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Book Report: The Galloping Ghost

by Randy Snow

Originally posted on AmericanChronicle.com, Monday, November 17, 2008

Every football fan knows the name of Harold "Red" Grange. It goes hand-in-had in football lore with the likes of Jim Thorpe, Bronko Nagurski, Knute Rockne and the Four Horsemen.

In the new book, The Galloping Ghost, author Gary Andrew Poole explores the life and career of Red Grange, the man who is single-handedly credited with bringing professional football out of obscurity and into the national consciousness in the 1920´s.

In 1923, his first season of playing college football, Grange and his teammates at the University of Illinois went undefeated with a perfect 8-0 record. Grange had 12 touchdowns and rushed for 1,260 yards that year. Illinois shared the 1923 college football national championship with the University of Michigan.

On October 18, 1924, in the third game of his second college football season, Illinois hosted Michigan in what was billed as the matchup of the year. Coming into the game, Michigan had a 27-game winning streak that dated back to 1921.Grange cemented his place in college football history that day by scoring four touchdowns in the first 12 minutes of the game. He took the opening kickoff and returned it 95 yards for a touchdown. On the next series, Grange had a 67-yard touchdown run. The third time he touched the ball, Grange ran 56 yards for another touchdown and his fourth touchdown came on a 44-yard run. The Illini went on to win the game 39-14. It was the first game ever played at Illinois´ newly built Memorial Stadium in Champagne, where the team still plays today.

In all, Grange scored five rushing touchdowns against Michigan, threw a touchdown pass, returned a kickoff for a touchdown and intercepted two passed while playing defense. He had 212 yards rushing, 64 yards passing and 126 return yards for a total of 402 yards on the day.

Grange may have been known as the Galloping Ghost, but he was also known by another nickname, The Wheaton Iceman. During the summers, Grange worked a job delivering ice to people in his hometown of Wheaton, Illinois. He had about 40 customers on his route and worked six days a week. Delivering 50-pound blocks of ice in the summer kept him in shape for playing football in the fall.

While Grange was in college, he became friends with Charles C. Pyle, an entrepreneur/con-man who, at the time, was the manager of the local movie house. C.C. Pyle, as he was known, saw the potential in marketing Grange and knew that he could be a great star at the professional football level. Pyle talked Grange into secretly becoming his partner.

While Grange played football for Illinois during his senior season in 1925, Pyle was quietly shopping the college superstar's services to the Chicago Bears. The NFL was only five years old at the time and needed a big name player if it hoped to survive. Pyle met with the Bears owner/player George Halas as the college football season was getting underway. Halas had also gone to college at Illinois and even played football under the same coach that Grange was now playing for, Robert Zuppke.

Pyle secretly negotiated a deal that would have Grange join the Bears as soon as the Illinois football season was over. Once he was signed with the Bears, the team would embark on a barnstorming tour across the country to show off their newest player. Pyle was also the one who went out and secured opponents for the Bears barnstorming tour. In return, Grange and Pyle would receive 50% of the money generated from the tour.

After shocking the college football world in the game against Michigan in 1924, Grange and his Illinois team struggled during the first part of the 1925 season. Illinois was 1-3 going into the game against the heavily favored University of Pennsylvania Quakers and Grange's performance so far that season had been average at best.

The weather in Philadelphia was snowy and cold that day and the field at Franklin Field was a muddy mess. However, the first time Grange touched the ball he ran 56 yards for a touchdown. Grange finished the game with 363 yards rushing and Illinois won the game 24-2. It was the first time that the influential sportswriters from the east coast had gotten a first-hand look at Grange in action. Their pregame skepticism of the Illinois running back turned to post game adulation after witnessing his performance.

Grange played his last college football game on November 21, 1925. It was a 14-9 road win at Ohio State in front of a crowd of 84,295. Minutes after the game was over, he announced that he was going to enter pro football.

The very next day, he signed a contract in Chicago to play for the Bears. A few hours after the signing, he was in attendance at the Bears game against the Green Bay Packers, but he did not play. He made his NFL debut a few days later on November 26, Thanksgiving Day, in a game against the Chicago Cardinals. The game ended in a 0-0 tie.

After that, the Bears embarked on an 18-game barnstorming tour with their new star. They played eight games in the next 15 days against teams in New York, Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Columbus, Ohio and Washington, D.C. The second leg of the tour took them to Tampa, Jacksonville, New Orleans, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. The final game of the tour was on January 31, 1926 in Seattle, Washington. Grange played in all but two of the 19 total games with the Bears.

After the tour, Pyle tried to become a part owner of the Bears. He wanted one third of the team for himself and Red. Halas refused.

On February 6, 1926, the NFL owners got together in New York. They saw the physical toll that the barnstorming tour had taken on Grange and the Bears and they came up with what was known as the "Grange Rule." Basically, it stated that no NFL team could play more than two games per week and that college football players could not sign with the NFL until after their current college class had graduated.

It was at this meeting that C.C. Pyle also made a push to get his own team in New York City. He had already secured a contract to play in Yankee Stadium and wanted the NFL to grant him his own team. The owners refused because they already had the New York Giants and didn't want to have two teams in the same city competing for fans.

Pyle then decided that he would form his own football league and build it around Grange's popularity. The league was called the American Professional Football League and featured his new team, the New York Yankees and eight other teams. Among the other APFL teams was the Brooklyn Horsemen, which featured quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, who was one of the famed Four Horsemen from Notre Dame.

To cash in on Grange's national celebrity status and good looks, Pyle also secured a Hollywood contract for Red and during the summer of 1926, he made a silent picture titled, One Minute to Play, in which Red starred as (what else) a football player. The movie did quite well at the box office.

In the fall of 1926, the APFL took to the playing field, but soon ran out of money and the league folded after just one season. Grange's Yankees finished in second place behind the Philadelphia Quakers.

Grange made a second silent movie in the summer of 1927 titled, Racing Romeo, in which he played a race car driver. That movie, however, was a flop.

C.C. Pyle, undaunted by the failure of the APFL, still had one more trick up his sleeve. He talked the NFL owners into letting the Yankees join the NFL in 1927, but there was a catch. The Yankees would be relegated to the status of a traveling team. That way, the other NFL teams would reap the benefits at the ticket gate by having Red Grange come to play at their stadiums. Pyle had no choice but to agree to the terms.

In 1927, during a game against his former team, the Chicago Bears, Grange severely injured his knee and played sparingly during the rest of the season. The Yankees team folded once the season was over and Grange did not play at all in 1928 as he recovered from his injury.

Pyle and Grange parted ways after the 1927 season. Pyle was not a popular man with the other NFL owners. He soon turned his attention to other endeavors including a pro tennis tour and a cross-country marathon race. He eventually wound up in the freak show business. Pyle died in 1939 at the age of 56.

In spite of all his faults and underhanded business dealings, the NFL owes C. C. Pyle a great deal of credit for their success. It was Pyle who had the vision of what pro football could become, if it was marketed correctly. His barnstorming tour created an excitement for pro football that the league had never known before. Having big name college players on their teams, with the power to draw fans out to the games, was what saved the league from extinction in the 1920´s.

Grange rejoined the Chicago Bears in 1929 and played for the team through the 1934 season, but the knee injury had slowed him down and he was not the same explosive player that he used to be. The Bears won back-to-back titles in 1932 and 1933. His final game was on January 28, 1935 in an exhibition game in Hollywood, California.

In 1931, Grange also starred in a 12-episode movie serial titled, The Galloping Ghost. He also had his own radio show for several years.

Grange, who wore the number 77 in college and in the NFL, was a member of the initial class of inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio in 1963. Today, a statue of Grange stands just inside the entrance and is seen by everyone who enters. He was also inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951.

In 1978, Grange was in attendance at the pre-game coin toss for Super Bowl XII in New Orleans. He was 74 years old at the time. He died on January 28, 1991 at the age of 87.

I found this book to be a great read. It brought one of the legends of college and pro football to life, as well as many of the people who were instrumental in his football career.

To see some fascinating photos and video of Red Grange, go to the author's web site, www.garyandrewpoole.com

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