by Rich Cohen
Halas stayed in the locker room after all the other players had left. He lingered in his street clothes, waiting for the trainer to turn off the lights. He hoped Cobb would be gone, but there he was, fists at his side, standing in the tunnel. He made a motion like he was going to crack Halas, but held out his hand instead, saying, “I like your spirit kid, but don’t overdo it.” Halas walked Cobb back to his hotel, a jaunt down Broadway in the fading gloom of old Manhattan, talking all the way. “Direct your energy positively,” said Cobb. “Don’t waste yourself being negative.” They remained friends the rest of their lives. I have a picture of them taken years later, old men in Bermuda shorts, in the sun, the entire history of American sports.
Halas hurt his hip in June, jammed it sliding into third. On an off day, he went to see a doctor known as Bonesetter Reese. The ensuing treatment bothered Halas for the rest of his life; he would eventually need to have that hip replaced. The injury did not improve his chances of staying in the majors. He had a crushing plate appearance against the Chicago White Sox. This was the team later known as the Black Sox; with the participation of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Lefty Williams, and four others, they would throw the 1919 World Series. Halas faced them at Comiskey Park, a few miles from the apartment where he grew up. It was a homecoming—his friends and family were in the stands. Halas badly wanted to perform, get some wood on the ball. But Eddie Cicotte, who would post an astounding 1.82 ERA that season, was on the mound for the Sox. Halas had determination and hustle, but Cicotte had a wicked knuckleball. In football, hustling can make all the difference, but when you’re hitting a baseball, all the effort in the world won’t help. In baseball, effort is the enemy of contact. On one pitch, Halas watched as the knuckler dipped and dived in for a strike. On another, he looked like a man trying to kill a bee with a Louisville Slugger. Sweat soaked his jersey. Halas struck out on three pitches as his family watched. He called it the worst day of his life.
Shortly after the game, Miller Huggins told Halas he would be sent to the minor league club in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he’d get the at bats he needed. He was on a train a few hours later. Cornfields and forest. The Night Ride of George Halas, nothing behind him, nothing ahead. He worked like a dog in Minnesota, but word soon arrived from New York: the Yankees had acquired a pitcher they intended to play in right field. When they got Babe Ruth, Halas knew he’d never play for the team again.
* * *
By the end of the summer, Halas had his own drafting table on the design floor of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, known as the CB&Q. The company had rail lines across the Midwest and West; its tracks serviced Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico; its gondolas were filled with Pennsylvania coal; its flatcars were heavy with Wisconsin lumber; its boxcars were loaded with Montana beef—seemingly endless trains on endless tracks, delivering the raw products of the continent to factories where they were processed and returned as ingredients. The CB&Q boomed after the First World War, which meant new routes and new trunk lines, the spurs running across factory yards where the men on break played football. Halas designed cast-iron bridges that crossed gullies and ditches, the waste places of industrial life. It was a good job: $55 a week, with the prospect of advancement. He might spend a month designing a span meant to carry a heavy train over a slag heap. An elegant sketch. Blue pencil on drafting paper. He was given the designs of fellow engineers to check for stresses. Geometry and algebra, like back in college, only without the release of a game on Saturday.
On some weekends, he played sandlot football. It was the age of the factory team. Every refinery put together its squad of eleven. They played before mean local crowds, a gridiron chalked behind the mill, brick buildings, black windows, a hundred yards of dirt on a desiccated stretch of lakefront. Pushed by rivalries, the best teams broke away to become independents, free to recruit, bring in ringers, college stars gone to ruin—a shade too old, a step too slow, but in need of cash. The first professional leagues formed in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, the names of its defunct teams recalling an America that’s gone the way of Carthage: the Massillon Tigers, the Youngstown Patricians. The first pro player was William “Pudge” Heffelfinger, a Yale all-American, who in 1892 took $500 to play for the Alleghany Athletic Association. The first great pro team was the Pittsburgh Stars, which dominated something called the National Football League in 1902. The Stars were led by Bucknell graduate Christy Mathewson, who would become one of the storied pitchers in baseball history. There were no written rules in these leagues, or schedules, or playoffs, or champions. Everything was agreed to before the game. By 1920, there were a handful of independents that operated in a near professional way. Chief among them was the Canton Bulldogs, which featured Jim Thorpe, the first star of American football.
Halas was recruited by his former navy teammate Paddy Driscoll, who had been playing for the Hammond Pros, an Indiana team that competed in the factory belt. He was paid $100 a game, nearly double his weekly railroad salary. He faced Thorpe on a sepia-toned afternoon in Canton. On one play, as Halas crawled away from the pile, Thorpe threw a leg over his back and said, “All right, if you are a horse, I’ll ride you.”
* * *
Halas’s bridge-building career ended with a phone call. It came from George Chamberlin, an executive at the A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company of Decatur, Illinois. What do we make? We make starch, son. He asked Halas to meet him at the Sherman House hotel on the North Side. February 1920, the gray days of winter, when the lid that covers Chicago every autumn is still firmly in place. Chamberlin said his boss, Mr. Staley, wanted to field a company football team that could compete with the best factory squads and independents. He’d already done it with baseball, building a roster around “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity, who’d pitched ten seasons in the major leagues. The Staleys were a sensation in southern Illinois, the bleachers of the factory stadium packed with boosters. It proved a boon for the company: good for morale, good for name recognition, good for starch. He wanted to do the same with football. Halas was approached for his pedigree: a student of Zuppke, a star at the University of Illinois, the MVP of the Rose Bowl, a season with the Yankees. He’d be given a job at the factory but be expected to do only a nominal amount of work.
When the offer was made, Halas must have realized how bored he’d been at the CB&Q. He told Chamberlin he had to think it over, but that wasn’t true. It was time he needed—to prepare his mother, who considered it a terrible idea. Here was Halas, forsaking a good job at a big company, for what? Decatur? A blister of a town 172 miles south of the only city that mattered. The boondocks, the sticks, a stain in the cornfields where Illinois bleeds into Dixie. And why? So he could make another run at his old dream, which was a life dedicated to a game. America has become endless childhood, where any passion can take you pro. Halas played a part in creating this world. Before him, football was a boys’ game. You played it because you loved it. If you took money, you were a whore. After him, football was everything.
Halas told Chamberlin he would take the job on the following conditions: that he be allowed to recruit, bring in ringers from around the region; that he be given power to hire these men, offer them jobs at the factory that paid at least as much as they’d make on the best independents—$100 a game; that these men be allowed to practice two hours a day, regardless of their Staley chores. Chamberlin got in touch with the boss, who agreed. Halas gave the railroad notice and put his blue pencils away. From now on, his drawing would be confined to X’s and O’s.
* * *
George Halas arrived in Decatur on March 20, 1920. He was surprised by the bustle of the place, a manufacturing hub surrounded by soybeans and corn, the fields as flat as the sea. When you stand on a berm, you can almost see the curvature of the earth. At night, stars cover the sky from the peak of heaven to the bank of the river, which unwinds toward the Mississippi.
He rented a room in a boardinghouse on El Dorado Stre
et, across from the Staley factory. There isn’t a plaque yet, but there should be. He met with Augustus Eugene Staley, the president and founder of the company, who would later remember the young Halas for “his drive, energy, pep and ambition.” The old zipperoo. The factory is still there, a maze of buildings and breezeways, warehouses and processing floors, burners, cookers, conveyors, and spinning machines churning out high-fructose corn syrup and starch.
Halas was given what mobsters call a no-show job, a title to explain his place on the payroll. No one expected him to master the trade. According to Halas’s grandson Patrick McCaskey, George worked in the yard, unloading freight cars. He was later moved to the glucose department, then to starch.
He spent most of his energy on the team. In addition to the power to hire players, Staley had given Halas $1,000 for supplies, travel expenses, etc. He began that summer by chasing down standouts he’d known in college or the navy. He signed six former Big Ten players, including Paddy Driscoll, Jimmy Conzelman, and Dutch Sternaman, an Illinois teammate who would become a part owner of the Bears. He brought in George Trafton, who’d played for Zuppke at Oak Park High School before becoming a Notre Dame star; Trafton was the first center to snap with one hand. Halas kept just one player from the team Staley had fielded before his arrival: Chuck Dressen, a gifted local who was technically the first quarterback of the franchise. Dressen played a single game for Halas, then went on to a good pro baseball career with the Cincinnati Reds. He later managed half a dozen major league baseball teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Detroit Tigers.
People think of the men who played in the early days of pro football as a distinct species, prehistoric, as tiny as pygmies. By the standards of today they were small and slow, yes—but not that small and not that slow. The average player on the Staley line was over two hundred pounds and over six feet tall. These were not scrubs; most of them had played at universities where football was big business. They practiced two hours a day, working themselves to exhaustion. They played their first game Sunday, October 3, 1920, at Staley Field. Two thousand people watched the Decatur Staleys roll over the Moline Tractors 20–0. Dutch Sternaman scored three touchdowns. Halas set up in the backfield, hands on knees, coaching as he waited for the snap. The team played thirteen games that season, the Illinois Central carrying them from factory town to factory town. They faced the Rock Island Independents, the Kewanee Walworths, the Hammond Pros. You would hardly recognize some of these games as football: it was a street fight, a contest to see who’d submit. They played the Chicago Tigers in Cubs Park, later named Wrigley Field—the team’s first appearance in what would become their home stadium. They hosted the Canton Bulldogs, a game in which Halas once again grappled with Jim Thorpe. Thorpe did not use his arms to tackle. He simply ran you over. It was said he wrapped his pads in sheet metal, suiting himself in armor.
After the game, Thorpe said, “Pretty nice crowd here.”
“Yes, maybe we ought to have a get-together, and form some kind of league,” said Halas. “We could really build this into something.”
The Staleys finished with ten wins, one loss, and a tie. Despite the record, the camaraderie, and the thrill of the games, Halas was disappointed. This was a million miles from the glory of college. There were just not enough quality clubs to play, and, even if good teams could be found, the games were put together in such an on-the-fly manner, the record seemed pointless. There was no way to compare, to identify the best. Halas’s motto was “Never go to bed a loser,” but who could tell the winners from the losers after such a slapdash season?
* * *
In the summer of 1920, Halas wrote Ralph Hay, the owner of the Canton Bulldogs. Hay had tried to set up a pro league the year before, but it fell apart. Halas suggested they try again. Ralph Hay is like one of the unfamiliar names on the Declaration of Independence: a big deal then, a footnote today. Short and stocky with meaty hands, he was an energetic bald man who sold cars. An exchange of letters followed: Halas to Hay, Hay to the owners of a handful of quality football clubs. A meeting was scheduled for September 17. Halas went by train, a trim man in a dark suit, a skinny tie, a newspaper in his fist. He rapped it on his knee when he had an idea, grinned, looked out the window. It was already in his head, the league, the teams, the stadiums. Halas was traveling with Morgan O’Brien, a Staley engineer and a football fan, the first of those innumerable guy Fridays who would do anything for the coach just to be close to the game.
They reached Canton in the afternoon. The streets were shaded by awnings. The awnings snapped in the wind. Twenty or so men turned up, the owners of a dozen clubs who crammed into Hay’s auto showroom. As there were not enough chairs, many of them sat on the running boards of Hay’s Hupmobiles. Halas did a lot of talking. He wanted a schedule, he wanted standings and rules, he wanted a commissioner, and he wanted a winner. In this way, the league was born. For the first two seasons, it was called the American Professional Football Association, a name later changed to the National Football League. Jim Thorpe was named commissioner, as he was the game’s only star. A terrible administrator, he was soon replaced by Joe Carr. The charter members were required to pay a $100 fee, forked over in greasy bills or check or IOU. The tickets getting here cleaned me out. Over the next ninety years, the $100 Halas used to purchase his franchise doubled in value, was raised to the tenth power, and multiplied by a gazillion. In September 2012, the Chicago Tribune estimated the team’s worth at $1.19 billion.
The list of NFL charter teams reads like a roll call of nineteenth-century street gangs: Canton Bulldogs, Decatur Staleys, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Akron Pros, Rochester Jeffersons, Rock Island Independents, Muncie Flyers, Racine Cardinals, Hammond Pros. Industrial towns—that’s where the league started, where its personality formed. It’s a ruggedness that still lingers in the mentality of the coach who distinguishes between hurt and injured: injured is broken, meaning you’re done; hurt is pain, meaning get back out there, you fuckin’ pussy. Only two original franchises survive: the Chicago Bears and the Arizona Cardinals, who previously played as the St. Louis Cardinals, the Chicago Cardinals, and the Racine Cardinals, not because they were based in Racine, Wisconsin, but because the roster was made up of guys who hung out on Racine Street on Chicago’s South Side.
4
LEATHER HEADS
Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost, played seven seasons for the Bears and put the NFL on the map.
The early years of the NFL recall a lost chapter in the leisure life of America. It was a time of over-the-hill quarterbacks and asthmatic runners, men traded for equipment, fans deputized to play. It was fun in the way of a fad or an enterprise everyone expects to fail: enjoy it while you can, soon you’ll take your place on the factory floor. The league was considered disreputable, the Wild West of professional sports. Each year, the names of the teams changed as old powers faded and factory squads ascended. Thirty-five franchises folded in the first decade, including the Milwaukee Badgers, which featured Paul Robeson, the great African American bass-baritone, who played one season in the NFL while attending Columbia Law School; the Providence Steam Rollers; the Akron Pros; and the strangest team in sports history, the Oorang Indians. The passion project of Walter Lingo, who made a fortune in dog kennels, the Oorang Indians were based in LaRue, Ohio, the smallest town to ever boast a professional anything. Lingo, a digger of arrowheads and builder of tepees, loved all things Native American and staffed his team entirely with Indians. He recruited from the Carlisle and Haskell Indian schools as well as Chippewa reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The names on the starting roster included Big Bear, Red Fang, Little Twig, Deer Slayer. He signed Jim Thorpe when he was so broken-down no other pro team would have him.
Halas made the great play of his career against Oorang. It happened in Chicago, on a rainy afternoon. Thorpe was carrying the ball, plunging into the pile. Halas put his head into the big man’s stomach. You could hear the wind leave his lungs: oof! The dark face scow
led as the ball came loose and bounded across the field. Halas picked it up, made one cut, and was gone, with Thorpe behind him. “I ran faster and faster but I sensed he was gaining,” Halas wrote. “I could hear the squishing of his shoes in the mud. When I could almost feel his breath, I dug in a cleat and did a sharp zig. Thorpe’s momentum carried him on and gave me a few feet of running room. He narrowed the gap. I zagged. Just short of the goal, Thorpe threw himself at me and down I went, into a pool of water. But I slid over the goal. No professional had run 98 yards for a touchdown. None did so again until 1972.” The Green Bay Packers entered the league in its second season; the New York Giants came a few years later. Tim Mara, a bookmaker who knew Halas from the smoky back rooms where ballplayers and gamblers mingled, paid $2,500 for the franchise. He was no football fan but figured anything in New York was worth $2,500. The Steelers started as the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1933, the hobby of former prizefighter Art Rooney, who knew everyone because he basically grew up in a saloon. The Redskins began in Boston but were moved to D.C. by George Preston Marshall, a Southerner who made a fortune in laundry. Marshall, the premier racist of the NFL—because of him, African Americans were kept off rosters for years—had his wife write the league’s first fight song:
Hail to the Redskins!
Hail victory!
Braves on the warpath!
Fight for old DIXIE!…
Scalp ’em, swamp ’em
We will take ’em big score …
When I think about those early days, I imagine black-and-white photos, moments of football time frozen in the phosphorous stink of a cameraman’s flash. Bloody faces beneath leather headgear, busted teeth, bloody hands, a ball wobbling in the cold air. The league was filled with characters: Shipwreck Kelly, Benny Friedman, Johnny Blood. Its great early star was Thorpe. By making him the first commissioner, Halas and Hay seemed to connect their game to the original inhabitants of the land, distinguishing football from fey sports like baseball and golf, which stunk faintly of Europe. Football was American, its first star a big gamboling red man, who, a generation before, you might have faced in more dire circumstances at the Little Bighorn. The presence of Thorpe, who was a myth when he was still alive, seemed to prove what the champions of the game claimed from the beginning: though the West had been won and the Indian Wars had ended and the cowboy had faded away, the spirit of the frontier lived on, on the football field.
