Cash and Carry: The Spectacular Rise and Hard Fall of C.C. Pyle, America's First Sports Agent

236 Pages·2008·2.14 MB·English

by  Jim Reisler

Cash and Carry
ALSO BY JIM REISLER
AND FROM MCFARLAND
Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles
from the Black Sportswriters Who Covered
the Negro Leagues(2007)
Voices of the Oral Deaf:
Fourteen Role Models Speak Out(2002)
Before They Were the Bombers: The New York Yankees’
Early Years, 1903–1915(2002; softcover 2005)
Cash and Carry
The Spectacular Rise
and Hard Fall of C.C. Pyle,
America’s First Sports Agent
J R
IM EISLER
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Reisler, Jim, 1958–
Cash and carry : the spectacular rise and hard fall of C.C. Pyle,
America’s first sports agent / Jim Reisler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-3846-4
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Pyle, Charles C., 1882–1939. 2. Sports agents—United
States—Biography. I. Title.
GV734.5.R45 2009
338.4'77960973—dc22 2008043935
[B]
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2009 Jim Reisler. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: C.C. Pyle aboard the S.S. Leviathan(Library of Con-
gress); brick wall ©2008 Shutterstock; background: Red Grange
carries the football against Michigan, 1924 (Library of Congress).
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
For Tobie and Julia
This page intentionally left blank
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Introduction 5
1. “How Would You Like to Make $100,000?” 11
2. “Three or Four Men and a Horse Rolled into One” 34
3. “One of the Finest Men I Have Ever Known” 64
4. “Football for All and All for Football” 88
5. “People Will Pay to See Anyone They Hate” 106
6. “The Most Stupendous Athletic Accomplishment in
All History!” 138
7. “It Is a New Racket Altogether” 156
8. “Everyone Will Be Satisfied” 176
9. “More Ideas Than Most Men Came Up With in a Lifetime” 191
Epilogue: “Everything He Touched Turned to Gold” 199
Chapter Notes 203
Bibliography 213
Index 217
vii
Charles C. Pyle is a character out of a book. He is today the most
interesting man in sports. A news person could keep his note-
book, and for that matter his entire paper, pretty well filled up
merely by assigning himself to follow Charles about the country,
and observe the birth, the incubation and the hatching of the
various schemes that enable him to make page one of the Met-
ropolitan dailies, free for nothing, most any time he cares to do
so.
—Paul Gallico, New York Daily News, May 29, 1928
Preface
I learned about C.C. Pyle in an unlikely way. As a member of the
Kenyon College cross country team in the fall of 1977, I was at practice one
afternoon when a man stopped by to ask if any of us were interested in try-
ing out for a new play to be staged in early 1978 on campus called “C.C.
Pyle and the Bunion Derby.”
A play about a man staging a 1928 trans–America footrace? “Well, why
not?” several of us figured. Directing Tony award winning playwright Michael
Cristofer’s script was Paul Newman, a 1949 Kenyon graduate. So we gave it
a shot, read some lines—and to a man, were positively dreadful. “Stick to
running boys,” I remember the man in casting advised us, “and we’ll get some
actors instead.”
In early 1978, I attended the play, which was great, after which I for-
got all about C.C. Pyle. But a few years later, a funny thing happened: After
I started writing sports books, I’d find myself poring through microfilm in
search of some tidbit about Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson or Damon Run-
yon, and bam, there would be an item about Pyle. I learned that in the mid-
to-late 1920s, C.C. Pyle was promoting not just distance running, but foot-
ball, tennis and even hockey as well, and usually at the same time. Slowly,
a portrait of one of the era’s most energetic, influential—and forgotten—
sports figures emerged.
I started a file on C.C. Pyle. The file grew, but most of the articles and
citations were distressingly brief, generally no more than a few paragraphs.
For all the headlines C.C. Pyle captured in his day, a sense of Pyle, the man,
was proving elusive. Sure, Pyle was quotable, verbose and always a bit shifty,
but who exactly was he? Pyle was said to be a gambler—but that wasn’t quite
right. He gambled—not in the traditional sense, but by losing vast quanti-
ties of other people’s investments in schemes that rarely worked. Pyle was
said to have inherited his golden-tongued ability to talk anyone into any-
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