by Rich Cohen
When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1970s, George Halas was a kind of god. His face seemed to hover over the city. The lantern jaw and steely skull, eyes blazing. Fury burned like a fire in the old man, flames seen through the window of a dilapidated mansion. Halas was an Old Testament god. In his years as coach of the Bears, he would race up and down the sidelines, screaming at referees and opposing players. The air around him turned blue. A lot’s in dispute about his legacy, but one thing seems settled: his favorite word was “cocksucker.” After a loss in Minnesota, he got on the plane’s PA system and said, “You’re all a bunch of fucking cunts.” End of speech. On one occasion, when a ref threw a flag, Halas shouted, “You stink, you lousy cocksucker!” The ref threw another flag, marked off fifteen more penalty yards, then said, “How do I smell from here, Halas?” He said that he retired from coaching only because his bad hip didn’t let him make it up and down the sidelines fast enough to keep up with the referees. He was known for being stingy, angry, and mean. Years before, when he docked Ditka’s salary, the young tight end said, “The old man is so cheap, he throws around nickels like they’re manhole covers.” It was a nasty thing to say, and it stuck. By the 1980s, it was the main impression fans had of Halas. Of course, like almost everything else said about old people, it was half considered, unfair, shallow, and wrong.
The bones sat close to the surface of Halas’s face. He looked like sculpture. Even when he was alive, he resembled a bust in the Hall of Fame. The high cheekbones, sharp nose, and exaggerated jaw that gave him a wicked underbite—it made the old man look like he was forever grinding his teeth or girding for a blow. His chin was dimpled in the axe-wound way of Kirk Douglas, a recognizable feature from his first schoolboy photo to the last shots snapped by local paparazzi. It was an iconic Chicago face, a West Side face, the face of a boss or alderman, as familiar as the silhouette of the Sears Tower.
Halas was born in 1895 and grew up in that part of the city once known as Pilsen, many of its early inhabitants having emigrated from the area around Pilsen, Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. Back then, Chicago was a quilt of immigrant neighborhoods, communities of outcasts, each more despised than the next. You lived with everyone from everywhere. Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Greeks. It gave Halas a broad-mindedness that distinguished him from other players in the early years of the NFL. Halas could get along with anyone as long as he could play.
Coach Halas working the sideline. When he disputed a referee’s call, the air around him turned blue. October 25, 1959
Pilsen was one of those redbrick neighborhoods you see from the window of the elevated train, broad streets rushing toward the vanishing point, narrow houses, shades drawn in the upper stories, neon in the saloon windows, church spires, hardware stores, stoops, iron, ruin, and rain. The fire escapes were complicated weaves of rotting wood. Halas’s father was a brewer, a barkeep, and a tailor. He owned a grocery on 18th Place and Wood Street, three miles west of the Loop. George and his siblings lived in rooms above the store. In the summer, George shoveled coal for 50 cents a week, money he saved for college. Later reminiscences of his youthful striving had the comical ring of the miser telling you how he walked three miles to school, uphill both ways: “It was sometimes said of me that I threw dollars as though they were manhole covers,” he wrote in Halas by Halas. “That is correct. It is precisely what I did do. By being careful with money, I have been able to accomplish things I consider important.”
Halas was a Cubs fan, a member of the last generation of Chicagoans who did not have their hearts broken by the team, then a dominant franchise. The Cubs played in West Side Park, a jewel box with curtained opera seats, brownstones looming. The stadium was demolished in 1920, lost in the way of Atlantis, sunk to the subconscious of the city. Baseball was the only pro team sport, and Halas watched with the fascination of the fan who recognizes a possibility: maybe, if I keep getting better. Though scrawny, he was a natural athlete, a master of every variety of stoop- and stickball game, the flea you make the mistake of underestimating. To get to West Side Park, he had to cross 14th Street, which meant fording the territory of the 14th Street Boys, a gang of jacket-wearing, punch-throwing gutter rats. “I would take a sock at the nearest punk and run,” Halas wrote later. “I believe that’s how I developed the speed that later was to be helpful in all sports.”
Running from thugs was football in its primal state, with the object not scoring but surviving. In the early years of the pro game, scouts looked for players with the toughest childhoods: those who had to fight would have the instincts. The street games that preceded high school, games we all played, were football stripped to its essence—a run from the 14th Street Boys confined to a playground. Mob ball, gang ball. Anything can be done to you as long as you hold the rock. Those who give it up too soon will be considered cowards; those who hang on as the blows rain down will be esteemed. Halas came to favor a half dozen phrases, but the highest was reserved for players who kept the ball a moment longer than seemed reasonable. Such men had “the old zipperoo.”
Halas excelled in every sport, but football was his favorite. The game itself was still relatively new; it had appeared in New England only after the Civil War. Here and there, it was banned as too violent. In Boston, where it was played at the beginning of the week, it was called Bloody Monday. It eventually was picked up by students. The first official college game was played between Rutgers and Princeton in November 1869. There really was no professional football, though there were a few independent teams, perhaps, fielded by factory owners who, caught in a rivalry, might pay ringers. For its first forty years, football meant college, where it became a sensation. By the time Halas was old enough to read the sports summaries in the Chicago Tribune, sixty thousand fans were filling the stadium in Champaign-Urbana to watch the University of Illinois play Michigan or Wisconsin or Northwestern, or any of the other Big Ten teams.
Halas subscribed to Tip Top magazine, which was filled with garish illustrations of football as war. Like millions of other boys, he lived and died with Owen Johnson’s football hero Frank Merriwell, whose adventures were chronicled in Frank Merriwell at Yale. These stories captured the appeal of the game: violence and injury; being wounded but persisting. People are currently trying to find ways to tame the game, but it will be difficult: football is violence, hitting and being hit, delivering one swift blow to the worst of the 14th Street Boys before escaping. “Frank felt himself clutched, but he refused to be dragged down,” Johnson wrote in a story Halas would have read when he was eleven. “He felt hands clinging to him, and, with all the fierceness he could summon, he strove to break away and go on. His lips were covered with bloody foam, and there was a frightful glare in his eyes. He strained and strove to get a little farther, and actually dragged Hollender along the ground till he broke the fellow’s hold. Then he reeled across Harvard’s line and fell. It was a touch-down in the last seconds of the game.”
Halas entered Crane Tech in 1909, long a powerhouse high school in Chicago, known for sports. Take the best suburban team, run them through an undefeated season, then send them to Crane Tech for a playoff—they return on a stone-quiet bus, as if they’ve been through a chipper. Halas was 110 pounds his freshman year—too small. He would take the ball, duck behind a blocker, then—BAM! He’d be sent sprawling. But he’d always pop back up, surface like a cork. Get to your feet one more time than you’ve been knocked down: that’s the old zipperoo.
He took a year off before college, hoping to grow. He worked at Western Electric in Cicero, hauling cable. He played for the company baseball team and now and then took $10 to play in the backfield in a semipro football game on the South Side. In this era, the semipros were monsters, the grizzled products of factories, the sort of men you’d find in the shipyards of Danzig. Halas showed up for college in Champaign in 1914 with $30 in his pocket and a suitcase in his hand, like the guitar player in the rock-and-roll song. He joined a fraternity, waited tables for money.
He studied civil engineering but dreamed of football. He played on the freshman team coached by Ralph Jones, whom he’d later hire to coach for the Bears, but was still ridiculously small when he went out for varsity. On the first play, Coach Robert Zuppke shouted through a megaphone, “Get that kid out of there before he gets killed!”
Zuppke was legendary, one of the innovators of the game. Halas credited him with inventing the huddle and the spiral, though Zuppke probably learned these tricks and much else from University of Chicago coach Alonzo Stagg—the Ben Franklin of football, the man who said and did everything first: first to send a man in motion, first to lateral pass, first to put numbers on jerseys. Football is patriarchal: the secret wisdom is passed from coach to player. Ditka learned it from Halas, who learned it from Zuppke, who learned it from Stagg. When asked where he got his plays, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne said, “I took them from Stagg, and Stagg took them from God.”
Halas reached six feet his junior year. Meat and potatoes brought him to 170 pounds. He had speed and was nasty on defense, finishing plays with that extra dig that became a Bears trademark. As Ditka said, “Victory is a matter of imposing your will.” Halas broke his jaw on the field, and his leg. He was the kid on the sidelines, waiting stoically as a trainer stitches his lip, piercing and pulling, breaking the string. Illinois won the Big Ten his senior year. For Halas, this team became the model for all the others. It was not just the excellence but also the closeness of the squad: the hours on trains and buses, the locker room talk, the society of boys. As the season came to an end, players began to make career plans. Though Halas earned a degree in civil engineering, he did not want to be cooped up in an office. He wanted to kick and tackle in the snow, bust his jaw and run free. Once you get the taste of the sport, you never want to do anything else.
There was a senior banquet following the season. Everyone got drunk, Zuppke said a few words. He was intelligent, less dictator than tactician. He was born in Berlin. They called him “the German.” He reminded the boys that they’d never play the game again. Pro football was still crude and rudimentary, a sandlot game, the provenance of working-class thugs. Zuppke congratulated his men, then spoke that bit of doggerel that every coach speaks at the end of the season: “You’re the best bunch I’ve ever had.” You smile and tear up but never believe it. “It’s a shame,” Zuppke went on, “just when I teach you fellows how to play, you graduate and I lose you. Football’s the only sport that ends just as a man’s career should be beginning.” But George Halas was special: he was the kid who actually took the coach seriously. Remembering Zuppke’s speech years later, he said, “Those words were to govern the rest of my life.”
* * *
America had entered World War I before the football season. Halas had waited until the last game, then enlisted in the navy. In honor of his service, the school awarded him the credits he still needed to graduate. He wanted to go overseas, fire guns and fight for freedom, but was instead sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Lake Bluff, Illinois, where he was added to the roster of the football team the navy brass was assembling from its bounty of conscripts. Halas was ranked an ensign, but all he did was play. In this way, he got to know the other football standouts of his time: Paddy Driscoll from Northwestern; Hugh Blacklock from Michigan State; Jimmy Conzelman from Washington University. If you look at the first busts in the NFL Hall of Fame, you’ll be looking at much of the navy’s World War I team.
The players were assigned to Navy Special Services, fitted with dress whites and travel sacks, then sent on the road. They whistle-stopped from college town to college town, where they whipped just about every football power in the nation. The games were meant to boost morale and serve as a recruiting tool. Halas soon took over as coach, his first experience in a job that would define him. They beat Michigan and Illinois, and battled Notre Dame to a tie. The season ended in Pasadena, California, where the navy played a team of All-Star marines in the Rose Bowl, then called the Tournament East–West football game. This game stands at the peak of Halas’s amateur career. It’s the moment he realized how good he’d become. The stadium was packed; the nation’s best players were out there in smocks. Halas carried the ball on offense, covered the speedsters on defense. If you came across the middle, you were going to get hurt. For Halas, it was one of those perfect days when the sun shines and the dirt flies and everything is revealed: He could read each play before it had been called, knew where the ball was going before it got there. He did not follow nor anticipate. He knew. He caught a pass from Paddy Driscoll, turned upfield, and ran for a touchdown. In the second half, when the outcome was still in doubt, he read “pass” in the eyes of an opposing halfback, drifted back, jumped. He was up there a long time before the ball found him, nestled in his arms, went to sleep. He hit the grass running: seventy-seven yards through a tunnel of lunatics. They dragged him down at the 3. He was named Rose Bowl MVP, then smiled all the way back to Illinois. He got drunk with the boys, laughed, told stories. Then it was over. The war, the team. Everything. He was back in Chicago shortly after Armistice Day, the delirium of Clark Street, the el rattling past. Confetti, banners, the celebratory howl of a town drunk on promise, and meanwhile the sharp-jawed athlete stands like a boy in a Sherwood Anderson story, asking himself, “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
* * *
A few years earlier, when Halas was playing baseball for the University of Illinois, he had been scouted by the New York Yankees. He was a right fielder, a switch-hitter with a knack for getting on base. The scout invited him to tryouts, but the war intervened. He decided to head to spring training after he was demobilized. His mother objected. Halas had a degree in civil engineering, and she wanted him to use it. To her, he must have seemed like the college graduate who refuses to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. But if he was going to spend the rest of his life in an office, why hurry to get started?
He arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, in the winter of 1919, carrying a glove and a letter from the scout. They put him in right field and told him to shag flies. It was the dead ball era. Babe Ruth was still in Boston, where he spent most of his time on the pitcher’s mound, a left-handed ace who, now and then, when he came to the plate—big powerful man that he was—drove a pitch into the deepest recesses of Fenway Park. George Halas was the exact sort of player that prospered in that ancient dispensation: the dead ball was all about bunting for singles, stealing bases, coming into second spikes high. He looked like Ty Cobb, the foul-tempered star of the major leagues—something the scout had probably noticed. And played like Cobb, too, without the talent. Halas was a fighter, a battler, a hustler, a go-getter, but despite the occasionally inspired play, he was not an artist on any field, baseball or football, which is why he is remembered less as a player than as a founder, an innovator, and a coach.
The Yankees already had some of the players who would be part of their great teams of the 1920s. Lefty O’Doul was pitching, as were Bob Shawkey and Carl Mays, but for the most part the roster was a grab bag of the old and infirm, leftovers, has-beens, spare parts. Frank “Home Run” Baker, Ping Bodie, Duffy Lewis. The most famous player on the team is remembered less for what he did on the field than as a warning to workingmen who want to go skylarking: Wally Pipp, the first baseman, who, in 1925, decided to sit out a game—because the season is long, the body weary—opening a spot for Lou Gehrig, who occupied it for 2,130 consecutive games. Not long ago, during a preseason Patriots game, when wide receiver Wes Welker was out with injury, his replacement returned a kick for a touchdown. Pulling Welker aside, Patriots coach Bill Belichick asked, “What’s the name of that guy who played first base for the Yankees before Gehrig?”
Halas was a switch-hitter, unusual for the time. He was a fine fielder, too, able to break on the ball with the crack of the bat and cover vast swaths of outfield. He was speedy, mean and, if he knew a fastball was coming, he could hit. One afternoon that spring, he faced the Brooklyn Robins’ Rube Marquard
, who threw a fastball as Halas was thinking fastball. He swung from the heels, the bat whipping across the plate. Crack. The sort of contact that vibrates through your entire body. The hands know it’s gone before the brain—the flash of lightning that precedes the thunder. The Yankees were on their feet, hooting as Marquard kicked the dirt and the ball vanished. That night, Yankees manager Miller Huggins took Halas aside: Pack your bags, son. We’re taking you to New York. Halas was given a standard rookie contract: $400 a month, plus a $500 signing bonus.
Halas’s single season of pro baseball reads in the record book as a joke, the answer to a trivia question. In the course of twelve games, he came to the plate twenty-two times and got two hits. His career batting average was .091. In later years, friends would speak of the day he faced Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, one of the game’s great pitchers. Halas hit two long flies off Johnson, which, had they been fair, would’ve been home runs. Harry Caray, the Cubs’ announcer, had a term for such near misses: “long strikes.” Halas struck out in eight of twenty-two plate appearances. Because of his fastball prowess, he was soon facing nothing but spitters, changeups, and curves. By June, he was dreaming of a foul tip, a taste of the ball. He was valued for the fire he brought to the cause. He was a respected bench jockey, the name given to players who excelled in the art of heckling.
One afternoon at the Polo Grounds, in New York, Halas went after Ty Cobb. Halas considered Cobb a model, a man with a surfeit of zipperoo. (To become an adult, you must kill your parents.) Every time Cobb came to the plate, Halas moved to the top dugout step. He stood there, calling Cobb a dog, a cocksucker, a cheap piece of nothing, a motherfucker. Cobb finally flung down his bat and stormed over. Halas froze. There stood his hero, eyes wild. “Punk, I’ll see you after the game. Don’t forget, punk!”