Red Grange

The Life and Legacy of the NFL's First Superstar

Chris Willis

In celebration of the National Football League’s 100th season, noted football historian Chris Willis brings to life the story of Red Grange, the nation’s first NFL star, in this definitive biography.

Harold “Red” Grange became a national sensation as a junior halfback at the University of Illinois in the 1920s. He quickly joined other great athletes of the Roaring Twenties such as Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth in enthralling audiences on the radio and in newspapers on a daily basis. A year later the "Galloping Ghost" stunned the country by dropping out of school after his last collegiate game and going pro with the six year old NFL, signing with the Chicago Bears.

In Red Grange: The Life and Legacy of the NFL’s First Superstar, Chris Willis tells the remarkable story of a humble football player who rose to fame in the 1920s and became an icon. With unlimited access and complete cooperation of the Grange family, Willis offers new insight into Grange’s rags-to-riches story, including details about his tomboy mother who died when Grange was six years old and never-before-published information on Grange’s barnstorming tour with the Chicago Bears that instantly gave credibility to the fledgling NFL.

With over fifty original interviews, personal letters to and from Grange, and more than forty photos, this definitive biography reveals in intimate detail the life of a sports pioneer. Whether as a player, coach, broadcaster, pitchman, Hall of Famer, ambassador, or icon, Red Grange was, and still is, the face of the early NFL and one of the greatest athletes of all-time.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 520 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-5381-0194-0 • Hardback • August 2019 • $40.00 • (£31.00)

978-1-5381-0195-7 • eBook • August 2019 • $38.00 • (£29.00)

Subjects: Sports & Recreation / Football, Biography & Autobiography / Sports, Sports & Recreation / History, Sports & Recreation / Football / Biography

Red Grange

The Life and Legacy of the NFL's First Superstar

Hardback

eBook

Summary

In celebration of the National Football League’s 100th season, noted football historian Chris Willis brings to life the story of Red Grange, the nation’s first NFL star, in this definitive biography.

Harold “Red” Grange became a national sensation as a junior halfback at the University of Illinois in the 1920s. He quickly joined other great athletes of the Roaring Twenties such as Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth in enthralling audiences on the radio and in newspapers on a daily basis. A year later the "Galloping Ghost" stunned the country by dropping out of school after his last collegiate game and going pro with the six year old NFL, signing with the Chicago Bears.

In Red Grange: The Life and Legacy of the NFL’s First Superstar, Chris Willis tells the remarkable story of a humble football player who rose to fame in the 1920s and became an icon. With unlimited access and complete cooperation of the Grange family, Willis offers new insight into Grange’s rags-to-riches story, including details about his tomboy mother who died when Grange was six years old and never-before-published information on Grange’s barnstorming tour with the Chicago Bears that instantly gave credibility to the fledgling NFL.

With over fifty original interviews, personal letters to and from Grange, and more than forty photos, this definitive biography reveals in intimate detail the life of a sports pioneer. Whether as a player, coach, broadcaster, pitchman, Hall of Famer, ambassador, or icon, Red Grange was, and still is, the face of the early NFL and one of the greatest athletes of all-time.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 520 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-5381-0194-0 • Hardback • August 2019 • $40.00 • (£31.00)

978-1-5381-0195-7 • eBook • August 2019 • $38.00 • (£29.00)

Subjects: Sports & Recreation / Football, Biography & Autobiography / Sports, Sports & Recreation / History, Sports & Recreation / Football / Biography

Author

Chris Willis is the head of the Research Library at NFL Films. He is the author of multiple books on early pro football, including The Man Who Built the National Football League: Joe F. Carr (2010), Dutch Clark: The Life of an NFL Legend and the Birth of the Detroit Lions (2012), A Nearly Perfect Season: The Inside Story of the 1984 San Francisco 49ers (2014), and Walter Lingo, Jim Thorpe, and the Oorang Indians: How a Dog Kennel Owner Created the NFL’s Most Famous Traveling Team (2017), all published by Rowman & Littlefield. Willis was nominated for an Emmy in 2002 for his work on the HBO documentary The Game of Their Lives and won an Emmy in 2016 for his work on HBO’s Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Houston Texans. He was awarded the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Ralph Hay award for lifetime achievement in pro football research and historiography in 2012.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The “Eternal Flame of Professional Football”
Part I: Humble Beginnings (1903–1922)
1: Forksville
2: Losing Mom
3: Wheaton
4: Love of Sports
5: The Wheaton Iceman
6: High School Glory
Part II: College (1922–1925)
7: Bob Zuppke
8: Freshman to All-American
9: 12 Minutes to Immortality
10: C. C. Pyle
11: East Coast Invasion
12: Rumors Swirl and Red’s Last Game at Illinois
Part III: Barnstorming with the Chicago Bears (1925–1926)
13: George Halas and Dutch Sternaman
14: Signing with the Chicago Bears and First Pro Game
15: Eastern Barnstorming Tour (November. 22, 1925–December 20, 1925)
16: Southern Barnstorming Tour (December 21, 1925–January 10, 1926)
17: Western Barnstorming Tour (January 11, 1926–February 4, 1926)
18: The Impact of the Barnstorming Tour
Part IV: Hollywood and the “Grange League” (1926–1927)
19: War with the NFL: The Grange League
20: One Minute to Play
21: 1926 Pro Football Season
22: Back to Hollywood: The Racing Romeo
Part V: FL Career (1927–1935)
23: 1927 New York Yankees
24: Out of Football
25: Halas Brings Back the Ghost
26: Indoor Madness
27: The NFL Grows Up
28: The Galloping Ghost Walks Away
Part VI: Coaching, Radio and Television, and Marriage (1935–1962)
29: Coaching and Broadcasting
30: Margaret “Muggs” Grange
31: Television Star
Part VII: Football Royalty (1963–1991)
32: Pro Football Hall of Fame
33: 50th Anniversary of Immortality
34: Super Bowl Coin Toss
35: Wheaton Homecoming
36: Meeting the Fighting Illini
37: Goodbye to the Galloping Ghost
38: The Legacy of Red Grange
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Reviews

In the 1920s, Red Grange (1903-91) was a spectacular college football player and a peer of the larger-than-life sports stars of that flashy decade, including Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Bill Tilden. They were the crest of the first wave of sports marketing, and Grange, with his agent C.C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, may have made more money out of his celebrity than any of them, while establishing professional football as a viable enterprise in the process. Grange wrote an autobiography in the 1950s and has been accorded two serious biographies since: John Carroll’s Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football and Gary Andrew Poole’s The Galloping Ghost. Now, Willis (research library, NFL Films) takes a personal look at Grange, whom he depicts as humble and amiable. The book’s centerpiece is an extended section on the Grange-led barnstorming tours of 1925–26. Willis presents a deep study of all aspects of that tour, devoting attention to Grange’s life before and after his playing days, relying on interviews with descendants of Grange’s family, friends, and colleagues. VERDICT A highly recommended picture of a football legend and one of the league’s first superstars.
— Library Journal

This book scores a touchdown . . . [Red Grange] should be at the top of your football reading lists as a must read.
— Gridiron Greats

Every bit as good as I’d hoped . . . We highly recommend [Red Grange] and appreciated the sheer volume of knowledge Willis dropped in it.
— Pro Football Journal

There is no better way to understand the 100^th season of the NFL than to begin with the remarkable story of Red Grange, whose singular talent changed the way football was marketed and consumed at a time in this country when people of all walks of life were starving for big stars on the big stage. Chris Willis of NFL Films, the brilliant biographer of our national obsession, has told this story as only he can—with unparalleled scholarship and in entertaining detail.
— Sal Paolantonio, National Correspondent, ESPN, and author of How Football Explains America

Chris Willis didn’t know Red Grange. He didn’t see him play. But, if there is anyone who might make you believe he did, it’s Chris Willis. Truly one of pro football’s leading historians, Willis combines well-researched facts with a human touch and an unequaled understanding of the game and the era of which he writes. Few others have his appreciation for the unquestionable impact Grange had on professional football during its formative years. During a time when college coaches like Amos Alonzo Stagg were calling the pro game “a menace to college football,” Willis chronicles how Grange—a model of good behavior and sportsmanship—converted pro football naysayers to enthusiastic supporters. There is no one better suited to tell the tale than Chris Willis.
— Joe Horrigan, Executive Director, Pro Football Hall of Fame

There are few figures in football history more mythic or more seminal than Harold "Red" Grange. In his carefully-researched new biography, Chris Willis expertly puts Grange in the context of his times, showing his outsized influence on the collegiate game and the immense importance of his arrival in the fledgling universe of the National Football League. The heart of the book is Willis's portrayal of Grange's punishing 1925-26 coast-to-coast barnstorming tour with the Bears—aptly described by one writer as a "national hysteria"—when the biggest star in college football helped legitimize the NFL.
— Michael MacCambridge, author of America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation