Vagabond Halfback: The Life and Times of Johnny Blood McNally
You can’t tell the story of the Green Bay Packers without telling the story of Johnny Blood.
But can you actually tell the story of Johnny Blood?
I think that’s the question Denis J. Gullickson is really trying to answer in this book. And to be sure, it’s quite a challenge to tell the story of someone as complicated as Johnny Blood — or Johnny McNally — especially considering the era in which most of his life took place.
Clearly, Gullickson really enjoys the subject, and how can you not? Blood was quite a raconteur. (And we’ll call him Blood because that’s what he called himself during the time of his life that’s most relevant to our discussion.) There’s practically no end to what he got up to during his life. He was a pro athlete, a professor, a writer, a poet, and more, and he did just about everything well.
In the book, I think it’s clear that Gullickson respects Blood both on and off the field. Gullickson writes that blood “eclipsed the antics of Terrell Owens and other such contemporary football personalities by some eighty years, though his motivation came from a far-less [sic] self-indulgent place in his psyche.”
I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think you can point to a lot of things about Johnny Blood that are pretty self-indulgent, and had he been anything less than a superstar athlete, I don’t think they’d have been tolerated.
But he was a superstar athlete. He made his first real mark on the athletic world at St. John’s University, and Gullickson recounts a prodigious day that Blood had at a field day competition one year:
“Of his twelve events, John took first place in the 120-yard high hurdles, 220-yard low hurdles, high jump, broad jump, mile run, half-mile run, 400-yard dash, pole vault, and discuss [sic] throw. He took second in the 100-yard dash, 220-yard dash, and javelin throw. He had set new school records in the mile and half mile, and earned the silver loving cup once again as high pointman for the day.”
Late in his college career, he started to moonlight as a professional football player, and that’s when he adopted his Johnny Blood moniker. It worked as something of an alter ego: Johnny Blood was a hard-drinking, hard-living athlete, while John McNally was a respectable, personable, almost intellectual man.
Eventually, he landed with the Green Bay Packers, but kept up his globe trotting ways, traveling the country and even working on freighters as a merchant seaman at times in the offseason. Once, while overseas, he ended up in jail. He said it was “on a matter of principle. I don’t remember now just what principle it was, but no doubt it was very important to me at the time.”
Throughout his time in Green Bay, Blood had a contentious relationship with Curly Lambeau. He once went over Lambeau’s head to the board of directors to get a raise, which Gullickson says was a factor in his departure from the Packers, on top of their very different personalities
“The relationship between Lambeau and Johnny Blood McNally, then, may come down to inscriptions. Lambeau’s is all about ultimate conquest, victory, and the laurels won when all others may have been vanquished. McNally’s is about freedom, celebration, and joy. They were bound to clash — the physical conqueror and the unconquerable spirit.”
Gullickson also argues, via quotes from players at the time, that Lambeau just didn’t know that much about football. His talent was in acquiring great players and letting them be great, but he still believed he played a role in their greatness. Players disagreed, Blood disagreed pointedly, and that seems to have soured the relationship.
After the Packers, McNally kept right on living his wild and adventurous life. He joined the Army during World War II and worked as a codebreaker, but struggled with alcoholism in the late 1940s. He may have used other drugs, too — in a 1982 interview, he claimed he’d used the drug called “uppers” as far back as 1935, telling a reporter. “In the early days of football, with light padding and a glove-sized helmet, as they were called, a player needed a strong fortification to attain an ethereal state of mind.” He also said he’d used opium while working on freighters.
Gullickson refers to this portion of Blood’s life as “handling the legend,” and I think that fits. McNally worked a lot of different jobs in a lot of different places after football, but he never really seemed to find his feet. He drifted a lot, but not unhappily, living up to his vagabond nickname to the end.
3N Test
So, is this a book worth reading? Does it belong in our football canon? Let’s turn to our 3N Test to make our determination. As a reminder, the 3 Ns stand for novelty, nuance, and narrative. We’ll score each one on a scale of 1 to 10, and if a book scores 20 or higher, it goes into the official Blue 58 canon of football literature.
As far as “novelty” is concerned, this book is an interesting perspective, but not a particularly novel one. Gullickson acknowledges in the early pages of the book that he relied heavily on another book called “Vagabond Halfback: The Saga of Johnny Blood McNally” by Ralph Hickok, which was written with assistance from Johnny Blood himself. Gullickson says that book was never published — and that may have been true in 2006, when his book came out. But Hickok published his version of Vagabond Halfback in 2017, and I came away from this book thinking I might rather have read that one. Consequently, I give this book a 4 out of 10 on the novelty scale.
Nuance is a book’s handling of its subject, and that’s the strength of this book. Gullickson does rely on the “other” Vagabond Halfback quite a bit, but he pulls in a lot of other sources, too, citing nearly two dozen other books in his bibliography, though I do deduct some points for using three books from widely discredited historian Larry Names, who’s been shown to play fast and loose with a few facts from Packers history. Still, Gullickson did his homework on this one, and it shows. I would rate this book an 8 out of 10 on the “nuance” scale.
Finally, “narrative” grades the actual writing, and I can’t go any higher than a 6 out of 10 here. This book treads a fine line between literary biography and sports journalism, and it has to live there because there’s so much of the legend of Johnny Blood that’s just that: legend. But I think if it had landed on one or the other, the book would have been stronger. What if you just told the tall tales of Johnny Blood? Or what if you dove really deep on what it meant for him to be a great player in the 1920s and 1930s? I think either of those approaches would be more interesting, but unfortunately, Vagabond Halfback doesn’t really hit either of those points as hard as I’d have liked.
That gives us a total of 18 out of a possible 30 points, meaning Vagabond Halfback: The Life and Times of Johnny Blood McNally doesn’t make the cut for our football canon. It’s worth a read for die-hard Packers fans, but there are other, better essentials you might want to read first if you’re looking to get a good foundation in Packers history.
Scorecard
Novelty - 4 out of 10
Nuance - 8 out of 10
Narrative - 6 out of 10
Total - 18 out of 30
What’s next?
Up next, we’re taking a turn into college football. What happens when a legendary coach who’s won multiple Super Bowl titles dives into the world of college football? We’re not talking about Bill Belichick here. We’re looking at Rough Magic by Lowell Cohn, an in-depth examination of the first season of Bill Walsh’s second tenure as the head coach of the Stanford Cardinal. Grab a copy and get reading, we’ll be taking a look at this book during the week just before Thanksgiving.
Quotes
“A halfback’s job is to avoid contact. I think my talent, if I have any, lies in avoiding contact.” -Johnny Blood
There was the story of the man-versus-dog race before the Eskimos played the Racine Tornaodes. A speakeasy owner said his German shepherd could run twice as fast as any football player. The Eskimos nominated John to find out, and put up $75. The dog started on one goal line, enticed by a big steak at the other end of the field. Johnny Blood started on the fifty and crossed the goal linebefore the dog hit midfield. The tale doesn’t say whether John got the steak.
“The modern passion for exposure! How greatly it is in evidence on the stage, the street, in art and literature. Everything from physiques to souls are frankly presented to the general gaze. The only prerequisite is the price of admission.” - Johnny Blood
“Johnny was the kind of guy who would read Shakespeare, Chaucer, and all those kind of people, although when he was drinking he would read filthy dime novels.” - Clark Hinkle