The preservation of football history owes a significant debt to the pioneering figures of the sport, and today, we delve into the life of one such luminary, Walter Eckersall. In our discussion with author Chris Serb, we explore the profound impact Eckersal had on Chicago sports and American football at large. Through his remarkable achievements as a three-sport athlete and his subsequent role as a distinguished sports journalist and official, Eckersall's contributions have largely been obscured by time. We will examine not only his athletic prowess but also his enduring influence on the game's evolution during a critical period marked by both innovation and peril. Join us as we uncover the legacy of Eckersal, a man whose story deserves to be celebrated in the annals of sports history.

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You know, the preservation of football history would be nowhere near it is today without some of the forefathers and trailblazers of early football.

Today we're going to talk about one, a gentleman named Ecky from Chicago with author Chris Serb, who wrote a biography about him recently.

Chris is up in just a moment to tell us all about it.

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 you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren hayes of pigskind dispatch.com welcome to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

And before we get to today's guest, let's make sure that you hit the subscribe button and notification bell so you know right when all of our content is coming up on Pigskin Dispatch here on the YouTube channel and the Pixkin Dispatch podcast.

And now let's talk to our guest on this great piece of football history.

And welcome to another edition where we get to interview an author about a recent book on a football legend.

This legend goes way back in time and his exploits have taken to many things that we enjoy in the modern game.

His name is Walter Eckersol.

As the subject of the book, the author's name is Chris Serb.

Chris, welcome to the Pig Pen, Darren.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's.

I could talk about Eckersol all day, so I'm thrilled to have the forum.

Well, we will get into Eckersol, but I guess before we do that, let's talk about Chris Cerb.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself in respect to football and football history and how you got interested in writing a book about Walter Eckersol.

All right, so I have just always been a sports fan, always loved my, especially my Chicago sports, my Chicago sports history.

Grew up on my dad's knee.

He would, he, he was a DePaul man.

They didn't have a football team at the time, but he would tell me about Amos Alonzo Stag and the University of Chicago and the, the history and tradition and the Chicago Bears, of course, locally here.

So I, I just always had an affinity for sports history, for football history, for Chicago sports history, all that good stuff.

I was trained as a journalist, have a journalism degree from Northwestern University.

Was working as a magazine journalist for a couple of years, and then my dream job almost fell into my lap.

So I left the, I left the full time journalism world aside and became a, a full time firefighter.

But I started freelancing right away because firefighters have an ideal schedule for doing projects like writing a book about an obscure sports, sports figure.

So we work 24 hours on, 48 hours off.

So in those 48 hours I could do research, I could write articles, have done a few things on.

I did War Football was my previous book which was about World War I era football and how the World War I military teams basically led to the birth of the NFL.

That was, that was kind of a, kind of an interesting take on it.

I think the, the PFA like that because they gave me the Nelson Ross Award for, for that effort and, and then my next effort, uh, became uh, became er, uh, kind of doing a deep dive into this figure whose path I had crossed in my research but uh, kind of superficially, kind of tangentially had touched upon him before.

So I decided to go all in.

I decided that would be my next project.

And, and he was even more fascinating than I anticipated.

Well, first of all, thank you for your services, being a firefighter and a lifesaver and you know, somebody that we can depend on when times are bad.

And second of all, you know, thank you for preserving this football history that you have in both war football and here in Equi that we're going to be talking about tonight.

Now Chris, maybe you could just briefly tell us who Walter Eckersol was and why is he important to football history?

So Walter Eckersol was an athlete here in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.

He was the first schoolboy superstar in Chicago sports history.

He was a, he was a three sports star.

He was a champion, a league champion, a state champion, even a national champion in three different sports.

He was, he was solid in football, he was solid in baseball.

He was solid in track.

He was, he was, he was the first high school athlete that got the big photos and the splashy headlines and stuff like that.

So he's a pioneer in that respect.

The Big Ten itself was, was fairly new.

He took the University of Chicago to its greatest heights.

He, he was, he was an all Big Ten player for four years or an all Big nine, I guess at the time all Big nine player for four years as a quarterback.

Now three of those four years were before the forward pass.

So he was a running quarterback.

But in that fourth year in his senior year the forward pass was legal and he actually he was a, a very good runner still, but he excelled at throwing the ball.

It was kind of this newfangled gadget, this newfangled gizmo and he was very good in very limited duty during that, during that senior year of his.

They won the national championship retroactively I guess the national championship in the Big ten or the, or the big nine championship with a magnificent two to nothing victory over Michigan which was, which broke their 56 game unbeaten streak.

That was the, that was the legendary point a minute teams with Feeling Yost as the coach.

He had just graduated.

So Ecky was.

So he was a big deal as a high school athlete, huge deal as a college athlete.

He was a three time all American which was, which was pretty rare at the time, but it was extremely rare.

He was the first one, the last one until Red Grange to be a three time all American who was not from one of the, one of the big three.

Harvard, Yale or Princeton or maybe you could throw Penn in there.

But, but football the, and that was the bias of the people like Walter Camp and Park Davis and stuff who were, who were naming these teams.

But they, they thought that.

They thought that Midwest football just wasn't as good as the east coast version.

But they made an exception for, for a football genius like, like Willie Heston, his contemporary.

Although he was only a two time first team all American.

Ecky was a three time first team All American.

The, the first one from the Midwest and the, and the, and the last one until red Grange some 20 years later.

So, so he was as an, as a high school athlete.

He was tremendous college athlete, he was tremendous.

And then he became the premier sports writer, the lead sports writer for the Chicago Tribune for 20 plus years.

He was.

He started out as football only writer but eventually he became a jack of all trades.

He covered boxing, he covered track and field, he covered swimming, he covered.

He was a college baseball beat writer for a couple of years.

He covered just random things like archery and shooting and even ski jumping.

Basically if people can compete in something, Walter Eckersall covered it.

He was, he was Kind of the.

Kind of the lens through which Chicagoans, and by extension the country, because he was widely syndicated, he was the lens through which people came to understand their sports at a time when the sports page was really growing and maturing and becoming something that we would recognize today.

So fascinating, dude, for sure.

Yeah.

Right.

Right on the cusp of sports journalism as it's getting out of the.

Mixed in with the.

The local news or wherever it would be in your local paper to having its own page.

That.

Very interesting.

Now something that just dawned on me and maybe.

Maybe you knew this already, but you know, always go back to two.

Two early Thomas Edison films when he was developing motion pictures.

So I'm sure E is in there somewhere and probably, you know, Heston is too.

But I don't know if you could identify him because of course they don't have numbers and it's a little bit of blurred images.

But how fascinating is that?

He's probably one of the first filmed football players of all time too.

Yeah.

And that's.

I think that film's preserved on the Library of Congress.

I've watched it a couple of times.

I've strained my eyes to get a glimpse of Aersol.

I'm sure he's in there.

I think that that game was at Michigan.

That was at the old fairy field at.

At University of Michigan.

And I think that the cameraman was kind of focusing on the Michigan folks.

So it's really hard to pick up glimpses of Eckersol.

We could probably pick him out if we slowed it down.

Suprem.

I didn't have the time to do such a thing.

But it's really fascinating that that's.

That.

That that still exists and that.

That's kind of this.

This little piece of evidence.

That game, by the way, Chicago lost.

I think it was 22 to 12.

So that was.

That was Walter Eckersol's last loss until his senior year when he had a.

He had a.

A 4 to 2 loss on a muddy field, uh, to, uh, to Bobby Marshall, another.

But, uh.

But that was, uh.

Those were really epic contests of giants.

And it's.

It was really fun to relive that mostly through reading newspaper accounts.

But as you said, we do have a film of that Michigan Chicago game.

Very, very.

A very short little bit of film.

Yeah.

Now, if I'm not mistaken.

Did Eckersol, didn't he get into a little bit of officiating football also?

This was kind of a sidelight, but it's an important, it's an important piece of that third act.

He was this, this kind of doesn't work with our sensibilities today, but nobody had a problem with it at the time.

A lot of sports writers doubled as game officials and Walter Ersall was first and foremost above among them.

He was, he was the guy, he officiated the Four Horsemen game, the, the, the one that Grantland Rice immortalized.

And you know, he was also banging out a story after the fact.

So kind of hard to keep your facts straight when you're running up and down and blowing a whistle and determining whether that was a first down or, or a touchdown.

But he was the, he was the premier official and officiated games all over the country.

He officiated, I believe it was five Rose Bowls he was in.

He went to every region.

He officiated games down south, you know, primarily in the Midwest.

But he, he went wherever the action was.

And he, he loved a good game.

He loved a big game.

He loved a good intersectional contest.

He was, that was a really important part of who Ecky was as, as a sportsman.

He really wanted to stay in the game.

So he, officiating as well as the sports writing was, uh, was a way that he could stay involved.

Yeah, I mean, I just find it amazing.

I was a high school football official for 27 years and after getting done with the game, I don't know that I could write about it because I really didn't know what was going on other than, you know, when I was a referee, I'm watching the quarterback every play and interior lineman and you know, signal a penalty, the press box.

I don't know really what's going on the rest of the time except, you know, final score.

So I don't know how he did it, but that's pretty amazing feat right there.

Yeah, I think the quality of his journalism declines in games that he officiated.

To be honest.

He might, he might notice a couple, he might take note of a couple of big plays.

Oh, Red Grange hit a 40 yard touchdown run.

But the rest of the description is pretty generic because that was about the best that he could do when he was, when he was calling the proverbial balls and strikes at the time, you know, calling the first downs and spotting the football and.

And calling penalties and things like that.

So.

So kind of by necessity, it had to be a little bit generic, but.

But the people still read it.

The people still loved it.

They.

And.

And he talked later on in his career.

He talked about how being an official just made him a better writer because he was more in tune with the game.

Whether that was accurate or not kind of isn't important.

That was his take on it.

It was.

It was his way of staying involved, of staying really right in the middle of the action, which.

That was kind of a unique perspective that he had as a writer compared to some of the other folks that were writing about the same games.

Yeah, imagine.

I'm not sure if he ever did it, but just getting some of the coaches speak or players speak, you know, Red Grange has a big run and comes back to the huddle.

He has the opportunity to say, hey, Red, what'd you think about that run?

You know, and maybe he could, you know, I doubt he did it, but just the inside information you would have being, you know, in between the lines as things are going on, that's kind of a cool aspect which would never go over today.

You know, you would be called a homer and probably chased out of every stadium you would go into after you wrote something.

But interesting the way football was back then and how people like Eckersol were able to.

To, you know, pull double duty at a football game and, you know, wearing two hats.

So kind of neat.

Definitely, definitely.

And.

And yeah, something that definitely wouldn't stand today either, but definitely a.

Definitely a sign of its times.

Yeah, well, you alluded to it earlier.

You know, he played in the era of when the forward pass was coming in.

You know, most of his playing career was during that brutal time where, you know, there was reports of deaths in football and severe injuries and Teddy Roosevelt's getting involved and football committees are getting banned up and stirred together.

What did that.

But how did he take that as a player?

And maybe were some of the things that he did as a player both before and after that maybe stood out?

So it's kind of funny.

He was a little guy when he arrived at University of Chicago.

He was.

He was 56 or 5 7.

I'm not sure his exact height.

He was 132.

I think he was listed as.

As a freshman.

And by the time he was a senior, he had bulked up.

He was.

He was somewhere between 140 and 145 pounds.

So he was usually the smallest guy on the field.

He never wore a helmet.

He, you look at some of these helmets were fairly common at the time.

But you can pick out e in a lot of these, in a lot of these pictures of game action.

It's like, oh, there's the bareheaded guy.

He, he, he didn't like it.

He thought that it held back his style.

He had no problem mixing it up.

Now he was, you know, he was, he was the quarterback, but as we know, the quarterback was, was not the way we think of a quarterback today, dropping back and passing until his senior year anyway.

But he was the guy that was calling the plays that was determining is this going to be inside run, outside run, is it going to be, are there going to be laterals involved, all that stuff.

And he had no problem mixing it up.

Like running right into the middle of a crowd, taking a hard hit, bouncing right off of it, and then scooting for another 10 yards or whatever the, whatever the case might be.

And that's back in the, the three downs to make 5 yards era.

You didn't, you didn't need 10 yards for first down, but you also only had three downs.

He didn't have four downs.

On defense, he was always, or almost always the safety man.

He was the guy that played deep back on the field, and if someone broke into the open, he would have to go and make that open field tackle.

And a lot of players, a lot of his contemporaries said that he was, they were surprised at how hard he could hit.

This guy that, you know, weighs 140 pounds, he was 140 pounds with blazing speed, almost, you know, just shy of Olympic caliber speed.

And he, he was, he was definitely a throwback, definitely an old school type of football player.

And, and not the guy that you would expect too.

You look at him, what's this guy going to do?

He only, he's, he's, he's a little guy, he's a shrimp, but he, he could dish it out and he could take it.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Now he, you know, as you alluded to too, you, he played for one of the most famous college football coaches of all time, a great innovator, somebody that I, I've, you know, put up on that Mount Rushmore of football innovators, you know, Amos Alonzo Stag.

What, what was Ecker's relationship with Coach Stag?

So they were very, very close.

It was there, there was a, definitely a mentorship involved, almost a type of thing.

Stag had been at University of Chicago for.

He, he was the.

He was the founding coach, the founding athletic director there.

He was a.

He was a JV player as a freshman, and then he was varsity the rest of his time there.

And Stagg was coaching at U of C. Just a mile away.

And he would often help out at university.

I'm sorry, at.

At High park high schools, football practices.

He would loan them their facilities.

Hey, come on, guys, come use our gym.

Come use our football field.

Host your games at our football field.

So there was.

He definitely got his.

Got his hooks into Eckersol early and, and often, but they were extremely, extremely close.

There was.

There was a lot of mentorship involved there.

Uh, Eckersol was, uh.

He was kind of a controversial figure.

He was.

He was very quietly.

Just a couple weeks after his, uh, senior season ended, maybe six weeks after senior.

Senior season ended, he was very quietly expelled from University of Chicago.

And on what the.

What the official documents say were loose morals, and they don't say much more about that, but he had been.

He had been caught committing a theft.

He had been caught stealing, arrested.

He made restitution.

I think he borrowed some money from his fraternity brothers to.

To pay back the theft.

He had.

He had stolen a suit from.

From a tailor.

So University of Chicago.

He had no more PR value to the university.

So they kind of.

They kind of quietly expelled him and kind of buried the evidence for.

For decades.

And he was.

He was combing through some old records.

I think he was actually.

He was actually the guy that organized the Stag papers and kind of kind of discovered some of this stuff.

Hey, wait a second.

This was.

This Stag was not the.

The whole.

Some, you know, parag of pure athletics that we thought because he did whatever he could to keep Eckersal eligible.

But the university was complicit.

And then.

And then Ecky.

Ecky got expelled.

And.

And, But.

But Stag and Eckersol remained close after that, even though.

Even if the university officials didn't really care for that.

They didn't want Ecky hanging around campus.

But he was a sports writer, so he had access to campus.

He was.

He would.

He would.

Occasionally.

There was.

He.

Champion Challenged them to a scrimmage.

And I believe they may have won that scrimmage.

That Ecky and his, and his buddies may have won that scrimmage.

Whatever it was.

They, they certainly, they certainly didn't look too rusty.

And Stagg loved it.

Stagg kind of welcomed him with open arms.

Eckersol had a, had a drinking problem as, as a young adult into, into, into his middle 30s, I guess.

He, he collapsed in his Tribune office.

And this was uh, this was attributed at the time to exhaustion, but Stag said that it was because of Eckersol's heavy drinking and uh, he counseled Eckersol and turning over a new leaf.

And Ecky, Ecky promised him and, and, and they kind of had this fatherly, fatherly relationship where, where Stan could give Eckersall advice and Eckersall would accept it and they, they would.

They, they were, they were extremely close for the, for the rest of their lives.

There was friction at various times.

There were, was a story of an unpaid debt that Ecky borrowed $20 or something.

I, I don't know the original source for that story, but you know that there, there may have been some friction in the relationship, but all the RSAL's death, he secured Stag some tickets to, to a Rose bowl game.

And you know, they were, they, they definitely had a mutual affinity and affection and, and they both helped each other to the highest heights of greatness.

So it was a mutually beneficial relationship for sure.

Now did, did Eckersol ever officiate any of Maroon's games with, with Stag on the sidelines.

So the standard at the time, as loose as the standards were, the standard was that you couldn't officiate games involving your own team.

And Eckersol abided by this with exactly one exception.

And Eckersol officiated that one.

That is, I believe that is the only University of Chicago game that he officiated.

And early on in his career he covered a lot of University of Chicago games as a sports writer because University of Chicago was still big news.

They won conference title and a national title.

He, he, he stayed away from that just because it wasn't financially beneficial to him for that.

But he, he still covered practice.

He would rely on Stag for quotes.

They, they maintained an affinity and a friendship.

I, I think Stag grumbled in a letter about that, you know, oh, Ecky's giving me the go by because he wasn't covering University of Chicago games anymore.

Certainly nowhere near to the extent that he had done as a young man as a new sports writer.

But, but there were multiple reasons for that.

Sort of a whole new echelon of teams coming up that were sort of planning or the powers that were earlier.

So.

Yeah, interesting.

So Chris, you know, we've gone this far in and we haven't.

I don't believe we've told the full title of your book, so why don't you give us a full title and where best place for people to buy.

It is sure the, the title.

It's EKI Walter Eckersol and the Rise of Chicago Sports.

It's published by University of Nebraska Press and you can get it directly through University of Nebraska Press.

It's also available Amazon, Barnes and Noble, various various outlets.

It's getting some guy.

It's there, there are a lot of, a lot of outlets, a lot of avenues available for, for, for purchasing the book and, and I highly recommend it.

I hope that, that all your listeners buy it because I, I obviously I'm biased, but I think he's a fascinating guy.

Yeah, there's not too many people that have touched that many aspects of the game of football at that period of time when it was such a delicate thing almost went out of existence during his playing time and you know, fascinating and I'm glad that, that you've preserved his history and as a Chicagoan having that Chicago pride to say, hey, here's one of our guys from, you know, over 100 years ago that had a big important play in America's favorite game right now.

So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, it was one of those things where as I got deeper into it, I was wondering how come nobody's told this story before?

You know, he was, he was Red Grange before Red Grange existed.

He was, he was the Four Horsemen.

He was, he was every bit of some of these figures who are mythical.

You know, Jim Thorpe, he wasn't that much older than Jim Thorpe.

And Jim Thorpe said dozens of biographies written about him.

Red Grange, Red Grange, same boat.

Walter Eckersol had exactly one biography written about him prior to this one.

And it was a, it was a very short, self published, really amateurish.

It was about 40 pages long.

And so it was.

I couldn't believe that nobody had told this story.

I was thrilled that nobody told this story because it gave me a great opportunity to tell.

Tell a story about a forgotten hero who hopefully now that now that EKI is on the record, won't be forgotten any longer.

Yeah, it's thanks to people like you that are picking up these stories on these forgotten people, making them relevant again, showing their importance to football history or any sport that, you know, they've participated in and, you know, great for preservation of history.

And we thank you for doing that and we thank you for joining us here today to share it with us.

And again, once again, why don't you give the title of the book and as we let you go.

Sure.

Once again, it's Ecky, Walter Eckersol and the Rise of Chicago Sports.

My magnum opus so far.

We'll see what's next.

All right, Chris, well, we appreciate you being on today and for preserving that football history.

All right, thank you so much, Darren.

It's been my pleasure.

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