Football's 'Galloping Ghost'

The First Star
nolead ends nolead begins Red Grange and the Barnstorming Tour
That Launched the NFL
nolead ends nolead begins By Lars Anderson.

Random House. 272 pp. $26

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Reviewed by Bill Lyon

In an open field, in full and glorious stride, he must have been a sight to behold, legs pumping like locomotive pistons, knees in a drum major's strutting high-step, one hand tucking away the ball, the other delivering a jolting jackhammer of a stiff-arm, flattening noses, splitting lips, jerking free from tackles.

He could change directions like a fox leading the hounds across the meadow, a spin here, cutback there, and - watch out - he's coming back this way - no, now thataway - they reach for him and are left holding only air - so elusive is he - as elusive as, well, as a ghost.

Yes, that's it, exactly. A ghost. Not just any ghost, though. A ghost that gallops. The Galloping Ghost. Red Grange. The greatest football player of his time. Maybe of all time. The man who helped give birth to professional football. The midwife of what would eventually evolve into a sporting monolith - the National Football League

That is quite an imposing legacy. It is also the claim, rapturously argued by football maven and historian Lars Anderson, of The First Star: Red Grange and the Barnstorming Tour That Launched the NFL, a book that is exhaustively researched, heavy with documentation and detail, and bordering on the worshipful.

Grange came along at a serendipitous period in American history - an age that was christened the Roaring 20s, a rowdy and raucous time of bathtub gin and speakeasies, flappers and jazz and Prohibition, and of athletes who were mythologized in florid prose and poetry, the hyperbole piled so high it was proclaimed the Golden Age of Sports.

Giants roamed the land: Ruth, Dempsey, Big Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Man O' War - and from the heartland this running back for the University of Illinois named Grange.

He had burst on the scene on an Indian summer Saturday in October of 1924. The Illini were celebrating homecoming and the official dedication of Memorial Stadium, a vast 70,000-seat horseshoe. The opponent was Michigan, undefeated in its last 20 games, coached by Fielding Yost, nicknamed Hurry Up, whose first Wolverine team had outscored its opponents 555-0.

Asked what Michigan's strategy would be in dealing with Grange, Yost snapped: "Have him hauled off the field on a stretcher."

Grange's rebuttal took 12 seconds, which is how long he needed to return the opening kickoff 95 yards. In the first 12 minutes, Grange scored four touchdowns. For the game, six touchdowns, and, oh yes, 402 yards rushing.

Writers witnessing this all but swooned. Their breathless dispatches reached the East, which was then the bastion of collegiate football and scant attention was paid to anything "out west." The Galloping Ghost was about to change all that.

As lovingly detailed by Anderson, Grange had all the ingredients of a matinee idol - chiseled chin, sturdy build (5-foot-9, 170 pounds) made hard by his summer job hoisting 100-pound blocks of ice, humble, self-effacing, shy, introverted, without swagger. A Boy Scout in leather helmet and wooden cleats. He was, in the studied opinion of George Halas, fit for a marquee, exactly what professional football needed to catch hold, a genuine star to latch onto, a way to counteract the shady, seedy reputation the pro sport had.

Halas' instincts were right. The Galloping Ghost was box-office gold. Halas had played the pro game, coached it, and became owner of what would become a storied franchise in the NFL's history - the Chicago Bears.

One more ingredient was needed: a money man. A promoter. Someone wise in the ways of relieving the public of its wallets.

Enter Charles Cassius Pyle. Better known, as tribute to his suave specialty, as Cash and Carry Pyle. Here he comes now, in $200 suit, spats, silk tie with diamond stickpin, a walking stick, a derby, and thin mustache, all topped off with a lacquered layer of oil-slick pomade.

He was debonair and silver-tongued, always well turned out whether flush or busted. A man unafraid of risk, it was said he made a million, lost a million, and did both frequently.

It was Pyle who organized the killer cross-country tour for Grange and his Bears - 19 games in 66 days. They made a mint, but by the end Grange was a walking bruise. It is the contention of Anderson that this barnstorming odyssey was a seminal moment in the history of pro football. It is an ambitious thesis; perhaps a touch too ambitious.

Anderson's portraits of the three pioneers - the Galloping Ghost, Papa Bear, and Cash and Carry - are richly drawn, though sometimes in his passion to make a point he all but genuflects at the Grange shrine, and his rhetoric occasionally lapses into the hero-worship style commonplace in the Golden Age.

But Anderson's researching efforts are imposing, the book so richly detailed that you feel you have been transported back in time and set down in 1925. He wrote an earlier work set in the same period, Carlisle vs. Army, that drew critical acclaim. This is in that genre.

In a sort of valedictory to his playing days, Grange offers a typically unassuming summary of his special genius: "If you have the football and 11 guys are after you, if you're smart, you'll run. It was no big deal."

Oh, but it was, was. The book says so.