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GRANGE, HAROLD "RED" 1903-1991

STAR RUNNING BACK

College Football's Best

Known as "Number 77" or "the Wheaton Iceman" or "Red" or, later, as sportswriter Grantland Rice called him, "The Galloping Ghost," Harold Grange was the decade's most famous college football player and, more than any other figure, the player who made professional football a popular spectator sport. Grange grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, where he became a star highschool halfback, averaging five touchdowns a game. One of the best coaches in the college ranks, Bob Zuppke, recruited him to play at the University of Illinois, where, from 1923 through 1925, he achieved his greatest gridiron successes. From 1925 through 1934 he played professional football but never attained the dominance he had had in college. When he retired from football, Grange had played the game for sixteen years, appearing in 237 games. He had carried the ball 4,013 times, averaging 8.1 yards per carry and two touchdowns a game, for 531 touchdowns total. He had been named All-American during each of the three years he played varsity football at Illinois and had been selected to the first All-Pro team in 1931. Later, in 1963, he would be elected to the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

First Varsity Game

After the first day of practice for the freshman team at Illinois, Grange was so overwhelmed by the more than two hundred players trying out that he wanted to quit. "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 made the seventh team. The following year Grange started at halfback and in the opening game against Nebraska on 6 October 1923 took a punt on his thirty-four yard line and ran for a touchdown. The Fighting Illini defeated Nebraska 24-7. In this first game he played thirty-nine minutes, gained 208 yards, scored three touchdowns, and drew national attention. By the end of his sophomore year he had rushed for 1,260 yards and scored twelve touchdowns—at least one in each of the seven games he played.

"The Wheaton Iceman."

During summer breaks Grange rejected lucrative job offers, choosing instead to return home and work at Luke Thompson's icehouse, a job he had held throughout his early years; he delivered blocks of ice house-to-house for $37.50 a week. After a photographer published a picture of him at work, he became known across the country as "the Wheaton Iceman."

The Michigan Game

During the 1924 season Grange was to have a record-setting game on 18 October against a powerful Michigan team that had not been beaten since 1921. He scored the first four times he touched the ball in the first twelve minutes of the game. He took the opening kickoff for a ninety-five-yard touchdown, then scored on runs of sixty-seven, fifty-six, and forty-four yards. Convinced that Grange could not sustain his brilliant performance, Zuppke removed him from the game. He returned in the fourth quarter for a fifth, fifteen-yard touchdown run and passed for a sixth, contributing to the Illini's rout of the Wolverines 39-14. The legendary University of Chicago coach Amos Alonzo Stagg later wrote, "This was the most spectacular single-handed performance ever made in a major game." Before the season ended, Illinois faced Stagg's team, one of the nation's strongest. In that game Grange played the entire sixty minutes, scored three come-from-behind touchdowns, rushed for three hundred yards, and passed for 177 yards. The teams played to a 21-21 tie.

National Star

In 1925, his senior year, Grange was elected team captain and moved to quarterback because of injuries to the regular starter. Against the unbeaten University of Pennsylvania, the team many regarded as the champions of the East, Grange played fifty-seven minutes, passed for thirteen yards, rushed for 363 yards, and scored three touchdowns and set up a fourth. This 24-2 Illinois victory, particularly, established him as a national rather than regional star among influential eastern sportswriters. Wishing to continue his football career, Grange signed a contract to play professional football once the collegiate season ended, and following the Ohio State game, he boarded a train to Chicago and George Halas's Chicago Bears.

Professional Football

Since professional football was held in contempt by those who believed in the purity of amateur athletics, Grange's decision to turn professional was considered by many as unwise, if not disastrous; yet the gifted football player managed to bring respectability and a real audience to the pro game. After only three days of practice, he made his debut for the Bears against the Chicago Cardinals on Thanksgiving Day 1925. The game ended in a 0-0 tie, but thirty-six thousand fans paid to see it. The team played every two or three days for the next two weeks, until in the season closer, when the Bears met the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds before a sellout crowd. Sixty thousand tickets had been purchased, but more than seventy thousand fans filled the stands. Still more spectators were turned away, and riot police had to be called out to control the potential mob.

Off-Season

Grange finished his first pro season badly bruised and had hoped to recuperate during the off-season, but his agent, C. C. Pyle, had other plans for him. Pyle had signed him to tour the South and West in the winter and early spring months of 1926, during which he would play exhibition games with teams of players, including the aging Jim Thorpe, recruited from professional and semiprofessional clubs. After the exhibition tour, Pyle committed Grange to appear in two movies, One Minute to Play and The Racing Romeo. These extra assignments added $125,000 to his roughly $100,000-a-year salary, but he started the 1926 season physically drained. Pyle also advised Grange to quit the Bears team and join a new team, the New York Yankees, in a new professional league, the American League, that Pyle was organizing. The team and league fared well until 1927 when Grange severely injured his right knee in a game between the Yankees and the Chicago Bears. The injury kept him out the entire 1928 season, and as a result the Yankees and the American League folded.

Final Years as a Pro

Grange returned to the Bears in 1929. Because his bad knee greatly hampered his running and cutting ability, he considered retirement. Halas, however, convinced him to continue playing, which he did until the end of the 1934 season. These five additional seasons of professional football took such a great physical toll on him that he was reduced finally to a utility player. During his professional career he scored 162 touchdowns and kicked eighty-six conversions. In 1935 Grange wrote a letter to Arch Ward, the Chicago Tribune sports editor, in which he stated: "I say that a football player, after three years in college, doesn't know any thing about football. Pro football is the difference between the New York Giants baseball team and amateur nine.… Pro football is smart. It is so smart you can rarely work the same play twice with the same results. Competition is keen. There are no set-ups in pro football. The big league player knows football, not just a theory or system."

The Gift

After football Grange started a successful insurance business and also became a respected radio and, later, television sports announcer. Throughout his life and career he remained genuinely modest, asserting that what he did as a runner was a gift for which he should not be accorded any special praise: "I could carry a football well, 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. 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 any credit for it?"