RED GRANGE CHANGED
THE SHAPE OF AMERICAN SPORTS

Today more Americans give more attention to sports than do the people of any other nation on earth. More than any other person, Red Grange, the Wheaton Ice Man who now lives in a deserved comfortable retirement in Florida, is the architect of this unprecedented attention in the United States to games and the athletes who play them.

The Grange career on the gridiron lasted for nearly one and a half decades ... high school in Wheaton, the University of Illinois and professional football. But his impact on the game and all sports in the U. S. rests on about five hours that came on two October afternoons ... October 18, 1924 in Champaign and October 31, 1925 in Philadelphia.

Red Grange and Earl Britten  begin the first of four touch-  down runs against Michigan  October 18, 1924.

With Red Grange as the cutting edge, Coach Robert Zuppke’s University of Illinois football teams on those afternoons demolished the national championship hopes of two formidable opponents ... the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. These afternoons made Grange a national sports hero of such magnitude that college football was made more exciting and professional football was raised from a sandlot game to a new national sport.

The Grange career has had an impact on most professional sports, even the games of baseball and tennis that were nationally important before Red Grange played on the gridiron.

Red Grange was the first football player to have a personal representative, an agent they are called now, to work out playing agreements. Grange was the first professional athlete in team sports whose pay was linked with the number of fans his fame and performance attracted to the games. These have become commonplace for professional athletes.

So great was the Red Grange impact on football and sports generally that he remains a gridiron hero fifty years after those electrifying October afternoons at the University of Illinois. Within the year spectators attending the University of Alabama football games were asked to name the greatest football player of all time. In a state geographically far removed from Wheaton and the University of Illinois and on a campus in the South that has produced its own football heroes, Red Grange was voted the greatest gridiron performer of all time.
 

Wheaton's Famous Ice Man

The youthful Red Grange played on the Wheaton Community High School football team four years, as an end the first year and in the backfield the other years. He was a high school gridiron sensation. In his final game for the DuPage County championship against Downers Grove, he set a scoring record of forty-five points that still stands for high school championship games.

Ironically, Red Grange did not go out for football when he went to the University of Illinois. He was a star in four sports in high school ... track, football, basketball and baseball. He thought baseball and basketball were his best sports bets to earn a varsity letter. The immortal Wheaton Ice Man did not answer the call when the freshman team candidates were called for practice that fall of 1922. When his fraternity brothers directed him to go out for football and got out the big paddle, Grange decided to report. He was issued jersey No. 77. In the first scrimmage against the lllini Varsity, Grange returned a punt 65 yards for a touchdown. In the next three years Grange turned No. 77 into a national byword.

Spurred by the first general use of the motorcar, radio and a boom economy, Americans during the 1920s began raising sports to the level of a national institution. Nothing like this development had ever happened in this country, or any other, before. Baseball had been regarded as the national game for several decades, but suddenly sports of many kinds became national past times. During the decade, each of these sports produced at least one all-time great. In baseball, there was Babe Ruth; in golf, Bobby Jones; in boxing, Jack Dempsey; in tennis, Bill Tilden and Helen Wills; in swimming, Johnny Weissmuller; and in football, it was Wheaton’s one and only Red Grange.

It is valid to contend that Grange’s role was the most spectacular of all in that he raised first college football and later professional to the level of national sports. Ruth, Dempsey, Jones, Tilden and the other sports immortals of the 1920s were stars in games that already had a wide following and in some cases, as in golf and tennis, international recognition.

Before Grange’s meteoric career on the gridiron, college football was largely a campus game of interest to students and alumni; but by the time Grange’s all-American career was finished at the University of Illinois, millions who had no particular interest in a college were aware of the Galloping Ghost and college football. Professional football, before Grange, was largely played by teams from neighboring towns in sand lot circumstances before hundreds, rather than thousands of fans.

The Illini football season of 1923 must have lingered in Coach Bob Zuppke’s memory as among the most pleasant of his long and illustrious coaching career. His 1922 football season had been a disaster. Then the 1923 team turned in an unbeaten season, were co-champions of the Big Ten and Red Grange, in his first varsity year, was named an All American.

Something very special was arranged for the 1924 season. The new University of Illinois Memorial Stadium, largest campus arena in the nation for football, was to be dedicated on October 18. The University of Michigan, also undefeated in 1923 and co-champions with the Illini, would be the opponent.

Michigan came to the big game a favorite. The Illini was missing some of its players from the 1923 team through graduation. Too, Illinois had lost its first game of the season, 9 to 6, to the University of Nebraska. Michigan was undefeated.

The Chicago Tribune reported, "It was the biggest crowd that ever attended a game of any kind in the State of Illinois. The capacity was sixty-seven thousand and there wasn’t a seat left."

No one has better described in so few words the historic Illinois-Michigan game and Red Grange’s contribution than Jerry Liska of the Associated Press in the book, "Sports Immortals" published recently by Prentice-Hall.

"The autumn wind still whistles shrilly through cavernous Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois, as if in perpetual tribute to college football’s legendary Galloping Ghost.

"It was at the dedication of Memorial Stadium, an imposing landmark on the flat plains surrounding Champaign, Illinois, that Halfback Harold ("Red") Grange slashed, whirled and spun phantom-like for the most fabulous twelve minutes in college gridiron history.

"Against Felding H. ("Hurry Up") Yost’s proud Michigan team, in a sultry October 18, 1924, Grange streaked ninety-five yards for a touchdown on the opening kickoff and then darted from scrimmage for three more stunning touchdown runs of sixty-seven, fifty-six and forty-four yards before leaving the field with three minutes remaining in the first quarter. In the second half, he scored a fifth TD on a twelve-yard run just for good measure.

"Almost one year later to the month, October 31, 1925, the Illini Thunderbolt in his senior season made Eastern skeptics complete believers, in a game against a great Pennsylvania team. Before a partisan crowd of sixty-three thousand that expected to see a Mid-western myth disintegrated, Grange swivel-hipped to three touchdowns, the first a sixty-yard scoring run the first time he carried.

"Football has grown much more sophisticated, specialized and intricate since Grange -a picture of grace, balance and speed -was the epitome of gridiron greatness, a Golden Twenties’ athletic peer of Babe Ruth’s , Jack Dempsey’s, Bobby Jones’s and Bill Tilden’s. Grange, whose magic name turned pro football from an ugly duckling to a present-day gilded and plush bird of paradise, will be remembered as long as football is played in America."

On Nov. 22, 1925, the day following his last game for the University of Illinois, Red Grange signed the first big time professional contract, casting his lot with the Chicago Bears, It called for one hundred thousand dollars and a share of the gate in a period when most professional football players were getting twenty-five to a hundred dollars a game, if they were paid at all.

The young player-manager of the Bears, George Halas, quickly organized professional football’s first nation-wide tour to capitalize immediately on Grange’s gridiron fame at the University of Illinois. It was the tour that turned professional football into a major sport. Crowd records were set everywhere the Bears went. In New York’s Polo Grounds, in the stadium where Babe Ruth and the Yankees played during the baseball season, the Wheaton redhead lured an astounding sixty-five thousand fans. Later on the same tour, Grange and the Bears set an all-time record at that time for a football game crowd when they played before seventy-five thousand in the Coliseum in Los Angeles.

The Red Grange football career began in Wheaton in 1918, on a playing field carved out of an old apple orchard, and ended in an exhibition game between the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants at Gilmore Stadium in Hollywood, California in 1935. He played for Wheaton High School, the University of Illinois, and the Chicago Bears and briefly for the New York Yankees football team.

Although he was excellent in passing, kicking and on defense (players handled both offensive and defensive responsibilities when Grange played), it was the elusive long runs that made him football’s Galloping Ghost and nationally famous.

In high school and college and as a professional, Grange carried the ball four thousand, thirteen times, gained thirty-three thousand, eight hundred and twenty yards, for a total of more than nineteen miles, an average of eight point four yards per carry. He scored two thousand, three hundred and sixty-six points in two hundred forty-seven games.
 

Mr. & Mrs. Red Grange, 1980

 
The Galloping Ghost’s valedictory as a player was typically Grange. The last time he carried the mail for the Chicago Bears in that January, 1935 game, he reversed off the weak side of the line. A New York Giant lineman shouted to the line backers, "look out! There goes the old Man" as Grange sprinted sixty-three yards to the twenty-yard line."

Grantland Rice, the nation’s all-time chronicler of the American sports scene, wrote these lines of tribute to the Wheaton redhead:

"A streak of fire, a breath of flame,
A gray ghost thrown into the game
Eluding all who reach and clutch;
That rival hands may never touch;
A rubber bounding, blasting soul,
Whose destination is the goal -
Red Grange of Illinois!"