Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [84]
Though at the time pro football wasn’t much of a game, Halas was intrigued by the possibilities. So, for that matter, was a man named A. E. Staley. As the president and owner of the A. E. Staley Corn Products Company of Decatur, Illinois, Staley thought it could be fun—and potentially profitable—to start his own semipro football team. He did so, and being a man of little ego, named the outfit the Decatur Staleys.
Staley hired Halas as his first coach, and in order to find opponents the team joined a new league that was being formed, the American Professional Football Association. The Staleys finished 10-1-2 in 1920, but with the American economy tanking, the team’s operating costs exceeded gate receipts by fifteen thousand dollars. Following the season, Staley approached Halas with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I’m afraid we can’t make a go of it here,” he reportedly said. “But I think there is room for another professional team [along with the Cardinals] in Chicago. Take the team there and I will give you five thousand dollars if you keep the name of Staley because it will be a good advertisement for me.”
Based out of Wrigley Field, the 1921 Chicago Staleys won nine games and the league title, but Halas wanted his franchise to forge an identity of its own.
The Chicago Bears were born.
So, for that matter, was the National Football League, the APFL’s snappy new name beginning with the 1922 season. Until his death in 1983, Halas always remembered the first time he realized the NFL had a genuine shot. It came on the morning of January 30, 1922, when he picked up a copy of the Chicago Herald and Examiner and read the headline STAGG SAID BIG TEN CONFERENCE WILL BREAK PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL MENACE.
The NFL was a menace? Really? “Terrific,” said Halas. “Absolutely terrific.”
As the decades passed and the league grew from fringe to noticeable to headline-worthy to packed stadiums, the Bears—in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford—became “the early history of the game itself.”
Halas was Chicago’s owner, coach, publicity director, and head ticket peddler. He also starred as a right end on both sides of the ball and was named to the league’s all-pro squad throughout the 1920s. He invested everything he had (and more) in the team and league, constantly thinking up new ways of generating revenue. Halas opened a laundry, sold automobiles, dabbled in real estate. As Frank Graham wrote in the New York Journal-American , “he organized his players not only into a team but into a promotional outfit.” On Saturday mornings, when Northwestern would host games at its Evanston campus, Halas had his players comb the stands, handing out flyers about the next day’s Bear clash. Years later, when the Great Depression was in full bloom and the franchise was hemorrhaging money, Halas asked his mother to purchase five thousand dollars in stock to keep the Bears afloat.
In 1925 Halas had the vision to sign Red Grange, the legendary University of Illinois halfback, to a hundred-thousand-dollar contract, then trot the Bears out on a two-month, eighteen-game barnstorming tour, bringing a new level of visibility to the NFL. At the time, Grange was one of the sporting world’s national treasures. If he deemed the NFL worthy of his services, fans would surely follow. They did—he debuted on Thanksgiving Day, and thirty-six thousand spectators jammed Wrigley Field to watch.
Halas ceased playing following the 1928 season, but he coached the team for four different spans into the late 1960s, winning a remarkable 324 games and bringing the T-formation offense to life. In 1933, Halas, along with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, shattered the monotony of the NFL’s lumbering run-run-run offensive approach by lobbying to make it legal to throw a pass from any point behind the line of scrimmage. He also added—among other things—daily practices, assistant coaches, press-box spotters, training camps, films, the first pro marching band, and first pro fight song