Scheduling was always a prickly matter for the NFL, particularly in the days before profit sharing. Naturally, each team was eager to schedule home games against the most popular opponents (e.g., the Redskins, Bears, and Giants). Conversely, nobody wanted the Cardinals on their home schedule. The snag this time was the Redskins-Bears game, always one of the biggest draws of the year. Here, Halas and Marshall could not agree. Each wanted the game for his home field. Layden, whose painstakingly crafted 55-game, ten-team schedule had been rendered moot by Cleveland’s sudden departure, could not resolve the impasse.
The following day, the owners approved several rule changes intended to address the wartime conditions. The maximum number of players each team was allowed to carry on its roster was lowered from 33 to 25. This helped alleviate the manpower shortage (as well as reduce costs). The change also mollified the Office of Defense Transportation, which had ordered the league to reduce travel to conserve fuel and rubber for the war effort. Layden said the smaller rosters, coupled with other modifications, would cut the league’s “man miles” by 37 percent from the previous season. The smaller rosters also prevented more powerful clubs from cornering the market by signing all the best available players. The owners further eliminated the minimum roster size of 22, leaving it up to Layden to determine when a team was too shorthanded.
“If a squad should drop down, for example, to 16 players,” Layden said, “then I might deem it necessary to take measures to bolster the squad roster.”
To get the most out of their smaller rosters, the owners approved another rule change: unlimited substitution. From its inception in the late nineteenth century, football was an endurance contest. The 11 players who started a game were expected to be on the field for all 60 minutes, playing both offense and defense, with little or no respite. The NFL permitted a player to enter a game just once each quarter, except for the fourth, when he could enter twice. Substitutions were also allowed when a player was injured—but it had better be serious. For the 1943 season, though, all restrictions were lifted. Teams were free to replace players as often as they pleased. Besides helping teams maximize their rosters, the new rule was also intended to reduce injuries, since rested players were less likely to get hurt. Most coaches, conservative by nature, opposed the change.
“I don’t want a player who can’t play both offense and defense,” grumbled Greasy Neale, the Eagles’ head coach. The owners approved unlimited substitution for the 1943 season only, citing wartime constraints, but the writing was on the wall. The change heralded the beginning of the end of the league’s heroic “60-minute men.”
The owners also voted to make helmets mandatory for the first time. Nobody had played bareheaded in the NFL since the Bears’ Dick Plasman retired after the 1940 season, but the owners weren’t taking any chances. They might have to cajole a few old-timers out of retirement and they didn’t want them getting hurt. Not that the leather helmets then in use afforded much protection. Concussions were a common injury. In 1939 the John T. Riddell Company had patented a new plastic helmet that was lighter and stronger than leather (and it didn’t get moldy when wet, either). But plastic was needed for the war effort, so players were stuck with the high-crowned leather headgear. Webbing inside the helmets held them in place on a player’s head. Facemasks were practically nonexistent. Ted Doyle may have been the only player in the league wearing one.
“I had a cap put on my tooth and didn’t want to have to replace it, so I had them put a nose guard on my helmet,” Doyle explained. “’Course it wasn’t a fence to hide behind like they have now, it was just a single bar that came down and another that came across the front.”
The helmets were hard to decorate, though some teams tried. The Eagles painted theirs green and white, but the paint constantly chipped off, giving the helmets a shabby look that must have driven fashion-conscious Elmer Layden crazy.
One rule change the owners considered but rejected would have allowed coaches to call plays from the sidelines. Ironically, coaches were largely barred from coaching during games. The quarterback or halfback was supposed to call all the plays. The rule was a vestige of the days when coaches also played. The owners’ rejection of the change was largely meaningless, though, as the rule was almost comically ignored. Every coach in the league had secret signals for calling plays. Greasy Neale used a game program. Depending on how he held it—rolled up, flat, right hand, left hand—his team knew which play to run.
The meeting concluded on Thursday, April 8, with the league’s eighth annual draft. Back in 1935, Bert Bell, who still owned the Philadelphia Eagles at the time, had come up with the idea of holding an annual draft of college players, with teams choosing in the inverse order of their finish in the previous season. Prior to that, college players who had exhausted their eligibility were free to sign with any team. Inevitably the best players signed with the best teams. The draft, inaugurated in 1936, brought about the first semblance of parity to the league, and it is a credit to owners like the Bears’ George Halas, the Redskins’ George Preston Marshall, and the Giants’ Tim Mara that they went along with the idea, putting the league’s interests above their own teams’.
During the war, the league renamed the draft the “preferred negotiations list,” so as to avoid any militaristic connotations. By any name, though, the 1943 draft was a fruitless exercise. Few of the draftees were expected to be available to play professional football in the fall, given their military obligations. (In 1942 only about 28 percent of all NFL draftees reported to training camp. The figure for 1943 would be closer to five percent.)
“The draft will be little more than a token affair,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Edward Prell, “teams staking out claims on players, the claims to be in effect when the war is over.”
To better the odds of actually landing a player or two, the league increased the number of players each team was permitted to draft from 20 to 30, prompting one official to quip, “It’s just a matter of selecting 30 men who aren’t going to play instead of 20.”
By virtue of their perfect 0-11 record in 1942, the Detroit Lions were awarded the first pick in the draft. They chose Frank Sinkwich, an all-American halfback from the University of Georgia. But Sinkwich had already enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and would be reporting for active duty as soon as he graduated.
The meeting adjourned at ten o’clock that night with much unresolved. A new schedule still had to be ratified. And there were some rumblings that one or more teams might join Cleveland on the sidelines before the fall. There was even a rumor going around that the Eagles and the Steelers were planning to ask the league for permission to merge—a rumor that Eagles general manager Harry Thayer emphatically denied.
“At no time have officials of the Eagles and Steelers discussed this possibility,” Thayer huffed. He should have told Art Rooney that. When asked about the rumor, the Steelers’ co-owner was characteristically forthright. According to the Chicago Tribune, he “admitted that such a deal might be a remote possibility in the event it became apparent later in the year that neither team could recruit a squad large enough to enter the race.”
To resolve the outstanding issues—and to clarify each club’s status once and for all—Layden and the owners decided to hold another meeting in June. For his part, the commissioner was optimistic about the future.
“I believe we’ll be able to find enough draft-exempt men to keep going,” he said after the April meeting concluded. “It won’t be easy, I know. Our easy source of playing material—college football ranks—is gone for the duration. We’ll have to uncover new sources of supply.”
One source of supply Layden and the owners did not uncover was right under their noses. It would have solved the league’s manpower shortage overnight. But it would have meant exhibiting a kind of courage they did not have.
AFRICAN-AMERICANS WERE WELCOMED, though not always warmly, in the National Football League’s early days. Fritz Pollard, an all-American from Brown, was one o
f the stars of the Akron Pros, the league’s first champions in 1920. The following season Pollard was named one of the team’s two co-coaches. He scored seven touchdowns to boot, tying him for the league lead.
One of Pollard’s teammates was his friend Paul Robeson, who managed to play professional football on weekends, while attending Columbia University Law School and singing in New York nightclubs the rest of the week. Robeson would take the train from New York to Akron (or wherever else the Pros were playing) on Friday night, practice with the team on Saturday, play the game on Sunday, and return to New York immediately afterwards.
Between 1920 and 1933, 13 African-Americans played in the NFL, often under great stress. Each had to endure the usual epithets and indignities. In newspaper reports they were inevitably described in racial terms: “ebony panther,” “dark menace,” “dusky,” “an Ethiopian in the woodpile.”
Fritz Pollard could not use the Pros’ locker room; he dressed for games at a nearby cigar factory. Nor could he eat in most Akron restaurants. On the road, he was prohibited from staying in the same hotel as his white teammates. Opposing players constantly took cheap shots at him. When he was tackled, he would roll on his back and kick his feet in the air to deter late hits.
Despite that hostility, black athletes found the NFL considerably more hospitable than professional baseball, where a “gentlemen’s agreement” had kept them off the field since the late nineteenth century. Baseball’s ban was strictly enforced by Judge Landis, the dogmatic commissioner, despite his public statements to the contrary. In 1943 Landis declared that “any major league club is entirely free to employ Negroes.” Yet that same year, Landis scuttled Bill Veeck’s attempt to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies, after rumors surfaced that Veeck was planning to stock the team with Negro League stars.
Landis frequently pointed out that there was no rule banning blacks. There was, but it was unwritten, and the owners of the 16 major league clubs adhered to it unconditionally, even when it was not in their best interests to do so. Many teams would have been vastly improved by integration. Perennial bottom feeders like the Browns and the Phillies certainly could have used a Satchel Paige or a Josh Gibson. As sports historian Alan H. Levy writes, “The fact that the leaders of the worst baseball clubs would not, could not, venture onto such a pathway to excellence, and preferred to be perennial league doormats, speaks poignantly to the depths to which the influence of Jim Crow, and the Commissioner’s office, penetrated.”
The early NFL was under no such influence. Teams were free to sign African-Americans. This was partly a matter of geography. Pro football was almost entirely a product of the Midwest, where racial attitudes were, in the main, less hardened and hostile than in the South. Of the 18 NFL franchises in 1922, 12 were based in just four states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin) and one (the Oorang Indians) was a traveling team composed entirely of Native Americans.
It was also a matter of practicality.
“It was hardly clear that any pro football league would survive,” writes Levy, “much less one that was all black or all white. The idea of segregation, or any other sort of segmenting, could not be considered, no matter how some owners may have wished to do so.” Considering the league’s tenuous finances, a color line would have been unenforceable anyway. Clubs that violated it could have been fined or boycotted, but what good would it have done the fledgling league to drive clubs out of business?
“It was not that owners of early professional football teams wanted African-American athletes to play,” Levy writes, “they simply could not do much to stop anyone else from employing them.”
Then George Preston Marshall came along.
Marshall was a failed actor who made his money in linen: He owned a chain of laundries in Washington. In 1932, he and two partners bought a defunct NFL franchise in Newark and moved it to Boston. They christened the team the Braves, after the city’s National League baseball team (now the Atlanta Braves), with whom they shared a ballpark (Braves Field). The Braves lost $46,000 in their inaugural season. Marshall’s partners wanted out and he obliged them. In 1933, Marshall renamed the team the Redskins and moved it a mile east to Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.
Marshall shook up the nascent NFL. His was the first team to hire a marching band and put on lavish halftime shows. He persuaded his fellow owners to split the league into two divisions and stage an annual championship game, presaging the Super Bowl by more than three decades. He also convinced them to change the rules to make the game more exciting. Restrictions on throwing the ball were lifted. The forward pass, formerly as popular as a soup line, suddenly became fashionable. Marshall was a showman and an innovator.
He was also a racist. Born in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1896 and raised in Washington, D.C., Marshall was the product of a rigidly segregated culture. In the Washington of his youth, every public institution maintained separate facilities for whites and blacks: schools, churches, restaurants, hotels, trolleys, swimming pools, ballparks. It seemed only logical to him that professional football should be likewise constituted.
At a league meeting shortly after the conclusion of the 1933 season, Marshall urged his peers to adopt a color line just like baseball’s. The discussion was off the record, naturally, but Marshall’s argument is easy to surmise: The country is in a depression. With so many whites out of work, how will it look if we go on hiring Negroes? It could lead to trouble.
Marshall was not beloved by his colleagues. He was arrogant, boorish, and a bit of a bully. Perhaps that’s why the other owners often acquiesced to his demands. On the whole, it was easier to go along with George than to fight him. Or, perhaps, they held deep biases of their own. Whatever their motives, pro football’s owners made their own “gentlemen’s agreement.” And with the league now financially stable, the agreement was enforceable.
Joe Lillard, a black halfback who had led the Chicago Cardinals in scoring in 1933, was not invited back to the team in 1934. Ray Kemp, who’d played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1933, was likewise dismissed. In fact, African-Americans would not be welcomed back to the NFL for 13 years.
Years later, the owners would deny colluding to exclude African-Americans. Steelers owner Art Rooney explained that good black players were simply too hard to find. Yet the sports pages were filled with their names: Brud Holland (Cornell), Wilmeth Sidat-Singh (Syracuse), and Ozzie Simmons (Iowa) were three of the most famous college football players in the country in the late 1930s. All were African-American. None was offered so much as a tryout with an NFL team. In December 1969, the football broadcaster and writer Myron Cope broached the subject with Bears owner George Halas in an interview:
There had been no ban on black ballplayers [Halas] said—“In no way, shape, or form.”
Why then, had the blacks vanished?
“I don’t know!” Halas exclaimed. “Probably it was due to the fact that no great black players were in college then. That could be the reason. But I’ve never given this a thought until you mentioned it. At no time has it ever been brought up. Isn’t that strange?”
In 1937, supposedly frustrated by a lack of support in Boston, George Preston Marshall moved his team to Washington. He marketed the Redskins as the Team of the South. He commissioned a fight song (“Hail to the Redskins!”) that included the line “Fight for old Dixie!” (now rendered “Fight for old D.C.!”). The team played exhibition games in the Carolinas and Virginia, and its games were broadcast on radio (and, later, television) stations throughout the South. And long after every other team in the league had integrated, the Redskins remained lily white and Marshall remained committed to excluding African-Americans.
“We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites,” Marshall defiantly declared in 1962. Later that year, threatened with eviction from the new, publicly owned D.C. (now RFK) Stadium, the Redskins finally started signing African-Americans.
5
Hatching the Steagles
IN
EARLY APRIL 1943, Lex Thompson—millionaire playboy, international sportsman, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, habitué of Toots Shor’s—was a buck private stationed at Camp Davis, a mosquito-ridden antiaircraft-artillery training center in rural eastern North Carolina. The nearest town was miniscule Holly Ridge, which the troops nicknamed Boom Town: “Boom, you’re in and boom, you’re out!”
Thompson had enlisted in the Army the previous October, motivated by patriotism as well as by his thirst for adventure. The war also appealed to his competitive spirit. It was a game in which he wanted to play. So, while his civilian colleagues were attending the league meeting at the swanky Palmer House, Thompson was attending officer training school and practicing his skills on the artillery range. From this distant outpost, Thompson did his best to keep tabs on developments in Chicago. Once or twice a day he spoke on the telephone with Eagles general manager Harry Thayer, who was running the team in Thompson’s stead and representing him at the meeting.
In one of those phone calls, Thayer told Thompson that he had been approached by Art Rooney with a curious proposition: Rooney wanted to know if the Eagles would be interested in merging with the Steelers for the upcoming season. Rooney was desperate. The Steelers had just six players under contract.
“The prospects of continuing on our own look very bad,” Rooney confessed to the Pittsburgh Press.
Rooney and his partner, Bert Bell, were determined to keep the Steelers alive in some form. The team was coming off its best season ever and they wanted to capitalize on that success. In the topsy-turvy NFL of 1942, with players coming and going like Grand Central Station at rush hour, the Steelers had managed to finish 7-4, posting the first winning season in the history of the franchise and finishing second to the Redskins in the Eastern Division. Attendance was up. The fans were excited.
The Steelers’ turnaround was largely due to a rookie named Bill Dudley. Dudley was a small, slippery halfback nicknamed “Bullet Bill,” not for his speed—he could barely outrun some line-men—but because he always hit his target when carrying the ball. He led the league in rushing that year and was named an all-pro.
Last Team Standing Page 5
