John McNally '24 helped lead teams to four NFL titles during his 14-year career in the league, and earned a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame's charter class in 1963.
But while he may have risen to fame on the gridiron, football was not even the sport where the colorful character nicknamed "Johnny Blood" made his biggest impact as a student at Saint John's University in the early 1920s.
Arguably, he excelled even more on the basketball court where he was a team captain for the Johnnies during the 1922-23 season – a campaign in which he racked up a team-best 96 points.
And on the track is where his performances in the college's then-annual Memorial Day weekend track and field meet were legendary. He won the silver cup that went to the meet's outstanding athlete two of his three springs in Collegeville (and finished second in the other).
His performance in the 1923 meet was particularly impressive, winning the 440-yard dash, the half-mile, the mile, the low and high hurdles, the high jump (an event in which he won an MIAC title in 1921), the broad jump and the discus.
He added second-place finishes in the 100 and 220-yard dash and the javelin.
Not bad for a kid who hadn't really participated in organized athletics prior to his arrival in Collegeville.
"He graduated high school (in New Richmond, Wisconsin) at 14, so he really never had the chance to show off his athletic skills at that age," said author Ralph Hickok, who got to know McNally well and wrote his biography "Vagabond Halfback: The Saga of Johnny Blood McNally."
"He didn't really discover those skills until he got to Saint John's a few years later. That's where he first demonstrated what he was capable of."
And, of course, he was pretty good on the football field, too. Even if the Johnnie teams of that era were not.
In fact, when he first arrived on campus in 1920, football was coming off a long stretch when it had not been a varsity sport at all. The school made the decision to abolish it following the 1909 season.
That meant his first impressions were made in intramurals.
"I played for a team called Cat's Pajamas," McNally wrote in his chapter of "The Game That Was," a 1970 collection of essays by many of the game's early stars edited by Myron Cope.
"That was an expression current at the time – it meant something like 'superior guy.' Anyway, I was an immediate success with Cat's Pajamas. We won the intramural league, and later I started competing for the college team."
That occurred in 1921 and '22 after Saint John's had returned to varsity competition. McNally was a standout, even as his teams finished a combined 2-9 those two seasons, its only victories coming against St. Cloud Teachers College (now St. Cloud State) and Little Falls High School.
That last season drew a particularly cruel year-end review from
The Record (the student newspaper where McNally was a staff member), reprinted in "Scoreboard: A History of Athletics at Saint John's University," published in 1979.
"And so, for this season at Saint John's, Old King Football is dead. 'Vive le Roi Basketball!' It is useless and unprofitable to multiply excuses for the many defeats. Without doubt there is something wrong, but who can say with justice where the fault lies.
"Let the curtain be mercifully drawn over the most disastrous season in the annals of any sport at Saint John's, and let the balm of future victories soothe the sting of these past defeats."
The following spring, McNally got around to giving baseball a try, throwing a three-hit victory against Macalester in his first collegiate game. That made him the first four-sport letterman in school history.
And all that was in addition to his role at
The Record and as editor of
The Sagatagan (the school's yearbook). He also portrayed Berkley Fresno, a "villainous collegian," in a production of "Going Some."
"When light was made, most of it condensed in Mac's smile," read one of his yearbook entries at Saint John's. "His specialties are impulses, and individuality. In track, he'd beat Atlanta without apples. In poetry, Voltaire would yield him the laurel. Elysium will find him pursuing Diana, the elusive, and hob-nobbing with Bacchus, the Unbeatable."
McNally went on to Notre Dame, then to a career in the NFL where his exploits off field were as legendary as his achievements on it.
According to a 1963 Sports Illustrated story that followed his induction into the Hall of Fame, during his seven seasons with the Green Bay Packers, he once scaled a ledge to gain access to head coach Curly Lambeau's hotel room after Lambeau had previously denied him a financial advance in the lobby.
The legendary coach declared he would not open the door if McNally knocked. But he hadn't said anything about the window. The star halfback departed with his advance in hand en route to a holiday in Catalina.
But his numbers as a player speak for themselves. In those early years of the pro game, he scored 49 touchdowns and 297 points. He was an All-NFL first-team pick in 1931 and a second-team pick in both 1929 and '30.
He won NFL titles with the Packers in 1929, '30, '31 and '36.
"I never saw a fellow who could turn a ball game around as quickly as Johnny Blood," recalled fellow Packers legend Don Hutson in that 1963 SI story. "When he came into a game, the whole attitude of the players changed.
"He had complete confidence in himself. He had tremendous football sense."
"They pay me to score touchdowns," said McNally, who took his nickname Blood after seeing a marquee for the movie "Blood and Sand" starring Rudolph Valentino in Minneapolis in 1924.
"The swagger I give 'em for free."
He was a player-coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1937 and '38, and an assistant coach in 1939 before winding down his playing career in an independent league in the early 1940s.
He eventually returned to Saint John's as head football coach from 1950-52, though that was not an altogether satisfying professional experience. His teams finished 13-9 over the course of those three seasons.
"So I got ulcers," he wrote of his time as the Johnnies' head coach in his 1970 essay. "Which is not necessarily inconsistent with my temperament. A lot of clowns have ulcers."
In fact, after stepping down, he offered a pessimistic view of the situation to his successor – a youngster from Montana's Carroll College named John Gagliardi.
"John, there's no way you can win here," Gagliardi recalled McNally saying.
But after watching the success Gagliardi went on to achieve, Hickok said McNally revised that opinion.
"He did talk ruefully about ever telling (Gagliardi) that," Hickok recalls. "He said it was funny he'd said it given all Gagliardi went on to do there."
And despite his rocky tenure as head football coach, Hickok said Saint John's always remained close to McNally's heart. He was particularly proud when the school honored him as a distinguished alumni in 1984, one year before his death at age 82.
"That really meant a lot to him," Hickok said. "One of the other guys honored was a state Supreme Court Justice (John Simonett '48) and the other was really successful in business (Merrill Lynch chairman of the board Roger Birk '52). So he was really proud to be honored alongside guys like that.
"He always spoke very fondly of Saint John's. He took me on a tour of campus back in the 1970s when I went on what I called the Johnny Blood trail. And it was clear Saint John's had been a big part of his life. He loved the lake up there. He told me how many times he'd just walked around it meditating on things.
"He really enjoyed his time there."
