CHICAGO _ Virginia McCaskey has spent nearly a century watching pro football. She has been riveted by title games. She also has endured her share of stinkers.
The playoff tiebreaker for the 1932 NFL championship was uniquely both.
Literally.
That year, when the NFL was as old as a seventh grader, the Bears played the Spartans of Portsmouth, Ohio, in an add-on game for the title.
In the throes of the Great Depression, to ensure paying customers showed up in subfreezing temperatures on Dec. 18, the game was played at Chicago Stadium _ yes, indoors _ atop 8 inches of dirt spread over concrete.
Almost nine decades later, McCaskey didn't hesitate when asked for her lasting memory of the Bears' 9-0 victory.
"Just the odor," she said with a laugh during an interview in March. "It was almost overwhelming because the circus had just left town."
Yes, "dirt" belonged in quotations that night. Picture 9-year-old Ginny Halas, daughter of Bears founder George Halas, longing to watch elephants parade around the Stadium instead of smelling what they had left behind.
And that's just a sniff of all the quirks that color one of the most influential games in NFL history.
Not only was the 1932 championship the league's first playoff game, it spawned several changes that helped revolutionize the sport and accelerate its ascent to the juggernaut it is today. As the league celebrates its 100th season this year, there is hardly a more vibrant, novel example of its growth than that indoor title game played on a 60-yard field.
That much is evident after a recent day downtown Chicago with the microfilm machines on the third floor of the Harold Washington Library. With Twitter and high-definition TV biding their time to take hold of pro football, no fewer than four Chicago newspapers were there to cover that prehistoric Super Bowl.
Their accounts are a portal to when the NFL was fighting for a place in the national sports consciousness. When punts were the most exciting play pro football had to offer. And when gate receipts were more important than any final score.
"The Bears and Spartans had quite an evening of it, prospecting in the soil strewn out for them by the Stadium redshirts," Marvin McCarthy wrote in the Chicago Daily Times on Dec. 20, two days after the game.
McCarthy explained how the Stadium kept its own supply of dirt and repeatedly reused it as a cost-saving measure. Over time, the soil collected an aggregation of sticks, cigar butts, an occasional elephant tusk tip and whatever the circus animals dropped out of their hind ends.
He wrote: "The ball players spent a goodly part of their time picking up these relics and tossing them resoundingly against the white sideboards of the enclosed arena. Thus, it can't truthfully be said that the evening was totally devoid of a bang."
