In writing the authoritative biography of Red Grange, Gary Poole has done so much more. He has vividly brought us back to the glory days of college football's past and the raucous birth pangs of the pro game. And he has brilliantly shown us how America's first national football hero was also, thanks to his charismatic and conniving manager, America's first sports commodity, as well. --- Samuel Freedman, Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of The Inheritance

This first major biography of the gridiron great Red Grange

reveals how a gifted athlete and a wily agent gave birth to

professional football in America.

The Galloping Ghost spins the remarkable story of Red Grange, the

fleet-footed college football player who inspired poetry and dazzled

fans as he felled opponents on the field, and who, aided by his unscrupulous

and utterly brilliant manager, the notorious Charles Cash and

Carry Pyle, helped launch professional football, changing American

sports forever.

Journalist Gary Andrew Poole draws on exhaustive archival research

and interviews to evoke the 1920s and the golden age of sports in all their

splendor and outrageousness. He transports readers from college football

rallies to barnstorming tours, from the locker room to the White House

and Hollywood, as he recounts Grange's rise and ultimate, tragic fall.

Moreimportant, The Galloping Ghost plumbs the depths of a fascinating

and psychologically complex relationship between a star athlete and this

country's first real sports agent, a relationship — as necessary as it was

evil — that encapsulated the good and shadowy sides of sports and how

they inevitably intersect.

For fans of Cinderella Man, The Devil and Sonny Liston, and

The Devil in the White City, The Galloping Ghost is an atmospheric,

character-driven story that sheds new light on a seminal sports figure.