Halas never appeared in another major-league game. By 1920, his baseball career was over. Babe Ruth had taken over right field for the Yankees, and Halas had embarked on a new career, to which he would devote his considerable energies for the next six decades.
In those days, games in industrial and semi-pro baseball leagues sometimes drew thousands of spectators. A.E. Staley, a manufacturer of corn starch and related products in Decatur, Illinois, had the idea that football games could be just as popular. He decided to sponsor a football team to represent his company, and he hired Halas to organize, coach, and play for it. Halas had made a name for himself on the gridiron at the University of Illinois, where he’d also lettered in baseball and basketball. He had been Most Valuable Player of the 1919 Rose Bowl game—but not in the orange and blue of Illinois. Halas had enlisted in the Navy when the United States entered World War I, and he was a member of the Great Lakes Naval Station team that defeated another group of servicemen, the Mare Island Marines, in the Rose Bowl.
Halas arrived in Decatur in March 1920. He had never forgotten something Illini coach Bob Zuppke had once said: “Just when I teach you fellows how to play football, you graduate and I lose you.” Halas believed that “post-graduate football,” as it was then called, had a future. But he was far from certain. College games routinely drew crowds of fifty, sixty, even seventy thousand spectators. The pro game was merely a curiosity to most fans, and pro players were generally regarded as nothing more than a bunch of hooligans. College coaches like the fabled Amos Alonzo Stagg condemned pro games as a scourge that corrupted the athletes and demeaned football itself. Halas’s mind was made up, however, and even his mentor and idol Zuppke could not dissuade him from going forward—though he tried.
Halas got to work building his team by recruiting men he had played with or against in college. Among the notables he landed were center George Trafton of Notre Dame, halfback Jimmy Conzelman of Washington University (St. Louis), halfback Dutch Sternaman of Illinois, fullback Bob Koehler of Northwestern, tackle Hugh Blacklock of Michigan State, and All-American end Guy Chamberlin of Nebraska. Chuck Dressen, a Decatur native who hadn’t played college football, would share the quarterback chores with Pard Pearce of Penn. (Dressen was soon to make the same career move Halas had, in reverse. After a brief stint in pro football, he switched to baseball and had an eight-year career as a third baseman with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants. He also managed for 16 years, winning pennants with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952 and 1953.)
Halas and the other players he’d signed up were placed on the Staley Company payroll, but they had few duties other than playing football. Their main job was to win games and bring favorable publicity to the company.
When Halas began trying to line up opponents for his new team, he ran into difficulty. He wrote to several of the better-known teams, but received noncommittal responses. “Paid football was pretty much of a catch-as-catch-can affair,” Halas recalled many years later. “Teams appeared one week and disappeared the next. Players came and went, drawn by the pleasure of playing. If others came to watch, that was fine. If they bought tickets or tossed coins into a helmet passed by the most popular player, that was helpful.”
Halas was thrilled when he learned that plans were afoot to organize a genuine league. Creating at least a semblance of order would be pro football’s first step in building credibility with the public. On September 17, 1920, the American Professional Football Association was founded in Ralph Hay’s Canton, Ohio, automobile showroom. Halas was there, representing the Decatur Staleys. Ten other teams became charter members of the fledgling league that day: Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Chicago Cardinals, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Hammond Pros, Massillon (Ohio) Tigers, Muncie Flyers, Rochester Jeffersons, and Rock Island Independents. Each agreed to pay $100 for a franchise. “To give the new organization an appearance of financial stability,” Halas recalled, “we announced that the membership fee for individual clubs had been set at $100. However, I can testify that no money changed hands. Why, I doubt if there was a hundred bucks in the whole room.”
The Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit Heralds also joined the APFA before its inaugural season. The Massillon club folded before playing a game; Muncie dropped out after a few games. The APFA was not a league in any real sense in 1920—it had no official schedule and kept no standings. League president Jim Thorpe, the legendary “world’s greatest athlete,” was purely a figurehead, chosen for his name. He was still an active player with Canton and hadn’t the time, inclination, or authority to handle any larger issues. Teams still scheduled games as they pleased, traveling only within 150 miles or so of home. The Staleys, for example, played only four league teams all season—the Cardinals, Tigers, and Rock Island twice each, and Hammond once.
The Staleys opened their season on October 3 by easily subduing a non-league team, the Moline Tractors, 20-0 before about 1,000 fans at Staley Field in Decatur. They won their first seven games and weren’t scored upon until the seventh, a 28-7 win over Hammond. They were scored upon only once more all season, in a 7-6 loss to the Cardinals in Chicago. That game drew a capacity crowd of 5,400 to the Cardinals’ field at 61st and Racine, with more spectators watching from rooftops and even from trees. When the two teams played again in Wrigley Field (then known as Cubs Park), about 8,500 fans showed up to see the Staleys prevail 10-0.
Decatur finished 5-1-1 in league games, and Akron was 6-0-1. The teams had not met during the season, so they rented out Wrigley Field for the first “world’s professional football championship game.” The weather was atrocious, and the 11,000 fans who turned out were treated to a duel between the two punters, as the offenses of both teams bogged down in the mud. Akron’s star player/coach Fritz Pollard—the first black All-American and the first black head coach in pro football by 60 years—was neutralized by the sloppy footing. So was Dutch Sternaman, the Staleys’ main offensive threat. So, too, was Paddy Driscoll, the great star of the Cardinals, who had suited up for the Staleys. “Driscoll had already proved himself one of the best backs and kickers in the game,” wrote Richard Whittingham, “and his team had ended [its] season the week before. The Decatur coaches put him in a Staley uniform, choosing to ignore the unwritten agreement about not tampering with another team’s players, but in the end it did them no good.” The game ended in a scoreless tie. Halas proposed a rematch, but Akron refused. Both teams claimed to be world champions.
The Staleys were off to an auspicious start. Including non-league games, they had compiled a record of 10-1-2, scoring 166 points while yielding only 14. Each player had earned about $1,900 for his efforts. Halas began planning for an even better year in 1921. But one day A.E. Staley suddenly informed him that he could no longer afford to subsidize the football team.
Halas was stunned. Staley, though, was about to do him the greatest favor of his life. “Mr. Staley was a good businessman,” Halas wrote in his autobiography. “I assume he went over the books carefully. One glance must have shown him the way to the future did not lie in Decatur. The three games played there brought in $1,982.49, while the five Chicago games produced $20,162.06.” Staley suggested that Halas and Sternaman take over ownership of the team and move it to Chicago. He even offered them $5,000 to get started, in return for a promise to retain the name “Staleys” for one more year. Halas and Sternaman eagerly took him up on it.
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