Before it was Super: The Story of the 1932 NFL Championship Game

The stands are packed with fans literally hanging from the rafters and ledges and sitting on the concourse steps.  The air is thick with cigarette smoke.  The grandstand is littered with peanut shells and puddles of stale beer.

Entering the fourth quarter the game is knotted in a scoreless tie.  Despite the fact that it’s been a sloppy, even a poorly played game, the atmosphere is nonetheless palpable with tension and excitement.

The visiting team, the Portsmouth Spartans clad in purple, are about to kick the ball off to the heavily favored Chicago Bears.  The local Chicago fans are waiting in hushed expectation for their hometown Bears to receive the ball and to finally break through the Portsmouth defense and score--in this the waning moments of the game.

All the fans know that it is only a matter of time before their imposing six foot three inch tall two-hundred and sixty pound fullback, Bronko Nagurski--the best player in all of pro football--punishes the Portsmouth linebackers with his athleticism and powerful running style.

Just last week Nagurski had broken open a 56 yard run at an icy cold Wrigley Field to almost single-handedly defeat the powerhouse Green Bay Packers who ended up finishing their season with a stellar record of 10 wins and only 3 losses.  The only two teams with a better record that season, at least in terms of winning percentage, had been the Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans.  But the Portsmouth Spartans had ended the 1932 NFL regular season with a record of 6 victories 1 loss and 3 ties with their only loss at the hands of the Packers.  For that very reason many sportswriters and fans alike had viewed last week’s contest between the Bears and Packers as the game which had truly determined the NFL’s best team for the 1932 season.

But in 1932 the National Football League was only in its twelfth year and the upstart league hadn’t yet figured out many of the minor details--minor details such as how to determine a league champion!

The season had ended the week prior to the match-up between the Bears and the Spartans on December 11, 1932, and it had ended in a theoretical three-way tie for first place.  By today’s NFL rules the Green Bay Packers with their record of 10 wins and only 3 losses would have been deemed the obvious champions.  However, back in 1932 ties did not count at all in determining a team’s winning percentage and which team was crowned champion was based solely upon their overall winning percentage which consisted of only wins and losses regardless of how many total games a team had played.  

The reason for this obtuse method of determining a winner was that in 1932 there was no such thing as a standardized league schedule.  Some teams like the Packers would play up to 13 total games that year, while others like both the Bears and Spartans, would play only 10.  It wasn’t until after the 1932 season when team owners finally met to resolve many of the league’s apparent inconsistencies that a standardized NFL schedule was adopted with teams playing a set number of games against a set number of opponents in a specific geographic region.

So that, despite having an impressive record of 10 wins and 3 losses, and despite having played 3 more total games than their competitors, the Green Back Packers finished the 1932 season with an overall winning percentage of .789 and were thereby ousted from the top spot by both the Spartans and Bears, each of whom had finished the year with a record of 6 wins 1 loss and 3 tues for an overall winning percentage of .857.

Normally, in years past, the NFL would have crowned a champion based upon which team had beaten which during the regular season as a sort of championship tiebreaker.  In 1932 the Chicago Bears had played the Portsmouth Spartans twice during the regular season--once in Chicago and once in Portsmouth.  And for the first time both regular season games had ended in ties--making the Portsmouth Spartans and Chicago Bears dead even by all the standards of the time when it came to crowning an NFL champion.

Enter George Halas, the legendary owner and head coach of the Chicago Bears.  Halas, considered by many to be one of the father’s of the modern NFL, particularly from a coaching and executive standpoint, would go on to run the Bears well into the 1960’s and his impact on the game continues down to this day.  Back in 1932 it was Halas who first conceived of the idea of having a postseason matchup--the first true NFL championship game--between the Bears and the Spartans to determine the league’s best overall team.

The idea of a postseason to determine a champion seems almost like second nature to fans of all sports today, but back in 1932, an era when the World Series of baseball a contest that pitted teams from two separate leagues against one another, was the only form of postseason play in town, the concept of having two teams in the same league play against one another to determine a champion outside the bounds and strictures of a regular season was almost revolutionary.

Halas’ idea was revolutionary, but it was also very popular, and the press particularly in Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin latched onto the idea in a heartbeat.  But despite the idea’s popularity, as the 1932 NFL season neared its conclusion, there remained two problems that had yet to be solved once it was determined that Portsmouth would play Chicago in the first ever NFL Championship Game.

The first of those problems was money.  1932 was the heart of the great depression.  Only today, at the height of the current COVID-19 epidemic, are unemployment numbers even remotely close to what they were back in the early 1930’s, and unlike today, back then there was no social safety net such as social security or unemployment to help people get by.  Simply put, since there was no cash to be had, all entertainment industries, not just sports had suffered and the NFL as a whole was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Worse yet, the Portsmouth Spartans were beyond bankrupt.  The Spartans were $27,000 in debt, a sum that today would be equal to nearly $250,000,  All of their players were in fact playing without any guaranteed salaries and the team could not even afford to rent any practice facilities while on the road.  Often the Spartans would simply end up practicing in an empty field on the side of a highway or a public park.  On a trip to New York to play the Giants in the middle of the 1932 season the Spartans were forced to practice in Central Park!

Even after being so successful during the 1932 season and making it all the way to the NFL’s first ever championship game the Spartans would be forced to move to then much larger and more affluent city of Detroit where they would be renamed the Lions--but in December of 1932 that still remained in the not to distant future.

In order to get the Spartans to agree to play in the Championship game, Halas had to foot the bill for most of their expenses and also agree to share with the Portsmouth team a more than generous portion of both the gate receipts and concession sales in spite of the fact that the game would be played on the Bears’ home turf in Chicago.  Halas was such a believer in the idea of a Championship game and so certain based upon the media buzz in the papers that the game would generate record attendance for a professional football contest that he willingly made these concessions to the Portsmouth club.

As it turned out, the week of December 12-18, 1932 was one of the worst weather week’s on record for the month of December in Chicago.  There was over two feet of snow that week and temperatures regularly plummeted to below 0 degrees.  This created problem number two--weather.  Given all the money that Halas and the Chicago Bears franchise had invested in the first ever Championship game, it was absolutely essential that the game have the maximum crowd possible.  Anything less than a complete sellout would almost surely guarantee that the game would end up being a net financial loss for both teams.  It didn’t seem likely that an outdoor game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where the Bears typically played all their home games, would even come close to selling out if fans were getting covered by a foot of snow in subzero temperatures.

Near the end of that week the club’s agreed on another revolutionary idea.  Both the Bears and the Spartans decided that they would play the 1932 NFL Championship game indoors and at night!  

The game would be held at the 11,000 plus indoor arena called Chicago Stadium on Madison Avenue in Chicago deemed ‘The Madhouse on Madison” by Chicogoans for the raucous crowds that events at the arena typically attracted.  The game would be played on a drastically modified football field covered in dirt and tanbark.  

Given the space limitations of the indoor venue the field that the Bears and Spartans played the first ever NFL championship game on would be only 60 yards long.  An NFL game would not be played on a shortened field again until the 2019 season when the Oakland Raiders and Green Bay Packers would play a preseason game on an 80 yard field in Winnipeg Canada.

In addition to a shortened field, the ball would be kicked off from the ten yard line to start each possession and field goals were banned altogether from the 1932 NFL Championship game.  Between each play the ball would be moved to the center of the field to enable the players to have enough room to maneuver each time that the ball was snapped.  Due to this innovation of having to move the ball to the very center of the field after each play, the 1932 NFL Championship game was the first American football game to feature the use of hash-marks on each side of the field, a feature of the gridiron that has become standard in the game.  There was no true out of bounds territory at Chicago Stadium, instead anytime a player touched or was driven against a wall on either side of the field, he would be marked as out of bounds.  The use of sidewalls to demarcate inbounds from out of bounds is something that has enabled games such as arena football and indoor soccer to rise in popularity in today’s sports world.

In addition to a modified field the 1932 NFL Championship game was the first ever pro football game at which a game program was sold to fans.  Each program was sold for ten cents apiece and helped to generate an estimated $5000 to $10,000 worth of revenue for each team.  

As Halas had predicted by moving the game indoors attendance soared.  The game was a complete sellout, drawing 11,198 fans to Chicago Stadium, an arena which at the time rarely sat more than 10,000.

Though the place was packed it can hardly be said that those who were in attendance on that frigid December evening witnessed a riveting example of American gridiron football.

For one thing, on the Saturday night before the game, Chicago Stadium had hosted a performance of the Ringling Brother Circus that had included a dozen elephants.  In addition to being covered with dirt and wood chips called tanbark, the players also had to contend with a field of play that was covered by a ubiquitous layer of elephant dung.  This playing surface caused those on both offense and defense to lose their footing and made tackling as well as running the ball a near impossibility.  Additionally, in the 1930’s football was a game where the forward pass was still somewhat of a novelty.  In the early days of the NFL teams did not rely on the passing game to make first downs or to methodically move the ball down the field as they do today.  Rather teams tended, for the most part, to try to wear down the other team’s defense by doggedly running the ball at the opposing defensive line and only relied on passing the ball when they wanted to quickly score or to catch the opposition by surprise.  During the 1932 Championship there were only eight passing attempts in total and five of those ended in interceptions.

With field goals banned, punts hitting the roof of the arena and landing in the stands, elephant shit covering the field and an awful to nearly non-existent passing attack on both sides the 1932 NFL Championship between the Chicago Bears and Portsmouth Spartans remained a scoreless tie well into the final moments of the game.  But the fans were still very much into the novelty of it all.

The Chicago fans knew that they could win thanks to their two best players.  Bronko Nagurski, mentioned before, known for his intimidating size and brutal running attack would go on to become a professional wrestler later in life, and Red Grange, called the “Galloping Ghost” perhaps one of the fastest players in NFL history who would later go on to be one of the NFL’s first television color commentators in the 1950’s and 60’s were not to be disappointed in the first example of professional football’s biggest stage.

As the game drew to a close, though, it looked as if the Portsmouth team might pull off one of the biggest upsets in sports history.  But just a few yards shy of the endzone, the Spartan halfback Glenn Presnell tripped and fell in a puddle left behind by the Ringling Brother’s from the circus the night before, thereby ending the Portsmouth drive and allowing the Bears to recover the ball.

With only a few minutes left, on an option play, the large and athletic Nagurski dropped back and threw a touchdown to the fleet of foot and wide open Red Grange.  Though this play was controversial because at the time a player who threw a forward pass was required to drop back at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage before releasing the ball, and many who saw the game doubted Nagurski had done so, in an era before instant replay was even dreamt of, the ruling on the field stood and marked the game’s only touchdown.  On the next possession the Bears would score a safety when the now hapless Spartans would once again lose their footing in the muck and fumble the ball in their own endzone.

The heavily favored Chicago Bears had defeated the Portsmouth Spartans by a score of 9 to 0 in the first ever NFL Championship game.

There may have been nothing super about this game, but an NFL championship has been played each year since, culminating in 1967 with Super Bowl I.  And though the 1932 NFL Championship Game may have been a far cry from what we now see every Sunday and Monday night in the Autumn and Winter, football fans across America should still give a nod of gratitude and remembrance to players like Grange and Nagurski and far-sighted owners like George Halas each February when they gather around their televisions with hot wings and nachos to celebrate the all-American spectacle of the modern Super Bowl.