Who Is Chic Harley? The Book

Chic Harley

WHY CHIC, WHY NOW?

"Nobody who didn't live through those days, nobody who never saw him play ever will understand the idolatry with which we who are gradually growing into old timers revere him. For Chic Harley was at once a man and a symbol, a man who was the greatest football player of his kind who ever lived and a symbol that stood for the stark refusal, regardless of the odds, to accept defeat."
--- Russ Needham, Dispatch sports editor, 1941

In 1950, the Associated Press conducted a poll of the nation’s top college football coaches and sportswriters naming the top halfbacks of the first half of the 20th century. The decision was clear. Jim Thorpe and Chic Harley were considered the best. Red Grange was only named to the second team.

How could this be? Wasn't Grange named the best college football player ever in 2008 by ESPN?

Yes, he was. You see, time---and television--- have a way of influencing history.

Not much is known about Chic Harley today. Yet, one cannot have a full understanding and appreciation of football---and a major chapter of American sport---without knowing Harley.

For a 10-year period beginning around 1912 when he tore up the football field at Columbus’ East High School, the name Chic Harley electrified central Ohio. However, with the emergence of mental illness in 1922, his fame slowly faded. Each generation remembers less about what he had done for the university and community. By the time of his death in 1974, only a few of his teammates were alive to do what they could to keep his memory alive. Today, they are all gone. Something had to be done before his name became nothing more than a shadow at best.

With the biography The One And Only: Chic Harley - America's Great Athlete, the memory of Chic Harley will never disappear. The faded yellow pages of newspaper articles, some of which have almost completely disintegrated, are now replaced with riveting accounts of the excitement he generated in the era just after World War I that led to the building of Ohio State’s great horseshoe arena. The story of Harley does not end with the end of his playing days. It matures into a moving account of how he coped with the disease that afflicted him the rest of his life.

The book alone, however, is not enough. Chic Harley deserves a fitting memorial that will ensure his name will live on in the minds and hearts of football fans everywhere. An effort has been launched to make that happen. And when that day arrives, the memory of Chic Harley will be preserved for all time. Time will have been conquered.