144 ChaPter 3
series for money. A few years later, the Yankees added the great first baseman
Lou Gehrig and began to dominate baseball. Ruth often hit more home runs
than the rest of the league combined and in 1927 set a record that would last
for over 40 years by slamming 60 out of the park. He and Gehrig led the
Yankees to several World Series titles in that era, as the Yankees lineup became
known as “Murderers’ Row.” As noted earlier, Ruth earned more money than
President Herbert Hoover and became the first sports star to be featured in
advertisements for various products such as underwear, cereal, Girl Scout cook-
ies, soap, and cigarettes , though the Babe himself was a big cigar smoker.
Football exploded as a national phenomenon at the same time. In August
1920, representatives from 4 football teams in Ohio and ten others met in
Canton, Ohio and formed the American Professional Football Conference,
renamed the National Football League [NFL] in 1922. Its first president was
Jim Thorpe, a gold medal winner at the 1912 Olympics and known as “the
world’s greatest athlete,” and he gave the league publicity and legitimacy. But
another figure would come to overshadow even Thorpe, George Halas. Halas
was a football star himself, and represented the A.E. Staley Company, a starch
manufacturer out of Decatur, Illiniois, at the 1920 founding meeting. In 1921,
Staley turned the team over to Halas, who won the NFL championship and
moved the team, thus founding the Chicago Bears. Halas played for and
coached the team, and in 1925 convinced the best-known player in college
football that year, Harold “Red” Grange, to play for the Bears. Halas and his
Grange became so famous that they were given a meeting with President
Calvin Coolidge who was told they were from the Chicago Bears” and
responded, seriously or not, “I’m glad to know you. I always did like animal
acts.” Coolidge’s indifference aside, Halas and the Bears became America’s
favorite football team and, more than any other unit, helped make the NFL
the American institution that it still remains today. Even more than the Bears,
a college team truly brought football hysteria to America, “The Fighting Irish”
of Notre Dame, a small Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana and its coach,
Knute Rockne.
Rockne was born in Norway, moved to the U.S. at age 5, and played foot-
ball at Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish had become known for beating sev-
eral major schools in the Midwest, but were denied entry into the Big 10
when Michigan coach Fielding Yost and others refused to allow a Catholic
school to join their conference. The team never lost a game while Rockne