Red Grange was rich. He was famous. He was near the end of his career, a shell of his former self after a severe knee injury five years earlier.
Yet there he was, on Dec. 17, 1933, at Wrigley Field, sticking his uncovered nose in for what George Halas called the greatest defensive play he ever saw.
The Bears led the Giants 23-21 in an NFL championship game that still stands as one of the league’s best. They took the last of the game’s six lead changes on a trick pass from fullback Bronko Nagurski to Bill Hewitt, who lateraled to Bill Karr for a 19-yard touchdown with about a minute remaining.
On the game’s last snap, the Giants looked to have struck gold. Quarterback Harry Newman heaved the ball to halfback Dale Burnett well beyond most of the Bears defense. Grange was the only Bear between Burnett and the end zone, and he spotted Giants center Mel Hein running just behind and to the side of Burnett.
In Grange’s 1953 autobiography, “The Red Grange Story,” he wrote: “I was the only one Burnett had to elude to cross the goal line with the game-winning touchdown. I knew Burnett would lateral to Hein as soon as I tackled him, so I grabbed him high, wrapping my arms around his, thus preventing him from getting the ball away. As I pulled Burnett to the ground, the gun went off ending the game.”
The heads-up tackle gave the Bears their second consecutive NFL championship. In his 1979 autobiography, “Halas by Halas,” which featured an entire chapter devoted to Grange entitled “The Golden Lad,” the Bears coach wrote: “Red knew if he made the usual tackle … we would lose the game. So Grange, the great Grange, made a new kind of tackle. He flung his arms around Burnett in a bear hug, clamping Burnett’s arms to his side. It saved the game.”
Eight years earlier, Grange joined the Bears as one of the pillars of American sport, equal to Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in name recognition and adulation. In the time between, in the 2019 biography “Red Grange: The Life and Legacy of the NFL’s First Superstar,” NFL Films historian Chris Willis writes: “Red Grange made the blueprint of what an NFL player could become: He left school early, signed with an agent, was paid the biggest salary in the history of the sport, made movies in Hollywood, did endorsements, won two NFL championships and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.”
Grange made his name in 1924 during an unprecedented junior year at Illinois. As he captured the nation’s attention with his touchdown runs, he earned the fawning words of the nation’s most prominent sports writers. Grantland Rice nicknamed him “The Galloping Ghost.” Damon Runyan wrote: “On the field he is equal to three football players and a horse.”
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On Oct. 18, 1924, against top-ranked Michigan at Memorial Stadium, Grange played perhaps the best game a football player ever has.
Michigan coach Fielding Yost didn’t buy into the Grange hype, so he directed his kicker to boot the ball to him on the opening kickoff. Yost believed a crushing hit followed by a pile-on of Wolverines might take some pep out of Grange’s step. Instead, Grange returned the opener 95 yards for a touchdown. He added scoring runs of 67, 56 and 45 yards by the end of the first quarter. He sat out the second quarter, then ran for a 12-yard touchdown in the third and passed for a score in the fourth.
Official stats credited Grange with 15 carries for 202 yards, three kickoff returns for 126 yards and 6-for-8 passing for 64 yards. In all, he contributed six touchdowns in the 39-14 win, and his legend grew exponentially.
Halas, a former Illini player, paid close attention to the ruckus in Champaign. The NFL was struggling to reach a mass audience, and the Bears barely made it from year to year by taking out loans.
“Papa Bear” wasn’t the only one interested in Grange. Charles Pyle, owner of Champaign’s Virginia Theatre, called Grange to a meeting after a movie one afternoon.
“How would you like to make $100,000?” Pyle asked. At the time, the average American made about $4,000 a year.
In Richard Whittingham’s 1991 book, “What Bears They Were,” Grange remembered the meeting.
“I thought he was crazy,” Grange said. “But naturally I said I would — who wouldn’t?”
Pyle, who went by his initials C.C., leading writers to nickname him “Cold Cash” or “Cash and Carry,” explained his plan. Grange would join a pro team and tour the United States with it after Illinois’ 1925 season ended. They would go to to cites that had pro teams and play against them, then visit places with no pro football such as Florida and California.
He said the Bears would be an ideal match, and that he would work to get together with Halas to make it happen. If it did, Pyle would take care of all Grange’s financial matters.
Pyle and Halas met in supposed secrecy, but word got out, and throughout Grange’s senior season at Illinois the press wondered when he would turn pro. Grange stayed with the Illini through their season, which ended with a 14-9 win at Ohio State on Nov. 21. After the game, Grange left the Illini’s hotel by the fire escape, boarded a train to Chicago and officially joined the Bears.
Grange played his first game with the Bears only four days after his final game as a collegian, joining Halas and his crew for their annual Thanksgiving game against the Cardinals. Most Bears games drew about 5,000 fans at the time, but 36,000 packed Wrigley Field to get a glimpse of Grange.
They came away disappointed as the Bears and Cardinals tied 0-0. Paddy Driscoll, later Grange’s teammate on the Bears, punted the ball away from Grange all game, drawing a chorus of boos, and Grange rushed for only 36 yards.
“I decided if one of us was going to look bad, it wasn’t going to be me,” Driscoll told the Tribune’s David Condon 40 years later. “Punting to Grange is like grooving a pitch to Babe Ruth.”
After the game, Driscoll went to see his future wife, Mary, in the stands. He lamented that the fans were wrong to boo Grange for his uninspiring debut.
“Don’t feel sorry for Grange,” Mary said. “It’s you they’re booing.”
The Bears immediately embarked on a 19-game barnstorming tour, with the team splitting revenues 50-50 with Pyle and Grange. The Bears guaranteed Grange a $100,000 contract, just as Pyle had predicted. One game at the Polo Grounds in New York drew 70,000 fans. It was the largest crowd to see a pro football game to that point, and it helped the struggling Giants stay solvent.
When the Bears went to Washington, Illinois Sen. William McKinley set up a meeting for Grange and Halas with President Calvin Coolidge. When they entered the Oval Office, McKinley introduced his guests as members of the Chicago Bears. Coolidge shook their hands and said, “I’ve always liked animal acts.”
The Bears and Grange trudged through the trip, with Grange obligated to play whether or not he was healthy. If he couldn’t run, he played quarterback and handed off to the annoyance of the crowd. At one point the Bears played eight games in two weeks, sometimes changing out of their uniforms on the train to the next city and putting their dirty threads back on for the next game without a chance to wash them.
In California, Pyle set up Grange as a movie star. Grange was no actor, but he made plenty of money filming “One Minute to Play” in 1926, “A Racing Romeo” in 1927 and “The Galloping Ghost” in 1931. Pyle also arranged for the production of Red Grange-endorsed candy bars, footballs, dolls, clothes, ginger ale and malted milk. To Pyle’s chagrin, Grange turned down a tobacco endorsement because he didn’t smoke.
By the end of the tour, it became clear that Pyle had undersold Grange’s earning potential. The two split about $250,000 for their share of the gate receipts, and Grange made another $100,000 in endorsements.
“Red came to the Bears famous,” Halas wrote. “Ten weeks later he was rich.”
Grange’s teammates were jealous of his money but could not complain since their salaries went up as more money came in. They soon found Grange to be just like them in most respects.
Bears quarterback Joey Sternaman, in “What Bears They Were,” remembers testing Grange’s team spirit.
“I was the play caller, and I said to him, ‘Are you interested in yourself, or are you interested in winning football games?’ ” Sternaman asked. “Red was honestly interested in winning football games, and, as I found out, was one of the finest team players around.”
Sternaman, whose brother Dutch co-owned the team with Halas, was amazed at Grange’s talent but thought he could be even more useful as a decoy. Time and again the quarterback would call a play that had Grange carrying out a fake that would fool the defense.
“Why, they’d just clobber him, and hell, I’d be bootlegging it around the other end,” Sternaman said. “We used a lot of deception, and it worked well. Red took a beating, especially that first year, but he never complained.”
After the tour, Pyle pushed for Halas and Dutch Sternaman to give Grange a one-third share of the Bears. They refused, and Pyle started the American Football League with Grange becoming player/owner of the New York Yankees. The league folded after one year, but Pyle persuaded the NFL to take on the Yankees, with Grange the main selling point.
In 1927, Grange severely injured his knee in a game against the Bears when George Trafton landed on it. Pyle urged Grange to play hurt, Grange’s injury got worse and worse, and he was unable to play at all in 1928 as the Yankees folded without him. He considered himself retired until Halas convinced him to give it one more shot with the Bears in 1929.
Halas wrote: “I figured he would no longer gallop for touchdowns, but I liked his intelligence, his determination and his desire. I thought he still had a great contribution to make to football. Too, there was still magic in the Grange name.”
“I guess I was about 70 percent of the football player I’d been,” Grange said, “but I worked on playing defense, and that became a strong point with me. … I stayed where I was supposed to, and I was a good tackler. I played for the Bears for six years after my knee went out, and we did pretty well.”
After Grange’s big play in the 1933 title game, he toughed out one more season before his knee gave out for good. He served as an assistant coach for the Bears for three seasons, then as radio play-by-play man for 14 while going into the real estate and insurance businesses. He died at 87 on Jan. 28, 1991, in his retirement home of Lake Wales, Fla.
Grange’s transition from college to the pros still resonates as college players try to better their situation and compensation. In 1925, college coaches thought it was a travesty that Grange was negotiating a contract while still a collegian and that he turned pro before earning his degree at Illinois. Halas and Grange were upbraided by two of their heroes, Illinois coach Robert Zuppke and athletic director George Huff. Michigan’s Yost, the University of Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg and Stanford’s Pop Warner joined the chorus.
“Football wasn’t meant to be played for money,” Zuppke told Grange.
Grange answered: “You get paid for coaching it. Why should it be wrong for me to get paid for playing it?”
As part of the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Bears’ 100th season, the Tribune’s Bears reporters and editors ranked the 100 best players in franchise history. Click here for the full list.
