red grange
1903 - 1991
1903 - 1991
Harold “Red” Grange needs no introduction to most sports fans. Eighty years after his exploits on the gridiron at the University of Illinois, people whose parents were not born when “The Galloping Ghost” haunted Memorial Stadium can still reel off his accomplishments. Sports fans at the university, however, were familiar with Grange long before he gained national fame on the football field. In high school, Grange participated in the State Track and Field meet three times, winning four gold medals and seven total medals in four different events.
Red Grange traveled a long road to Champaign-Urbana. He was born in 1903 in Forksville, Pennsylvania, a hamlet nestled high in the Appalachian Mountains east of Williamsport. Grange’s father was a foreman in a lumber camp. When Red was five, his mother died, so his father moved the family to Wheaton, Illinois, to be with relatives. Red and his brother, Garland, learned to take care of themselves while their father worked as the town policeman. The boys spent most of their free time outside playing football, baseball and basketball.
Grange was an excellent natural athlete, but his career almost ended before it began. When Grange was eight years old, a doctor diagnosed the boy with a heart murmur and ordered him to refrain from all strenuous exercise. Like most boys, Grange soon ignored the order and was back out in the streets playing ball, without his father’s knowledge. When his father finally found out, he decided it was more important that Red grow up happy than to worry about the possible side effects. As it turned out, the heart murmur was either misdiagnosed or simply disappeared, because it never bothered him again.
At Wheaton High School, Grange won 16 Varsity letters in four years. He played football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball and track in the spring. Grange liked baseball best of all, despite the fact that he scored an incredible 532 points with 75 touchdowns and 82 point after touchdowns in his four years of football. But he also made his mark as a track star.
High school track meets in Illinois have never featured pentathlon or decathlon competition, but Grange would have been a natural for them. As a sophomore in the Class B portion of the 1920 State Track and Field meet (for high schools with fewer than 400 students), Grange won the high jump with a leap of 5 feet 9 inches, two inches higher than the Class A champion, placed third in the 100 yard dash and finished fourth in the 220 yard dash. In the 1921 State Track and Field meet, Grange won both the 100 yard dash and the long jump. His jump of 22’ 3” again was better than the Class A winner. As a senior in the State Track and Field Meet, he won the 220 yard dash and finished third in the 100 yard dash.
It was at the last meet that Grange made the most important contact of his life. Robert Zuppke, the Illinois football coach, pulled him aside between events and confided, “If you come down here to school I believe you’ll stand a good chance of making our football team.” The rest is sports history.