Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [82]
“I felt so sorry for the Yankees,” says George. “They had to replace me with a reconditioned pitcher from Boston named Babe Ruth.”
A statement of the late Illinois coach, Bob Zuppke, kept echoing in George’s mind: “It’s a pity that just when my players get to know something about football, I lose ‘em.”
George turned the coach’s statement around to read from the player’s point of view, and an idea blossomed. He got in touch with a number of recent college stars who regretted having been forced to quit the game at the peak of their powers, and in 1920 George sold officials of the Staley Starch Works, in Decatur, Illinois, on the idea of sponsoring a team, with himself as player-coach. The next year, when he moved to Wrigley Field in Chicago and adopted the name “Bears” to indicate these were the Cubs’ big brothers, the team with the proudest tradition in the game was launched.
Since then, Halas’ contributions to pro football have far outnumbered those of any other man. It was he who, in 1920, suggested forming a league – and proposed, furthermore, that it be called the National Professional Football League. And when he signed Red Grange and barnstormed the Bears across the country with the Wheaton Iceman, George lifted the postgraduate sport from sandlot status to front-page respectability. Today, George is the only coach from that period who is still active in the game.
He can remember a time when fans in Rock Island, Illinois, chased center George Trafton and other early Bears off the gridiron and out of town for roughing one of their players. It wasn’t only Trafton’s neck that was at stake. The team’s share of the gate receipts were also threatened. In those days, you took it with you or it didn’t go. To the astonishment of many, George tossed the heavy moneybag to Trafton as the center raced toward the exit with the ugly mob at his heels.
Explained Halas later: “I would have been running only to save seven thousand dollars – but Trafton was running for his life.”
Halas had an even narrower squeak at Comiskey Park during a Bear-Cardinal game in 1923 – or at least to hear him tell it he did. (The only detail I care to vouch for is the fierce partisanship of the fans. No other city supported two National Football League teams for so many years as Chicago, and no intra-city rivalry was ever more bitter.) According to George, this game was unusually hard fought and the fans were even more rambunctious than usual. On one play, when Halas, playing end, was tackled hard and high, he dragged his tackler down with him and locked the man in a wrestling hold. A near riot ensued. Players from both benches rushed onto the field, but before they could reach the scene of the fight, a policeman – a Cardinal partisan – raced over to the embattled Halas and placed a gun squarely against his head. “Let go of that Cardinal!” he shouted. (At least, that is what Halas told me he shouted. I have not been able to get the policeman’s version.)
Now, in those days, as in these days, George asked for no quarter, and gave none. I thought of that as I asked him what he did next.
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” he said. “Especially when you have no choice. I released my grip on the player. Both he and the cop walked away. Fortunately, nobody has put a gun to my head since – though I’m sure a few would have liked to.”
As former chairman of the NFL Rules Committee, Halas was also largely responsible for three key changes which have done much to make the professional game the exciting, unpredictable spectator sport it is today. He advocated cutting down the range for field goals by moving the goal posts from