Early Life and College Career
Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Graham's first interest growing up was music. Encouraged by his parents, both of whom were music teachers, he took up several instruments: the piano, violin, cornet and French horn. Graham also excelled in athletics, and attended Northwestern University on a basketball scholarship in 1940. There he played on the varsity basketball team as a freshman and continued to study music. Graham did not take up football until his sophomore year, when Northwestern coach Pappy Waldorf saw him throwing in an intramural game and invited him to practice with the team. Northwestern's coaches were impressed with his running and passing, and Waldorf convinced him to sign up. Although football became Graham's primary sport, he also played baseball and continued on the basketball team. As a senior, he was named a first-team basketball All-American, a squad selected by news outlets comprising the best players at each position.
Graham's first game for the Northwestern Wildcats football team was on October 4, 1941, when he caught a Kansas State punt and returned it 90 yards for a touchdown. He ran and passed for two more touchdowns in the 51–3 victory. After scoring another pair of touchdowns in a win against Wisconsin, Graham passed to his wide receivers for two touchdowns in a victory over Ohio State, coached by Paul Brown, the team's only loss of the 1941 season. Northwestern ended the year with an 11th-place showing in the AP Poll of the best college teams in the country.
As America's involvement in World War II intensified after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Graham signed up for service alongside many fellow student-athletes, entering the U.S. Navy Air Corps. He was able to stay at Northwestern as he waited to be called for active duty. The Wildcats struggled in 1942 as their players joined the war effort, winning only one game. Graham still had 89 completions, setting a single-season passing record in the Big Ten Conference, a division of major college teams from the Midwestern United States.
The following year, Graham and some of his teammates enlisted in the military but continued to play for Northwestern. Enlistees from other schools also enrolled at Northwestern, where the U.S. Navy had a training station. The 1943 season was a strong one for Northwestern. The team beat Ohio State, the defending national champions, and a good military team at Great Lakes Naval Station. The Wildcats lost to Notre Dame and Michigan, however, and finished the season with an 8–2 record and a ninth-place ranking in the AP Poll. Graham set another Big Ten passing record, was named the conference's Most Valuable Player, received All-American honors and finished third in Heisman Trophy voting. By the end of his college career, he held a Big Ten Conference record for passing yards with 2,132.
Graham's career at Northwestern officially ended in February 1944, when he moved to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York in the Navy's V-5 cadet program, a pilot training course. He played basketball for Colgate before moving to North Carolina Pre-Flight later in 1944, where he played on the Cloudbusters football team under coaches Glenn Killinger and Bear Bryant.
Impressed by Graham's performances in Northwestern's wins over Ohio State in 1941 and 1943, Paul Brown came and offered him a contract worth $7,500 per year ($96,821 in 2012 dollars) in 1945 to play for a professional team he was coaching in Cleveland in the new All-America Football Conference (AAFC). Graham would not receive his salary until he started playing, however, and Brown added a monthly stipend of $250 ($3,227 in 2012) until the end of the war. It was a large amount of money at the time. "All I asked was, where do I sign?" Graham said later. "Some of the other navy men said I was rooting for the war to last forever." Graham was also drafted by the National Football League's Detroit Lions, but he did not sign a contract or play a game with the team as the war wore on.
Large numbers of athletes came home as the conflict wound down in Europe with Germany's surrender in the summer of 1945. The AAFC's first season was not set to start until the fall of 1946, and Graham occupied the intervening months by joining the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball League (NBL), a forerunner of the National Basketball Association. In March 1946, the Royals swept a best-of-five series against the Sheboygan Redskins to win the NBL title.
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