Skip Horween’s great-grandmother wanted nothing to do with football.
In fact, her two sons were so petrified she would find out they were messing around with the barbaric-looking game that they decided to play under assumed names. That’s how it came to be that Arnold and Ralph “McMahon,” both standouts on the Harvard football team a century ago, managed to play for the Chicago Cardinals in the early days of professional football. And in a roundabout way, it’s how their family, immigrants from the Ukraine who opened a Chicago tannery in 1905, would come to provide the leather for NFL game balls used today.
Including those used by the Patriots and Falcons in the Super Bowl on Feb. 5.
“The story is really astounding,” said Mike Halpert, whose Philadelphia Hide Brokerage Corp. has provided the Horween Leather Co. with raw material for years.
Not just astounding, but quintessentially American.