Join Darin Hayes as he welcomes author Doug Vilhard to discuss his captivating new book, "The Golden Age of Red," which shines a light on the legendary football player Red Grange and his impact on the sport. Set in the 1920s, the conversation explores Grange's journey from a humble college athlete to a national sensation, revealing the complexities of fame and the pressures that came with it. The episode delves into the intriguing relationship between Grange and his groundbreaking sports agent, C.C. Pyle, who played a pivotal role in reshaping the business of football. Listeners will also discover how Grange's story parallels contemporary discussions around athlete compensation and the evolving landscape of college sports. With rich historical context and engaging anecdotes, this episode offers a unique perspective on the origins of professional football and the enduring legacy of its early stars.

Professor Doug Villhard puts the story of Red Grange and his eccentric manager, C.C. Pyle front and center in his amazing book, The Golden Age of Red. It is an amazing ride with some new twists on a well-known story based on real history.

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We got a great addition coming up tonight.

Author Doug Vilhard joins us with his new book that just came out, the golden age of red.

That's right.

And talk about the legend Red Grange.

The Galloping ghost story comes up in just a moment with Doug Villehard.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of american football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes, is podcasting from America's north shore to bring you the memories of the great gridiron one day at a time.

Before we get started, if you love the sights and sounds of great american football history like we're showing tonight, why don't you subscribe to our podcast and you'll know exactly that every time it comes out on YouTube and your favorite podcast provider.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com dot.

Welcome once again to the Pigpen.

Your portal deposited football history.

And welcome to another edition where we have a little bit of an author's corner.

Here we have an author about a very interesting book on red Grange, telling the story of Grange in a little bit different light.

His name is Doug Villehard and he's wrote a book recently on red.

We'll bring him in here right now.

Doug, welcome to the pigpen.

Hey, thanks for having me.

It's going to be fun.

Yeah, definitely will.

Doug, why don't you give us the title of your book and where folks can get a copy.

Yep.

So it's called the golden age of Redem and a novel of Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost.

So the golden age of Red.

And you can get it pretty much wherever books are sold.

But Amazon is great.

We've got it in print.

We've got it in Kindle.

And the audio version is really, really fun.

Yeah, it's a very fun book.

I just got done with it here recently.

And I appreciate you sending a copy forward so we can have this discussion.

And before we get into the book, let's get into a little bit about you and maybe tell us, give us sort of the 50 cent tour of Doug Villehard and how you became to author a book on Red Grange.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm an entrepreneurship professor, actually at Washington University in St.

Louis, and I've written several books about entrepreneurs.

So real life entrepreneurs, biographical fiction.

And I used to own companies and sell companies and buy companies.

And I was a little bit successful.

So I'm like financially retired, if you will.

And I teach for fun and write for fun, but we'll find out in a minute.

I do love Red Grange.

Absolutely.

But he also had America's partnered with America's first sports agent.

So it was actually the agent that drew me to it.

And we'll, and we'll talk about that and how that ties into entrepreneurship as well.

Okay.

So that's sort of, you took your background in a very public figure that was popular and that was your connection.

And, of course, the love for red grange.

And you're, I see you live in the Illinois area, so that sort of probably helps out a little bit, too, with the alliance.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I do, I do love in Illinois.

I do like the Bears, which is relevant, too, to this story, and I do like Illinois, too.

So it kind of all tied in.

But, you know, as we talk about it, we'll learn that he reads more than a player, though, what he did for the NFL, too.

And what cc Pyle did is worth talking about along with Red's accomplishments.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, you sort of do a twist, you know, a little bit on the story.

It's sort of, I mean, how would you describe the genre of the books?

It's like a sort of fictional nonfiction.

Is that it's biographical fiction or historical fiction.

But the way I like to think about it is even though it's a book, I like to think about it like you're watching the movie, if you will.

So this would be as if you're watching the movie of Red Grange.

And I don't know.

I don't know.

It's like, it's how I like to be entertained.

And I think it's a fun way to tell the story.

And I think a lot of nonfiction books do a great job of telling you what happened, like how many yards and what the weather was like and stuff like that.

But I try to tell you, like, how it happened and have you kind of feel what it would be like to be a young man with so much fame all of a sudden and how you might handle it.

So that's how we go about the storytelling in this book.

Yeah, you do an excellent job of that.

And you sort of bring out some of the qualities that, you know, I enjoy and probably most people enjoy about red Grange and even though, you know, he lived and was famous 100 years prior to this modern era, but we sort of think of him as sort of a humble guy, and you bring a lot of his humbleness.

And I don't think, I think especially beginning of the story, he doesn't realize his greatness where others recognize it.

And I think that's just such a cool aspect.

And I love some of the caricatures that you do and some of the, the interactions he has with some of the other characters in the story.

Yeah.

Thanks for saying that.

You know, what drew it?

I kind of knew I had a story when I realized we've got, what we've got here is a star who doesn't want to be a star, never wanted to be a star, wanted to be behind the scenes.

And then in the sports agent, we've got someone who should be behind the scenes, but he would rather be the star.

And out front, and when you put them together, and it happened in real life, but when you put it together, it made for a really fun story.

Yeah.

Well, we might as well.

Let's reveal, let's, let's talk a little about the sports agent.

Let's.

Very famous characters.

Why don't you go ahead and introduce him?

Yeah.

So his name is Cc Pyle and he's considered America's first sports agent.

Right.

Okay?

So they, you know, 20 year difference.

And CC Powell wanted to be a movie star and he was an actor and did other things in Hollywood.

And the sort of group that he was running with at the time went on to be very successful.

And he wasn't like Charlie Chaplin is one of them that he was with early on and he wasn't.

And there's, I love Champagne Illinois.

There's nothing wrong with champagne Illinois.

But he finds himself stuck sort of running a movie theater, silent movie theater in champaign, and then, bam.

This kid, this kid rises to a level of fame greater than Babe Ruth, sort of right under his nose.

And, you know, and he had seen before the path of other actors and such make it.

He didn't.

And anyway, he saw a path at the time.

So, you know, the world put those two together, you know, at this point where one was on his way up and the other one wished he had been on his way up.

So they just, history just kind of crossed paths at the right time for those two.

Yeah.

I love the way that you took.

And Grange was aware of CC Pyle, you know, prior to them actually meeting.

You have Grange frequently going to, trying to sneak into the theater.

He's paying, he's paying his way, but he's sneaking in the side door from the manager and sitting in the back.

Doesn't want anybody to see him.

Just watch a movie like a normal kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because he doesn't want to, he doesn't want the attention.

And he knows if he goes through the front doors, you know, people are going to flock around him and everything.

So I love that whole aspect of it.

And then, you know, I always look at CC Pyle and maybe, maybe unjustly, but maybe, but you sort of bring a different caricature to CC Pyle.

And it's sort of, he's sort of a smooth operator in your, as a character in your book.

And he sort of, he knows he wants to have red Grange, you know, be on Red Grange's coattails and make some money off them, but he sort of schmoozes them and does some, some clever things to make Red Grange want him.

And it's a very, really interesting relationship, especially in the beginning.

Yeah, that, that's right.

And he, so, you know, I think you may, you may disagree, but, you know, I think history kind of vilifies cc Pyle.

They, they make him out, is a like fly by night guy, only interested in money, all that kind of stuff.

And I don't know if that's not true, but he, but if you try to have like empathy for him for a moment or they try to, we do that in storytelling sometimes.

Have empathy for the villainous, if you will.

The villain's trying to do something and the hero keeps getting in the way.

But what he, what he would argue is that he's actually a champion of the student athlete.

And that's, that's what interests me because with nil the name image likeness debates going on today, this was the original one, although they didn't call it name image likeness, they called it fame.

And what CCPY was saying to Red was, you own your fame, you know, you might be selling out these college stadiums.

And by the way, red paid tuition to go to school.

There were no, there were no scholarships.

So CC Pyle's argument is you're being exploited by, by the Big ten, by Illinois, by the NCAA to sell off these stadiums and make millions of dollars for everybody.

And you have to, you have to work a summer job so you have enough money to stay alive during the year and pay tuition.

It's unfair, right?

So that was, that was how I believe in real life and in the book, how he sort of hooked red into, you know, into doing that.

And you've seen that before in other movies before.

They just don't walk right up to a guy and say, let's partner.

You know, they whisper in his ear, you're being treated badly.

You're being treated badly.

You're being treated badly.

If only you had someone to help you.

You're right.

If only someone you could trust.

Right.

So that's, that's how we approach it and how, and how I believe it happened in real life, too.

Now, I jotted down a line from your book early on.

This sort of captures this.

And he, Red's coach, you know, Bob Zubke of Illinois, definitely did not like professional football.

He was sort of on the side of Amos Alonso Stagg and others, that college football's the height of football.

Everybody else is just, you know, there has beens and you shouldn't make money from playing football.

That was their stance back then.

It was popular.

But you have CC Pyle, who knows he wants Red to go into pro football.

But like you said, he sort of disguises that, that desire and that want.

And he says this line, and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit where CC Pyle is talking to him.

He's sort of saying, you know, you got to stay within.

The.

Red's talking about staying in the NCAA rules and not doing some things that would be make them come down on him at all.

He says, stay clear of the NFL.

And then it goes on to say, but your name and identity are yours.

No rules currently prevent you from making money during doing anything other than being paid to play.

You own the fame.

I thought that was brilliant.

And I really, that's one of the things that really stood out to me in the book.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And, and the NCAA realized it because what happens is, and we can talk about some more, you know, red's decision to go pro and such like that, but, but the endorsements come in and all that, and they realize that he could have actually, red could have done that while he was a college athlete like Caitlin Clarke.

He actually could have, there wasn't actually a rule.

There was a rule that you couldn't be paid to play professionally, but it was very loose on, on the rest.

So the NCAA actually took care of it and shortly after in a bylaw.

And that's, you know, and that's what it, that's what it was challenged in court recently.

So it was, they, they watched this and they were worried about it.

But, you know, the other reason all those coaches didn't like the pros was the fact that there wasn't, there is now something called actually, it's still in the books today.

It's very important.

It was a very important rule.

It's the only rule that actually allows college and pro to coexist.

It's called the Red Grange rule, actually.

And it wasn't in place at the moment.

And so what they were worried about was that a kid would have a really big game on a Saturday and then he'd be tempted to go pro on Sunday, just leave college right in the middle of the season and go.

And that's what they were most worried about.

And then they ended up a year later after he left.

They put the Red Grange rule in place, which still holds today, which basically says if you start playing a college season, you're not allowed to be in the pros that same season.

So it has to swing around a calendar year before you can be a pro.

And Bob Zubkey really pushed for that.

And then, and then they all got comfortable, then they got comfortable with it.

They just didn't want to be the minor league system, you know, for the NFL.

And remember, you know, in the minor leagues, you can pull somebody up to the pros, right, whenever you want.

They didn't want to be like that.

So that's part of why they hated it at the time.

And also they were making so much money, the schools were and everything that, you know, they were worried, no offense to college baseball today, no offense, but they didn't want to be that.

You know, they didn't want to be that.

They wanted to be really no offensive college baseball.

They wanted to really draw big crowds and be really relevant.

So that's what they were worried about.

And they were, and you bring that up in the book, too.

And, you know, they're, they're putting 60, you know, 50, 60,000 people in the stands at games regularly during the season.

You know, a handful of games each year where the NFL is lucky.

Yeah, big game.

And if we go back to CC pile for a second, that's the thing is George Hallis, the Bears owner, you know, routinely paying, nothing wrong with it, but routinely paying people 50 playing players, $50 a game, 550 to play.

And they all had other jobs.

And even George Hallis, the owner of the Bears, had another job, too.

You know, there wasn't a lot of money, but with redhead, you know, Halas was willing to pay $500 a game.

And I think Red would have taken it probably on his own.

Right, so that would have been a lot of money.

But CCPA was there to say, wait a second, $500 a game is the place to start.

Red Bull draws 60,000.

Here's our offer.

Half.

Half the gate will split it.

And just to put that in perspective, okay, so callous is wanting to do that.

So sort of digress.

The pay of players pro football advanced.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So when they negotiate half the gate for Red, there was a game.

There's a game where they played in New York City where Red got half the gate, which was actually more than Babe Ruth got all year.

And Babe Ruth was in the stands after watching, too.

So, I mean, that's why the concept of sports agents were like, the leagues were like, we got to stop that on their own.

This kid doesn't know how to negotiate for himself, but with an agent is too much.

Yeah, I really enjoyed knowing quite a bit because, like I said, I write and I talk quite a bit about this era of football history.

And I love how you brought in some of the real life characters of the day.

And then that's what Zupke's and his the like, Kim, are worried about pro football doing, corrupting others.

Yeah, got caught up.

Right?

Ernie nevers and Wildcat Wilson and some of these great players.

But you're also bringing in Grantlin Rice, who's writing these two very poetic, famous journalism, journalistic pieces, basically the same weekend.

And one about Grange, one about the four horsemen and naming them, giving them their nicknames that we carry on to this day.

We know who people are talking about when they bring those.

And you have a scene where during the Chicago, Illinois game, where Walter Camp is sitting next to Grantlin Rice and they're having a conversation about some of the things going on in football that day.

And I just thought that was just such a cool little clip that really got ingrained in my mind.

I loved it.

Yeah, thanks.

Thanks for that.

It was a lot of fun.

The reason that I did it is I wanted to sort of remind the audience that we didn't always have football.

Walter Camp figured it out.

I mean, it was just what we call today, like kill the man with the ball.

It started in colleges.

There'd be 100 guys on a field.

They'd, like, throw a ball out and see what happened.

Right.

Just total chaos.

And it was Walter camp who really led the way to, wait a second, let's have 100 guys in the field.

Let's do eleven on his side.

Let's have a line of scrimmage.

Let's have some order to it.

So when Roosevelt's like, if you guys don't add structure to this, we're going to stop it because kids are dying on college, kids are dying on the field.

So I wanted to pay sort of homage to that.

And then also, I mean, if you go, when you go from chaos to structure, and then right at the end of his life, red Grange, someone comes along who really takes the game to another level.

I just wanted him to sort of see and recognize, you know, the beauty in, you know, in a great career's work in terms of Walter camp.

So that's why we have that scene in there.

Yeah.

It's a milestone in football because really, pro football is really not significant.

Till Redgrange, with his barnstorming tour, he really takes pro football, saves the NFL, in many cases, saves the New York Giants, definitely, with the game they had there at the polo grounds.

So it's really remarkable how you, I liked how you captured the essence of the importance of that era.

Yeah, thanks.

And you know what?

We consider that era to be the golden age of sports.

Right.

And the golden age of sports journalism, too, because up until World War one, everything was about, you know, it's about the war and that.

And then really, newspapers only started in the, right around that time, in the twenties, like, devoting 20% of the paper to sports.

That started in that era.

It was also an era where we passed some labor laws where you didn't have to work all seven days a week, too.

So people had this, some disposable income and some days off.

So, you know, so the golden age of red is the golden age of a lot of things, if you will, in the roaring twenties.

And I like that you personally appreciate that era because, you know, obviously I do.

I do, too.

And I think just some amazing innovations took place, and it was fun to, fun to reference them in the book.

And one of my favorite things, too, is I actually have a kid at Notre Dame, so I'm part of that now.

I wasn't, I'm not against it or anything like that, but I'm, like, in the thick of it.

But I get, and I, and I love it and I'm part of it and all that, but I get such a kick out of the fact that only three of the four horsemen are all Americans.

The fourth is not, because guess what position he played?

Red Grange's position.

So Red Grange actually beat out one of the horsemen.

So I, you know, so I just, I just love when you research this stuff and figure it out.

It's just all happening at, you know, at the same time.

Same time.

And you tell that that part of, you know, you have, I think you have Grantlin Rice talking while he's at the Army Notre Dame game and saying, you know, thinking to himself, hey, you know, these four guys are going to be on Walter Camp's all american list.

This is going to be the backfield for his list.

And lo and behold, news reports come out while he's in the press box of, you know, this red Grange kid scoring all these touchdowns against fielding Yost Michigan team.

So I thought that was really, really cool.

And I believe that actually, it was a true event or pretty close to true.

Yes.

And you know what's also fine?

Just the way history repeats itself.

I was talking to a reporter of sporting News.

A very nice piece actually came out about the book in the sporting news on October 18.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

And he said, Doug, I read your book.

And he said, I'm covering.

Let me think for a second.

He's covering.

Was covering Ohio state a couple weeks ago, and it was a blowout game.

And he's sitting in the press box covering that, and all of a sudden, everybody's whispering, whispering, whispering, whispering.

And he realizes Alabama may be about to lose today.

And suddenly the whole press box switches gears, right from writing about a Ohio state blowout to Alabama losing.

And he goes, the whole time I was thinking about your book, and I was thinking about Grantlin Rice trying to write a story about the four horsemen.

And then, bam, over the wires, because they did have wires.

Then over the wires, we learned that red Grange had what today Sports Illustrated calls the most unforgettable moment in sports happen.

So anyway, history repeated itself just two weeks ago.

Yeah, definitely.

That's a great comparison.

I'm sure it happened especially.

But with our day of having cell phones and, you know, anything going on in the world is instantly at our fingertips.

Just, just thinking how those guys would get it in a press box and with the ticker tape and everything else going through, just, you know, fascinating tape.

And somebody on the phone with somebody else going, yeah, I can't believe this.

Can't believe this.

Yeah.

It was like, also, like the early era of, like, information traveling quickly.

Not, not to us, the human, not to us.

We had to look at in the paper the next day, but amongst the media, it was traveling pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard to find football articles if you're going back through old newspapers, because they could be anywhere.

It could be in the gossip section to the front page page just about anywhere.

So it's not a set sports page like we know it today and have grown up with.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's just, that's, that's when this was happening.

And Red Grange had a lot to do.

Babe Ruth had a lot.

Babe Ruth had a lot to do with it, but Red Grange had a lot to do with it.

One of the elements of your book is you connect to the reader.

Well, you connected to this reader, and probably some of our listeners can connect this to it.

You had a scene where Garland range, Red's younger brother, and he are delivering ice for company.

That's what they did in the off season.

That's how they build up their great athleticism.

But they pull into a neighborhood of unfortunate kids and something special happens.

And you really connected.

If you could maybe share that scene with us.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

So Red talked a lot about in interviews.

He played in high school, of course, he was very good high school player, the best college player ever, in my opinion, you know, and a hall of Fame NFL player.

But he found, he found the love of the game from the research that I did in a sort of an empty sand lot, if you will, in Wheaton, Illinois, in Red.

Wheaton, Illinois, just outside Chicago.

In Red.

Red's family was not very wealthy at all, very working class.

His dad was a lumberjack.

His mom died.

His dad was a lumberjack.

And then his dad became the city jailer.

And the great stories that his dad was so big, they said they didn't.

Why lock that?

There's no reason to even lock the door of the jail.

You're like, not, you're not going to mess with him, with him.

But it left so without a mom and such like that, it left those two brothers kind of walk around the neighborhood, if you will, and they had the most fun, you know, what's described as the black part of town at the time.

And those were the kids that they played with, did not care about color, anything like that.

You know, Red talked a lot about that during his life.

You just want to.

Just want to play football with kids that could challenge him.

And, yeah, they played.

They didn't know how it worked.

They had no idea how it worked.

There's no television to watch football.

The, you really don't even understand the rules unless you went to college, which very few people did.

That was another thing that kind of hurt pro football.

A lot of people looked at pro football just like they did professional wrestling.

They were just looking for blood.

They didn't even understand the rules.

There's still people today that watch the game and do not understand the rules.

But what Red did with his brother growing up was play what we did it today.

We called, you know, kill the man with the ball.

Basically, somebody had a tattered ball.

They'd roll it out, you know, they'd fight like heck to get the ball and then fight like heck to keep it until somebody took it away from him.

So that's, that's how he, you know, that's how he developed sort of his love for the game.

That's how he learned to run fast.

You're going to get killed if you don't run fast.

That's how he learned to juke left and right.

And, you know, that.

That was his youth growing up.

And I'm no Red Grange and neither.

Neither are you.

But I bet that's how we played, too, when we were kids.

Don't know any better way to do it than that.

And obviously, that's what Walter camp cleaned up for us, but that's what little kids do.

If you come to Thanksgiving at my house and we got a gazillion little kids, unless an adult goes out there and organizes the game on their own, that's what they'll do.

They'll.

They'll play kill the man with the ball.

Yeah, that's.

Well, that's the recognizable thing of football, is somebody tackling somebody with the ball.

So that's.

That's all they knew.

Natural element.

Right, right.

And great fun doing that, too.

Fun, too.

Especially when you're, you know, when you can't really hurt yourself at, you know, seriously at that age, especially if you're.

Not the one with the ball, it's really.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Which I was rarely.

I rarely had the ball, so I got to tackle people.

Yeah.

And I love that how you, you had that scene as when they're children playing the game, those folks, and then they come back in the ice truck and they, they're having sort of a squabble themselves, and they sort of resolve it with, again, the kids from the neighborhood of that, that era.

And I thought that was brilliant the way you put that in there.

And.

Yeah.

Thanks.

I think that I wanted to show that even when you're playing at a, at a serious level, a serious level, if you call a timeout for just a second, it's still a game.

It's.

It's still game.

And.

And I wanted them to kind of revert back to their youth like that.

And I wanted to show I have a brother.

People in my neighborhood used to really enjoy watching my brother and I fight, which is, which is very, like, it's funny when siblings go at it, they actually.

It's really a lot worse than when other people go, go at it.

And red head.

Red told stories of, like, getting in big fights.

Well, even on the ice truck, even in college, getting in big fights with his brother, like, pulling over to the side of the road, duking it out, and then next thing you know, they're back in the cab and they're friends.

You know, the friends again.

So it was kind of.

It was fun to work in a real life scene that red described into the book.

Yeah.

And you, in part of that scene.

And you have some game situations for red.

You have sort of the, you know, here's this, if I may say, almost like a demigod of folks for football, but he's having some serious issues that we're recognizing today of, you know, probably concussions and some other things during his play.

And I, I thought that was great that you brought that up, that, you know, this isn't a modern thing.

This has always happened.

Yes.

And you know, that adage like, you know, how generations will say men used to be men, you know, back, back in the day.

But listen to this.

So you, the way football works is if you come organized football, college football, pro football, if you come out of the game, you can't go back in again until the next half.

If you come out in the second half, you can't go back in.

I mean, it's based, that's how professional soccer, you come out of the game, you can't go back in.

It's based on that.

So what, so what happens is we have players, yes, they're getting banged in the head, but they're playing offense and defense.

And another rule at the time is coaches are not allowed to coach during the game.

No plays.

They call in no plays.

In fact, they're forced to sit their butt on the bench.

It's in the rulebook.

Sit on the bench, shut your mouth, let the players play.

So not only does red have to play both sides of the ball, he's been taught by zupke, basically, to become an assistant coach.

He's the offensive and defensive coordinator.

So he can't come out of the game.

He can't come out of the game.

He's, he's everything.

So, yeah, they get knocked in the head.

Somebody picks them up, points them back in the right direction, they keep, and they keep going.

That's funny.

A new helmet called the Zupkey Helmet.

So he's actually famous, too, for at least starting to pay attention to, you know, to head injuries and such and starting to think about it at the time that that guy's a genius, by the way, Bob Zupke, absolute, absolute genius.

And we had one of our episodes where our characters went, and they went to the same Chicago, Illinois game that you talked about in yours.

So we have them going into almost like a coaches speak, and they're in front of Zopke reporters, which, I don't know if it really happened, but it was fun because that's what we have today.

That's what we're doing.

But your character of Zapke, I really was entertained by it.

You brought in some of his german descent, uh, having read over for dinner with the wife and, you know, the night before the games.

And I just thought it was, it was.

It was great.

And the interaction all the way through the book of Zupke and Grange.

Yeah, so.

So listen, I I don't think Zupke gets enough credit.

I really don't.

He had four national championships in ten years.

He's a little bitty guy.

He could never, never have actually played.

Didn't he never actually play himself at a serious level?

He's too little.

And I love those kind of people because they make up for it some other way.

And he, you know, he makes up for it in his mind in designing plays.

You know, he, he invented, at Illinois, he invented the screen pass.

He invented the spiral snap, you know, basically shotgun, the flea flicker, the fake punt.

And then because he had all these different plays, he invented the most amazing thing ever, the huddle.

Bob Zupke created the huddle so that he actually had a little bit of time so they could figure out what they're doing.

And that drove yoast and stag and all those guys crazy.

In fact, in fact, in a derogatory way, they called Zupkeep Mister Razzle dazzle as a derogatory term.

And the reason is all the other teams were doing great with finding the biggest farm kid possible, giving him the ball and running up the middle and running up the middle and running up the middle.

And then Zupke all of a sudden would punt on first down.

You're like, what just happened?

He'd take a whole different field position, punt again.

They're like, what just happened?

And then fake the punt.

Fake the punt, do a flea flicker and score.

So I just, I love, I love him.

You know, that Newt Rockney is totally deserving.

But Newt Rockney died in a plane accident and kind of like buddy Holly, right?

So he became.

Or Janice Joplin or any of those that died too young, so it really added to his fame.

Whereas Zupke, unfortunately, had a lot of losing seasons in the thirties because he.

The irony is, even though he's the innovator, he refused to adapt to what everyone else was doing, which was money on the side of and paying for paying for people and recruiting.

You know, he just, he felt like if you were in Illinois and you were an athlete, you would want to play for your state.

He did not understand why you would want to go somewhere else.

So.

And I also love irony, too.

I think that's great.

But, yeah, the irony of the innovator is he didn't innovate off the field in the thirties, and that's, that's why we don't remember him like, like we should.

Yeah.

It's brilliant that you bring that up and you sit there and think about it as we talk about sort of football shifting gears.

College football.

At first it's all the powers in the east, and then just after world War one, you have, like, the California wonder teams and more of a western side, sort of the balances, but now you have that shift to the midwest.

Of the four coaches you're talking about who were definitely probably the four top guys and four team top teams in the twenties, were those teams Notre Dame's, Illinois, Michigan?

And what was the other one I just missed?

We just talked about University of Chicago.

Chicago.

Yeah.

With Amos Lonzo stag.

Yeah.

So definitely you bringing all those into the mix, and you're still talking about, you know, Ernie nevers out, you know, Stanford and Wildcat Wilson Washington.

I love that, how you brought that history into the conversations.

Thanks.

I had a lot of fun with the, the game where, you know, all happened in real life, but wherever, where Bob Zupke scheduled a game against University of Pennsylvania red senior year for one reason only, which was to say, east coast football, you're done.

You're done.

You're not, you know, Yale, Harvard, all that stuff, you're done.

And what, I didn't do it in the book because it didn't happen.

Because it didn't happen.

But it would have been fun for a southern team to tell the midwest, hey, you're done.

You know, like, you know, football is in the south now, if you will.

And that's not totally fair.

I'm a big ten fan and all those kinds of things, but I think you would have to agree east coast football is done.

And that's where it started.

And this was really an era where it started to switch.

So we, so we had a lot of fun with that.

There was something called, they would always have these banners that said penniless ruled the east, as in University of Pennsylvania ruled the east.

And basically what Eleanor was saying was, who cares?

Because Midwest is where the action is.

Yeah, definitely true.

That's, it just brings out some of that history and it shows, even today, how the SEC is the powerhouse one year, the big ten.

The next year, uh, you could go to one of the, you know, the acc.

It shifts around and it's whoever's got the.

The hot game going on and the hot players that's, uh, you know, who's going to rule football for that, that season or that.

Yeah, I think so.

Although if you look at the northeast, um, I mean, what, who can, you know, I don't know if.

I don't know if Penn State counts.

Maybe it does, maybe that's the edge of it.

Penn State, Boston College.

But it's, it's, you know, it's getting more difficult for the northeast to win national championships than the southeast, that's for sure.

Boston colleges and things like that aren't.

They just don't have the manpower to deal with some of these bigger schools that are really dominating.

Yeah, I love that aspect of it, too.

Now, you had a couple characters in here that I wanted to ask you about.

They pop up throughout, and they're a great part of the story.

You have a couple of young ladies that keep popping up in Red's life, and is there some basis of truth on them?

Helen and Polly are, to them, really talking about.

Yeah.

So, um.

So I'm going to be a little more vague with this one because.

Because I'd like people to enjoy the story, you know, and me not give all of that away.

But, um.

But I.

But I will say that, um, one of them.

One of them is.

Was a figment of my imagination to help move the story along.

Okay.

The other one was very much a real life person in Red's life, and you.

And it takes some extra research to figure that out because they don't talk about it a lot.

But there was a love interest in real life and led to a disagreement between them and a public disagreement between them.

So we'll save that one for your readers, too, to digest, to dig into.

But you just a little business side.

You know, 70% of fiction readers are women, actually, and not to be so stereotypical, but to bring them into the story, they do appreciate those types of relationships and most of the.

Most of the book clubs and, well, frankly, I've never been to a book club with a man.

Just be honest with you.

I don't know if there's a man in the world in a book club, but most of the women book club will not talk about sports history like we're talking about.

They'll talk about the relationships, if you will.

And I think that's great, actually.

So it's my, it's my pleasure to talk to that audience, too.

It makes it rounds red out, and I think, I think it makes him more human and more real.

And I did a lot of research on one of those characters, on one of those characters to make it really real.

It was excellently done and they're very interesting characters and we'll leave it at that.

So you had some other great pieces that you talk about of the history, and one of them that you alluded to earlier is the connection that you had wanting to write the book was CC Pyle.

So maybe you give us, wetted our bill just a little bit on CCPyle and being an entrepreneur, maybe if you could touch on that a little bit.

Yeah.

So I think what is, is interesting about this is, of course, Red is a human and red is a player and all that, but you know, he is in, he was in the first.

I'm going to get to CCP 1 second.

But Red, Red was in the first class of the NFL hall of Fame.

There were 17 of them.

Owner of the Bears was in there.

Owner, owner of the Giants was in there.

Jim Thorpe was in there.

I think Ernie nevers actually was most.

Of that first class for profitable hall of Fame you have mentioned in your books.

Yes.

Yeah.

Covered the majority of them, I'm sure.

Yeah, majority of them.

But Red wasn't in there for a player.

He was a good, he was a really good NFL player, but he'd gotten hurt, too.

And he just wasn't quite the NFL player that he was, the college player.

But the reason that he's in the NFL and what George Halice, owner of the Bears said, he said, no, no one did more for football, college or pro than red grades.

And what they mean is the way his fame brought money and people and attention to the league and that, and it was red, but it was really his agent that did this.

And I, and I think the best analogy, and by the way, apparently so do others, because the recent New York Times piece and sports sporting news piece of going off of what I, what I've been saying here for a month or so, that I believe Caitlin Clark is the best, best analogy to Red Grange today.

Caitlin Clark, basketball player, really famous at the University of Iowa, right.

Incredibly famous.

And then she makes a choice.

She didn't have to.

She made a choice to go to a league, by the way, where they don't get, they don't get paid very much.

But she made a choice to go to the league.

And that league has been, WNBA has been around for a while, but I think there's a lot of evidence that she has taken it to a whole new level in the last year.

And that is completely analogous to what Red Grange did, incredibly famous in college and made a choice to go to the NFL and lend his credibility.

And look what's happened now.

There's no bigger league in America, obviously, than, than the NFL, but it was, it was that, that I really wanted to talk about.

And, and CC Pyle, you know, having a vision for it.

And, you know, in, you can wikipedia read for 1 second, you'll see something weird on there.

Where he played for the Bears and then he played for the New York Yankees football team, but he didn't just play for the Yankees.

It was also him and Pyle who decided, Red, you know, you're not gonna be able to play forever, right?

You're human.

You can't play forever.

So how are we gonna keep having an income stream?

So they decided they were too big for the Bears.

They needed their own team.

Like Red, you don't want to be, you don't want to be on a team.

You want to own the team.

And then they said, we're too big for a team.

We're too big for the NFL.

They started the AFL.

They started their own league.

Right?

Imagine if Caitlin Clark, by the way, she had offers from like upstarthouse, three on three leagues in Las Vegas and stuff like that.

She could, instead of, instead of doing WNBA, she could have just started her own thing and the media would have followed.

And that's actually what they did.

What they did.

And then when they didn't quite go the way they wanted, they merged it back with the NFL.

But that's no offense to Red, but that's not a 22 year old coming up with that.

That's CCPA and that's that.

And that's what drew me to the story.

Yeah, definitely some great characters to play upon.

And you did a great job of doing that and telling a story that's really, really timeless.

And like I said, it covers a lot of different grounds, love interests, football, to the business world.

So really excited for people to get their hands on that.

So why don't you share with us again the title of the book dug in.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Yeah, it's called the Golden Age of Red by Doug Belhard.

Pretty, pretty easy to find.

Again on Amazon's probably the easiest golden age of red.

And we got print books.

You know, we got digital books.

But my favorite, my favorite is the audio version.

And I will, for business reasons.

I'll be a little cc pile too.

I'll push that because not as many men readdez as we would like or people read as we would like.

But when you listen to this thing, the actor does different voices and such like that.

It really is like watching the movie.

And I think, and I bring it up not to sell books and such like that, but I bring it up because I think we need to know this story.

I think we need to understand Red Grange and, and not just take for granted all these great sports that we get to watch, but really to call time out for a second, ask ourselves where this came from.

And I think the audiobook is a fun, fun way to do that.

Well, Doug, we really appreciate you telling the story in the book and the audio version and preserving this piece of football history and american history for that.

And we appreciate you coming on the show today.

Oh, it was so much fun talking to you.

And thanks.

Thanks for having me.

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