Behold some fascinating looks at football of the 1920s and 30s and note how incredibly similar this ancient reel of highlights is to a Sunday morning Fox NFL Pre-Game show. Indeed, the entire game seems largely not to have changed much at all from the game we know now, except for the silly costumes and terrifying lack of headgear. This is the era when the forward pass had recently been legalized, though the half-back remains a position of showiness and glamour, unlike recent years where the passing game was the exciting stuff and the running game the boring part. (This has been changing of late, with the astonishing playing of the Eagles Saquon Barkley among others). We see some 1920s legends like Red Grange and Knute Rockne and lots of highlights from various college games of the era. You probably know Rockne’s name from the Pat O’Brien biopic ‘Knute Rockne–All American’ (The Fighting Irish and all that Notre Dame stuff) but Grange is an interesting and mostly forgotten figure. Click here to read his Wikipedia entry–he really personified the image we have of the football ‘hero’ of the 1920s. He was a college star playing for Illinois and went onto a career with the then quite young Chicago Bears. You’ll see footage of a remarkable 94 yard return of his in a game between the short-lived New York Yankees (for which he played half-back) and the slightly longer-lived Brooklyn Dodgers.. Oh–you think I made an error in referring those two baseball teams as football teams? Well…
The formation of the Yankees came about as a result of a result of a contract dispute between Grange and the Bears. During the early 1920s, Grange was the star attraction for the Bears, and his play had done a lot to promote the fledgling NFL. However Red’s agent C.C. Pyle (nicknamed ‘Cash and Carry;) challenged the Bears owner George Halas in 1926, by stating that Red’s contract was owned by himself, and not Halas. Pyle then approached Halas to demand for Grange a generous salary and one-third ownership of the Bears. Halas refused and thus somehow the Yankees were born–as a team specifically devoted to exploiting Grange’s celebrity. (He was the first football player pictured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1925). The team folded in 1930. Grange lived until 1991, working as an insurance broker, NFL commentator and—of all things—the President of the National Girls Baseball League. The tale of Grange and his hard-hitting agent show us something else that hasn’t changed about football; money and business were always at its center, just as they are today. It took baseball–pure at heart and posing as too poetic to dirty its players hands with excess money–years to catch up to football in this respect. But when it did, it did so with a vengeance…