The 1932 NFL championship, indoors at Chicago Stadium
CHICAGO – Virginia Mccaskey has spent nearly a century watching pro football. She has been riveted by title games. She also has endured her share of stinkers.
The playoff tiebreaker for the 1932 NFL championship was uniquely both. Literally. That year, when the NFL was as old as a seventh grader, the Bears played the Spartans of Portsmouth, Ohio, in an add-on game for the title.
In the throes of the Great Depression, to ensure paying customers showed up in subfreezing temperatures on Dec. 18, the game was played at Chicago Stadium – yes, indoors – atop 8 inches of dirt spread over concrete.
Almost nine decades later, Mccaskey didn’t hesitate when asked for her lasting memory of the Bears’ 9-0 victory.
“Just the odor,” she said with a laugh during an interview in March. “It was almost overwhelming because the circus had just left town.”
Yes, “dirt” belonged in quotations that night. Picture 9-yearold Ginny Halas, daughter of Bears founder George Halas, longing to watch elephants parade around the Stadium instead of smelling what they had left behind.
And that’s just a sniff of all the quirks that color one of the most influential games in NFL history.
Not only was the 1932 championship the league’s first playoff game, it spawned several changes that helped revolutionize the
sport and accelerate its ascent to the juggernaut it is today. As the league celebrates its 100th season this year, there is hardly a more vibrant, novel example of its growth than that indoor title game played on a 60-yard field.
That much is evident after a recent day downtown Chicago with the microfilm machines on the third floor of the Harold Washington Library. With Twitter and high-definition TV biding their time to take hold of pro football, no fewer than four Chicago newspapers were there to cover that prehistoric Super Bowl.
Their accounts are a portal to when the NFL was fighting for a place in the national sports consciousness. When punts were the most exciting play pro football had to offer. And when gate receipts were more important than any final score.
“The Bears and Spartans had quite an evening of it, prospecting in the soil strewn out for them by the Stadium redshirts,” Marvin Mccarthy wrote in the Chicago Daily Times on Dec. 20, two days after the game.
Mccarthy explained how the Stadium kept its own supply of dirt and repeatedly reused it as a cost-saving measure. Over time, the soil collected an aggregation of sticks, cigar butts, an occasional elephant tusk tip and whatever the circus animals dropped out of their hind ends.
He wrote: “The ball players spent a goodly part of their time picking up these relics and tossing them resoundingly against the white sideboards of the enclosed arena. Thus, it can’t truthfully be said that the evening was totally devoid of a bang.”
In its 100th season, the NFL is a $15 billion behemoth with a cultural footprint extending from Soldier Field to the White House to overseas.
In 1932, it was merely a clumsy, rambunctious cub hoping to secure its next meal.
George Halas, the Bears owner and manager (Ralph Jones coached that year), entered the season “surrounded with IOUS,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Halas by Halas.”
He used notes for $1,000 to postpone payments to Bronko Nagurski and Red Grange. Nowadays, checks like the one for Khalil Mack’s $34 million signing bonus clear just fine.
By 1932, as the Depression strangled the country, the league had contracted to eight teams from 22 in 1926. There were no divisions, and playoffs were unprecedented. The firstplace team was the champion.
When the Bears (6-1-6) and Spartans (6-1-4) tied in the standings after tying both their meetings, Halas and other league officials sought a playoff for the financial windfall. (Schedules weren’t always uniform as the league strove to organize.)
In fact, before Halas mentioned a single detail about the game in his autobiography, he wrote: “The game was a financial success – a capacity house of 11,108.”
Would that many paying customers have showed up to Wrigley Field?
The previous Sunday, only 5,000 saw the Bears beat the Packers 9-0 on the North Side. About four 4 inches of snow fell the day before and continued through the game, with a wind chill of about 11 degrees.
Halas angled to move the game indoors, having at least experienced football in the Stadium during a 1930 exhibition against the Chicago Cardinals.
Cubs President William Veeck Sr. released Halas from his pledge to play all home games at Wrigley. Meanwhile, the Spartans agreed to play on the road, knowing their share of the gate in Chicago would be greater than elsewhere.
The move to the Stadium was reported by Chicago newspapers Dec. 16, two days before kickoff.
Howard Roberts of the Chicago Daily News wrote: “...even the hardy pro-gridders whom even last week’s heavy snow could not daunt, balked at playing on an icy field in sub-zero weather and in comparative privacy.”
The venue change prompted X’s and O’s to foxtrot through the minds of Chicago football scribes.