Red Grange

The Life and Legacy of the NFL's First Superstar

By: Chris Willis

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eText | 9 August 2019 | Edition Number 1

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In celebration of the National Football League’s 100th season, noted football historian Chris Willis brings to life the story of Red Grange, the nation’s first NFL star, in this definitive biography.

Harold “Red” Grange became a national sensation as a junior halfback at the University of Illinois in the 1920s. He quickly joined other great athletes of the Roaring Twenties such as Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth in enthralling audiences on the radio and in newspapers on a daily basis. A year later the "Galloping Ghost" stunned the country by dropping out of school after his last collegiate game and going pro with the six year old NFL, signing with the Chicago Bears.

In Red Grange: The Life and Legacy of the NFL’s First Superstar, Chris Willis tells the remarkable story of a humble football player who rose to fame in the 1920s and became an icon. With unlimited access and complete cooperation of the Grange family, Willis offers new insight into Grange’s rags-to-riches story, including details about his tomboy mother who died when Grange was six years old and never-before-published information on Grange’s barnstorming tour with the Chicago Bears that instantly gave credibility to the fledgling NFL.

With over fifty original interviews, personal letters to and from Grange, and more than forty photos, this definitive biography reveals in intimate detail the life of a sports pioneer. Whether as a player, coach, broadcaster, pitchman, Hall of Famer, ambassador, or icon, Red Grange was, and still is, the face of the early NFL and one of the greatest athletes of all-time.

Industry Reviews

In the 1920s, Red Grange (1903-91) was a spectacular college football player and a peer of the larger-than-life sports stars of that flashy decade, including Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Bill Tilden. They were the crest of the first wave of sports marketing, and Grange, with his agent C.C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, may have made more money out of his celebrity than any of them, while establishing professional football as a viable enterprise in the process. Grange wrote an autobiography in the 1950s and has been accorded two serious biographies since: John Carroll’s Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football and Gary Andrew Poole’s The Galloping Ghost. Now, Willis (research library, NFL Films) takes a personal look at Grange, whom he depicts as humble and amiable. The book’s centerpiece is an extended section on the Grange-led barnstorming tours of 1925–26. Willis presents a deep study of all aspects of that tour, devoting attention to Grange’s life before and after his playing days, relying on interviews with descendants of Grange’s family, friends, and colleagues. VERDICT A highly recommended picture of a football legend and one of the league’s first superstars.