Red Grange, the Iceman, Helped Make the NFL Cool while Showing College Athletes How to Turn Pro

By Mark Schipper

THE ICEMAN GOES PRO

Barely five minutes after the gun had sounded that cold November day in Columbus, the brightest comet that ever burned across the college football sky confirmed rumors that had scandalized most of his senior season. The University of Illinois' Red Grange, known equally well as the Wheaton Iceman and the Galloping Ghost, was turning pro, effective immediately.

Within a day Grange’s agent—a sports-loving dandy known as Charlie "Cash-and-Carry" Pyle—told newspapers that a deal had been struck to send Grange to the Chicago Bears of the National Football League, a club that was in the middle of its 1925 season. The star gridder would be in uniform and on the field by the end of the week.

The Big Ten, the league that Illinois belonged to, was not happy to hear the news. Both the conference itself, and several of its most influential members, including the University of Michigan's Fielding Yost and the University of Chicago's Amos Alonzo Stagg, were virulently anti-professional football. In the 1920s it was a position that they seemed to trumpet in the newspapers on a weekly basis. But Grange was finished with college football and was as enthusiastic about playing for money as the Big Ten was avid that he not.

Grange and Pyle had connected quietly the year prior during the Iceman's pyrotechnic junior season. The already legendary Grange was lounging at Pyle's Virginia theater in Champaign, Illinois when the Country Shark introduced himself. After slipping Grange an unlimited-movie pass, explaining that his theaters were open to him at any time—an extra benefit that could have cost Grange both his amateur eligibility and his reputation in the ultra-strict Big Ten—Pyle asked if Grange was interested in chasing some big money in professional football after his amateur eligibility had expired.

Grange was interested, and the pair began to plot a business partnership centered around professional football. That was how Grange and the Bears were able to reach terms so quickly—behind the scenes the plan had been in the works for months.

At the time Grange signed with the Chicago club, a six-year-old franchise run by a 30-year-old player-coach-general-manger called George S. Halas, the organization was floundering. Four years earlier the Bears had relocated from the farming and factory town of Decatur, Illinois to the Big City. The club had changed its name from the Staleys, which was the food-starch processing company that paid its bills, to the Bears, which had a more general appeal.

Several clubs from the original American Professional Football Association (APFA), which had rebranded to the NFL at Halas's urging three years before, were relocating from the factory towns of their birth to bigger cities with bigger markets and, in theory, better media coverage. The league was executing a conscious strategy to package and sell its product more like Major League Baseball sold theirs, but the enterprise was being stymied on several fronts and was experiencing a failure to launch.

In 1925 the NFL, and professional football generally, was regarded as a second rate, back-circuit bloodsport, where rough men covered in soot were paid a pittance to brutalize each other on the Lord's Day of Rest. The townie-gladiator reputation that an otherwise indifferent media had saddled the league with was sabotaging any shot it had at survival. There were no socially redeeming values to the professional game that anyone was willing to vouch for, which framed the league in extreme contrast to its collegiate counterpart.

The college game—which was played on the grassy floors of newly built stadiums that towered like Cathedrals in the middle of campus—was covered with something like poetic passion by the newspapermen. The sport seemed to fire the imagination of the scribes, who wrote mostly exuberant pieces that spread the gospel of the collegiate game across the country.

The conventional wisdom on the matter was that college football was a strength and character-building game for the country's leadership class. The sport had entered a heretofore uncharted territory in which unpaid gentlemen amateurs, full of courage and skill, competed for the honor and glory of their alma maters, which seemed to have an almost mystical value built into it. Leaving the Camelot of the collegiate game to play factory football for the amusement of a few gamblers and boozehounds on a set of wooden bleachers was not just a downgrade, it was closer to a scandal.

Grange, center, signing his contract with the Bears. His agent, CC Pyle, is to his left, while George Halas and "Dutch" Sternaman are to his right.

It was in that general context that Grange’s NFL contract, and what the colleges looked at as the subversive intention behind it, emerged in the cultural conversation. Cash-and-Carry, the impresario who had orchestrated the play, was a slick businessman who had outgrown the college town of Champaign. Pyle was tall and lean with an aristocratic posture. Dapper and confident, with neatly-combed salt and pepper hair styled beneath his fitted derby, he wore a diamond stick in his tie and carried an ivory handled cane. Pyle was a shrewd operator down to the black spats over his shining shoes, and he knew a big-business opportunity when he saw one.

Grange made a stark contrast to Pyle. The Wheaton Iceman was a profoundly humble person who considered himself no better or worse than a blue collar worker. It so happened that his trade was competing at football. Grange had not internalized the shame that collegians were conditioned to feel about the prospect of playing for money. Grange saw no conflict in the idea of earning a paycheck for the work he had trained to do, and demonstrated such an elite aptitude for, in college.

It was the Golden Age of sport in America, after all, and business was booming. Baseball, boxing, college football, golf, and horse racing combined to sell hundreds of millions of tickets across the country. The games and seasons were followed with a rapt dedication in the erupting mass-media marketplace, and athletic heroes were coming to occupy a special Pantheon in the American culture.

Understanding the situation, and seeing an opening for professional football to stake its own claim, Pyle went to work on selling Grange to the NFL, which was easy money. Like the rest of the league, Halas and the Bears had struggled to attract big name college players, so they jumped at the opportunity to sign a 22-year-old living legend right off the college gridiron. Unlike baseball, which had a vast array of options to fill out its rosters, the NFL had only the college game to train its potential workforce. The NFL knew it was going to die on the vine if it could not start convincing the schoolboy heroes to play the sport professionally.

And so it came to pass that just six days after Grange had played his final college game in front 85,000 souls at Ohio Stadium, he was in a locker room at Cubs Park, now known as Wrigley Field, preparing to make his professional debut. While a paltry 7,500 tickets had been sold the preceding week, a capacity crowd of 39,000 packed the ballpark on a frigid, snowy Thanksgiving afternoon to watch the Galloping Ghost make his maiden run.

The largest crowd in NFL history bore witness to a scoreless tie played out in comically abysmal conditions. The (covered in) Iceman's longest run against the crosstown Chicago Cardinals had been six yards, but the excitement of his arrival in the professional game kept the needle pinned into the proverbial red.

The Grange-era of the NFL exploded into the media, both the huge expectations for Grange, and the controversy behind his leaving college before the year was out. For the NFL it was the league's first encounter with cultural relevance. Literally overnight the big newspapers were covering the Bears as though the professional game was a main engine of the sporting culture.

MASS-MEDIA STARDOM

Red Grange could not have picked a better moment to be a college football star. The Ghost was beyond doubt a supremely talented competitor, but what gave his career its epic grandeur was the historical moment in which he competed. Grange not only starred in a sport that had mesmerized the country and exploded in popularity following the First World War, he did it during a decade in which the mass media created immortals in almost facet of American life.

By 1922 the rapidly improving radio industry had mostly built out its national network and was broadcasting games live to millions of listeners. The Rose Bowl Game, which was the sport's only post-season contest, was broadcast commercially for the first time in 1925. Just two years later a new network called the National Broadcasting Company would send the Rose coast-to-coast to an audience of more than 25 million.

Even before the 1920s, wire reporting of game outcomes from almost any hinterland happened instantaneously, while hundreds of daily newspapers covered the season in granular detail. A packet of weekly and monthly magazines arrived in the wake of the news that included feature pieces written by famous authors. Those periodicals would be full of photo spreads that captured athletes, coaches, and game day atmospheres from across the country. On top of all the print and broadcast material, newsreels with film footage of the biggest games and stars ran dozens of times a day in thousands of movie theaters.

In effect the media created a national, three-and-a-half-month long pageant of college football. Everything that the media industry does in the twenty-first century to create a big seasonal storyline was established in the 1920s. But in those early days the operation was fresh and exciting and the drive to build legends was intense. Grange entered the American pantheon alongside men like Charles Lindbergh, Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey as a consequence of the far-flung dissemination of his schoolboy heroics at Illinois.

It had begun for Grange in 1923 when he was named a sophomore All American on the Illini’s undefeated co-national-title team. Grange would return to the fray in 1924 and make himself into an immortal. Like all of the legendary performers, Grange was at his best when the stakes were highest. His greatest single performance, and the one that still resounds through college football history, came in the middle of October against the mighty Michigan Wolverines.

Illinois' co-champion the year before had been its Big Ten conference mate, Michigan. Because the two undefeated teams had not played each other, the first opportunity to settle the issue would come in 1924 in Champaign.

The Wolverines would enter the game on the crest of a 20-game unbeaten streak, while the Illini were riding a 10-game run of their own. Michigan's Fielding Yost, who had moved from the sideline to the athletic director's chair that offseason, had no doubt that Michigan was about to make an emphatic statement. Always cocky about his program, Yost had put his hand-picked coaching replacement against the wall when he began promising reporters that the Grange phenomenon was entering its final days.

Illinois had picked the Michigan game, one of the biggest in the history of its program, to stage the dedication ceremonies for its one-year-old Memorial Stadium, a classical brick and stone monument pledged to those students and alumni who were killed or missing after serving in World War I. An overflow crowd of more than 67,000—with columns of cars rolling downstate from Chicago—had arrived early to partake in the festivities. Spectators continued pouring into the ballpark right up until kickoff, squeezing onto the staircases and climbing up onto the sloping parapets at the edge of the grandstands.

The twin-decked stadium, its facades festooned with patriotic bunting, was pulsating with energy when Michigan thumped the opening kickoff skyward. With the newsreel cameras whirring on the balconies Grange settled under the ball, fielded it cleanly, and bolted ninety-five yards for a touchdown. The huge thundering crowd boiled up into an ecstatic mass all around the field.

Over the next twelve minutes Grange would score on electrifying touchdown sprints of sixty-seven, fifty-six, and forty-four yards. The Galloping Ghost scored four times in the game's opening quarter against a Michigan defense that had surrendered four touchdowns in the two preceding seasons combined.

Red Grange running the ball against Michigan, October of 1924. Note the decorative bunting along the bottom stadium parapet for the dedication ceremony, and the capacity crowd. Men and boys can be seen sitting on the ledge of the grandstand because every seat was filled.

In that era of single-platoon football with strictly limited substitution rules, Grange also played defense. After intercepting two Michigan passes in that opening round Grange had gone to the bench for the entirety of the second quarter. He returned in the second half and immediately scored again on an eleven-yard touchdown run. Grange would finish his performance by throwing a touchdown pass in the fourth quarter to seal a 39-14 Illinois blowout victory.

Grange had been responsible for six touchdowns, 36 of his teams 39 points, and 402 yards of offense on the ground. The two interceptions were almost lost in the magnitude of the scoring. The incandescent nature of the performance swept over the nation. The boys in the press box went wild trying to top each other with purple prose, while the newsreels would roll the game's highlights for weeks afterward.

Grantland Rice, the king of American sports writing, had been at the Polo Grounds in New York composing his epochal "Four Horseman" lead for the Notre Dame/Army game while Grange was annihilating Michigan. But when Rice heard about the performance he was lifted to poetry.

“A streak of fire, a breath of flame

Eluding all who reach and clutch;

A gray ghost thrown into the game

That rival hands may never touch;

A rubber bounding blasting soul

Whose destination is the goal—Red Grange of Illinois!”

Warren Brown, a sportswriter for the Chicago American, nicknamed Grange the “Galloping Ghost” in his postgame column. It was a moniker that would stick to Grange for all time.

Following his second straight All-American campaign in 1924, Grange returned for a final run at the glory. While the Illini struggled to begin the 1925 season, opening at 1-3, with rumors leaking out that Grange was considering professional football, the team had a major opportunity to salvage its season against Pennsylvania University on a Halloween Saturday in Philadelphia.

The 1920s was a transformative decade for college football. One of its most significant shifts occurred when the game’s power-center moved out of the Northeast for the first time since the sport had been created there in 1869. The Midwest, the South, and the Far West had asserted themselves as the future of the game, but many of the most influential sportswriters, most of whom worked in the media epicenters of New York City and Philadelphia, were not prepared to acknowledge that fact. For those scribes, any team that competed outside of the East was automatically second rate until they had slayed one of the old guard.

Fortunately for Illinois the newsmen had anointed Penn the champions of Eastern Football for the 1925 season. Puffed up and overconfident about Penn's program, the media hype created a big stage upon which the Quakers were expected to throttle the pretenders from the Midwest. Special trains clacked into the heart of Philadelphia from the Eastern Seaboard as 62,000 souls packed the already-venerable Franklin Field. The press box was lousy with scribes on a cold and muddy Halloween day when Grange went ballistic again.

The Ghost piled up 363 yards of offense, running like a champion mudder, and scored three touchdowns on runs of fifty-six, twenty, and thirteen-yards. The Fighting Illini dismantled the champions of the East, winning 24-2, as word of Grange’s pyrotechnics again went hurtling to every corner of the land.

Laurence Stallings, a famous columnist for the New York World—and a man who had covered the carnage of World War I at the Western Front—essentially folded on the special assignment that he had asked for. The game had become such an intensely felt and massive spectacle that in the immediate aftermath Stallings could not establish the proper context in which to write his piece.

“This story’s too big for me. I can’t write it,” he said.

The massively popular short-story writer, Damon Runyon, who had been at the game as a free-lance correspondent, launched into ecstasies describing the performance: “This man Grange of Illinois is three or four men, and a horse rolled into one for football purposes. He is Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Al Jolson, Paavo Nurmi and Man O’War. Put them all together. They spell Grange.”

The newsreels that played the highlights of Grange's performance called him "the greatest man who ever wore moleskines." Illinois, with the wind filling its sails, went on to win its final four games, including Grange's valedictory at Ohio State. The Wheaton Iceman was named an All American for the third consecutive season.

There was no denying that Grange had a flair for the spectacular. In three seasons and just 20 games he had scored 31 touchdowns, at least one score in every game except one. Sixteen of those touchdowns had come on runs of more than twenty yards, while nine of them were from more than fifty, leaving only six touchdowns that covered fewer than twenty yards. Grange was a transcendent player, but the course of his career at Illinois was as much a revelation of the myth-making power of the mass media as it was the apotheosis of a football god.

Grange, for his part, was always extremely humble about what he had done and the avalanche of attention it had brought down on top of him.

“They built my accomplishments way out of proportion,” Grange said, looking back. “I never got the idea that I was a tremendous big shot. I could carry a football well, but there are a lot of doctors and teachers and engineers who could do their thing better than I did mine.”

THE COLLEGES' HYSTERICAL REACTION TO GRANGE'S DEPARTURE

What the colleges considered disquieting about Grange's immediate departure for the NFL was that he had not waited until his class graduated in the spring of 1926 to do it. The overnight transition from college hero to professional athlete created the impression of a close synapse between two organizations that the college crowd wanted separated by an impenetrable wall.

The colleges were so spooked by the NFL's sudden viability as a competitor that they pressured the league into making an immediate change to its calendar. The NFL, eager to appease the outraged universities before they did something punitive, agreed to prohibit college athletes from playing in the league during the same season they had competed for a university. With this first provision of what was known as the Red Grange Rule, the Galloping Ghost became the last man to play in both a college and NFL game in the same season.

One fundamental conviction shared by university administrators across the country was that college football never should become a trade school for the professional game. In the 1920s only around five-percent of Americans earned a college degree, and one expectation that came with that higher level of education was that the student rise above physical toil and dedicate himself to an occupation that required the use of his mind.

While college football's backers had constructed a world in which their game was an arena for gentlemen amateurs to build up their physical and martial skillsets, there were no such justifications for the professionals. For the universities the professional game was a low rent, mercenary operation all the way around.

“Pro football is inferior to the college brand, not in skill but in spirit,” read an editorial in the Chicago Tribune just a month before Grange’s final game. “It is the difference between the patriot and the mercenary in warfare.”

Grange had been on the cover of Time magazine just a month before he joined the Bears, raised up as the ideal of flaming youth right up until the moment he left school to make money playing football. When Grange jumped ship an influential cohort of the college crowd rebranded their former hero a traitor to his own kind. Some of the reactions to Grange's decision bordered on the hysterical.

Grange on the October, 1925 cover of TIME magazine.

Outlook, a major sporting magazine of the era, wrote a piece imploring the colleges to “De-Grange” themselves before the contagion spread. The name Grange was used as a verb that meant to trade the clean amateur fame that belonged to a collegian for something vulgar, like a paycheck. Outlook did not mention that Grange came from humble, blue collar origins, or that the money from football meant real economic freedom for him. In a bit of unintentional irony, the publisher sold its Grange issue for the full newsstand price. Being a professional news operation was no problem.

Fielding Yost, whose program had been scorched to ashes by Grange during one of the most legendary performances in the history of the sport, did not want to see Grange in professional football, either.

“I’d be glad to see Grange do anything except play professional football," Yost told the newspapers.

It was the same story out of the University of Chicago, where the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg, a former All American at Yale, maintained a particular disgust for professional football, which he described as a menace to personal character and national health. Stagg had spent time around professional baseball players in the 1880s when he was a multi-sport star at New Haven. Stagg had left their company thoroughly unimpressed with what he saw. After turning down a professional baseball contract to study theology, Stagg claimed that the professionals he knew were a pack of drunken, carousing loafers who had nothing to offer society.

"To patronize Sunday professional football games is to cooperate with forces which are destructive of the finest elements of interscholastic and intercollegiate football," Stagg said in the early 1920s. "The boy who now plays on a professional football team sells not only his ability but also the name of the college he formally represented"

Stagg grew so paranoid about the contagion of professional football that he led the charge to prevent the Big Ten from hiring any referee who had ever worked a professional game. He also, alongside several other big name coaches, led the movement within the new American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) to prohibit any professional coach from becoming a member.

At the height of his derangement Stagg pledged to retroactively strip varsity letters from any of his former players if they chose to play football professionally. And now here was the great Grange, the sport's mightiest star, and an athlete who had competed in the Big Ten, enthusiastically forsaking the aristocrats of the collegiate game for the company of Stagg's carousers.

Ironically, the most heroic effort made by the colleges was to ignore the fact that Grange’s fame came entirely from playing college football. While academics and reformers had looked at the sport with a jaundiced eye for decades, chattering about its creeping commercialism since at least the 1880s, the big football boom following World War I had transformed the game into a full-scale commercial enterprise.

Massive War Memorial stadiums, allowing for sixty, seventy, and eighty-thousand fans to purchase tickets, went up across the country. Already by 1925 hundreds of American universities counted on the cash hauls from football season to fund their athletic operations and bankroll building projects across campus.

But even as the game exploded commercially it remained critical to the schools, and a kind of gentlemen’s agreement within the media, that the amateur nature of the athletes competing would be played up. That need stemmed from a choice made by the schools during the sport's earliest days to adopt the English concept of amateurism in justification of their enterprise.

The English ideal, which was established at the prestigious universities at Oxford and Cambridge in the first half of the 19th century, made the acceptance of payment for an athletic performance a perversion of pure sport. While no on ever backed the ideal with any independent moral reasoning, it worked in England because of the intense class-stratification of its society. The amateur ideal was meant to keep the working classes out of sports that the upper classes wanted to enjoy amongst themselves, and it was easy to create a calculus that would do that.

If you could afford to equip yourself and compete and not need to be compensated in exchange for your time, you were a gentleman amateur. If, on the other hand, you had to choose between being compensated in order to train and compete, or to work at a trade in order to support yourself, you were a professional athlete, and not welcome at the local clubs.

The issue with this application in the United States was rooted in the fundamental openness of American society. Unlike England, the United States was a youthful country in which talented men with personal merit, but no real heritage or wealth to draw upon, could rise quickly to the highest echelons of society. Outside of the universities, which in general regarded themselves as part of an American upper class, the rest of the country never really accepted the claim that an athlete being compensated for his performance would in some way soil him.

“We must have an amateur ideal,” said Bob Zuppke, Grange’s coach at Illinois. “If a man plays for himself alone he can’t be happy. If he plays for the spirit of the school in the true sense, nothing can make him more truly a man."

For a young man like Grange, who hauled ice blocks on his back during the summer to earn cash for the school year, amateurism's soaring ideals were little more than abstractions.

“I took quite a beating in the press and from different schools for joining pro football,” Grange said many years later. “Probably I would have been more popular with the colleges if I had joined Capone’s mob in Chicago rather than the Bears.”

Paul Gallico, a writer for the New York Daily News, did not struggle to see it from the athletet's perspective.

“Grange’s critics simply object to all this gorgeous jack falling into the hands of socially inferior persons who were in the thing only for gain, and didn’t even pretend they were doing it because they loved it," Gallico wrote in one of his columns from the period.

Zuppke, the 46-year-old chief at Illinois, felt almost proprietary over Grange's accomplishments, which was a common enough sentiment amongst coaches at that time.

“Grange has no right to capitalize on his athletic fame,” Zuppke said as the scandal played out in the media. “His fame belongs to Illinois, not him.”

The university was so anxious to avoid the apparent calamity of Grange going pro that the university's president and athletic director drove 150 miles to the Grange family house in Wheaton to make him an offer. Having massaged their connections at the Chicago Herald and Examiner, the men flashed a check worth $5,000 dollars and told one of the most famous athletes on earth that there was a no-work job at the newspaper if he would wait until his class graduated before competing as a professional.

These high-minded college men had such a cowering fear of being humiliated by Grange's lack of shame that they compromised their own integrity to try to stop him. The unfathomable irony that these apostles of amateur purity had offered an able-bodied youth a big check in exchange for doing nothing with his life for a year, was lost on them. The Granges politely declined their offer.

Coach Zuppke, in a fit of pique over the sudden loss of power and influence, took a nasty parting shot at Grange during the team banquet, which was supposed to be a joyful farewell to the departing seniors. After singling out Grange, the most significant player in the history of the university, Zuppke announced that he would not have any more “hundred-thousand-dollar football players at Illinois".

Grange, who was reportedly being paid that amount to barnstorm with the Bears, got up and walked out of the banquet.

“I thought his remarks were completely uncalled for,” Grange said. “I had done my very best during the three varsity seasons I played for him and now that my college football career was over I felt what I did from then on was my own affair.”

Grange and Zuppke became estranged for a time, but they would reconcile several years later and become good friends and professional colleagues. Grange, true to his own perspective to the last, never felt any guilt about the decision he had made.

“Early on I found out after entering college that an arts degree isn’t worth a dime in business,” Grange said. “I believe the public will be better satisfied with my honesty and good motives if I turn my efforts to that field in which I have been most useful.”

If the the universities had taken a practical view on what Grange was doing, or even a sense of basic decency, they not only would have been proud of Grange, and grateful for the glory and fame he had brought to their game, they would have been boasting in the media for every parent to read that they had helped Grange develop his values and his expertise. Grange was every bit the honest gentleman that they claimed their game built.

PRO FOOTBALL

The Chicago Bears, delirious at the prospect of packing stadiums for the first time ever, scheduled a psychotic ten games over eighteen days to capitalize on the acquisition of Grange. The club’s plan was to barnstorm the professional game around the country and to make a pile of cash while the Ghost's star shone from its zenith. That plan was emblematic of how small-time the NFL was in 1925 and 1926. It was a league more-than willing to risk the physical destruction of its one real star if it meant a cash stake and a season-long run of good publicity.

“When I came to pro football in the twenties, it was really a nothing game,” Grange said.

A few years down the road, writing columns for the Saturday Evening Post with a man named George Dunscomb, Grange detailed a few of the differences between the two games, and why the traditions and atmosphere around college football created such an advantage for the sport.

“Football, collegiate or professional, is a branch of the show business,” Grange said. “In the professional game, however, we’ve lacked the props—that is, bands, organized cheering, mass meetings and football girls—which make college football a pageant."

There is no doubt that the college crowd would have both agreed and thrown another heap of reasons on top of those. The one game was staged like a patriotic folk festival every Saturday, while the other might have been described on certain muddy Sundays as grim and forlorn.

Red Grange in his no. 77 Chicago Bears uniform.

The national tour set up by the Bears meant that Grange played 19 games in 17 cities over just 67 days. The brass tacks worked out to a bone-rattling competition every three-and-a-half days for two straight months. It beat the hell out of everyone on the team, including Grange, who at times looked like he was playing at half power.

But fortunately for the Ghost, the incredible contract secured by Pyle earned him both a game fee plus a percentage of the house gate. At a time when most players earned around $100 an outing, Grange collected in the neighborhood of $125,000 over eight weeks, nearly $2 million in today’s dollars.

Pyle also connected Grange with multiple product endorsement deals, including cigarettes and candy, and held autograph signings for an ala carte fee, making Grange the prototype for the modern athlete. During a stop in Washington D.C. Grange, decked out in a new fur coat, and George Halas were brought for a private meeting with President Calvin Coolidge. That was how big the traveling spectacle had grown. Coolidge, for his part, after being informed by his handlers that these men were with the Chicago Bears, told Grange and Halas that he had always liked animal acts. By the time it was over Grange was by far the richest and most famous football player in the history of the country, and its first professional superstar.

After a year in the NFL Grange and Pyle had attempted to buy an ownership stake in the Bears. When their offer was rejected, they created an entirely new league to find out if Grange’s star wattage was enough to make it go. The NFL was so rickety at the time—no playoffs, no championship game, no real structure at all—that creating a new organization to compete against them was a legitimate business risk. After securing funding for nine franchises and naming the venture the American Football League, Grange took his place as the star attraction on the New York Yankees football team, with a five-year lease to play at Yankee Stadium.

That first version of the AFL played for a full season, went on a barnstorming tour in the winter to drum up more enthusiasm, and then folded. The owners quickly learned what the NFL had known for years, which was that the college game cast a giant shadow. But Grange's Yankees were picked up by the NFL and Grange continued his professional career, eventually returning to the Bears.

A serious knee injury caused him to miss an entire year and when he returned he was a solid but no longer a spectacular player. But despite the injury Grange had some the olde magic left before he hung up his togs for good. In 1932, at the league's first unofficial championship game, Grange hauled in the only touchdown pass in a 9-0 victory over the franchise that became the Detroit Lions. A year later, after the league had approved its new post-season format, Grange made the game-saving tackle against the New York Giants to secure the first ever NFL Championship for Halas and the Bears.

For the rest of his life Halas would call Grange the Eternal Flame of professional football.

The college set, of course, had looked on with horror at the cash-making gambits of Grange and Pyle that played out in the press like an in-spirit prototype of a reality television show. The colleges' position on amateurism, and their attitude toward professional football, had not changed in the least. The schools were not just holding the line, they were clawing back turf. Even a decade after Grange had finished at Illinois, and despite his triumphs in the NFL, for much of the culture the professional game still wore the mark of the beast.

The Heisman Trophy, created to honor the best college player in the country, made its debut exactly ten years after Grange had gone pro. But from 1935 through 1939 its first five recipients had rejected professional football. Two of them—Larry Kelley of Yale and Davey O’Brien of TCU—had played a combined three seasons in the NFL before Kelley decided to become a prep-school instructor, and O'Brien joined the FBI. The rest of the winners—Jay Berwanger, Clint Frank, and Nile Kinnick—never spent a day in professional football.

It wasn’t until the middle 1940s, nearly twenty years after Grange had defied the culture, that Heisman Trophy winners began testing themselves in the NFL. And it wasn't until the 1950s, half-a-decade after World War II had ended, that they were expected to join the professional ranks. The college game had ruled over the football culture for eighty-years until the combined forces of the Greatest Generation and the advent of live-television took possession of it for good.

Grange, for his part, never had any regrets about being the first college hero to give the NFL a shot.

"I am not ashamed of a thing I've done. I think I showed plain common sense in cashing in on an asset after I had given everything I had to my university,” Grange said during an interview that represented his general position on the matter.

Red Grange in New York Yankees warm up gear.

But despite the NFL's slow climb to preeminence, the Galloping Ghost’s impact on pro football was massive. Immediately after Grange made his jump the NFL was pressured to collude with the irate colleges to institute the so-called the Red Grange Rule. This regulation, which went into effect in 1926, forbade NFL teams from signing any college football player before his class had graduated. This provision helped the universities hold on to their money-making property until it had reached full maturity, and it allowed the NFL to bolster its reputation as a serious business, and not the collection of pimps that the colleges sometimes made them out to be. The Grange Rule would hold up for nearly sixty years.

Grange’s professional career, which ran from 1925 through 1933, marked the first serious and sustained coverage the NFL had received since it was established in 1920. The Ghost's sudden burst into the NFL ended up being a long foreshadowing of the league's big-money future. For his distinguished and exceptional contributions to the game Grange was enshrined in the inaugural classes of both the college and professional football halls of fame.

For several years after retiring the Wheaton Iceman continued to haul his blocks of ice during the summer. It was both his essential working class humility that brought him home, and because he knew the toil would keep him physically fit. Widely admired for his affable personality and a complete lack of personal pretension, Grange spent years as one of television's top analysts for both college and professional football.

With the advent of the new era of Name, Image, and Likeness rights arriving almost a century after Grange played, and the opening of commercial marketplaces for these so-called amateur competitors, the college game has changed forever. What was once an unimaginable status quo—with football players earning money to compete for their alma maters, let alone professionally—has become a reality. But every argument about what it means to be a gentleman amateur, or what it says about the character of the man who chooses to turn pro, ultimately runs back to Red Grange, who did everything he could for his university, and then what he had to do for himself.