06/17/2026
& Great
Rick Casares 🏆
He turned down double the money to be a Chicago Bear. And then he went out and became the greatest rusher in that franchise's history.
Rick Casares grew up in the kind of circumstances that don't just test a kid — they erase most of them. He was seven years old when his father was shot dead in a gang killing. Seven years old, and the world he knew was already gone. His mother, unable to manage it all, sent him to live with relatives in Paterson, New Jersey. By fifteen, he was back in Tampa — a Golden Gloves boxing champion in the 160-pound division, already drawing the attention of professional promoters. His mother stepped in again. No boxing contract. You're going back to school.
Think about what that meant. A kid from that kind of loss, with that kind of talent in his hands, being pointed — almost forcibly — toward a different life.
He went. And at Thomas Jefferson High School in Tampa, the coaches found him almost by accident, watching him pick up a javelin for the first time and throw it like he'd been doing it all his life. Football, basketball, baseball, track — Casares played everything, dominated everything, and won back-to-back city football championships in 1948 and 1949. He was all-state in two sports. Not two seasons. Two sports.
A scholarship to the University of Florida followed. He scored the first touchdown in Gators bowl game history. He led the basketball team in scoring and rebounding for two straight years. He was a captain twice. Then the Army came calling, pulling him out before his senior year, and the NFL draft caught him mid-service — eighteenth pick overall, Chicago Bears.
Here is where the story turns into something worth remembering.
The Toronto Argonauts offered him $20,000 a year. Double what George Halas was offering from Chicago. Casares took the $10,000 offer. He wanted to play in the NFL, and he wanted to play for the Bears. That was that.
He rewarded that decision — and Halas's faith — with one of the most physically punishing careers any fullback has ever run. In 1956, Casares led the entire NFL in rushing with 1,126 yards on 235 carries, at the time the second-highest single-season rushing total in NFL history, just 20 yards short of the all-time record. He carried Chicago to the 1956 NFL Championship Game almost on his back. He won a championship ring in 1963. He led the Bears in rushing for six straight years. When he finally left, he was the franchise's all-time leading rusher — 5,657 yards, 49 touchdowns, a record that would stand until a man named Walter Payton came along to rewrite the whole book.
He was the toughest guy I ever played with. I remember him playing on a broken ankle.
That was Mike Ditka — not a man who used the word "toughest" carelessly — speaking to the Tampa Tribune years later. A broken ankle. Still on the field.
There was a darker chapter too. In 1962, NFL investigators — alongside the FBI — looked into links between players and organized crime. Casares had been seen at Chicago mob-connected nightclubs and was questioned about point shaving. He said he was questioned, he took two lie detector tests, and he passed both. The investigation ultimately led to the suspensions of Alex Karras and Paul Hornung. Casares was never suspended, never charged. But the shadow fell on him regardless, the kind that lingers even when it has no right to.
He went home to Tampa after football, ran a home improvement business, and lived quietly in the city that had shaped him. He died on September 13, 2013, at 82 — heart disease and shoulder damage, both debts owed to those years of grinding, punishing football. A U.S. Army veteran, he was buried at Sarasota National Cemetery.
His name doesn't echo the way Payton's does, or Sayers's, or Ditka's. It probably never will. But behind every record Payton eventually broke, there was a number Rick Casares had put there first — forged out of a childhood that should have broken him, a sacrifice most men wouldn't have made, and a body he gave entirely to the game.
He deserved to be remembered. He earned that much.
