100 years ago: How Red Grange helped save the Giants
Red Grange of the Chicago Bears during a game against the Giants at the Polo Grounds on Dec. 6, 1925. Credit: AP
One hundred years ago, on Nov. 22, 1925, the Giants beat the Kansas City Cowboys, 9-3, at the Polo Grounds. Owner Tim Mara was not at that game, though. He was off saving the franchise.
By this point in the team’s inaugural season, they were winning games — that victory over the Cowboys was their sixth straight — but losing money. Mara famously had invested $500 for the NFL charter to birth the Giants, but that amount did not include the actual costs of running the organization and paying those involved on and off the field. By late November, the Giants were about $40,000 in debt.
Mara knew he needed a big draw for the Giants, and the biggest of them all was about to enter the league. Red Grange was a star player for the University of Illinois and was about to make the jump to the pro level; at that point, seniors who had finished their college seasons could continue right on into the NFL.
So Mara took a train to the Midwest to try to convince Grange to sign with the Giants.
On Nov. 21, 1925, Grange played his final collegiate game for the Illini, a 14-9 win over Ohio State. On Nov. 22, 1925, he signed his first pro contract.
Mara wired the news back to New York.
“Partially successful,” he wrote. “Returning on train tomorrow. Will explain.”
(Original Caption) The New York Giants vs. the Chicago Bears at the Polo Grounds in this photo. Red Grange is shown at left, about to make a pass. Credit: Bettmann Archive/Bettmann
No one with the Giants knew what that meant. Was Grange a Giant or wasn’t he?
It turned out he wasn’t. The Galloping Ghost signed with his hometown Chicago Bears for $100,000 despite the Giants’ best efforts. But Mara returned with something just as important. While in Chicago, he’d struck a deal with Bears owner George Halas to play a previously unscheduled home-and-home series between the two franchises.
“Grange will be playing in the Polo Grounds this year,” Mara told his team, “only he’ll be playing for the Bears.”
On Dec. 6, 1925, that game was played in Upper Manhattan. The Bears won, 19-7, but it was a tremendous financial victory for the Giants as about 70,000 fans flooded into the Polo Grounds to watch the contest. That almost doubled the previous record for spectators at a pro football game set just weeks earlier when Grange made his pro debut for the Bears in front of 36,000 at Cubs Park (which today we call Wrigley Field).
The Giants made close to $143,000 in that game alone, enough to clear their debts, and finished the season turning a net profit of $18,000. Had the Giants not made money that season, Mara might have given up on his venture.
“That game in the Polo Grounds literally saved the marquee franchise who had just joined the league,” Joe Horrigan, the former executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and one of the sport’s premier historians, told Newsday in 2020. “[Mara] was a businessman and he didn’t want to waste his money. The Grange Game took his red ink and turned it black.”
It also helped Grange. Part of his contract with the Bears included a cut of the gate on all games at home and on the road, so he made about $30,000 on top of his salary. While in New York, he also secured thousands more in lucrative endorsement contracts and even agreed to a movie deal that paid him about $300,000.
And of course it helped the pro sport, which had been overshadowed by the college game for most of its existence. Dozens of reporters flocked to cover the spectacle at the Polo Grounds and the game even received play in the London Times. (The Giants, incidentally, would play the NFL’s first international game in London in 2007.)
“It’s not just the most important early game in Giants history but probably in NFL history,” Horrigan said. “It gave the league credibility and the understanding of how fast this thing called the NFL was coming down the track.”
There was some detriment to it all. The size of the event quickly shifted the focus of pro football from tiny midwestern towns to big cities. By the start of the 1927 season, teams from Canton, Akron and Columbus had folded, and within the next few years, almost all of the charter teams either dissolved or moved to much larger markets. Only the Bears (known in 1920 as the Decatur Staleys) and Cardinals survive as original NFL teams. The Packers joined in 1921. The Giants, established in 1925, are the fourth-oldest current NFL franchise.
Grange played for New York eventually, although not for the Giants. In 1926 and 1927, he played for the New York Yankees, a short-lived AFL team. He actually was a co-owner of that franchise. But that team and league were no match for what the NFL and the Giants already had become — thanks in large part to Grange himself! — and after 1927, Grange pulled his stake from the Yankees and returned to Chicago. The Yankees folded in 1929.
The Giants, of course, did not.
Tim Mara called his quest to sign Grange “partially successful.”
One hundred years later, it’s hard to argue with him.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
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