Walter “Eckie” Eckersall is the Chicago sports legend you’ve never heard of.
Chicago author Chris Serb aims to fix that with his new book, “Eckie: Walter Eckersall and the Rise of Chicago Sports” ($36.95; University of Nebraska Press).
Eckersall was a South Sider who, at just 5 feet 6 inches and 118 pounds, became the city’s first prep sports star more than a century ago as quarterback for Hyde Park High School’s championship football team.
By the time he was a senior in 1902, Eckersall, known as “Eckie,” became a darling of Chicago media, which was beginning to devote real ink on prep football. He’d bulked up to 135 pounds by then.
Those were strange times for high school football, which saw teams coordinated not by faculty members or responsible adults, but mostly by the students who were playing, Serb explains in the book.
In fact, the whole high school experience was new. Between 1890 and 1918 public high school enrollment in the United States grew sevenfold, according to the book, which was published in October.
It was out of this Wild West atmosphere that Eckersall became the nation’s top collegiate recruit. Serb details how the University of Chicago Maroons — then in a powerhouse league that preceded the Big Ten — won a seedy recruiting contest for Eckersall over their rival University of Michigan Wolverines.
A last-minute attempt to change Eckersall’s mind was thwarted by Maroons coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who intercepted Eckersall on the platform before he could board a train headed for Ann Arbor.
As a junior, Eckersall led the Maroons to a national championship in 1905 by defeating Michigan.
Eckersall hadn’t even officially graduated high school when he started at UChicago as a “sub-freshman,” and he barely maintained athletic eligibility, at the high achieving school, which was formed in 1890.
“This dude had some pretty significant flaws,” Serb said.
During his senior year, after the football season ended, “university administrators kept their eyes on the former star, especially since he had no more public relations value,” Serb wrote in the book.
A few weeks later, Eckersall found himself facing criminal charges after a downtown tailor accused him of stealing $40 (about $1,300 today) worth of clothing. Eckersall made the tailor whole with the help of fraternity brothers, but word got back to university officials and the damage was done. He was quietly expelled.
“He was in his early 20s, it was one of those ‘What were you thinking?’ moments,” said Serb, who noted that Eckersall probably would have played professional football had a pro league existed at the time.
Serb dedicates the second half of the book to Eckersall’s prolific career as a sports writer with the Chicago Tribune before he died of a heart attack in 1930.
Serb, who writes books while not working his main gig as a Chicago firefighter, had been interested in Eckersall’s story ever since he volunteered at a Special Olympics event more than 20 years ago at Eckersall Stadium, a Chicago Public Schools sports venue on the South Side. “I saw the name on the stadium but had no idea who the guy was,” he said.
“Other than the name on the stadium there’s very little public remembrance of him,” said Serb, 55, who lives in Norwood Park.
Serb filed the question about Eckersall’s life away and circled back in 2020. The book became a passion project during the pandemic for Serb, who earned a master’s in journalism at Northwestern University and worked as a freelance magazine writer before joining the fire department in 1999 and rising to the rank of deputy district chief.
Serb — also the author of “War Football,” a book about football during World War I, and “Sam’s Boys,” a history of Leone Beach in Rogers Park and legendary lifeguard Sam Leone — feels like a proper accounting of Eckersall is overdue.
The university cut its football program in 1939. It was resurrected years later as a Division III program.
“I feel like I’m correcting an oversight,” Serb said. “His story is almost totally forgotten because the U. of C. proud football tradition is forgotten.”