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EPISODE SUMMARY
For those who remember George Halas, we might think of him in his later years as the aging, but still cranky, coach of the Chicago Bears. Stiff-jawed, intense, and focused, one wonders if Halas ever smiled on the field. From all accounts, he did not! Football was his passion and the urge to play pushed him into pro football in 1919 with the Hammond Bobcats after he told his mother pretty confidently that he “was through with football.”
This followed his break-through season with the Great Lakes Naval Training Center football team which won the Rose Bowl in early 1919. With World War I and the flu epidemic hitting the country in 1918, many college football teams either disbanded or played a reduced schedule. This left military bases, teeming with servicemen who played in high school or college, to fill in the gaps and participate on the football landscape in the fall of 1918......
Read the entire episode blog post and check out some other cool info regarding this episode here.
WHEN FOOTBALL WAS FOOTBALL BACKGROUND
Each episode takes the listener back to the very early days of the National Football League. Author Joe Ziemba will share a forgotten or lost story from one of the NFL’s two oldest teams: The Bears and the Cardinals. Team championships, individual exploits, or long-buried items of interest from the earliest years of the NFL will be dusted off and resurrected for the listener. Not for the football faint-of-heart since these programs will document when the struggling Bears nearly went out of business or when Cardinals’ players earned $15 a game and were proud of it! It’s NFL history—with a twist!. See Joe's books below.
Cadets, Canons, and Legends: The Football History of Morgan Park Military Academy
When Football Was Football: The Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL
Music for the episode - https://www.purple-planet.com/
