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. More important, 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.