Football: Great Writing About the National Sport - Softcover

Various

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598534173 ISBN 13: 9781598534177

Publisher: Library of America, 2015

Synopsis

Now in paperback, the definitive anthology about the sport that dominates our culture.

Since football’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century, the standout writers on the sport—an All-Pro line-up that includes Red Smith, Frank Deford, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton, Richard Price, Charles Pierce, Michael Lewis, and Roy Blount Jr—have gone behind and beyond the spectacle to reveal the complexity, the contradictions, and the deeper humanity at the heart of the game.

In this landmark collection, which the San Francisco Chronicle called “the finest football volume of all time” and Men’s Journal “the ultimate football reading list,” The Library of America and editor John Schulian bring together the very best of their work: gems of deadline reportage, incisive long-form profiles of football’s storied figures, and autobiographical accounts by players and others close to the game. Celebrating the sport without shying away from its sometimes devastating personal and social costs, the forty-four pieces gathered here testify to football’s boundless capacity to generate outsized characters and memorable tales. With a new preface by John Schulian.

About this title

About the Author:

JOHN SCHULIAN  was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News before moving to Hollywood, where he was, among other things, the co-creator of Xena: Warrior Princess. With George Kimball, he co-edited the Library of America anthology At the Fights. He is the author most recently of Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Ghost of the Gridiron: Red Grange Could Carry the Ball
by W. C. HEINZ

When I was ten years old I paid ten cents to see Red Grange run with a football. That was the year when, one afternoon a week, after school was out for the day, they used to show us movies in the auditorium, and we would all troop up there clutching our dimes, nickels, or pennies in our fists. The movies were, I suppose, carefully selected for their educational value. They must have shown us, as the weeks went by, films of the Everglades, of Yosemite, of the Gettysburg battlefield, of Washington, D.C., but I remember only the one about Grange. I remember, in fact, only one shot. Grange, the football cradled in one arm, started down the field toward us. As we sat there in the dim, flickering light of the movie projector, he grew larger and larger. I can still see the rows and rows of us, with our thin little necks and bony heads, all looking up at the screen and Grange, enormous now, rushing right at us, and I shall never forget it. That was thirty-three years ago. “I haven’t any idea what film that might have been,” Grange was saying now. “My last year at Illinois was all confusion. I had no privacy. Newsreel men were staying at the fraternity house for two or three days at a time. “He paused. The thought of it seemed to bring pain to his face, even at this late date.
“I wasn’t able to study or anything,” he said. “I thought, and I still do, that they built me up out of all proportion. “Red Grange was the most sensational, the most publicized, and, possibly, the most gifted football player and greatest broken field runner of all time. In high school, at Wheaton, Illinois, he averaged five touchdowns a game. In twenty games for the University of Illinois, he scored thirty-one touchdowns and ran for 3,637 yards, or, as it was translated at the time, two miles and 117 yards. His name and his pseudonyms—The Galloping Ghost and The Wheaton Iceman—became household words, and what he was may have been summarized best by Paul Sann in his book The Lawless Decade.
“Red Grange, No. 77, made Jack Dempsey move over,” Sann wrote. “He put college football ahead of boxing as the Golden Age picked up momentum. He also made the ball yards obsolete; they couldn’t handle the crowds. He made people buy more radios: how could you wait until Sunday morning to find out what deeds Red Grange had performed on Saturday? He was ‘The Galloping Ghost’ and he made the sports historians torture their portables without mercy. “Grange is now fifty-five years old, his reddish brown hair marked with gray, but he was one with Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Bill Tilden. “I could carry a football well,” Grange was saying now, “but I’ve met hundreds of people who could do their thing better than I. I mean engineers, and writers, scientists, doctors—whatever. “I can’t take much credit for what I did, running with a football, because I don’t know what I did. Nobody ever taught me, and I can’t teach anybody. You can teach a man how to block or tackle or kick or pass. The ability to run with a ball is something you have or you haven’t. If you can’t explain it, how can you take credit for it? “This was last year, and we were sitting in a restaurant in Syracuse, New York. Grange was in town to do a telecast with Lindsey Nelson of the Syracuse–Penn State game. He lives now in Miami, Florida, coming out of there on weekends during the football season to handle telecasts of college games on Saturdays and the Chicago Bears’ games on Sundays. He approaches this job as he has approached every job, with honesty and dedication, and, as could be expected, he is good at it. As befits a man who put the pro game on the map and made the whole nation football conscious, he has been making fans out of people who never followed the game before. Never, perhaps, has any one man done more for the game. And it, of course, has been good to him. “Football did everything for me,” he was saying now, “but what people don’t understand is that it hasn’t been my whole life. When I was a freshman at Illinois, I wasn’t even going to go out for football. My fraternity brothers made me do it.”
He was three times All-American. Once the Illinois students carried him two miles on their backs. A football jersey, with the number 77 that he made famous and that was retired after him, is enshrined at Champaign. His fellow students wanted him to run for Congress. A senator from Illinois led him into the White House to shake hands with Calvin Coolidge. Here, in its entirety, is what was said. “Howdy,” Coolidge said. “Where do you live? “In Wheaton, Illinois,” Grange said. “Well, young man,” Coolidge said, “I wish you luck. “Grange had his luck, but it was coming to him because he did more to popularize professional football than any other player before or since. In his first three years out of school he grossed almost$1,000,000 from football, motion pictures, vaudeville appearances, and endorsements, and he could afford to turn down a Florida real-estate firm that wanted to pay him $120,000 a year. Seven years ago the Associated Press, in selecting an All-Time All-American team in conjunction with the National Football Hall of Fame, polled one hundred leading sportswriters and Grange received more votes than any other player. “They talk about the runs I made,” he was saying, “but I can’t tell you one thing I did on any run. That’s the truth. During the Depression, though, I took a licking. Finally I got into the insurance business.
I almost starved to death for three years, but I never once tried to use my football reputation. I never once opened a University of Illinois yearbook and knowingly called on an alumnus. I think I was as good an insurance man as there was in Chicago. On the football field I had ten other men blocking for me, but I’m more proud of what I did in the insurance business, because I did it alone. ”Recently I went down to Miami and visited Grange in the white colonial duplex house where he lives with his wife. They met eighteen years ago on a plane, flying between Chicago and Omaha, on which she was a stewardess, and they were married the following year. “Without sounding like an amateur psychologist,” I said, “I believe you derive more satisfaction from what you did in the insurance business, not only because you did it alone, but also because you know how you did it, and, if you had to, you could do it again. You could never find any security in what you did when you ran with a football because it was inspirational and creative, rather than calculated. ”Yes,” Grange said, “you could call it that. The sportswriters used to try to explain it, and they used to ask me. I couldn’t tell them anything. “I have read what many of those sportswriters wrote, and they had as much trouble trying to corner Grange on paper as his opponents had trying to tackle him on the field.
Grange had blinding speed, amazing lateral mobility, an exceptional change of pace, and a powerful straight-arm. He moved with high knee action, but seemed to glide, rather than run, and he was a master at using his blockers. What made him great, however, was his instinctive ability to size up a field and plot a run the way a great general can map not only a battle but a whole campaign.
“The sportswriters wrote that I had peripheral vision,” Grange was saying. “I didn’t even know what the word meant. I had to look it up. They asked me about my change of pace, and I didn’t even know that Iran at different speeds. I had a crossover step, but I couldn’t spin. Some ball carriers can spin but if I ever tried that, I would have broken a leg. “Harold Edward Grange was born on June 13, 1903, in Forksville, Pennsylvania, the third of four children. His mother died when he was five, and his sister Norma died in her teens. The other sister, Mildred, lives in Binghamton, New York. His brother, Garland, two and a half years younger than Red, was a 165-pound freshman end at Illinois and was later with the Chicago Bears and is now a credit manager for a Florida department store chain. Their father died at the age of eighty-six. “My father,” Grange said, “was the foreman of three lumber camps near Forksville, and if you had known him, you’d know why I could never get a swelled head. He stood six one and weighed two hundred ten pounds, and he was quick as a cat. He had three hundred men under him and he had to be able to lick any one of them. One day head a fight that lasted four hours.”
Grange’s father, after the death of his wife, moved to Wheaton, Illinois, where he had relatives. Then he sent the two girls back to Pennsylvania to live with their maternal grandparents. With his sons, he moved into a five-room apartment over a store where they took turns cooking and keeping house. “Can you recall,” I said, “the first time you ever ran with a football?”
“I think it started,” Grange said, “with a game we used to play with-out a football. Ten or twelve of us would line up in the street, along one curb. One guy would be in the middle of the road and the rest of us would run across the street to the curb on the other side. When the kid in the middle of the street tackled one of the runners, the one who was tackled had to stay in the middle of the street with the tackler. Finally, all of us, except one last runner, would be in the middle of the street. We only had about thirty yards to maneuver in and dodge the tackler. I got to be pretty good at that. Then somebody got a football and we played games with it on vacant lots. “In high school Grange won sixteen letters in football, basketball, track, and baseball. In track he competed in the 100- and 220-yarddashes, low and high hurdles, broad jump and high jump, and often won all six events. In his sophomore year on the football team, he scored fifteen touchdowns, in his junior year thirty-six—eight in one game—and in his senior year twenty-three. Once he was kicked in the head and was incoherent for forty-eight hours.
“I went to Illinois,” he was saying, “because some of my friends from Wheaton went there and all the kids in the state wanted to play football for Bob Zuppke and because there weren’t any athletic scholarships in those days and that was the cheapest place for me to go to. In May of my senior year in high school I was there for the Inter-scholastic track meet, and I just got through broad jumping when Zup came over. He said, ‘Is your name Grainche?’ That’s the way he always pronounced my name. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Where are you going to college?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He put his arm around my shoulders and he said, ‘I hope here. You may have a chance to make the team here. ’That was the greatest moment I’d known. “That September, Grange arrived at Champaign with a battered secondhand trunk, one suit, a couple of pairs of trousers, and a sweater. He had been working for four summers on an ice wagon in Wheaton and saving some money, and his one luxury now that he was entering college was to pledge Zeta Phi fraternity. “One day,” he was saying, “they lined us pledges up in the living room of the fraternity house. I had wanted to go out for basketball and track—I thought there would be too much competition in foot-ball—but they started to point to each one of us and tell us what to go out for: ‘You go out for cheerleader.’ ‘You go out for football manager. ’You go out for the band.’ When they came to me, they said, ‘You go out for football.’ “That afternoon I went over to the gym. I looked out the window at the football practice field and they had about three hundred freshman candidates out there. I went back to the house and I said to one of the seniors, ‘I can’t go out for football. I’ll never make that team.’ “So he lined me up near the wall, with my head down, and he hit me with this paddle. I could show you the dent in that wall where my head took a piece of plaster out—this big. “With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he made a circle the size of a half dollar. “Do you remember the name of that senior?” I said.
“Johnny Hawks,” Grange said. “He was from Goshen, Indiana, and I see him now and then. I say to him, ‘Damn you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d never have gone out for football.’ He gets a great boot out of that. ”So what happened when you went out the next day? ”We had all these athletes from Chicago I’d been reading about. What chance did I have, from a little farm town and a high school with three hundred students? I think they cut about forty that first night, but I happened to win the wind sprints and that got them at least to know my name. “It was a great freshman team. On it with Grange was Earl Britton, who blocked for Grange and did the kicking throughout their college careers, and Moon Baker and Frank Wickhorst, who transferred to Northwestern and Annapolis, respectively, where they both made All-American. After one week of practice, the freshman team played the varsity and were barely nosed out, 21–19, as Grange scored two touchdowns, one on a sixty-yard punt return. From then on, the freshmen trimmed the varsity regularly and Zuppke began to give most of his time to the freshmen.
“That number 77,” I said to Grange, “became the most famous number in football. Do you remember when you first got it?”
“It was just handed to me in my sophomore year,” he said. “I guess
anybody who has a number and does well with it gets a little superstitious about it, and I guess that began against Nebraska in my first varsity game. “That game started Grange to national fame. This was 1923, and the previous year Nebraska had beaten Notre Dame and they were to beat “The Four Horsemen” later this same season. In the first quarter Grange sprinted thirty-five yards for a touchdown. In the second quarter he ran sixty yards for another. In the third period he scored again on a twelve-yard burst, and Illinois won, 24–7. The next day, over Walter Eckersall’s story in the Chicago Tribune, the headline said “Grange Sprints to Fame. “From the Nebraska game, Illinois went on to an undefeated season. Against Butler, Grange scored twice. Against Iowa, he scored the only touchdown as Illinois won, 9–6. In the first quarter against Northwestern, he intercepted a pass and ran ninety yards to score the first of his three touchdowns. He made the only touchdown in the game with the University of Chicago and the only one in the Ohio State game, this time on a thirty-four-yard run. “All Grange can do is run,” Fielding Yost, the coach at Michigan, was quoted as saying. “All Galli-Curci can do is sing,” Zuppke said.
Grange had his greatest day in his first game against Michigan during his junior year. On that day Michigan came to the dedication of the new $1,700,000 Illinois Memorial Stadium. The Wolverines had been undefeated in twenty games and for months the nation’s football fans had been waiting for this meeting. There were sixty-seven thousand spectators in the stands, then the largest crowd ever to see a football game in the Midwest. Michigan kicked off. Grange was standing on his goal line, with Wally McIlwain, whom Zuppke was to call “the greatest open field blocker of all time,” on his right, Harry Hall, the Illinois quarterback, on his le...

About this edition

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1598534173
• ISBN 13: 9781598534177
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 490
• Editor: Schulian John