JRN 362 - Lecture Eight

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Eight

Review
• The end of World War I ushered in
the golden age of football as the
game commanded new heights of
popularity.
• More than 70 new stadiums such as
the Rose Bowl were built in the 1920s
to meet spectator demand.

Review
• The confluence of new stadiums and
new media – film and radio – gave
Americans new ways to live
vicariously through football.
• And that dream life of ecstasy and
violence would draw on three key
people who seemed to be magically
connected.

The Golden Age
• At the opening of the 1920s, the key
figure would be Jim Thorpe, a native
American from Oklahoma who played
football for Pop Warner at the Carlisle
Indian Industrial School and would
later be a star for one of the first pro
leagues.

The Golden Age
• By the middle of the decade, another
key figure emerged: Red Grange.
• Grange left the University of Illinois
after his final college game to play
pro football with the Chicago Bears,
giving the game where they pay for
pay credibility.

The Golden Age
• The connective tissue between
Thorpe and Grange (and much else
of football history) would be George
Halas, the Great Lakes Naval Station
player-coach appointed to the post by
Walter Camp during World War I.

The Golden Age
• When Thorpe (far right in stance)
played for the innovative Warner at
Carlisle School he scored all of
Carlisle’s points in a stunning 18-15
victory at Harvard in 1911.
• In 1912, he led Carlisle to the
mythological national championship,
as calibrated by the polls.

The Golden Age
• That same year, Thorpe won the
Olympic gold medal in the pentathlon
and decathlon at the games held in
Stockholm.

The Golden Age
• Thorpe also played baseball, but he
saw himself first and foremost as a
football player.

The Golden Age
• Over the first two decades of the 20th
century, post-graduate, or pro,
football was played almost entirely in
the football crescent.
• Teams from towns such as Canton
and Massillon, Ohio, and other places
would pay players to show up and
play.

The Golden Age
• In 1913, Thorpe played with a pro
team in Indiana, the Pine Village
Pros.

The Golden Age
• Two years later, the Canton Bulldogs
signed Thorpe, to play against the
Massillon Tigers, for $250.

The Golden Age
• Thorpe led Canton to championships
of the Ohio League in 1916, 1917
and 1919, making the team the
unofficial world champion of
professional football.
• An ad, in fact, proclaimed the 1917
game as the first world championship
of football.

The Golden Age
• Thus, Thorpe set the stage for a
larger professional league that would
eventually range outside of the
crescent to field teams in the urban
centers of the east and midwest.
• And college football leaders in the
1920s would do all they could to stop
that from happening.

The Golden Age
• While Thorpe was winning Ohio
League pro football championships,
college players and alumni joined the
service during World War I but still
played for their posts or stations.
• Halas of the University of Illinois was
one of the former players who joined
after graduating in 1918.

The Golden Age
• The War Department – through
Walter Camp - assigned Halas to the
Great Lakes Naval Training Station in
Chicago where he organized the
football team.

The Golden Age
• The 1919 Rose Bowl featured a
game between two military bases:
Great Lakes Naval Station and Mare
Island.
• Halas scored twice two in leading
Great Lakes to the win – and
establishing the station as a key site
in the history of pro football, one
whose influence persists.

The Golden Age
• In 1919, only two pro football leagues of note – the Ohio League and the
New York Pro Football League – existed.
• Both leagues were pinned tightly to the football crescent, and both had
teams that played against each other in exhibition games.
• Team owners and representatives of the two leagues set up a meeting in
August 1920 to discuss a merger to counter rising salaries.

The Golden Age
• Halas represented the Decatur Staleys, a team owned by a starch company
in Illinois.
• The company owner hired Halas in 1919 to upgrade the team so that it could
compete against other semi-pro and industrial teams in Illinois and adjacent
states.

The Golden Age
• On September 17, 1920, the teams
agreed on a combined league and a
name: the American Professional
Football Association.
• And they named Jim Thorpe to the
post of league president to give it
credibility among players and fans.

The Golden Age
• The league consisted of the following teams:
1. Akron Pros
2. Buffalo All-Americans
3. Canton Bulldogs
4. Chicago Tigers
5. Cleveland Tigers
6. Columbus Panhandles
7. Dayton Triangles
8. Decatur Staleys

The Golden Age
9. Detroit Heralds
10. Hammond Pros
11. Muncie Flyers
12. Chicago (Racine) Cardinals
13. Rochester Jeffersons
14. Rock Island Independents

The Golden Age
• The league followed the contour of
the football crescent and even that of
the Big Ten, or Western, college
conference as established by Stagg
at the University of Chicago.
• Here, in both the industrial heartland
and coal country of America, pro
football took root

The Golden Age
• The league standardized rules of play and animated the idea that the pro
game could compete if it presented quality competition within an organized
schedule to eliminate chaos.
• Teams agreed to a primitive salary cap and promised not to sign each
other’s players or to take players still competing in college.
• Halas would play a pivotal role in establishing the league but almost from the
start his team ran into financial problems.

The Golden Age
• The first year did not go smoothly.
• Some teams disbanded as soon as
they their last games of the year.
• Still, the league crowned its first
champion – Akron, the only team to
complete the season undefeated.

The Golden Age
• In its second year, 1921, recession
forced the Staley company to fire its
athletes.
• Halas paid $100 for the rights to the
team and moved it to Chicago.
• The team – the Chicago Staleys –
won the 1921 league championship,
its first.

The Golden Age
• Also in 1921, a team from the
northern reaches of the crescent
joined the league.
• Its name: the Green Bay Packers,
named for the packing company that
sponsored it, Wisconsin.

The Golden Age
• A year after that, In 1922, with his
team on stronger footing, Halas
renamed his club the Chicago Bears
in homage to baseball’s Cubs and the
home both shared, Wrigley Field.

The Golden Age
• And the league renamed itself.
• It would now be known as the
National Football League, effective
for the 1922 season.

The Golden Age
• Over the next two years, some
original teams would fold, and new
ones added.
• A team headed by Thorpe, the
Oorrang Indians, of LaRue, Ohio, the
smallest town ever to host a NFL
team, joined in 1922 but folded after
the 1923 season.

The Golden Age
• In 1924, the NFL ventured outside
the football crescent to eastern
Pennsylvania, adding the Frankford
Yellow Jackets.
• Previously an independent team, the
Yellow Jackets had their own field in
northeastern Philadelphia.

The Golden Age
• Their fans were typical of pro
football’s followers.
• Unlike college football and its well-
dressed and followers from the upper
class of society, the pro game
attracted working class men such as
these fans of the Yellow Jackets.

The Golden Age
• The industrial northeast was much
like the midwest in that its factories
employed millions of people who
sought recreation and entertainment
when not working, making it possible
for the NFL to expand outside of the
crescent.

The Golden Age
• In 1925, the league would add new
teams, including one in New York,
named the Giants by the owner, Tim
Mara.
• That marked the continued expansion
of the NFL to eastern cities such as
Providence in 1925 and Hartford in
1926 along with a Brooklyn team.

The Golden Age
• Thorpe played for the Giants and the
Rock Island team in 1925.

The Golden Age
• The Giants played their second pre-
season game, in New Britain,
Connecticut, against a local team.
• Jim Thorpe kicked off.

The Golden Age
• The NFL went to the west coast for
the first time in 1926 when the Los
Angeles Buccaneers began play.
• The team’s players were from
California colleges, but it was based
in Chicago and played road games
outside of two exhibition games in
January 1927.

The Golden Age
• Professional football’s problems,
however, persisted. Many
midwestern teams from smaller
markets folded, leaving the league’s
center of gravity in New York,
Providence and Philadelphia with the
Frankford club. The league would not
be stable until the late 1930s.

The Golden Age
• The college game was simply more
dynamic and in the space of just two
generations had bolted itself to
America’s autumnal rites awash in
tradition and nostalgia.

The Golden Age
• When Thorpe - who had left the
league office to lead a team in
Cleveland – appeared in New York
for an exhibition game, the reaction
was muted.
• Only 3,000 people came to see the
world-famous Thorpe and his team
play.

The Golden Age
• “There was none of the cheering or
color of a college contest, and the
players seemed to reflect the
indifference of their audience … The
play lacked speed and snap, and the
men went their paces in a manner
that would have been fatal on a
college gridiron.” – The New York
Times.

The Golden Age
• College coaches were even more
strident in their criticism of the game
as they sought to protect the holy
ground of amateurism.
• During a December 1921 meeting of
the American Football Coaches
Association, college football – and
Walter Camp who attended the
meeting as an honorary member –

The Golden Age
• Pro football, the coaches stated, was
“detrimental to the best interests of
American football and American
youth” among other things.
• The group voted to revoke varsity
letters from undergraduates who
played in pro games and ban officials
who worked the games.

The Golden Age
• And this was just the start of a
decade-long war between college
and professional football.

The Golden Age
• The great Stagg joined in, channeling
his inner Walter Camp about the
dangers of playing for pay.
• His caustic remarks revealed
deepening animosity between the
formally organized but still upstart
National Football League and the
college game.

The Golden Age
• Stagg wrote that:
• “ … to patronize Sunday professional
football is to co-operate with the
forces which are destructive of
interscholastic and intercollegiate
football, and to add to the heavy
burden of the schools and colleges in
preserving it in its ennobling worth.”

The Golden Age
• He went on write:
• “If you believe in preserving
interscholastic and intercollegiate
football for the upbuilding of the
present and future generations of
clean, healthy and right-minded and
patriotic citizens, you will not lend
your assistance to any of the forces
helping to destroy it.”

The Golden Age
• Stagg’s fear of the menacing influence of professional football was based on
a 1921 game between players from Illinois and Notre Dame in Taylorville, Ill.
• Taylorville was a semipro team that had beaten another semipro team from
Carlinville in 1920.

The Golden Age
• Seeking revenge in 1921, Carlinville planned to hire college players from
Notre Dame, then coached by Knute Rockne.
• Carlinville rooters bet heavily on their team to win, knowing they had the
Notre Dame players.

The Golden Age
• Taylorville heard about the scheme and hired players from Illinois.
• Taylorville won, meaning the residents of Carlinville who bet that their team
would win lost.
• Rumors placed the figure at $500,000.

The Golden Age
• The action shook college football to its core and led to severe actions:
- The Notre Dame players were expelled.
- Nine players from Illinois were suspended
- The Big Ten hired its first commissioner.
- The NCAA revised eligibility rules.

The Golden Age
• The battle for football’s soul was on,
and it would soon involve Rockne,
who had transformed a tiny Catholic
college into a national power as
hostilities between college and the
pro league raged in the 1920s.
• And it would involve the greatest
player of his generation – Harold
“Red” Grange of Illinois.

The Golden Age
• Grange was born in western
Pennsylvania but grew up in
Wheaton, Illinois. In summers there,
he delivered ice.
• He earned 16 letters in football,
baseball, basketball and track.
• In track, he was a four-time sprint
champion.

The Golden Age
• Grange, however, did not want to
play football at the University of
Illinois.
• He preferred basketball and track and
wanted to compete in those sports.
• Fraternity brothers talked him into
playing football.

The Golden Age
• In 1923, Grange rushed for 723 yards
as a sophomore.
• In 1924, his exploits became legend.

The Golden Age
• On Oct. 18, 1924, against Michigan in the game that opened Memorial
Stadium on the Illinois campus, Grange scored four touchdowns in 12
minutes:
- He returned the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown.
- He followed that with touchdown runs of 67, 56 and 44 yards.
- That’s as many TDs as Michigan allowed in the two previous
seasons.

The Golden Age
• The press couldn’t get enough of
Grange.
• Grantland Rice wrote: “A streak of
fire, a breath of flame, eluding all who
reach and clutch; a gray ghost thrown
into the game that rival hands may
rarely touch; a rubber bounding,
lasting soul whose destination is the
goal – Red Grange of Illinois.”

The Golden Age
• A Chicago sportswriter gave him one
of the greatest nicknames in the
history of sport: The Galloping Ghost.

The Golden Age
• Camp saw in Grange the perfect
combination of brains and brawn.
• In the citation for Grange’s selection
to the 1924 All-America team, Camp
wrote a startling account of the back’s
capacity to gain yardage, comparing
him in one passage to an animal and
in another as a man possessing a
fertile imagination.

The Golden Age
• “Red had that indefinable something
that the hunted wild animal has –
uncanny timing and the big brown
eyes of a royal buck. I sketched a
team around him like the
complementary background of a
painting …

The Golden Age
• “The average person does not think
of imagination as being necessary to
an athlete. Brawn without brains has
become a by-word in athletics. But in
real life brawn and brains together
excel …

The Golden Age
• “He is elusive, has a baffling change
of pace, a good straight arm and
finally seems in some way to get a
map of the field at starting and then
threads his way through his
opponents.” – Walter Camp

The Golden Age
• Grange’s coach, Robert Zuppke,
agreed:

The Golden Age
• “A brawny football player must be
able to picture the entire scope of the
play he is a part of ... When Red
Grange ran a play, his imagination
pictured the part and duties of every
one of his teammates. Inferior
athletes are unable to do that.” –
Robert Zuppke

The Golden Age
• Grange projected the personality of a
humble football player as per the
template of the grid hero.
• He was an easy sell.
• In 1925, he was on the cover of Time
magazine.

The Golden Age
• For a time, his popularity exceeded
that of Babe Ruth, a larger-than-life
figure in the mid 1920s.

The Golden Age
• Commercial endorsements followed
later.

The Golden Age
• Yet even the Galloping Ghost himself
could not have predicted the impact a
decision he made in November 1925
would have on the sports landscape
of the United States.

The Golden Age
• Some 85,500 people watched
Grange play in his final collegiate
game at Ohio State.
• “The most famous, the most talked-
of, the most written about, most
photographed and most picturesque
player that the game has ever
produced has completed his
intercollegiate career.” – The New

The Golden Age
• Then Grange then did something that
upended football: he turned pro.

The Golden Age
• After his final college game, Grange
headed for Chicago, where he would
play for George Halas and the Bears.
• A ground of 45,000 watched the
game and Grange, who wore his No.
77.
• A week later, 70,000 watched him
play in New York.

The Golden Age
• Grange had given professional
football a legitimacy that he had not
secured prior to 1925.
• And that flew in the face of college
coaches and officials – including the
founding fathers Camp and Stagg –
who earlier than Grange’s
appearance had remarked saw pro
football as the focus of all evil in the

The Golden Age
• "I'd have been more popular with the
colleges if I had joined Capone's mob
in Chicago rather than the Bears,"
Grange said.

The Golden Age
• Grange becomes a somewhat tragic
figure as a result.
• He played for the Chicago Bears in
1925 after leaving Illinois but sought
to own a team, in New York.
• The Giants’ owner, Tim Mara, said no
as he sought to protect his territory.

The Golden Age
• Grange started a team, the New York
Yankees, as part of a new American
Football League in 1926.
• The league folded after one season,
and it folded for a good reason.

The Golden Age
• Few people attended the games.

The Golden Age
• The NFL added the New York
Yankees in 1927 but Grange suffered
a knee injury and didn’t play in 1928.
• He rejoined the Chicago Bears in
1929, playing until 1934 when he
retired to become one of the first
former athletes to broadcast games,
first on radio, then on TV.

The Golden Age
• Grange’s decision to go into
broadcasting after football was
almost as revolutionary as his
decision to turn pro immediately after
his last college game.
• He anticipated the rise of media
coverage of football in radio and film
and, in the 1950s, television,
conquering all as football became

The Golden Age
• College football continued to prosper
as a new public figure – Rockne -
took the stage just as the Walter
Camp era finally ended.

The Golden Age
• Camp died of an apparent heart
attack on March 14, 1925, after a
meeting of college football’s Rules
Committee in New York.
• More than anyone else, Camp stood
as the most influential figure in the
founding era of the game, first as a
player in the 1870s and as the force
behind the rules for almost 50 years.

The Golden Age
• "Football has lost its father," Michigan
football coach Fielding Yost said later
that day. "He gave football its high
place in amateur athletics. He wrote
its rules. He taught its uses. He made
it a dominant factor in American
youth."

The Golden Age
• Indeed, football would represent the
dream life of millions of boys who
could now dream of playing college
and pro football, dedicating their lives
to the game with full support of the
media that popularized their heroes.

JRN 362 - Lecture Eight

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JRN 362 - Lecture Eight