CHAPTER 1

The Golden Age of Sports

In the presidential election of 1920, the first after the end of World War I, Republican candidate Warren G. Harding took as his slogan “A Return to Normalcy.” He summed up exactly what he meant by that term in a speech that he delivered on May 14, 1920:

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality …”

“My best judgment of America’s needs,” he said “is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people …”

The voters in that year’s election, which for the first time included women, must have been in complete agreement with Harding’s message. He and his running mate Calvin Coolidge defeated Ohio Democratic Governor James M. Cox and his running mate Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide, garnering 404 electoral votes compared to 127 for their opponents.

Although the voters may have bought into Harding’s vision of “normalcy,” as the decade began to unfold, it soon became clear that what was taking place was anything but getting back to normal. “Normalcy” quickly evolved into the “Roaring Twenties” and everything that Harding outlined as to what was needed such as serenity, dispassion and tranquility was quickly tossed aside in favor of all that he warned against. While Americans may have wanted the comfort that comes with a familiarity with the past, they were quick to exchange it for the benefits of the advances, technological, and social, that were ushered in during the decade.

Virtually every key aspect of life in the country was transformed during the 1920s including transportation, communication, and production technology. The automobile had perhaps the biggest impact on American life in the 1920s. Henry Ford’s new assembly line innovation made it possible to build cars faster and to sell them cheaper thus making them available to the average American family.

By the end of the decade most families owned at least one automobile. To support this increase in the number of cars on the road, by mid-decade, government spending on highways and bridges was more than $1 billion. Not only was the automobile industry thriving but so were those businesses that the auto industry depended on such as rubber, glass, and fabric, not to mention the oil business. All these developments created millions of jobs during this time. The economy was booming.

Air travel also emerged as an option in the 1920s. After the effectiveness of flight had been demonstrated during World War I, private companies began to look for opportunities to establish passenger lines and airmail contracts. In 1920, the first transcontinental airmail route was created from New York to San Francisco. Later in the decade, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, when he piloted his single-engine plane from New York to Paris in 1927. This gave the aviation industry a much-needed boost and made Lindbergh into a legendary hero. So much for Harding’s notion that the country did not need “heroics.” Lindbergh would not be the only hero the decade produced.

Also key to the transformation experienced in the 1920s was the radio. Guglielmo Marconi invented the wireless telegraph in 1890, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that the first commercial radio station went on the air and broadcasted music to initially only a few thousand homes but by the end of the decade there were 800 radio stations in the country broadcasting to over 10 million radios. In 1924 the first radio network, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) was created. It was followed by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), three years later. NBC and CBS provided networks of radio stations which made it possible for people across the country, for the first time, to listen to broadcasts of news, entertainment, and sporting events.

In 1926, Ford also instituted a 40-hour work week for the employees in their plant which resulted in higher productivity. The workers would now be working eight-hour days, five days a week. Soon other companies followed Ford’s lead and so it was that people in the 1920s found themselves with more time, more disposable income, more freedom, and more mobility. By the decade’s end most homes had electricity and for the first time more people lived in urban centers than in country towns. In the 1920s the number of millionaires increased by 400 percent over the previous decade.

With the thriving economy and more free time, Americans began to look for sources of entertainment. Although there always was a general interest in sports in the country, the hysteria created in the 1920s was such as to name the decade the “Golden Age of Sports,” and to transform American sports in such a way as to have a lasting impact felt to modern times.

“Three forces created the sports hysteria of the 1920s. The American public enjoyed unprecedented prosperity during the period. With more leisure time and disposable income, people turned to sports for fun and entertainment. Second, through serendipity and lucky parenting, a colorful athlete in each sport came along at the right time to focus the fan’s interest. Last, the emerging art of promotion exploded into a cultural and economic whirlwind called ‘ballyhoo’. The strongest winds blew from exuberant sports journalism, with some sports writers approaching the celebrity status of the star athletes they covered.”¹

Although baseball and college football were the most popular sports at this time, the popularity of all sports was beginning to grow, and in each, at least one star emerged to help drive that popularity. Baseball had the likes of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, boxing had Jack Dempsey, football had Red Grange, and golf had Bobby Jones.

There were five Olympic Games during the decade, starting with the Summer Games in 1920, the first since the end of World War I. The first ever Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France in 1924, where over 200 athletes from 16 countries competed. This was followed by the 1924 Summer Games in Paris, the 1928 Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland and 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam. Each was wildly popular and captured the attention of the world. The big American star to emerge from the Paris Olympics in 1924 was swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who took home three gold medals in swimming and one bronze for water polo.

Finally on September 17, 1920, a group of businessmen, who were owners of professional football teams gathered in the showroom of a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, owned by Ralph Hay. Hay, the owner of the Canton Bulldogs, invited other teams from the Ohio league to join what was called the American Professional Football Association. Fourteen teams joined the league for its inaugural season. Although it would be decades before professional football would challenge baseball as the country’s national pastime, this largely overlooked meeting gave rise to the National Football League.

As sports became more popular in the decade, newspapers assigned it more coverage and the sports pages were no longer manned by “over the hill hacks and cub reporters.”² For most newspapers during this decade, sports coverage soon accounted for 15 percent of its reporting and the “hacks” and “cub reporters” were replaced by the likes of Grantland Rice, Ring Larder, Damon Runyan, and Westwood Pegler. There was an art to their writing not seen before or since. Mythical terms were used to describe the athletes and their exploits and each of the stars were given a “catchy nickname.”³ Babe Ruth was the “Sultan of Swat,” Ty Cobb “The Georgia Peach,” Jack Dempsey was “The Manassa Mauler,” Red Grange “The Galloping Ghost,” and Notre Dame’s 1924 backfield, thanks to Grantland Rice, became the “Four Horsemen.”

In his reporting on the Notre Dame vs. Army football game in 1924, Grantland Rice penned the perfect example of “ballyhoo” when he wrote: “Outlined against a blue gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction, and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out on the green plain below.”⁴ From the moment Rice’s words made their way to print, the 1924 Notre Dame football team would be forever referred to as the “Four Horsemen” team.

In addition to the boost given by newspapers, radio also contributed to the growth of sports in the 1920s. It was able to give the fans immediate results and eventually play-by-play broadcasts. The first World Series to be broadcast over the radio was the 1922 series between the Giants and the Yankees. An estimated 5 million people in the New York area tuned into the broadcast. The game in 1921 between Texas and Texas A&M was the first play-by-play broadcast of a college football game.

During the decade an amazing number of new venues were built to accommodate the swelling crowds that were anxious to see sporting events in person. Franklin Field in Philadelphia was built in 1922 and expanded in 1925 to seat 65,000. The Horseshoe at Ohio State was built in 1922 to hold 66,000. The Rose Bowl was also built in 1922 to accommodate 57,000. In 1927 the University of Michigan built its stadium to hold 72,000 fans. Yankee Stadium was built in 1924 to hold 56,000. Illinois, California, and Stanford Universities all also built new stadiums over the course of the decade.

When Walter French left his Moorestown family and friends after his junior year at Moorestown High School in 1917, the start of the “Golden Age of Sports” was still a few years away. It would have been impossible for anyone to predict what the 1920s would have in store given that just a few months before the end of the school year, America had entered World War I.