October 18, 1924: Red Grange & the Four Horsemen

This photo of Red Grange is colorized, but is otherwise real.

October 18, 1924, 100 years ago today: Two of the most iconic games in the history of college football are played.

Harold Edward Grange was born on June 13, 1903, in Forksville, in the mining country of Northeastern Pennsylvania -- 6 days before Lou Gehrig was born 200 miles to the southeast in East Harlem, Manhattan. He was born 15 days after entertainer Bob Hope, 5 days before early film singer Jeannette MacDonald, 9 days before Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell and bank robber John Dillinger, and 12 days before British writer George Orwell.

His father was the foreman on a lumber camp, and eventually moved the family to Wheaton, Illinois, about 30 miles west of Chicago, where 4 of his brothers lived, and he became that small city's Chief of Police. His son Harold, nicknamed Red because of his hair, got a job delivering ice, a hard job because ice is heavy. (A gallon of water weighs over 8 pounds. Now imagine it hard as a rock.) It made him strong, and he was fast, too. He was nicknamed "The Wheaton Iceman" well before "The Galloping Ghost." He made $37.50 a week -- about $590 in today's money.

Red lettered in football, baseball, basketball and track at Wheaton High School, all 4 years, 16 varsity letters. He was a State Champion in the high jump, the long jump and the 100-yard dash.

The school is now known as Wheaton Warrenville South High School, and also counts astronomer Edwin Hubble, journalist Bob Woodward, and the comedian brothers John and Jim Belushi among its alumni. The colors are orange and black -- not quite the same colors as Red would wear for the Illini and the Bears, but close. The school's stadium is named Red Grange Field.

In his 1st game at the University of Illinois, in Champaign in the east-central part of the State, on October 6, 1923, Grange scored 3 touchdowns against Nebraska, a very strong team at the time. Coached by Bob Zuppke, Illinois went 8-0, beating teams by an average score of 17-3. After a 9-6 win away to Iowa, they didn't allow a point for the rest of the season.

The Helms Athletic Foundation awarded Illinois the National Championship. This notoriety allowed Illinois to raise the money to build a new stadium, as a memorial to the school's alumni who had fallen in World War I a few years earlier.

On October 18, 1924, Red Grange led the Illini onto the field at Memorial Stadium in Champaign for its dedication game against the University of Michigan. A player now largely forgotten outside Michigan, Bennie Oosterbaan, led the Wolverines, who were favored to win the National Championship. (Michigan and Notre Dame did not play each other that season. They have not always played, occasionally feuding, and this was during one of the feuds.)

Grange returned the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown. He ran 67 yards for a touchdown. He ran 56 yards for a touchdown. He ran 44 yards for a touchdown.

All this was accomplished in the 1st 12 minutes of the ballgame.

He later passed for another touchdown, and returned a kick for another. He accounted for 6 touchdowns in Illinois' 39-14 victory.

Keep in mind: Michigan was already the most honored college football program west of the Ivy League. In spite of the achievements of Knute Rockne and George Gipp, Notre Dame was not yet Notre Dame. But Michigan, under the guidance of legendary coach Fielding Yost (and, this season, George Little, was already Michigan, which, despite their recent struggles to beat arch-rival Ohio State, remains the defining football school of that league.

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Grange's performance is often called the best one-man game in college football history. But it wasn't even the most talked-about game played that day. There was another game that made this day, as far as college football was concerned, the peak of the "Roaring Twenties." Did I mention Notre Dame? Yes, yes, I did:

At the Polo Grounds in New York, the South Bend, Indiana-based University of Notre Dame beats Army -- the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York -- 13-7. The Fighting Irish were led by their 4-man backfield: Quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller and fullback Elmer Layden. Layden scored a touchdown in the 2nd quarter, Crowley in the 3rd.

Army were favored to win, but there was precedent: Notre Dame had shocked them in 1913, with quarterback Gus Dorais and end Knute Rockne, for all intents and purposes, introducing the passing game to a wide audience, and making Notre Dame more than just what we would now call a "mid-major" Catholic school in the Midwest like DePaul or Marquette. Now, with Rockne as head coach, the Fighting Irish -- although Miller was of English descent, and Stuhldreher, German -- pulled off a much less surprising upset.

George Strickler, a Notre Dame student, was what we would now call a publicity director. At halftime, he mentioned Rudolph Valentino's 1921 silent film epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although that term comes from the Bible's Book of Revelation), in the press box. The great syndicated sports columnist Grantland Rice, based out of the New York Herald Tribune, ran with it, and wrote this opening paragraph, the most famous piece of sportswriting ever:

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

They don't write 'em like that anymore: Not only was the 1920s, as Rice himself later billed it, the Golden Age of Sports, it was the golden age of sportswriting, with Rice joined by such men as Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, Jimmy Cannon and Damon Runyon.

To further plant the idea of the Four Horsemen in people's minds, the 4 of them were posed on horseback, wearing full uniforms and holding footballs. From left to right: Miller, Layden, Crowley, Stuhldreher. A set of statues representing that photo is now at Notre Dame's Guglielmo Athletic Complex.

(As far as I know, nobody ever asked Red Grange to pose as a ghost, or with a man dressed as a ghost, or on a galloping horse.) 

Over the Horsemen's 3 seasons -- freshmen were not eligible to play varsity football at the time -- Notre Dame won 27 games and lost only 2, both away to Nebraska, plus a tie in an earlier game with Army. They won the 1924 National Championship, defeating Ernie Nevers' Stanford squad in the 1925 Rose Bowl, with Layden returning 2 interceptions for touchdowns. (Notre Dame would then refuse all bowl invitations until the 1969 season.)

None of the Four Horsemen was over 6 feet tall, and none was listed as weighing more than 162 pounds. But this was typical of football players of the Roaring Twenties. And no one today can question their toughness: In their 30 games together, they played in primitive protective equipment, played offense and defense, excelling on both sides, and played all 60 minutes, with no substitutions. The offensive line that protected them was nicknamed the "Seven Mules," to emphasize their crucial but less glamorous function.

(The Mules didn't become famous in their own right, with one exception: The center, Adam Walsh, would go on to coach the Cleveland Rams to the 1945 NFL Championship, and then become their 1st head coach in Los Angeles the following season.)

It was the Four Horsemen, and Rockne's subsequent publicity campaigns through the beginnings of mass media in the 1920s, that made Notre Dame iconic. Even George Gipp wasn't as famous in life as the 1928 Notre Dame-Army game, in which Rockne made up the "Win one for the Gipper" story, and the later film Knute Rockne, All-American, with Pat O'Brien as Rockne and young Ronald Reagan as Gipp, would make him in death.

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Having made legends out of the Four Horsemen, Grantland Rice took pen in hand (or, more likely, tapped out on his typewriter), and wrote this about Grange:

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!

Although Rice had called Grange "a gray ghost" (and he certainly appears as such in the few surviving film clips of him playing, all black and white, of course), Warren Brown, writing for the Chicago American, gave him the nickname "the Galloping Ghost."

A year later, on Halloween, October 31, 1925, Illinois traveled to Philadelphia to play the University of Pennsylvania at Franklin Field. The playing surface was a muddy mess, and few expected Grange to move well on it. He did, scoring 3 touchdowns and setting up the Illini's other touchdown, in a 24-2 win. Rice covered this game as well, and wrote:

There are two shapes now moving

Two ghosts that drift and glide

And which of them to tackle

Each rival must decide.

They shift with spectral swiftness

Across the swarded range

And one of them's a shadow

And one of them is Grange.

Runyon added, "This man Red 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."

Zuppke would later say, "An All-American consists of a fast back, weak opposition, and a poet in the press box." But he also said, "I will never have another Grange, but neither will anyone else. They can argue all they like about the greatest football player who ever lived, but I was satisfied I had him when I had Red Grange." A statue of Grange now stands outside Memorial Stadium -- essentially, the house than Zuppke and Grange built.

Grange's 77 became the 1st celebrated uniform number in American sports -- especially since Major League Baseball wouldn't have uniform numbers until 1929, and the National Hockey League until 1926. When asked how he got the famous double-digit, he said, "The guy in front of me got 76, and the guy behind me got 78." It wasn't a choice, and it's not like Wheaton had uniform numbers at the time. (In case you're wondering about the Four Horsemen, I looked it up: Layden wore 5, Miller 16, Crowley 18 and Stuhldreher 32.)

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How did the Four Horsemen do in the pros? Not especially well. Pro football was then still frowned upon, as a backwater game at best, and as outright dishonorable at worst. Zuppke himself was of two minds about it: George Halas, who had helped Illinois gain a share of the 1918 Big Ten title (before going into the U.S. Navy and helping the Chicago-based Great Lakes Naval Training Center team win the 1919 Rose Bowl), remembered him lamenting that players graduated just as they were really learning how to play. But Zuppke also stopped speaking to Halas and Grange for many years after they turned pro, eventually reconciling with both of them.

The Horsemen only played 1 professional game together, at the end of the 1925 season, for the Waterbury Blues against a team from Adams, Massachusetts, at Hartford, Connecticut (about halfway between), and won 34-0. (Imagine Patrick Mahomes passing to Stefon Diggs, with Derrick Henry and Dalvin Cook in his backfield, and the other 7 players on his own team and the 11 on the other side being college players, and you'll get the idea of what it was like.) The Horsemen were paid $5,000 apiece -- about $90,000 in today's money, for a little over 2 hours' performance. Then as now, nice work if you can get it.

Stuhldreher, from the football-crazy town of Massillon, Ohio (also hometown of Yankee Legend Tommy Henrich), and Layden, from Davenport, Iowa (part of the "Quad Cities" that were then represented in the NFL by Illinois' Rock Island Independents), had a team built around them and named for them, the Brooklyn Horsemen. They played in the original American Football League in 1926. When that league folded, the Brooklyn Horsemen were absorbed into the NFL, which still needed the publicity, and played 3 games in that league's '26 season.

Stuhldreher ended his playing career after that season, and was named head coach at Villanova, and later at the University of Wisconsin, managing a decent record but no conference titles in 24 years. He then worked for U.S. Steel, and wrote a couple of books about football. He died in 1965, only 63 years old.

Layden went on to be the head coach at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, getting them into the 1934
Festival of Palms Bowl, the forerunner of Miami's Orange Bowl. He then became head coach at Notre Dame, and in 1941 was offered the post of Commissioner of the NFL, serving 5 seasons and guiding them through the difficulties caused by the manpower shortage from the World War II draft. He then went into business in Chicago, and died in 1973, age 70.

Miller, from Defiance, Ohio, about halfway between Toledo and Fort Wayne (and the only 1 of the 4 from anywhere near South Bend), coached at Georgia Tech, and then practiced law. He was appointed a U.S. Attorney for the Cleveland area by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and died in 1979, age 77.

Crowley, from the football-crazy town of Green Bay, Wisconsin -- Packer co-founder Earl "Curly" Lambeau had played for Rockne at Notre Dame -- became an assistant coach at Georgia, and head coach at Michigan State and Fordham.

At Fordham, in The Bronx, he coached a team that challenged for the National Championship in 1937 and '38, with a line known as the Seven Blocks of Granite, including 2 future Pro Football Hall-of-Famers. Alex Wojciechowicz starred for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Detroit Lions. The other never played a down of pro ball, and is in the Hall as a coach: Vince Lombardi. (Longtime Giants owner Wellington Mara didn't play, but was also a student at Fordham at this time.)

Crowley enlisted in the Navy in World War II, and coached the Navy's renowned North Carolina Pre-Flight School team at Chapel Hill, with Paul "Bear" Bryant and Johnny Vaught, later to become coaching legends at Alabama and Mississippi, respectively, as assistant coaches.

Crowley then coached the Chicago Rockets of the All-America Football Conference, including receiving legend Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch. He later became chairman of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, and was the last survivor of the Four Horsemen, living until 1986, at the age of 83.

Grange played his last college game on November 21, 1925, a 14-9 Illinois win away to Ohio State. His collegiate obligation complete, he signed with Halas' Chicago Bears. At the time, there was no NFL Draft, nor any rule preventing it. Five days after his college finale, he suited up for the Bears against the Chicago Cardinals at Wrigley Field (in its last season under the name Cubs Park) on Thanksgiving Day, resulting in a 0-0 tie.

The Bears went to New York to play the Giants on December 6, and the gate receipts from that full house at the Polo Grounds -- New Yorkers coming to see Grange, not the home team -- may have saved the Giant franchise, and possibly even the League. He would play in the NFL until 1934, helping the Bears win the NFL Championship in 1932 and 1933, teaming with Bronislau "Bronko" Nagurski.

Grange became the template for the speedy halfback, Nagurski that for the big bruising fullback. Think of Grange's "descendants" as being Steve Van Buren, Doak Walker, Lenny Moore, Paul Hornung, Gale Sayers, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders and Christian McCaffrey; and Nagurski's as being Marion Motley, Tank Younger, Jim Brown, Jim Taylor, Larry Csonka, Franco Harris, John Riggins, Emmitt Smith, Terrell Davis, Jerome Bettis, Adrian Peterson and Derrick Henry.

Grange went on to become a broadcaster. In 1963, he was a charter inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He died on January 28, 1991, at the age of 87.