Gary Andrew Poole - The Galloping Ghost: Red Grange, an American Football Legend

Copyright 2008 by Gary Andrew Poole

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Poole, Gary Andrew.

The Galloping Ghost : Red Grange, an American
football legend / Gary Andrew Poole.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-69163-0
1. Grange, Red, 19031991. 2. Football players
United StatesBiography. I. Title.
GV 939. G 7 P 66 2008
796.332 092dc22
[b] 2008014751

Illustrations by Michael Prendergast

e ISBN 978-0-547-52351-4
v1.1014

This book is for
Leslie, Rose, and Joe

R ED GRANGE PLAYED way before my time, but his ghost always hovered above the American sporting landscape. Now there was a great player, the geriatric fans would remind us. Most of those old-timers never saw him play, but to them he was, and is, the football version of Babe Ruth. Every ten years since 1924 American football fans would celebrate the anniversary of the game that made Grange famous, and Red would repeat, verbatim, the clichs. With his side-mouthed delivery, Red told the tales with a slight grin, not exposing his two false front teethin his day, lips were the only mouthpieces. The sportswriters would visit his house from time to time, and Red would walk outside and greet them in the driveway (Park next to the Buick!) and then invite them into his living room for a chat and some of Muggss burned-nearly-to-a-crisp roast. The writers would nod respectfully at this grandfatherly man (who was supposedly childless), transcribe his words, and keep the legend alive: the greatest college player ever... the man who popularized professional football... They had never met a human, athlete or no, with such humility. They built me up way too much, he would say, referring to the writers and public who idolized him. That was Granges greatest legacy. He never believed in his own greatness. He lived the ideals of football: sacrifice for the team.

Later in life Grange didnt get out much because he loathed traveling, but he was coaxed away from his Florida tract home and beloved dachshunds to toss the coin at Super Bowl XII. Always a snappy dresser, he wore a burgundy coat and a wide tie as he walked briskly, Miss America on his right arm, to midfield. This was a few years before the Parkinsons really hit, before he started getting really tremorish. It was on January 15, 1978, in New Orleans, and Pat Summerall had the call. Ladies and gentlemen, we direct your attention to the center of the field where one of professional footballs immortals... Red Grange of the Chicago Bears, will toss the coin... The invisible crowd, lost in the Superdomes dark vacuum of artificiality, nodded and clapped politely. The Broncos and Cowboys captains recognized him; Grange, used to being a player, just looked confused, not knowing where to stand. (Its tough to toss the coin when Miss America is looking at you, he quipped.)

The thing about Grange was that only a handful of Americans had seen his electrifying runs or any real evidence of his greatness. And if they had seen it, it was in film footage that was so rare and damaged by nitrocellulose decomposition that it proved nothing. But the legend persisted through the century. Mention Red Grange to just about anyone with an interest in football, meaning just about everyone, and the reply would be reverent: the Galloping Ghost... It was a pitch-perfect nickname, conjuring an image that fit the man, on and off the field. When Red went into the Lake Wales Hospital Extended Care Facility in 1991, the columnists started the buzzard circle and the old yarns were repeatedand repeatedsome more, like a last bit of CPR. Dempsey and Jones were dead. Ruth was long gone. They had all been friends, and back in the twenties their names had been splashed alongside each others on the sports pages. Grange was the last star of the Golden Age of Sports, and its most mysterious.

But the fading war stories never satisfied, never answered the question of how Red Grange came to forever popularize football, and define manhood, for a generation and beyond. To understand the man and the game he played, I have searched America for Granges ghost. Regrettably, I never met Red Grange, butthrough newspapers, letters, oral histories, interviews, radio broadcasts, court documents... the forensics of biographyI have reconstructed his days of fame. I did not experience Granges athletic brilliance firsthand, but I visited and retraced his steps in the stadiums where he ran so elegantly, and I traveled to Wheaton, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Florida, and to Forksville, Pennsylvania, in dead winter.

Gary Andrew Poole, 2008

All-American