Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [71]
Chicago was the site of the first automobile race on the American continent, held on Thanksgiving Day, 1895 – a 54.36-mile run won by Frank Duryea at the unheard-of average speed of 7.5 miles per hour. Chicago inaugurated the five-figure purse in horse racing, at Washington Park’s noted American Derby. Chicago built the first eighteen-hole golf course, at the Chicago Golf Club in Belmont, Illinois.
This city witnessed the founding of both the National and the American Leagues in baseball, and it was here that the formidable Big Ten Conference in collegiate football was first organized. (And where the Big Ten commissioners – the late Maj. John Griffith, Tug Wilson, and the current Bill Reed – always have maintained headquarters.)
Chicago is where boxing’s biggest gate ($2,600,000) and second-largest crowd (104,943) were recorded for the second Dempsey-Tunney fight at Soldier Field, in 1927; where Joe Louis turned pro for fifty dollars, and where he later won the heavyweight title from Jimmy Braddock in Comiskey Park; where Red Grange joined the Chicago Bears to put professional football among “respectable” sports; and where such star basketball players as bespectacled George Mikan have been groomed.
“I’m sorry, Mikan,” Notre Dame’s basketball coach, George Keogan, had told the awkward, uncoordinated youth, “but basketball just isn’t your game. You’ve got a good future in your studies. Keep at them.” But at De Paul University, Coach Ray Meyer saw promise in the young man. He put him on a stiff regimen, which included rope-skipping, trying five hundred shots a day with each hand, and learning balance by shooting while holding a towel under his right arm. Under Meyer’s guidance, Mikan developed rapidly into the basketball player voted “Greatest of the Half-Century.”
And speaking of basketball, the sport took on new importance in Chicago thanks to the college doubleheader program, originated by the late Judge John Sbarbaro and attorney Arthur Morse a quarter-century ago. The first doubleheaders were played in the Madison Avenue Armory on the West Side. From there they were shifted to the Coliseum, and finally to the Chicago Stadium, which has been their home for the past twenty years.
And for years, Chicago was the home of a man who was in on the very beginnings of basketball. Amos Alonzo Stagg, the “Grand Old Man of Football,” was a classmate of James Naismith, the young physical education student who, in 1891, was asked to think up a competitive sport that his class could play indoors.
Coach Stagg was seven years old in 1869, when the first intercollegiate football game was played. In his long, brilliant coaching career at the University of Chicago, Stagg revolutionized the game with such innovations as the lateral pass and line and backfield shifts. Under his enlightened reign University of Chicago elevens were perennial Conference and national champions or – at worst – contenders. (Today, of course, the Maroon stars play their most exciting football in the intramurals.)
It was also in Chicago that Charles (“Chick”) Evans, Jr., the “Grand Old Man of Golf,” won his first tournament as a teenager. Since then, he has played in more meets, and won more championships – including the first sweep of both the National Amateur and the United States Open crowns in