One hundred years ago this week, Red Grange took the opening kickoff of the Illinois-Michigan football game on the Fighting Illini’s 5-yard line and zigzagged through 11 frustrated defenders to score a touchdown, giving 65,000 fans a down payment on the thrill show they were expecting when they headed to Champaign’s new stadium from all directions.
“There were as many special trains run into this small city as could be parked on all the sidings,” the Tribune reported. Though the two universities had tied for the Big Ten championship the previous year, Grange was the real draw. Already a star at high school in Wheaton, his play during the Illini’s undefeated season in 1923 had electrified fans.
Then on Oct. 18, 1924, on the big stage in the big game, he turned in one of the most dominating performances in sports history. He scored five touchdowns, leading the team to a 39–14 Illini victory and earned the nickname the Galloping Ghost. What he did a year later was even more shocking: The three-time All-American dropped out during his senior year to turn pro.
Here are six takeaways from the famous game.
1. Grange the ‘Big Bashful Boy’
Harold Edward “Red” Grange was, along with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, one of the most heralded athletes of the 1920s, the storied “Golden Age of Sport.” In 2008, ESPN named Grange the greatest college football player ever, a title he all but sewed up on that warm Saturday afternoon in 1924.
Grange was a promoter’s dream, as was his all-American-boy personality. He had been photographed delivering ice in his hometown of Wheaton during summer recess.
Shortly after his big game, a Tribune profile ran under a headline: “Red Grange, Off Grid, Is A Big Bashful Boy.” When the reporter asked about a professional sports career — in high school he won letters in baseball, basketball, track and football — he demurred: “I hardly think so. At least, I feel now that I would prefer a business life.”
A year later he changed his mind, perhaps after realizing sports could be big business.
2. Dedicating a new stadium
The day before the Illini’s homecoming game, the university dedicated a new Memorial Stadium to students who died in World War I; their names engraved on the nearly 200 pillars surrounding the stadium.
“By our use of this great monument will be determined from year to year whether we are keeping on the high plane of ethical aspiration and conduct that our beloved and honored dead built for us,” said University President David Kinley.
The next day, just before game time the Tribune reported: “The two opposing bleachers rose without a sound, hats off and heads bowed as taps were played for the heroic collegiate dead to whom this stadium is dedicated.”
The bugler’s mournful tones were a prelude to the disaster the Michigan team shortly suffered.
3. Transported to a football fan’s Valhalla
Michigan coach Fielding Yost didn’t buy into the Grange hype, so he directed his kicker to boot the ball to him on the opening kickoff. Grange returned the opener 95 yards for a touchdown. He followed it up with three more in the first quarter alone, shredding a Michigan defense that had given up just three touchdowns in its last two seasons, with scoring runs of 67, 56 and 44 yards by the end of the first quarter. His fifth and final TD run was an 11-yard jaunt in the third quarter. If that weren’t enough, he also passed for a touchdown in the fourth quarter.
In total, he ran for 409 yards, threw most of Illinois’ forward passes, and held the ball for a point-after-touchdown kick. He also played defense, as footballers then did, putting on an unforgettable performance. “There may be a few clear voices in Urbana tomorrow,” a Tribune reporter predicted. “They will belong to those who could not get into the game.”
Grange stayed with the Illini through their season, which ended with a 14-9 win at Ohio State on Nov. 21. After the game, Grange left the Illini’s hotel by the fire escape, boarded a train to Chicago and officially joined the Bears.
4. The Galloping Ghost nickname
Sportswriter Grantland Rice, a celebrity in his own right, gave Grange lyrical immortality with verses such as:
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.
Another prominent sports writer, Damon Runyon, wrote: “On the field he is equal to three football players and a horse.”
5. Grange lends his star appeal to professional football
What became the NFL had formed in 1920, and, as the author of the Tribune’s “In the Wake of the News” column observed when Grange signed with the Chicago Bears, “pro football as a sport has not yet entirely warmed the cockles of our heart.” He was speaking on behalf of many: Attendance was small, teams came and went, players got chump change. Grange changed all that. By the time he hung up his cleats in 1934, he had transferred his charisma to the NFL, heading it in the direction of its present domination of professional sports.
Grange played his first game with the Bears only five days after his final game as a collegian, joining Halas and his crew for their annual Thanksgiving game against the Cardinals. Most Bears games drew about 5,000 fans at the time, but 36,000 packed Wrigley Field to get a glimpse of Grange.
The Bears would end up defeating the Giants for the world championship in 1925. Grange’s exploits during that season led popular sportswriters, including Rice and Runyon, to travel with the team, giving professional football a credibility it had lacked.
Grange, who died in 1991, downplayed his storybook career, saying a lot of doctors, teachers and engineers had accomplished more. His own success he attributed to a simple philosophy: “If you have the football and 11 guys are after you, if you’re smart, you’ll run.”
6. Grange was the first pro football player to have an agent
Charlie Pyle was the manager of a Champaign movie theater. He got Grange an unprecedented contract with the Bears that guaranteed him thousands of dollars a game while his teammates were lucky to make $100 per contest. He also got a cut of the gate receipts — which earned Grange and Pyle an extra $27,000 when the Bears played against the New York Giants in 1925 to a packed crowd — that’s over $475,000 in 2024 dollars.
Pyle also lined up endorsements, wholesale, as Grange recalled for a Tribune reporter in 1929: “Charlie Pyle sat in the drawing room of his hotel suite in New York. Agents stood in a changing group outside his door, and now and again his voice could be heard, calling through the transom with smooth urbanity, ‘Don’t be impatient gentlemen, everybody will be heard in due course.’”
Pyle arranged for the production of Red Grange-endorsed candy bars, footballs, dolls, clothes, ginger ale and malted milk. To Pyle’s chagrin, Grange turned down a tobacco endorsement because he didn’t smoke. “Red came to the Bears famous,” Bears Coach George Halas wrote. “Ten weeks later he was rich.”
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