by Rich Cohen
Thorpe was a perfect symbol of the frontier because he was actually born there, in Indian Territory in 1887 or 1888. His parents were of mixed heritage, part Irish, part Sac, Fox, and Potawatomi Indian. Thorpe grew up on reservations all over the Midwest. The skills Thorpe developed while rambling in the open country were just the ones he’d need for football: speed, endurance, stealth. His Indian name was Wa-Tho-Huk, “Bright Path.” He was as fast and strong as anyone who ever lived. His career in organized sports began at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where, according to lore, he walked onto the field one day and did a just-for-the-fun-of-it high jump in street clothes that set a record: five feet nine inches. He was nineteen. He played every sport at Carlisle but excelled in football, where he was coached by Pop Warner. It was Warner who convinced Thorpe to go out for the U.S. Olympic Team. In 1912, Thorpe won the decathlon and pentathlon in Stockholm. He was covered in gold. At the medal ceremony, he was given gifts by Czar Nicholas II and King Gustav V of Sweden, who shook the Indian’s hand and said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”
Jim Thorpe, the first great star of professional football
Thorpe’s response—“Thanks, King!”—was said to demonstrate the casualness of the new American character. He returned a hero, marched in parades, and was showered in honor. He called it the peak of his life. That’s the way of the world: you are shown everything, the entire hand, fanned out with kings and one-eyed jacks, a moment before it’s taken away and shuffled back into the deck. A few months after Thorpe’s return, a newspaper scared up an old minor league box score, which proved Thorpe had been paid a few dollars to play a handful of baseball games for the Rocky Mount Railroaders of the Carolina League. College athletes earning food money in the summer leagues was a common practice. Thorpe stood apart only for his naïveté: he didn’t know enough to invent an alias. In a letter to the Olympic Committee, he begged for forgiveness. “I hope I would be partly excused because of the fact that I was simply an Indian school boy and did not know all about such things.” His records were stripped from the books. He was asked to return his medals as well as the gifts that had been given to him by the czar and the king.
For Thorpe, it was the trauma that confirmed his sense of the world: its prejudice, its hypocrisy. From there, his story is desultory, an opera of decline shot through with occasional moments of triumph. He bumped from town to town, sport to sport, playing 289 games in major league baseball, mostly for the New York Giants, where his name was still a draw. Like Halas, he could not hit the curve. He married, drank, lost a son, and eventually reached Canton, where he would put the NFL in the news. According to Grantland Rice, a prominent sportswriter of the time, “Thorpe was the cornerstone, badly used, but nevertheless a cornerstone of professional football.”
He played for a half dozen teams, valuable as a name long after his body began to fail. He spent less and less time practicing, more and more time drinking. He was a barroom brawler. By 1926, he embodied everything the game does to a man: strong and skinny at the start, he was beefy and broken at the end, alcoholic, in constant pain, bitter and confused. His boyish face had become a mask. His body wasted, the world-class speed gone. It was with melancholy that Rice wrote, “I can still see Thorpe as Pop Warner described him when he first came to Carlisle from the plain country of Oklahoma: a skinny Indian youngster weighing around 130 pounds … but moving like a breeze.”
Thorpe was the subject of perhaps the first great football movie, Jim Thorpe—All American, starring Burt Lancaster. You see him tackle, hit, break free; you see him robbed of everything, humiliated—all in hallucinatory close-ups that anticipate modern sports coverage. Near the end, Thorpe sits alone in L.A. Coliseum, the empty seats rising high above him like a grave. He’s nothing but self-pity, rage, regret. Of course, there’s a happy ending. But in real life, Thorpe continued to struggle, working construction, digging ditches. He appeared in B movies, often playing the Indian who gets killed. In 1950, diagnosed with cancer, he went to a charity hospital. He was destitute. His wife begged donations. “We’re broke,” she told reporters. “Jim has nothing but his name and his memories.” He died in 1953. He was sixty-four, just a belly and a dollar or two.
Football is an angry game, played with punishing violence. People get destroyed on the field, lives end. It makes sense that its first star was someone who’d already lost everything, a ruined man, ill-treated, stripped to his essential qualities: speed, strength, power. Jim Thorpe is the spirit of the game. Every NFL hit still carries the fury of the disgraced Indian, prowling the field, seeking justice.
5
THE EYE IN THE SKY
Wrigley Field configured for the 1963 NFL Championship. The temperature was ten degrees at game time.
My first job after college was at The New Yorker. I was a messenger and a receptionist. I was supposed to deliver packages, sort mail, and answer the phone, but I spent a lot of time working on stories. On one occasion, a valuable piece of art entrusted to my care was destroyed. It was not my fault but I was blamed. On another, a panic button was accidentally pressed and the authorities were summoned. Finally, one day, the managing editor called me into her office, sat me down, and said, “It’s clear to everyone that you care more about writing than about answering the phone.” I mention this only to explain my sympathy for George Halas, who, in the summer of 1921, when he was twenty-seven, was called into Eugene Staley’s office. Staley sat him down and said, “George, I know you like football better than starch.”
Staley did not blame his employee. After all, Staley brought Halas to Decatur to do exactly what he’d done: build a team. But he hadn’t counted on the cost. It turned out Staley couldn’t afford to employ sixteen men to play football. He’d already lost $14,000 on the team. He felt guilty about the situation: he’d made promises, and a young man had quit his job and moved to a strange town on the basis of those promises. With this in mind, Mr. Staley made Halas an offer, the deal that would bring the Bears to Chicago. Staley would give Halas $5,000 to take the team independent, get them up and running in a new home, a business like any other, with payroll covered by ticket sales. Staley’s only condition was that the team keep his name for another season. This explains the first line in the Bears record book, which lists the Decatur Staleys.
A few weeks later, Halas worked out a deal with Bill Veeck Sr., the president of the Chicago Cubs. The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned:
“You okay, Bronk?”
Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.”
In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.
* * *
Chicago was booming in 1922. It was the Jazz Age, the city of the gangster, the great metropolis taking in and spitting out the raw produce of the nation via freight yards and slaughterhouses and lakefront factories. The first skyscraper had been designed in Chicago, and the city was being remade in its image, a line of towers rising and falling along South Michigan Avenue like notes on a musical score. There are certain times when everything is in the right place, when all the players are at their instruments—you want to slow the spinning world and let the moment linger.
Big Bill Thompson was serving as mayor in 1922, Al Capone was at his club in Cicero, Louis Armstrong was on the South Side playing his horn, and Carl Sandburg, who was at his house in Evanston, had turned it all into verse:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding …
Halas was living in Oak Park with his wife. Her name was Wilhelmina Bushing but everyone called her Min. They’d met in high school. She’d been in the stands at one of his indoor baseball games, rooting for the other team. She heckled whenever Halas came to the plate; she was beautiful. The combination was irresistible. Halas kept after her until she said yes.
Their daughter, Virginia, was born on January 5, 1923. Their son, George Jr., known as Mugs, or Mugsy, was born November 4, 1925. In the first years after Decatur, the Bears had a co-owner in Dutch Sternaman, but Halas eventually bought him out for $38,000 and would never share ownership again. He took odd jobs and started businesses instead, anything to make the money he needed to hang on to the team (football would not be a going concern until the 1940s). For a time, he worked at his brother-in-law’s ice plant, the huge blocks clattering down steel chutes, trucks waiting to make the early morning deliveries. In charge of the night shift, he’d get to the plant at around midnight, spend hours checking orders and deploying men, go home for five or six hours’ sleep, have a breakfast of cornflakes and banana, then head to practice. He would eventually quit the icehouse, but he always approached football with the glee of a man who has snuck away from his real job.
Halas played his last game in 1928. He appeared just four times that season. His body had begun to fail. Hips and knees, his poor head, which, in the course of twenty seasons, had been slugged, crunched, dinged. His reflexes, too, the internal mechanism, which causes everything to speed up as you age … you see the ball, reach for it, but your hand arrives a moment too late. You shake your head and think, Two years ago, I had that.
At first, Halas retired altogether, bringing in his freshman college coach, Ralph Jones, to run the team. But he couldn’t stay away. The Bears were his life. He’d never really let go. By 1930, he was back on the sideline—only the uniform had changed: from jersey, helmet, and cleats to jacket, loafers, and fedora, a program curled into a megaphone, carrying the West Side growl: Hey, O’Brien, why don’t you shut up, ya fuckin’ pop-off artist! Despite the occasional profession of exhaustion, followed by a brief retirement, George Halas would remain on the sidelines for the next thirty-five seasons. He’s among the most winning coaches in NFL history, with a career record of 324–151–31.
He tends to be depicted as the personification of the old-time coach, the grandfather with the iron fist. Even his own players regarded him this way: “As a tactician, he was simple,” said the Bears linebacker Doug Buffone. “They’re either gonna knock you down, or you’re gonna knock them down.” But the opposite is closer to true. Halas was one of the great intellectuals of the game, a brainiac, a football genius. As a thinker, he stands in a line that starts with Alonzo Stagg and includes 49ers coach Bill Walsh and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was Halas, as much as anyone, who invented the modern NFL offense and lifted the game from the ground into the air.
His innovations, various and brilliant, were driven by the oldest of playground motivations: he wanted to kick ass. “I play to win,” he said. “I always will play to win. I speak no praise for the good loser, the man who says, ‘Well, I did my best.’ I have learned to live with defeat but each loss is an agony which remains with me for several days and is dissipated only by the growing prospect of victory.”
Halas was probably the first coach to use game film—to shoot every practice and play, then huddle in a screening room with players, watching and rewatching, searching for the weak point or hidden detail. It’s become an NFL cliché: the head coach gathered with his men, breaking down each failure but passing over moments of excellence in silence; you don’t get praised for doing what’s expected. But Halas was among the earliest to identify film as a way to glean hidden information. It’s what the old man had always been after: the fresh vantage point or unnoticed angle, a perspective from which the game could be seen as if for the first time. Jesus, no wonder we’re getting killed on third down. That cocksucker is missing the block.
He was probably the first to employ an “eye in the sky,” a coach hidden in the bleachers from where he could see enemy formations as clearly as a general studying drawings in the book by Clausewitz. Like just about every meaningful breakthrough, it came about by accident. One afternoon, when the Bears were playing the Yankees, Halas sent his assistant Luke Johnsos into the stands with a note for Mrs. Halas. While awaiting Min’s response, Johnsos looked at the field. He had been a good football player but had never seen the game from this high. He suddenly recognized it as something other than big men in a scrum: from here, it was patterns, the arrangement of pieces. Things that had been hidden—What’s happening in the secondary, that area behind the linebackers where defensive backs guard against the pass? Where’s the safety, the player who functions as a last line of defense?—were revealed. “I must have been standing in the fortieth row,” Johnsos said later. “And I could really see what the defense was doing from up there. It looked crazy. The way they were aligned. There was a big hole in the middle of the field. I ran down to the sideline and I told the coach, ‘Hey, the middle is wide open. I could see it from the stands.’” Halas looked at Johnsos, then looked at Min. He called over his players, issued a few curt instructions. “Coach ordered a receiver to circle back behind the defense line,” Johnsos said. “The quarterback threw him a pass and he went all the way for a touchdown.”
Halas sent Johnsos back into the stands with a pad of paper. He was to study the defense. If he spotted a hole, he would write a note and hand it to a runner, who’d carry it to Halas. But half the time, the note did not arrive until the play was over. Before the next game, Halas had a phone installed in the press box. Johnsos would sit up there with binoculars. When he spotted something, he would call Halas, who had another phone installed by the bench. When Halas wanted to know what the linebackers were doing or how the flanker kept getting free on the deep pattern, he would call the “eye in the sky.” It was a logical innovation, perhaps inevitable, but it changed the conception of the game. A coach was now able to operate from a position of omniscience, the position of a god, where he could linger over each move the way a chess master lingers, his hand resting on the rook, considering each consequence before committing. “If you go to the Folies Bergère in Paris, sit in the front row,” Johnsos said, “but at a football game, sit high so you can see the teams deploy.”
When other coaches figured out what Halas had done, they demanded their own eye in the sky at Wrigley. Halas bitched—it’s not an advantage if everyone’s got it—but complied. He then positioned the Bears marching band behind the visitors’ bench. Every time a visiting coach picked up the phone, the band launched into the fight song—just one tactic in Halas’s war of discomfort and deprivation. “Teams visiting Wrigley Field constantly complained
about lack of soap, towels, programs,” Halas wrote. “They put it down to my stinginess. But why not deprive visitors, if doing so upsets them? What better location for the band than directly behind George Preston Marshall, tootling in his ears? And if Curly Lambeau had trouble seeing the play from his specially allocated bench in a far corner, so much the better for the Bears.”
In the 1930s, NFL offenses still operated in the preindustrial spirit of mob ball. The quarterback might call for the snap, but the action was controlled by a halfback who pitched out as he raced along the line, ran it himself, or tossed downfield. Known as the option or the single wing, this offense was easy to learn but offered a limited number of ways to score. It was often three yards and a cloud of dust. But the league changed the rules in the 1930s to make the game friendlier to the pass—the ball itself was redesigned—and it meant terrific opportunity for the coach who could capitalize.
Halas’s greatest innovation came in the 1930s, with the introduction and refinement of the modern T-formation, bastard sons of which still dominate pro football. In this way, Halas and his assistants invented the look of the modern game.
Invented by Pop Warner in 1907, the single wing dominated early professional football. It usually featured a halfback or fullback who took the snap, then raced across the field, cycling through options: he could run, pass, or pitch out. The formation, with its tailback (TB) and wingback (WB), recalls an earlier era of football.