Interview: The Galloping Ghost's Gary Andrew Poole

By Marcus Gilmer in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 30, 2009 9:22PM

As Sunday's Super Bowl approaches, it's a good time to look back and reflect on some of the football legends that have come before Kurt Warner and Ben Roethlisberger. Specifically, it's not hard to think about Wheaton's pride and joy, "The Galloping Ghost" Red Grange. A star athlete at Wheaton High School, Grange then took his skills to the University of Illinois where he further flourished under legendary coach Bob Zuppke. From there, Red went on to a stellar NFL career with both the Chicago Bears and the New York Yankees, who were Grange's team of his start-up American Football League, his challenge to the NFL. Grange's shadow is still cast over football today: ESPN recently named him the greatest college football player of all time. Grange was considered one of the great sports legends of the early twentieth century, along with Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey.

It's only appropriate that as football's biggest spectacle approached, we talked to Gary Andrew Poole, a Los Angeles-based writer who has recently tackled one of football's biggest legends. Poole has previously written for the New York Times, TIME, GQ, USA Today, and the Independent on Sunday (London). In his new book The Galloping Ghost, Poole examines not only Grange's intriguing life - from his birth in Forksville, Pennsylvania through his stellar career to his Hollywood days and eventually to his death in Florida - but examines the context in which Grange's legend grew. Examining the evolving relationship of the athlete and sports agent through Grange's relationship with the famed C.C. "Cash and Carry" Pyle to the way Grange helped spur football's popularity explosion, Poole brings several threads in to view through Grange's career in a smooth, eloquent narrative that reads less like a history book and more like a story. I talked with Poole about Grange, the rise of football in the Midwest, and the frustration over writers who refuse to get their facts straight.

For additional writing by Poole, check out this article he wrote for The Columbia Journalism Review. And for more on Poole and Grange, check out the book's excellent website.

Chicagoist: How did you come about the idea to write about Red Grange?

Gary Poole: A lot of it was because, here was this guy who was a very significant figure in football history as well as American sports history and he hasn’t really been written about too much. There are a couple of books written about him, but none that I thought were serious enough, in a way. So I thought, here was a guy who really needed to be explored, he’s kind of an unexplored icon. He really has an important story to tell, I think, so that’s really why I wanted to write the book.

But the way it hit me was that I was actually at a football game with my daughter and she was asking all of these innocent questions: what’s a blitz, why are those two guys standing with the orange things with the chain attached to it, that kind of stuff. And I started thinking innocent questions myself. One of them was: where did this all begin? If you could put it on one guy, who would it be, where this whole football phenomenon began? And that guy is Red Grange. I think that’s really where the football culture in this country started, if you’re going to pick one guy, college and pro.

C: The book is a biography, but you do such a good job of incorporating the overall growth of football’s popularity. Was that part of your goal when you started?

GP: Yeah, definitely. Football really started as an East Coast game but there were significant teams in the Midwest and it definitely became less of an elitist sport because of the rise of football in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago and the rural areas of Illinois and Ohio and other places. You’d have to say Chicago was the epicenter of sophisticated football with the Chicago Bears there, the University of Chicago with Alonzo Stagg coaching them. Northwestern had a pretty good team as did the University of Illinois. The Midwest is really the breadbasket of football. I know you’re an S.E.C. guy, right?

C: Yeah, for better or worse.

GP: Football migrated down to the South but it was really a Midwestern game and I wanted to capture that. It’s been captured in other books, but I really wanted to capture that feeling of where the game started from and why a lot of the mores of the game - of teamwork, a lot of what we see today in football like how these guys are supposed to act and the way the game is sort of a maker of men - really started in the Midwestern ethics.

C: And you trace the development of how the game exploded in popularity in the Midwest.

GP: The game really was an Ivy League game for many years, and with the rise of land grant and big, public schools, like the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, the game migrated over to the Midwest and it really boomed. If you look at these classic stadiums that are still being played in today, they were all built in the era, at Michigan and Illinois and even the Coliseum out here in Los Angeles. Notre Dame’s stadium was built around that era, Soldier Field was built then. And the reason those stadiums were built was because the game was becoming popular. They could make a lot of money with getting people in the seats - there was no television of course - so the athletic departments were making tons of money having a lot of ticket buyers.

C: As far as the actual writing of the book, it’s obviously been painstakingly researched, with the citations and index. How long did you spend researching Grange and the evolution of football in general?

GP: It was a two-to- three year project. I spent a majority of the time in Chicago, in Wheaton, and at the University of Illinois. I really wanted to capture the time and I’m a journalist, so I didn’t want to just read about it, I wanted to go visit it, to basically follow Grange from birth to death. I went to the town where he was born, Forksville, Pennsylvania, and I spent a lot of time in Wheaton, Illinois. I spent a lot of time in Chicago and Champaign. I also went to New York where he played some significant games and had his own league and team. I spent some time out here in Los Angeles doing research and I also went to where he died in Florida to see where he lived and passed away. I hired some researchers for research in some of the towns he played in, to get all the newspaper accounts and any other oral histories I could get.

It was a labor of love but it was labor. I didn’t want to write just some dry history. My goal was to write a book like [Laura Hillenbrand’s] Seabiscuit where it was a narrative history, where I could tell a story. To do that, you have to do a lot of research, otherwise, it won’t ring true, especially if you don’t have your facts in line. Newspaper stuff, oral history…I found some people who knew Red…He allegedly had a kid, which I detail in the book, and that took at least a year of digging through court records and finding the person and then the person didn’t even really want to talk to me. She lives in Chicago and that’s his daughter, she’s elderly now. And that kind of stuff takes a lot of work.

You can go through the newspaper accounts and rely on that but that only tells half the story. So I did a lot of digging because I wanted to get the back-story, what was going on underneath all the stuff: financial problems or controversies or whatever. It took a lot of effort. You don’t want to have tons of information; it should tell a story. You want people learning but not know that they’re learning, if that makes sense. I call it “hiding the wires.” I don’t site anything in the book but I do all at the end. I was trying to tell a story. It’s a football book so it should be fun and not an academic exercise.

C: Well, that striking detail and prose narrative, specifically the Michigan-Illinois game at the beginning of the book and the scene when Red meets President Coolidge, how did you go about crafting those scenes?

GP: It’s pretty tough but a lot of it came through the reporting. For example, when he meets Coolidge, he told that story many times but George Halas was there and I wanted to tell it through his eyes, so I did some research to find out how he described it. And then I looked through things like the Presidential archives to put it in the context of history. It’s complicated to explain. Some paragraphs didn’t take that much work but a paragraph like that [the Coolidge meeting] - just five sentences - might take me looking through five books, five newspaper articles, five oral histories. And that one in particular took me a while because I wanted to make sure it rang true. It really comes back to reporting. That kind of stuff doesn’t ring true unless you really do the research. I wanted it to read like fiction. That doesn’t mean making stuff up but I wanted to make it read that way, like a story.

C: On that note, we’ve seen so much in the last couple of years, with memoirs and history books, where the writers have been accused of making stuff up or not even giving sources credit. Was that something that was at the back of your mind going into writing this book? Do you worry that the reader will trust you?

GP: Sure, I think it’s the reality we live in and that’s why I really wanted to make sure I cited everything because a lot of books don’t always cite things so sometimes you wonder, “Where did they get this information?” I wanted to provide all that to show how much work into it and, secondly, for any future researchers who are doing a similar book, and then thirdly just to show readers that this is legitimate information.

It really makes me upset when these guys make up quotes and that sort of thing. In fact, in the course of researching the book, I was at the Pro Football Hall of Fame and there’s a chapter or two in my book about the Barnstorming Tour, where Grange and the Chicago Bears went on this, well, barnstorming tour that essentially brought credibility to the league, and I found this article with all these amazing quotes describing Grange, CC Pyle, and I thought, “Wow, this is a gift.” I thought I could weave these quotes into the book and make it more colorful. I was in my motel in Canton and I thought, “This is almost too good to be true,” so I tracked down the writer of the article. He lived close to me in Los Angeles so we had lunch and I he told me he made it all up.

C: He willfully admitted this?

GP: He said, “I made it all up.” He said that it was kind of the way it was but he had made the whole thing up. And so I was very diligent checking things. For example to describe Stagg Stadium, the University of Chicago stadium, which is no longer there, I went there and toured the grounds. I wanted to get some feeling of the stadium so I could write it in the book about how the guys came into the stadium. You hear about how they came through these doors and I was actually able to find the doors, they still have it at the University of Chicago. So I was able to really describe it. Someone can read that and know it’s right. I spent every waking minute fact-checking and double-checking. I did my damndest to make sure it was as accurate as possible.

The thing that drives me crazy is that I was willing to do that, to find the door or go talk to the guy who was attending to him at the hospital when he died to describe that accurately and to describe the way the stadium look and went through the papers - so many writers aren’t willing to do that and they take shortcuts and it screws it up for everyone else.

I am really passionate about reporting. I spent a lot of time and effort reporting this book, and I basically spent my entire advance to track down information. I tracked down the smallest details, from how Grange's playing boots looked (the University of Illinois dug them out for me), to where he died. I feel it is my responsibility as an author of a non-fiction book to report-out facts, and honor my subjects by doing my best to render their lives accurately. When you write narrative non-fiction, it takes an enormous amount of work because accurately describing events, especially ones in the 1920s, takes a tremendous amount of research. For example, if you read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, it is amazing how much reporting is inside the narrative. Amazing. I could have taken short cuts but I basically spent two years traversing the country to paint an accurate portrayal of the characters and the events. Finding little things that I can weave into the narrative excites me.

I was obsessed with writing a good book, and to so I tried to go to primary sources as much as possible. (Just regurgitating other books wasn't good enough.) I drove from Canton to Forksville, Pennsylvania in an incredible snowstorm, driving like a crazy nut, just so I could get a good description of where he grew up and describe the mountains where his father was a lumberjack, to see the river he used to fish in. I call this the forensics of research. I did a lot of the work myself, and I also hired a court researcher in Chicago who helped me dig up a lot of great stuff. I don’t want a medal, I’m just saying I put the effort in to describe stuff accurately. I think it’s totally legitimate for readers to question a writer, like, “Wow, did he really see this?” That’s why I wanted to have the index and citations in there. You have to do that now days or people don’t trust you. I’m willing to do it and I just get mad when other people aren’t willing to do it and just get lazy.

All the stories about concussions and finding information about the more seedy parts of college football took an enormous amount of research, too. Finding his daughter was a journey in itself, and took about a year... I try to make all the information seamless in The Galloping Ghost; there is a lot of information flowing through the story, and I hope readers learn a lot and enjoy a good novel-like story. My goal was to make the book a rich and honest, not some trite, "Back in the '20s a Coke cost 10 cents" sort of pabulum.

C: What writers did you look to for any inspiration or guidance when putting the book together?

GP: Two books that were guiding me were Seabiscuit because it was sports-related. And Devil in the White City because he [Erik Larson] does a great job of describing Chicago and the characters really well and a lot of it through historical research. And he has a dual narrative which I sort of have in my book. Those two books were in the back of my mind as I wrote this. One thing I wanted to do was to weave the language of the time into the book. I read a lot of books of that era so I could understand the language better and tried to work that into the book. That’s why I think it feels pretty real, because I was using the language of the time to describe things.

C: I think that comes through, especially given the amount of quotes and information you were able to include in the book.

GP: Well, Grange is a tricky guy. Here’s a guy who’s an exceptional athlete, who sacrificed for the team but didn’t necessarily brag or is even really insightful, so he posed a difficult challenge. And without Pyle, the book would really fall flat. I needed Pyle to have a guy who was reflecting Grange and that relationship…but Grange is not an easy guy to write about.

C: Is there a present-day player that comes close to Grange’s abilities?

GP: It’s always hard to compare these eras because Grange was really a good all-around player. He could also kick the ball and play decent defense. But I think Chicago’s Devin Hester comes close because when he touches the ball on a kick or punt return, everyone’s waiting to see what will happen. He’s an incredibly exciting player.

I think Reggie Bush is a good example. I thought of Bush- there was a game earlier in the season, a Monday Night game when he ran back a couple of kicks…

C: Against the Vikings.

GP: Yeah, that had a similar feel where you thought, “This guy can do anything in the open field.”

C: But as a Saints fan, I want to tell Reggie you can’t run backwards in the NFL.

GP: Well, that’s actually the problem that Grange had to some degree. He was like Bush in that he could do these cuts and S-runs in college but in the NFL, the players are just bigger and faster. Grange ran into that same problem early on in his career. It’s too bad that Grange got hurt so early in his career because he didn’t really have time to develop as a player. And that Barnstorming Tour just killed him.

C: Do you have a pick for the Super Bowl this weekend?

GP: My sentimental pick is with the Cardinals just because of Warner’s story but I think the Steelers will win by five.