Grange, Red (1903–1991), football player and broadcaster.As the “Galloping Ghost” and the “Wheaton Ice Man” at the University of Illinois from 1923 to 1925, Harold “Red” Grange was the most famous
football player of the 1920s. Grange's career starkly reveals the power of the new mass media,
radio and
film, and of a popular press fully exploiting sports’ appeal, to create a new phenomenon, the sport celebrity. By chance or exquisite timing, Grange's most spectacular football achievements came on the most media‐focused occasions: against the University of Michigan on 18 October 1924, before 67,000 fans and a large regional media corps assembled for the dedication of Illinois's Memorial Stadium; then against Penn on 31 October 1925, before newsreel cameras and most of New York's major sportswriters.
Represented by the big‐time sports promoter C.C. Pyle, another new figure of the 1920s, Grange provoked an unprecedented outpouring of media attention and controversy when he turned professional immediately after his final college game in 1925. At a time when pro players typically were paid $100–$150 a game, Grange earned as much as $200,000 for football, product endorsements, and a movie contract in just a few months. Following the media circus of his ten games with the Chicago Bears in 1925 and a subsequent barnstorming tour through the
South and
West, Grange's subsequent football career proved largely anticlimactic. After retiring from the Bears in 1934, he became a football broadcaster on radio and then
television, widely admired as a remarkably modest football hero, one of the greatest of all time.
See also
Journalism;
Sports: Professional Sports;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
Michael Oriard , Home Teams, South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Spring 1996): 471–500.
John M. Carroll , Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football, 1999.
Michael Oriard
