PREVIEW

Submitted for your approval, here is a sample chapter from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports.

 

Chapter 6

Birth of the Bears

 

“Nothing is work unless you’d rather be doing something else.”            -- George Halas

 

On May 6, 1919, 24-year-old George Halas made his debut as a right fielder with the New York Yankees. In his first 12 games, he managed just two hits in 22 at-bats, for a batting average of .091. He had no doubles, no triples, no home runs, no runs batted in, and had struck out eight times. Manager Miller Huggins took him aside and told him that he was being sent down to the minor leagues for more seasoning.

     Halas never appeared in another major-league game. By 1920, his baseball career was over. Babe Ruth had taken over right field for the Yankees, and Halas had embarked on a new career, to which he would devote his considerable energies for the next six decades.

 

In those days, games in industrial and semi-pro baseball leagues sometimes drew thousands of spectators. A.E. Staley, a manufacturer of corn starch and related products in Decatur, Illinois, had the idea that football games could be just as popular. He decided to sponsor a football team to represent his company, and he hired Halas to organize, coach, and play for it. Halas had made a name for himself on the gridiron at the University of Illinois, where he’d also lettered in baseball and basketball. He had been Most Valuable Player of the 1919 Rose Bowl game—but not in the orange and blue of Illinois. Halas had enlisted in the Navy when the United States entered World War I, and he was a member of the Great Lakes Naval Station team that defeated another group of servicemen, the Mare Island Marines, in the Rose Bowl.

     Halas arrived in Decatur in March 1920. He had never forgotten something Illini coach Bob Zuppke had once said: “Just when I teach you fellows how to play football, you graduate and I lose you.” Halas believed that “post-graduate football,” as it was then called, had a future. But he was far from certain. College games routinely drew crowds of fifty, sixty, even seventy thousand spectators. The pro game was merely a curiosity to most fans, and pro players were generally regarded as nothing more than a bunch of hooligans. College coaches like the fabled Amos Alonzo Stagg condemned pro games as a scourge that corrupted the athletes and demeaned football itself. Halas’s mind was made up, however, and even his mentor and idol Zuppke could not dissuade him from going forward—though he tried. Halas got to work building his team by recruiting men he had played with or against in college. Among the notables he landed were center George Trafton of Notre Dame, halfback Jimmy Conzelman of Washington University (St. Louis), halfback Dutch Sternaman of Illinois, fullback Bob Koehler of Northwestern, tackle Hugh Blacklock of Michigan State, and All-American end Guy Chamberlin of Nebraska. Charlie Dressen, a Decatur native who hadn’t played college football, would share the quarterback chores with Pard Pearce of Penn. (Dressen was soon to make the same career move Halas had, in reverse. After a brief stint in pro football, he switched to baseball and had an eight-year career as a third baseman with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants. He also managed for 16 years, winning pennants with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952 and 1953.)

     Halas and the other players he’d signed up were placed on the Staley Company payroll, but they had few duties other than playing football. Their main job was to win games and bring favorable publicity to the company.

     When Halas began trying to line up opponents for his new team, he ran into difficulty. He wrote to several of the better-known teams, but received noncommittal responses. “Paid football was pretty much of a catch-as-catch-can affair,” Halas recalled many years later. “Teams appeared one week and disappeared the next. Players came and went, drawn by the pleasure of playing. If others came to watch, that was fine. If they bought tickets or tossed coins into a helmet passed by the most popular player, that was helpful.”

     Halas was thrilled when he learned that plans were afoot to organize a genuine league. Creating at least a semblance of order would be pro football’s first step in building credibility with the public. On September 17, 1920, the American Professional Football Association was founded in Ralph Hay’s Canton, Ohio, automobile showroom. Halas was there, representing the Decatur Staleys. 10 other teams became charter members of the fledgling league that day: Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Chicago Cardinals, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Hammond Pros, Massillon (Ohio) Tigers, Muncie Flyers, Rochester Jeffersons, and Rock Island Independents. Each agreed to pay $100 for a franchise. “To give the new organization an appearance of financial stability,” Halas recalled, “we announced that the membership fee for individual clubs had been set at $100. However, I can testify that no money changed hands. Why, I doubt if there was a hundred bucks in the whole room.”

     The Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit Heralds also joined the APFA before its inaugural season. The Massillon club folded before playing a game; Muncie dropped out after a few games. The APFA was not a league in any real sense in 1920—it had no official schedule and kept no standings. League president Jim Thorpe, the legendary “world’s greatest athlete,” was purely a figurehead, chosen for his name. He was still an active player with Canton and hadn’t the time, inclination, or authority to handle any larger issues. Teams still scheduled games as they pleased, traveling only within 150 miles or so of home. The Staleys, for example, played only four league teams all season—the Cardinals, Tigers, and Rock Island twice each, and Hammond once.

     The Staleys opened their season on October 3 by easily subduing a non-league team, the Moline Tractors, 20-0 before about 1,000 fans at Staley Field in Decatur. They won their first seven games and weren’t scored upon until the seventh, a 28-7 win over Hammond. They were scored upon only once more all season, in a 7-6 loss to the Cardinals in Chicago. That game drew a capacity crowd of 5,400 to the Cardinals’ field at 61st and Racine, with more spectators watching from rooftops and even from trees. When the two teams played again in Wrigley Field (then known as Cubs Park), about 8,500 fans showed up to see the Staleys prevail 10-0.

     Decatur finished 5-1-1 in league games, and Akron was 6-0-1. The teams had not met during the season, so they rented out Wrigley Field for the first “world’s professional football championship game.” The weather was atrocious, and the 11,000 fans who turned out were treated to a duel between the two punters, as the offenses of both teams bogged down in the mud. Akron’s star player/coach Fritz Pollard—the first black All-American and the first black head coach in pro football by 60 years—was neutralized by the sloppy footing. So was Dutch Sternaman, the Staleys’ main offensive threat. So, too, was Paddy Driscoll, the great star of the Cardinals, who had suited up for the Staleys. “Driscoll had already proved himself one of the best backs and kickers in the game,” wrote Richard Whittingham, “and his team had ended [its] season the week before. The Decatur coaches put him in a Staley uniform, choosing to ignore the unwritten agreement about not tampering with another team’s players, but in the end it did them no good.” The game ended in a scoreless tie. Halas proposed a rematch, but Akron refused. Both teams claimed to be world champions.

     The Staleys were off to an auspicious start. Including non-league games, they had compiled a record of 10-1-2, scoring 166 points while yielding only 14. Each player had earned about $1,900 for his efforts. Halas began planning for an even better year in 1921. But one day A.E. Staley suddenly informed him that he could no longer afford to subsidize the football team.

     Halas was stunned. Staley, though, was about to do him the greatest favor of his life. “Mr. Staley was a good businessman,” Halas wrote in his autobiography. “I assume he went over the books carefully. One glance must have shown him the way to the future did not lie in Decatur. The three games played there brought in $1,982.49, while the five Chicago games produced $20,162.06.” Staley suggested that Halas and Sternaman take over ownership of the team and move it to Chicago. He even offered them $5,000 to get started, in return for a promise to retain the name “Staleys” for one more year. Halas and Sternaman eagerly took him up on it.

     Shortly before the 1921 season, Halas called on Bill Veeck, Sr., president of the Cubs. He wanted to make Wrigley Field his team’s permanent home. According to Halas, the negotiations lasted less than two minutes. Veeck asked for no cash up front—probably recognizing that the young entrepreneur had none anyway. Instead, he asked for a straight 15 percent of the gate receipts and all concessions. Halas, inwardly delighted but not wanting to accede too easily, said the Cubs could have all the concessions except the game programs. Veeck agreed. Veeck suggested that the Cubs’ take should be raised to 20 percent whenever the gate exceeded $10,000. Halas agreed. The deal was sealed with a handshake, and, according to Halas, never committed to paper. It remained in effect until the Bears moved to Soldier Field half a century later.

 

The APFA was reorganized in 1921, becoming a league in the true sense of the word. Under its new president, Joe Carr, the APFA established an official schedule and began to keep standings and other statistics. It also enacted sanctions against tampering with players on other teams. The Staleys’ recent misappropriation of Paddy Driscoll might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but virtually every team had been guilty of using ringers on occasion. Players had casually jumped from club to club for the slightest inducements. Carr saw to it that this practice was discontinued.

     The Staleys opened the 1921 season with an apparently meaningless exhibition game against the Waukegan American Legion team, winning 35-0. Then they played their first, and last, official league game in Decatur. A capacity crowd of 4,000 came out for the team’s farewell appearance at Staley Field. The Staleys beat Rock Island 14-10, then boarded the train to Chicago. Halas rented out rooms for his players in a boarding house at 4414 N. Clarendon, for two dollars per man per week. The players walked to Wrigley Field for practices and games.

     Through their first six league games, the Staleys were undefeated and untied. In the sixth, they dispatched Jim Thorpe’s new team, the Cleveland Indians, 22-7 before a crowd estimated at 10,000. On Thanksgiving Day, the unbeaten Buffalo All-Americans invaded Wrigley Field and handed the Staleys a tough 7-6 defeat. On November 27, quarterback and coach Curly Lambeau led his Green Bay Packers into Chicago for the first game in what would become the greatest rivalry in pro football. The Staleys won 20-0. Then, in the biggest game of the season, a rematch with Buffalo, Guy Chamberlin scored a touchdown and kicked a field goal to carry the Staleys to a 10-7 victory.

     Now Chicago and Buffalo each had suffered one loss. The Staleys beat Canton 10-0 on December 11, then closed out the season the next Sunday against the Cardinals. On a frozen field, the teams slipped and skidded to a scoreless tie. The Staleys finished 9-1-1 in league games, while Buffalo was 9-1-2. Joe Carr ruled that the Staleys’ game with the semi-pro Waukegan team would count in the APFA standings. Thus the Staleys were 10-1-1 and the first official champions of pro football.

     Although they triumphed on the field and were reasonably successful at the box office, the 1921 Staleys did little to justify Halas’s faith in the ultimate profitability of pro football. They lost $71.63 for the season.

     In 1922, the Chicago Staleys became the Bears. “I considered naming the team the Chicago Cubs,” Halas remembered, “out of respect for Mr. William Veeck, Sr., and Mr. William Wrigley, who had been such a great help. But I noted football players are bigger than baseball players; so if baseball players are cubs, then certainly football players are bears!” The Staley franchise was officially transferred to the Chicago Bears Football Club, Inc. A year later, the American Professional Football Association also adopted a new name—the National Football League.

 

On November 22, 1925, the Bears blanked the Packers 21-0 at Wrigley Field. Observing from the Bears’ bench was Harold “Red” Grange, the Wheaton native whose sensational career at the University of Illinois had concluded less than 24 hours earlier. Immediately after the Illini’s season-ending 14-9 victory at Ohio State, the three-time All-American had secretly boarded a train for Chicago to join the Bears. Thus he was at their game the very next day—but not in uniform, because the final details of his contract had not been settled.

     When Grange officially signed with the Bears on Monday morning, it was a monumental coup for Halas. He announced that “the Galloping Ghost” would make his debut on November 26, Thanksgiving Day, against the Cardinals. Tickets went on sale Monday afternoon, and the 20,000 that had been printed were sold within three hours. Mounted police were called to quell a potential riot among fans who were still in line when the supply ran out. More tickets were printed the following day, and another 16,000 were sold.

     Thursday afternoon was damp and chilly, but Wrigley Field was filled to the rafters. 17 people were arrested outside the park for selling counterfeit tickets. Grange took the field wearing a Bears’ jersey onto which his familiar No. 77 had been hastily stitched.

     In the first quarter, Grange brought the fans to their feet when he fielded a punt and zigzagged 30 yards before being wrestled down. The rest of his afternoon was less eventful. He ended up with 66 yards on three punt returns and 36 yards on 13 carries from scrimmage. He also attempted six passes, all of which fell incomplete, and caught one pass. His interception thwarted one of the Cardinals’ two scoring threats (the other was a field-goal attempt by Paddy Driscoll that ricocheted off one of the uprights).

     Although the Bears failed to mount a serious assault on the Cardinal goal line and the game ended in a scoreless tie, no one seemed too disappointed. When the gun sounded, Cardinal players lined up to shake Grange’s hand, knowing that his presence in the league was likely to make them all more prosperous. Hundreds of fans swarmed onto the field, and only quick work by a cordon of policemen saved Grange from being stampeded by the well wishers.

     “The Bears and the Cardinals are great pro teams,” the Tribune’s Don Maxwell wrote the next morning. “They have thousands of enthusiastic followers. But the more than 36,000 folk who made the turkey wait until the game was over weren’t there to see their teams play. They were there to see the redhead of Wheaton. They cheered when Grange gained ground; they cheered when he lost ground. They went into vocal hysterics when he trotted on the field, and they almost mobbed him when he left it.”

     To exploit Grange’s tremendous popularity, the Bears played exhibition games in St. Louis, Washington, and Pittsburgh in addition to their five regularly scheduled league games between December 2 and December 13—for a total of eight games in 12 days. Late in December, they set off on a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour that saw them play nine more games before the end of January. As a result of these games, Halas said, “Pro football for the first time took on true national stature.”

     Pro football was here to stay. By the time of his death in 1983, Halas had seen the value of a franchise increase from $100 to roughly $100 million. He had also done more than anyone to make it happen.