Who Is Chic Harley? The Sport That Harley Built

Chic Harley

THE NEW FOOTBALL

"Just as Babe Ruth became the daddy of modern day baseball enthusiasm, resulting in construction of the Yankee Stadium, so did Harley perform a similar feat for Ohio football."
---Jim Cummings, The Columbus Dispatch, October 24, 1963

Only a few years before Chic Harley burst onto the football scene, the game was considered a contest pitting hooligans against each other. The objective was to push the other team back across the goal line. If it took brute force and beatings to do it, that was OK.

Then in the fall of 1912, a skinny little kid, who just five years earlier was frolicking in Chicago, stepped onto the East High School gridiron in Columbus, Ohio and began transforming the game into one of intelligence, speed and grace. Four years later, he was doing more of the same at a small school in the heart of Ohio called Ohio State University. Nothing’s been the same ever since. Not for Ohio State, not for American football.

Harley’s emergence played a major role in universal acceptance of a game that valued true skill over pure muscle. The “little guy” now had a chance with Harley and his 5-foot, 8-inch frame leading the way. The thrills and excitement Harley generated in just a few short years reached such a crescendo that hundreds of thousands of Ohioans couldn’t help but reach into their pockets to pay for the building of the famed “horseshoe” stadium that stands mightily to this day.

Two short years after Harley’s last college game in 1919, pro football came knocking on his door. It needed a savior to keep the game from running itself into the ground. Reluctantly, Chic stepped forward and 1921 proved to be a great season for the game especially the team Chic played for, the Decatur Staleys, which a year later were named the Chicago Bears.