Read Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football for Free Online Page B

itself was still relatively new; it had appeared in New England only after the Civil War. Here and there, it was banned as too violent. In Boston, where it was played at the beginning of the week, it was called Bloody Monday. It eventually was picked up by students. The first official college game was played between Rutgers and Princeton in November 1869. There really was no professional football, though there were a few independent teams, perhaps, fielded by factory owners who, caught in a rivalry, might pay ringers. For its first forty years, football meant college, where it became a sensation. By the time Halas was old enough to read the sports summaries in the Chicago Tribune , sixty thousand fans were filling the stadium in Champaign-Urbana to watch the University of Illinois play Michigan or Wisconsin or Northwestern, or any of the other Big Ten teams.
    Halas subscribed to Tip Top magazine, which was filled with garish illustrations of football as war. Like millions of other boys, he lived and died with Owen Johnson’s football hero Frank Merriwell, whose adventures were chronicled in Frank Merriwell at Yale . These stories captured the appeal of the game: violence and injury; being wounded but persisting. People are currently trying to find ways to tame the game, but it will be difficult: football is violence, hitting and being hit, delivering one swift blow to the worst of the 14th Street Boys before escaping. “Frank felt himself clutched, but he refused to be dragged down,” Johnson wrote in a story Halas would have read when he was eleven. “He felt hands clinging to him, and, with all the fierceness he could summon, he strove to break away and go on. His lips were covered with bloody foam, and there was a frightful glare in his eyes. He strained and strove to get a little farther, and actually dragged Hollender along the ground till he broke the fellow’s hold. Then he reeled across Harvard’s line and fell. It was a touch-down in the last seconds of the game.”
    Halas entered Crane Tech in 1909, long a powerhouse high school in Chicago, known for sports. Take the best suburban team, run them through an undefeated season, then send them to Crane Tech for a playoff—they return on a stone-quiet bus, as if they’ve been through a chipper. Halas was 110 pounds his freshman year—too small. He would take the ball, duck behind a blocker, then—BAM! He’d be sent sprawling. But he’d always pop back up, surface like a cork. Get to your feet one more time than you’ve been knocked down: that’s the old zipperoo.
    He took a year off before college, hoping to grow. He worked at Western Electric in Cicero, hauling cable. He played for the company baseball team and now and then took $10 to play in the backfield in a semipro football game on the South Side. In this era, the semipros were monsters, the grizzled products of factories, the sort of men you’d find in the shipyards of Danzig. Halas showed up for college in Champaign in 1914 with $30 in his pocket and a suitcase in his hand, like the guitar player in the rock-and-roll song. He joined a fraternity, waited tables for money. He studied civil engineering but dreamed of football. He played on the freshman team coached by Ralph Jones, whom he’d later hire to coach for the Bears, but was still ridiculously small when he went out for varsity. On the first play, Coach Robert Zuppke shouted through a megaphone, “Get that kid out of there before he gets killed!”
    Zuppke was legendary, one of the innovators of the game. Halas credited him with inventing the huddle and the spiral, though Zuppke probably learned these tricks and much else from University of Chicago coach Alonzo Stagg—the Ben Franklin of football, the man who said and did everything first: first to send a man in motion, first to lateral pass, first to put numbers on jerseys. Football is patriarchal: the secret wisdom is passed from coach to player. Ditka learned it from Halas, who learned