But the bombing of Pearl Harbor rearranged Layden’s priorities overnight. He stopped worrying about stockings. On December 8, he was asked to assess the league’s future.
“Material will be scarce because the colleges will be hit and that of course hits us,” he answered. “We will do what is asked and make elastic rules as situations arise.” Elastic? Layden had no idea how far the league would be stretched.
The 1941 NFL season limped to a listless conclusion. On December 14, a week after Pearl Harbor, the Bears beat the Packers in the Western Division playoff, 33-14. In the championship game at Wrigley Field a week later, the Bears defeated the Giants, 37-9. The weather was mild, yet just 13,341 fans bothered to show up, the lowest attendance for a title game in league history. And that was in football-crazy Chicago. It was a bad sign.
The next month, President Roosevelt wrote a letter to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the rigid and humorless baseball commissioner. In what came to be known as the Green Light Letter, the president urged Landis to keep baseball going for the duration of the war:
There will be fewer people unemployed and everyone will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before…. As to the players themselves, I know you agree with me that individual players who are of active military or naval age should go, without question, into the services. Even if the actual quality of the teams is lowered by the greater use of older players, this will not dampen the popularity of the sport…. Here is another way of looking at it—if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens—and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.
Roosevelt was a football fan, too. He had been captain of the freshman team at Harvard, and while he was too small to make varsity, as editor of the Harvard Crimson, he ceaselessly extolled the team in editorials. Yet it’s no surprise that he made no mention of football in the Green Light Letter. Baseball was the only professional sport that mattered then. Lesser sports were on their own. If pro football survived the war, it would have to do so without the president’s imprimatur.
Still, Elmer Layden and the team owners assumed Roosevelt’s widely publicized letter to Judge Landis as their own green light, and in the spring of 1942 Layden decreed that the National Football League would continue to operate in the fall, with all ten teams participating. The usual schedule of 55 games would be played.
“But,” Layden cautioned, “everything we decide today may have to be abandoned tomorrow. While we believe professional football has a definite place in the recreational program of a nation at war, nothing connected with it should or will be permitted to hinder the war effort.”
On average, each NFL team had lost fewer than five players to the draft in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, though, the floodgates opened. By May 1942, 112 of the 346 players under contract to the league’s teams—nearly one-third—were in the service. Even more players were sure to be gone before the fall.
Finding replacements was problematic. Many colleges were abandoning their football programs, and Uncle Sam’s appetite for able-bodied young men was insatiable. More than three million were conscripted in 1942, a 200-percent increase over the previous year. As they left the workforce for an armed force, the unemployment rate plummeted (from 9.9 percent in 1941 to 4.7 percent in 1942). Defense industries were already reporting manpower shortages. If General Motors couldn’t find enough workers, what hope was there for the National Football League?
By the time the 1942 season kicked off on September 13, some teams were virtually unrecognizable from the preceding year. The Eagles had lost 28 players from their 1941 roster, including their leading rusher (Jim Castiglia) and top receiver (Dick Humbert). The Giants had lost 27 players, the Dodgers 25. Not surprisingly, fan loyalty was tested. The constantly changing line-ups—not to mention more pressing concerns—caused attendance to plummet 20 percent, from an average of 20,157 per game in 1941 to 16,144 in 1942—the lowest average since 1936. When the final gun sounded on the championship game in Washington (Redskins 14, Bears 6) some owners were beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t just put the league out of its misery for the duration.
WHEN HE GRADUATED with honors from the University of Nebraska in the spring of 1938 with a degree in animal husbandry, Ted Doyle had two options: take a job with the Hormel Company, where he would have a low starting salary but could work his way up the corporate ladder to a lucrative executive position; or play professional football for $200 a game. He’d just gone into hock buying a new suit and shoes for graduation. He’d just gotten married, too. He needed money fast—and so he chose football.
“I thought that was the right decision, to get the money [right away],” Doyle explained. “I don’t know if it was or not—I guess it was the wrong one. Nevertheless it was the one I made, so I lived with it. I suppose I would have been in better shape down the road if I’d’ve went with the Hormels.”
The eldest of ten boys, Doyle was born in Maywood, Nebraska, on January 12, 1914. Growing up, he worked on his family’s farm, “stacking hay and so forth.” He made his high school football team but was so small he didn’t play much. During his senior year, though, his weight jumped from 113 pounds to 185—all muscle, thanks to stacking hay. He went to the University of Nebraska because “it was the only school I knew.”
“In those days,” he said, “they didn’t do much recruiting and they definitely didn’t have any scholarships or anything like that. You just went to school and went out for football. Whatever happened, happened.”
Doyle made the team and played tackle. In the summers he worked sorting fruit. By the time he graduated, Doyle was a beefy six-two, 224 pounds. He was a great tackle, too, a fact he attributed less to his physique than to his mind-set. Doyle said his greatest asset was his ability to psych himself up before a game. It was a slow, steady buildup, timed to peak at kickoff.
“If I could put enough pressure on myself, I could get some adrenaline flowing, and if I got that a-flowin’ I could actually run over the guy opposite me.”
On December 12, 1937, the New York Giants selected Doyle in the eighth round of the third NFL draft ever held. The Giants then sold his rights to the Pittsburgh Pirates (as the Steelers were then known), probably because Pirates owner Art Rooney had a penchant for players with Irish-sounding names. The following summer, Doyle and his wife, Harriet, loaded the car and drove the 970 miles from Lincoln to Pittsburgh.
The 1938 Pittsburgh Pirates were a memorable football team, though not a very good one. Since joining the NFL in 1933, the Pirates had not had a winning season (though they managed to finish 6-6 in 1936). Fed up with losing, owner Art Rooney went after the most coveted prize in the 1938 draft: Byron “Whizzer” White, the University of Colorado’s flashy all-American tailback. Convinced White would boost his team’s fortunes at the turnstiles as well as on the field, Rooney offered him a one-year contract for $15,800—more than any other player in the history of the league. White had planned to forgo professional football; he’d been offered a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. But Rooney’s offer was too good to pass up, and he deferred the scholarship until the end of the season.
The team’s coach (and backup halfback) was John Victor McNally, better known as Johnny Blood. In his prime, Blood had been an outstanding runner and pass receiver. He had logged time with some of the league’s most colorful and storied franchises—the Milwaukee Badgers, the Duluth Eskimos, the Pottsville Maroons, the Green Bay Packers—earning him the nickname the Vagabond Halfback. He was also known as the Magnificent Screwball, due to his generally erratic behavior.
Blood took his pseudonym in 1924, when he and a friend named Ralph Hanson tried out for the East 26th Street Liberties, a semipro team in Minneapolis. To preserve their college eligibility, they decided to adopt assumed names. Riding McNally’s motorcycle to the tryout, they pas
sed a theater that was showing the Rudolph Valentino movie, Blood and Sand. McNally shouted back to Hanson, “I’ll be Blood and you be Sand.”
Blood enjoyed reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, and dime novels. He was known to sign his autograph in blood by cutting his wrist. He frequented prostitutes merely for platonic companionship. “He liked an unusual conversation,” remembered Clarke Hinkle, one of Blood’s teammates in Green Bay.
On the train home from a game one time, he so antagonized LaVern “Lavvie” Dilweg, another Green Bay teammate, that Dilweg chased Blood all the way through the train to the rear platform. To escape, Blood climbed to the roof and ran back up the length of the moving train, leaping the gaps between cars along the way. He climbed down into the cab, surprising the engineer and the fireman.
“I’ve always had this thing for trains,” Blood explained. “They bring something out in me.”
“He was a little wild,” Ted Doyle remembered. “[Blood] was a character. One time we were playing a game and he wasn’t there. He was someplace else. He was playing a game in Buffalo.”
The Pirates opened the 1938 season with three straight losses. On October 3, Doyle broke his arm in a game against the Giants and was sidelined for more than a month. Whizzer White ended up leading the league in rushing but the Pirates were still awful: they finished 2-9 and attendance was little improved. As expected, White left the team to study at Oxford, though Doyle claimed he quit because he felt the linemen weren’t blocking for him. If that’s the case, Doyle can claim some credit for White’s second career, which culminated with a seat on the United States Supreme Court. (White’s Rhodes Scholarship would be interrupted by the war, and he returned to the States to play for the Detroit Lions in 1940 and 1941.)
Blood returned to coach the Pirates in 1939, with the usual results. After the team lost its first three games, Blood abruptly quit on October 3—the first anniversary of the Pirates’ last win. He was sick of losing.
“I would not say that my temperament was designed for coaching,” Blood later conceded.
In 1940, owner Art Rooney gave the Pirates a new name, the one they carry today: the Steelers. But they remained, in Rooney’s words, the “same old Pirates,” finishing 2-7-2 in 1940 and 1-9-1 in 1941. (In later years frustrated fans would modify the phrase, derisively referring to the team as the “same old Steelers.”) In 1942 the Steelers finally had a winning season, finishing 7-4, and Ted Doyle had his best season ever.
After the 1942 season, Doyle, who, like most players, worked a second job in the off-season, was hired at a Westinghouse factory in East Pittsburgh. He told his family and friends he was building parts for navy boats, but he was really working on the Manhattan Project. Westinghouse manufactured equipment for Y-12, the government’s nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
“Frankly I don’t think we knew what we were doing. We were making some parts. I assume that it was something that transferred uranium-235 to -238. That’s what we figured out later anyhow.”
It’s likely that Doyle was building components for the equipment used to enrich the uranium that was put in atomic bombs.
Doyle, always ambivalent about his football career, was even more so now that he was an important part of the war effort. In June 1943, shortly before the Steelers and the Eagles merged, he wrote a letter to Bert Bell, who had become a co-owner of the Steelers two years earlier.
“Dear Bert,” he wrote,
I would probably play football this fall if the proper arrangements could be made. At the present time I am working from 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., and will have to continue to do so. I also would have to work six days per week most of the time. You see, we are building equipment which is wanted as fast as we can put it out. Last week we worked from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. six days, and then worked eight hours on Sunday.
I asked for my vacation early in September, but don’t know whether I will get it then or not. In fact it looks like that may be one of our busiest periods….
I think it will be possible to carry on with football if we practice evenings and if we allow the boys to work as I do now. Much as I like football, we must do our part for the war effort first and furnish football recreation afterward.
Doyle’s proposal would not fall on deaf ears. For more than a year, Bert Bell had advocated requiring players to work full time in defense plants during the football season. But neither man had any idea just how directly professional football—and the Steagles in particular—would contribute to the war effort.
4
Making Changes
On Tuesday, April 6, 1943, the NFL opened its annual meeting at the Palmer House hotel in downtown Chicago, where, it so happened, Elmer Layden kept a suite. Layden and the representatives of the league’s ten clubs gathered around a large table in the hotel’s ornate Crystal Room, a far cry from the Canton automobile dealership in which the league had been founded 23 years earlier. The room was filled with the sweet smell of cigar smoke, courtesy of Art Rooney’s ever-present and pricey stogie.
Layden convened the meeting at 10:20 a.m., saying, “I don’t believe there is any need to tell you that this is a very important meeting. I think we are all aware of the fact that the public will be scrutinizing our words and our actions very carefully throughout this meeting.” He was being a bit self-aggrandizing—the public had much more important things to worry about that spring—but it was obvious that the league was imperiled. Another 150 players had been lost to the service since the end of the 1942 season. Some clubs were in ruins. The Eagles had just 16 players under contract, and they were in better shape than most other teams. Cleveland and Green Bay had just 14 players each. New York, 13. Detroit, 12. The Cardinals, ten. Pittsburgh, only six. Even the owners were marching off to war. Lex Thompson of the Eagles was an Army private, Dan Topping of the Dodgers was a Marine captain, George Halas of the Bears was a Navy lieutenant commander, and the two co-owners of the Cleveland Rams, Fred Levy and Dan Reeves were, respectively, a lieutenant colonel and a captain in the Army.
“It’ll be a miracle if we operate,” one coach told the Chicago Daily Times.
The owners had another concern, though. Professional football, hardly a lucrative business before the war, was even more risky now. Most clubs were losing money. Given the player shortage and the precipitous attendance drop the previous season, some owners simply felt it wasn’t worth carrying on. By one newspaper’s estimate, four of the ten clubs favored suspending operations for the duration. But the league’s two most outspoken and influential owners—the Bears’ George Halas and the Redskins’ George Preston Marshall—adamantly opposed folding. Halas, who was training aviation mechanics at the Naval Air Technical Center in Norman, Oklahoma, was so determined to keep the league running that he managed to finagle a leave to attend the crucial meeting and lobby his colleagues. Marshall threatened to keep playing even if every other club voted to shut down: “We’re going to operate if our only opposition is Georgetown University or if we have to scrimmage among ourselves.” In fact, Marshall couldn’t understand what the problem was.
“We’re fortunate, unlike baseball, in that we only play on Sundays,” he said. “Many fellows in defense work could find time to practice and play—at least in the home games. Nope, it won’t be the highest caliber of football, but it’ll be football.” Marshall had 9,000 reasons to keep playing: that’s how many season ticket orders the Redskins had already received.
Elmer Layden also opposed any cessation, insisting “we can and will play football.” Of course, he didn’t have much choice: the alternative was to incur the wrath of Halas and, most especially, Marshall. (Layden’s resolve was further boosted by a “war clause” in his contract that stipulated he would not get paid if the league ceased operations. His annual salary was $25,000, roughly ten times the national average in 1943.)
On Tuesday afternoon, the Cleveland Rams—represented by their head coach, Charles “Chile” Walsh, and Percy Cowan, a Chicago financier who was “handling
certain business affairs” for the absent owners—asked the other clubs for permission to drop out of the league for the duration of the war. With Rams co-owners Levy and Reeves in the Army, their representatives said, and with so many players lost to the service, it was no longer feasible to operate the club. (Unlike the other owners on active duty, Levy and Reeves had not assigned a full-time caretaker to look after their club.) Some owners weren’t happy about it, but Cleveland’s motion passed unanimously. You couldn’t very well force a team to play when it didn’t want to. There was a caveat though: the suspension would be for the 1943 season only, not the duration. The Rams would have to ask again if they wanted to keep sitting out the following season.
There was a silver lining to Cleveland’s withdrawal: the 14 players it still had under contract would be disbursed among the league’s nine remaining teams. This was accomplished by drawing the names out of a hat.
Cleveland’s departure left the league with a major scheduling problem. Normally, each of the ten teams played 11 games: two against each of the other four teams in its division and three against teams from the other division. But with the league reduced to nine teams—five in the East and four in the West—that arrangement was impossible. A new schedule would have to be drawn up.
Last Team Standing Page 4
