George Halas

George Stanley Halas Sr., born in Chicago on February 2, 1895, was a player, coach, owner, and executive who helped build professional football while it was still finding its shape. Nicknamed “Papa Bear,” he founded and owned the Chicago Bears of the National Football League and served as his own head coach on four occasions. He was also, more briefly, a Major League Baseball player, appearing in 12 games as an outfielder for the New York Yankees in 1919 before a hip injury effectively ended his baseball career.

Halas came from a Czech-Bohemian immigrant family. His mother, Barbara, ran a grocery store, and his father, Frank, was a tailor. After Crane High School in Chicago, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he played football for Bob Zuppke, as well as baseball and basketball, and earned a degree in civil engineering. He helped Illinois win the 1918 Big Ten Conference football title. During World War I, he served as an ensign in the Navy and played for the Great Lakes Naval Training Station team, earning MVP honors in the 1919 Rose Bowl.

His life in sports was marked by both opportunity and narrow escapes. In 1915, while working temporarily for Western Electric, he had planned to be on the SS Eastland, but he was running late while trying to gain weight to play Big Ten football and missed the capsizing that killed 844 passengers. After the war, his baseball path took him through the minor leagues to the Yankees, but football soon became his main field. He signed his first professional football contract with the independent Hammond All-Stars, then moved to Decatur, Illinois, to work for the A. E. Staley Company.

In Decatur, Halas became a sales representative, played for the company baseball team, and served as player-coach of the company football team, the Decatur Staleys. In 1920, he represented the Staleys at the Canton, Ohio, meeting that formed the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL in 1922. After Augustus E. Staley turned control of the team over to him, Halas moved it to Chicago, kept the Staleys name for the 1921 season, and soon renamed the club the Chicago Bears. He chose the name as a nod to the Chicago Cubs, reasoning that football players were bigger than baseball players.

Halas did nearly everything for the Bears. He coached, played end on offense and defense, sold tickets, and ran the club’s business. He was named to the NFL’s all-pro team in the 1920s, and in 1923 he stripped Jim Thorpe of the ball and returned the fumble 98 yards, a league record that stood until 1972. In 1925, he persuaded Illinois star Red Grange to join the Bears, helping raise the league’s respectability and popularity. After stepping away from coaching in 1930, he returned in 1933 during the financial strain of the Great Depression. With Clark Shaughnessy, he later perfected the T-formation system, which powered the Bears’ 73–0 win over Washington in the 1940 NFL Championship Game.

Halas was elected in 1963 as one of the first 17 inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He coached the final game of his career in December 1967 at age 72 years and 318 days, then the oldest age for a head coach in NFL history. The NFC Championship trophy bears his name. His plain-spoken line, “Nobody who ever gave their best regretted it,” fits a life spent playing, coaching, owning, adjusting, and building, often all at once.