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C. C. Pyle
American sports agent From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Charles C. "Charlie" Pyle (March 26, 1882 – February 3, 1939),[1][2] sometimes cattily referred to as "Cash and Carry Pyle," was a theater owner and sports entertainment promoter best known for his touring exhibitions featuring American football star Red Grange and French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen.
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Pyle was the founder of the New York Yankees football club in 1926, owning it until the team's demise at the end of the 1928 season.
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Biography
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Early years
Charlie Pyle was born March 26, 1882, in Delaware, Ohio, the son of a Methodist preacher.[3] He was large and athletic, standing about 6'1" and weighing 190 pounds in his prime, and he participated in boxing as a boy.[4]
Pyle dropped out of Ohio State University and headed west, where the loquacious and ambitious young man became involved in a series of business ventures and money-making schemes — selling Western Union clocks, starting a modest travel agency, and dipping his toe into show business as an advance man for a touring Margarita Fischer vaudeville road show.[5] He started his own small touring company and in 1908 became involved in the movie business, buying a projector and a few films and taking the show on the road.[5] He later bought an amusement park and small vaudeville theater in Idaho before liquidating his assets and moving back to the Midwest.[5]
Pyle became involved in the theater business, owning the Virginia and the Park theaters in Champaign, Illinois — home of the Illinois Fighting Illini football team[6] — as well as a third in Kokomo, Indiana.[4] Pyle was fastidious in his personal grooming, sitting in a barber shop for a hair trim twice and week and always dressing nattily from a seemingly vast wardrobe.[4]
Signing Red Grange
An avid football fan, Pyle spotted star Illini halfback Red Grange seated in the back row of the Virginia theater in the fall of 1924, Grange's junior year, and send an usher down to bring him to the office so that he could meet him.[6] Pyle gave Grange a complimentary season pass to the Virginia and Park theaters, which was frequently used, keeping the pair in contact for the duration of Grange's stay at the university.[6]
Well into Grange's senior season, during which the running back emerged as a national sports hero, Pyle began to see Grange as a potential commercial asset.[6] One night in 1925 Pyle sent an usher to Grange's seat in the Virginia Theater calling him to his office.[4] When Grange entered and sat, Pyle hit him with an unforgettable proposition, asking, "Red, how'd you like to make a hundred thousand dollars?"[4] Grange's interest was piqued.
"Pyle sensed that maybe some money might be made by showing me off like a sword swallower and he asked me what I intended to do upon leaving school," Grange later recalled[6] Pyle and Grange came to a handshake agreement on an agent–client relationship and he made his way to Chicago to meet with George Halas and Dutch Sternaman, owners of the National Football League's Chicago Bears.[6] Arrangements were made for Grange to join the Bears after his final game with the Illinois collegiate team.[6]
Grange later recalled that at the time "I did not have the slightest idea of playing professional football and intended to get into some commercial business and I know that at the time Pyle wasn't thinking about the National League. In fact he didn't know anything about it, having been in the theatrical game all his life."[6]
The deal Pyle negotiated on behalf of Grange as one of professional football's first agents was lucrative.[7] Under terms of the contract, signed in November 1925, Grange would join the Bears as soon as the college football season concluded and would play for the team for the rest of the season, to be followed by a post-season barnstorming tour that Pyle would help arrange.[8] In return, Pyle and Grange — a superstar of the day — would receive a 50% share of total gate receipts.[5] A further handshake agreement between Grange and Pyle would split their half of the take 60–40, with the star halfback receiving the lion's share.[5]
The Red Grange exhibition tour proved a smashing success. According to archival research by gridiron historian Chris Willis, the total gate from the 19 dates of the Grange contract was just over $620,000 — yielding $252,274.39 for the Pyle–Grange partnership.[9] This payout for Grange dwarfed that of any other football player of the era, in which a quality back might receive $125 or $150 a game.[10]
Founding the New York Yankees football team
Grange's contract with the Bears expired at the end of the 1925 season. Despite the deal's massive payout to the star player, Bears owners George Halas and Dutch Sternaman had also profited epically by the association and an interest was expressed in renewing deal splitting the gate 50-50.[11] Here, however, Pyle overplayed his hand, demanding in addition for Grange a one-third ownership stake in the Bears franchise.[11] This was resoundingly rejected as non-negotiable by Halas and Sternaman, pushing Pyle to push another avenue towards acquiring ownership of a team for Grange.[11]
Pyle sought a team in New York City as a sure-fire business proposition. However, in 1925 Tim Mara had purchased a NFL franchise for the New York Giants, guaranteeing him territorial rights to the city.[12] Flush with success and loaded with cash from the successful 1925 Grange barnstorming tour, Pyle once again attempted to execuite a power play — now obtaining a 5-year lease for use of Yankee Stadium for football, booking every Sunday from the middle of October through the end of December.[12] Lease in hand, Pyle crashed the NFL's annual winter owners' meeting in Detroit, held the weekend of February 6–7, 1926, announcing to the assembled owners, "I have the biggest star in football and I have a lease on the biggest stadium in the country, and I am going into your league."[13]
A heated debated followed, with personal enmity between the NFL owner and the prospective NFL owner boiling over.[12] In this era of a struggling league with anemic attendances and no alternative revenue stream to dollars coming through the gate, Mara firmly rejected the idea of another NFL franchise playing its games less than a mile from his home stadium.[12] No compromise was forthcoming and Mara's objection — well within his rights — held sway with league president Joe F. Carr and other league owners.[12] There would be no New York football team for C.C. Pyle and Red Grange.
Not to be denied, Pyle determined not only to launch his "New York Yankees" football team, but to form an entire new professional football league for which it would be the centerpiece. On February 17, a mere eight days after collapse of his negotiations with the NFL, the first American Football League was announced.[14] Pyle obtained an office in the plush Hotel Astor in New York City as the base of operations for his new organization.[14]
Pyle then took his team into the NFL for the 1927 season. As one of only twelve teams in the league and splitting the lucrative New York City market with Tim Mara's New York Giants, Pyle had high expectations of financial success going into the year, telling one journalist that he hoped to clear $50,000 for his efforts.[15] Pyle said that he carried 21 men on the roster, although only 18 were eligible in a given week due to league rules.[15] These cost him approximately $3,500 per week, he reckoned.[15]
Grange suffered a severe knee injury early in the 1927 system, for which he did not undergo surgery. Robbed of his ability to make explosive cuts as a halfback by his untreated injury, Grange's star faded.
Although the popular Red Grange remained a player and part owner of the Yankees, the number of tickets coming through the turnstile did not meet expectations, and the team folded after the 1928 season.
Professional tennis promoter
In 1926, Pyle signed Lenglen and several of the best tennis players in the world to start the first professional tennis tour, which traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada.[16] Two years later, he inaugurated the first Trans-American Footrace, known as the "Bunion Derby", an ambitious, 3,455-mile-long foot race from Los Angeles, California, to Chicago, Illinois, to New York.[17][18] Pyle lost money on the 1928 race when many towns along the route defaulted on their sponsorship fees.[19] The next year Pyle organized a 1929 "return" along essentially the same route from New York to Los Angeles.
Later years and legacy
After managing the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" exhibit in the Chicago World's Fair, Pyle married comedian Elvia Allman Tourtellotte in 1937. He became president of the Radio Transcription Company, a position that he held until his death of a heart attack in Los Angeles, February 3, 1939.[16]
A play based on his life, C.C. Pyle and the Bunion Derby, was written by Tony Award winner Michael Cristofer and directed by Paul Newman.
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