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By Root 1452 0

room, and the fields were terrible.” Once the season started, the conditions somehow worsened. The team held most of its practices at Soldier Field, its home stadium, which featured a rock-solid artificial turf surface that only hardened as the temperatures dropped. On the days Abe Gibron, the head coach, decided his team needed more space, he loaded the players on a couple of yellow school buses and drove them to nearby Grant Park. “That was the biggest joke,” said Rich Coady, a Bears center from 1970 to 1975. “We’d get off the bus and they’d be throwing the winos off the patch of grass where we were going to work. There were no lines or goalposts, and for conditioning we’d be told to run up a big hill at the park that kids used for sledding. The older guys would run it once or twice, then lay on top and wait until everyone was done. The whole thing was a circus.”

The ringleader was Gibron. A three-hundred-pound barrel of jelly, Chicago’s coach had been a Pro Bowl offensive lineman with the Cleveland Browns. His gritty reputation endeared him to George Halas, the Bears founder and owner. Yet in his three seasons guiding the team, Gibron’s claim to fame wasn’t winning (his teams went 11-30-1), but eating and drinking. It was once said that if Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Abe Gibron had the face that lunched on a thousand shrimps. While most players were uninspired by his coaching acumen, the barrel-bellied, watermelon-headed Gibron dazzled all with his consumption skills. “He was the first person I knew,” said Ernie Janet, a Bears offensive guard, “who could eat a hamburger in two bites.”

“Abe and I would go to dinner, and he was known everywhere in Chicago because of how much he ate,” said Bob Asher, a Bears tackle. “I remember going to Greektown with him, and every restaurant we’d pass a waiter would come out yelling, ‘Abe, try this! Abe, try this!’ He ate two full meals on the way to our meal.”

For fans of comedy and characters, this was wonderful. For Halas and the Bears, however, Gibron’s emergence as the face (and blubber) of a onceproud franchise was nothing short of a tragedy.

George Halas hadn’t thought of becoming a legend.

The idea never entered his mind because, in 1920, football was a fringe endeavor, popular with a certain sect of society, but largely ignored. To become an iconic American figure in the sport was no more likely than becoming an iconic shoe salesman or dog walker. Baseball players and boxers were icons. Football players were circus freaks.

Halas was born on February 2, 1895, the son of a tailor from Pilsen, Bohemia, who immigrated to Chicago’s West Side. George learned football first at Crane Tech High School, then under Coach Bob Zuppke at the University of Illinois, where he also lettered in baseball and basketball while earning a degree in civil engineering. In helping the Illini capture the 1918 Big Ten football title as a senior end, Halas recalled Zuppke once complaining that, “Just as a fellow begins to learn how to play football, he graduates from college and never plays again.”

The words stuck with Halas, who graduated, then joined the navy and fought in World War I. He was initially stationed at a base in Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and bonded with the other recent college graduates (including two future professional stars, Paddy Driscoll and Jimmy Conzelman) who had played football at their respective universities. The soldiers formed their own team, and emerged as a national power. Because the war had decimated the rosters of collegiate programs, the 1919 Rose Bowl was played between the Great Lakes Navy and the Mare Island Marines. Halas’ team won 17–0 (Halas still holds the Rose Bowl record for longest interception return without scoring—seventy-seven yards), and the military rewarded the victorious players by granting their releases.

Interestingly, Halas also excelled in baseball, and that same year he appeared in twelve games with the New York Yankees, playing right field and batting .091 with two hits and eight strikeouts in twenty-two