cramped field where the end
zone was only nine yards deep – Nagurski stomped on two opponents, leaving one
unconscious and the other with a broken shoulder. Next he collided with a goal post and
spun into the wall, which stopped him at last. Picking himself up, he told a teammate,
"That last guy hit pretty hard."
At an NFL game years later, when former quarterback Fran Tarkenton asked him about that
day, Nagurski remembered everything but fracturing the wall.
"But I’ve seen the crack myself," Tarkenton said.
"Oh, c’mon now," Nagurski said. "No human could crack a brick
wall."
No human, maybe. But Nagurski had super-human strength. Everybody who played in that
era said so. He was the NFL’s first big winner, and he was the one they talked about
the most whenever old-timers got together, as they did one summer in Canton, Ohio, home of
the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "I saw Nagurski for the first time when I was an NFL
rookie," remembered Don Hutson, who has ranked as one of football’s top two or
three receivers, all-time, since his All-Pro days at Green Bay. "At Alabama, I’d
been known as a good defensive end, so I played Nagurski the way I’d play a Georgia
fullback. On first down they gave him the ball, and he ran straight over me. I mean he ran
me down and kept going without breaking stride."
Arch-rival Green Bay fullback-linebacker Clark Hinkle recalled: "He was the most
bruising runner ever. The first time I tackled Nagurski, I had to have five stitches in my
face. My biggest thrill in football was the day he announced his retirement."
At their Canton reunion that summer, Hutson and Hinkle were joined eventually by no
fewer than four other all-timers: center Mel Hein, halfback Johnny Blood (McNally), guard
Danny Fortmann, and, of all people, Bronko Nagurski himself. Hutson and Blood lured Bronko
out of International Falls, Hein said, by putting pressure on Eileen Nagurski, somehow
persuading her to fly in with the Recluse of Rainy Lake.
It isn’t true that he hadn’t left his lakeside cottage for twenty years, but
he hadn’t left it often, and his appearance at Canton made the show for old-time
fans.
Hein, the old New York Giants’ Hall of Fame center, was asked how the Hutson-Blood
connection could get Nagurski all the way to Canton when the International Falls people
couldn’t get him downtown. "In the last few years, Hutson and the rest of us
have called on Bronko at the lake," Hein said. "He knows what we look like, and
we know what he looks like now. So he doesn’t mind being around us. But I think
he’s embarrassed to show himself in public at International Falls. He’d rather
they remember him as he used to be, as he used to look, when he had his strength –
when he was tough and trim, and awesomely vigorous." ...
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