When the 51st Super Bowl kicks off Sunday, a Chicago product will be at the center of the action.
Don't get your hopes up, Bears fans — your memories of this season weren't just a bad dream. But while the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons are supplying the players, Chicago-based Wilson Sporting Goods will provide the footballs, made from leather crafted by another company with old Chicago roots: Horween Leather.
Shoe enthusiasts might know Horween for high-end shell cordovan leather made from horsehide, but sporting-goods leathers now make up about 40 percent of the tannery's business, said vice president Nick Horween, a fifth-generation member of the family company that's operated out of the tannery, in the 2100 block of Elston Avenue, since 1920.
Horween makes leather for Spalding basketballs and Rawlings baseball gloves. But most of its sports business comes from football leather, which Horween started making around 1940 when founder Isidore Horween's sons Arnold and Ralph — football standouts who played for Harvard and the Chicago Cardinals — teamed up with Wilson and Bears founder and owner George Halas to try to make a better ball, Nick Horween said.
First things first: The pigskin is not actually made of pig skin. Every week, about 2,000 steer hides are shipped to the tannery from livestock producers in central Canada and the Midwest, Horween said.
For 24 hours, hides are treated with an acid solution that removes the hair. To make leather used in sporting goods, hides get a first round of tanning in large drums where fats and oils are stripped away and chrome is added to strengthen the material.
Employees then take the "wet blue" hides — named for their pre-dyed tint — and assess quality. Every hide will get another round of tanning, but the process depends on the final product. Football leather emerges with a grippable tackiness — part of the reason Nick Horween is irked when announcers blame flubbed passes on slippery balls.
Two Chicago-based companies — Horween Leather and Wilson Sporting Goods — have been making footballs since the 1940s. Their footballs are used in the Super Bowl.
Bone-colored football leather is dried in an oven on the tannery's top floor, glued to glass plates to keep it from shrinking. A pebblelike texture — Wilson's pattern includes tiny W's — is stamped on with heated steel plates. The leather then is sprayed with dye until it's that recognizable reddish-brown hue.
Horween ships the finished leather to Wilson, which turns it into footballs at a 120-employee factory in Ada, Ohio, that makes about 700,000 footballs each year. About 23 employees will handle each NFL game ball, which each take 30 to 45 minutes to make, said Wilson spokeswoman Kristina Peterson-Lohman.
Each team playing in the Super Bowl gets 108 balls — 54 for practice and 54 for the game. Wilson sends a few extra, designated for the kickers, directly to the NFL's official hotel. About 120 footballs are used in a typical Super Bowl game, Wilson says.
From Horween's perspective, making Super Bowl-ready leather is no different than leather that will wind up in high school or college players' hands. But Wilson typically will select leather made from the densest part of the hide for its highest-tier balls, Nick Horween said.
"Where you get the nicest steaks is usually where the nicest leather is," he said.
The process hasn't changed much in the 76 years since Wilson began supplying the National Football League's official game balls in 1941. Other parts of the business have shrunk — there's less demand for mechanical leather and a more-limited supply of horsehides — but the football leather business has been steady, Horween said.
"We're fiercely loyal to (Wilson), and think they'd say the same," he said. "We've tried to make the best quality we can."
lzumbach@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @laurenzumbach
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