Finally there was the prickly issue of uniforms. Eagles owner Lex Thompson would not allow his players to wear anything other than the team’s usual colors of kelly green and white. Bell and Rooney wanted the team to wear the Steelers’ black and gold jerseys, at least when it played in Pittsburgh. In the end, Thompson won out. The team would wear Eagles jerseys for every game. Bell and Rooney probably gave in because it would have been too costly to clean and maintain two sets of uniforms all season anyway.
It wasn’t everything Thayer and Thompson wanted, and Bell and Rooney practically gave up the farm. But, considering the circumstances, the principals were satisfied with the merger.
“Without it,” said Bert Bell, “we would have been pathetic and so would the Eagles.” Back in Pittsburgh, though, there was disappointment.
“So far as anyone in Pittsburgh need be concerned,” Chet Smith wrote in the Press, “there will be no National League football here in the fall. The temporary merger of the Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles was worked out on anything but an equitable basis.”
Incredibly, at 10:45 that night, after many long hours debating contraction, the owners reconvened to discuss expansion. In a sign that better times were to come, the league had received applications for new franchises in Baltimore, Boston, and Buffalo. The owners voted unanimously to award a team in Boston to Ted Collins, the manager of singer Kate Smith (famous for her rendition of the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America”). Collins’ team would not begin play until the 1944 season. The owners, however, were free to divvy up his $25,000 down payment on the $50,000 franchise fee immediately. Which they did before going to bed.
The next day, the owners tackled a bit of business that remained unfinished from the April meeting: the game schedule. One benefit of the merger was that it neatly reduced the league to two four-team divisions (the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh combine naturally having been placed in the Eastern Division). This made scheduling much more manageable than a nine-team league with two unbalanced divisions. Elmer Layden proposed that each team play two games against each of the other three teams in its division and one against each of the four teams in the other division. That would give each team ten games, one fewer than usual, but, for the first time, each team would play every other team in the league at least once. This the owners agreed to.
The hard part, as usual, was figuring out the home games. George Preston Marshall insisted on playing six of his Redskins’ ten games at Griffith Stadium, which prompted Jack Mara to demand six home games for the Giants. And, since their newly constituted “Eagles” would be playing home games in two cities, Rooney, Bell, and Thayer felt entitled to an extra home game too.
It took sixteen hours of bitter and tedious negotiations over two days, but in the end, the Redskins, Giants, and Eagles got their six home games. It was decided the Eagles would play four home games in Philadelphia and two in Pittsburgh. (Each city would also get one pre-season exhibition game.) The Bears, Lions, and Dodgers would play five home games each, the Packers four, and the poor Cardinals just three—and one of those would be played in Buffalo because of a scheduling conflict at Comiskey Park. (When “tight spots develop in National League huddles,” a Chicago sportswriter complained, “it always is the Cards who take a kicking around.”)
With the Father Draft looming, the owners also voted to begin tapping new sources of talent. Teams were allowed to sign college undergraduates attending schools that had discontinued football. It was a rare exception to pro football’s ironclad ban on signing collegians before their classes had graduated. Layden defended the change in patriotic terms: “We believe football provides a boy with training he needs for the future and if he can’t get it at the college he is attending and it isn’t feasible to transfer to another one where the sport is in vogue we see no reason he shouldn’t be given a chance to play with one of our teams.”
The owners also debated the merits of allowing active-duty military personnel to play. George Preston Marshall, who favored the idea, said, “I think that as far as this league is concerned we shouldn’t pass any rule detrimental to a fellow in the service…. I see no reason why that fellow shouldn’t play with a team in this league.” Besides, he added, “All of us know damn well that we are going to have one awful job getting 20 or 25 players.” (Marshall seemed to have ulterior motives: Washington was swimming in servicemen.) But other owners worried about what would happen if a grunt got hurt playing pro football. It was decided that a serviceman would be allowed to play only with the permission of his commanding officer.
After the league meeting adjourned on Monday, June 21, Bert Bell returned to his home in Philadelphia and called on an old friend who’d played for him back when he owned the Eagles. The friend hadn’t played football in years, but Bell knew just what it would take to coax him out of retirement.
LIKE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS in the spring of 1932, Bill Hewitt was out of work. For three seasons he’d been a stalwart on the University of Michigan’s football team. But now his eligibility was used up; he couldn’t play college football anymore.
“I was a semester short of graduation,” Hewitt remembered, “but getting a diploma was not then my consuming passion.” So he was bumming around his hometown of Bay City, Michigan, not even sure “where my next few thousand meals were coming from.” Relief came in the form of a letter from Bears owner George Halas, who’d apparently heard about Hewitt from a Chicago sportswriter. Halas offered Hewitt $100 a game to play for the Bears. Hewitt countered with $110. Halas agreed, but when Hewitt showed up for training camp, he learned the contract didn’t have a no-cut clause. Hewitt didn’t want to take any chances, so he settled for $100 after all: “I swapped ten dollars a game for a written guarantee that I’d be kept on the payroll for the entire season.”
Halas got his money’s worth. Hewitt immediately became the Bears’ starting left end.
The NFL had never seen anything like Bill Hewitt. On offense he was a ferocious blocker and a nimble pass catcher. On defense he was an aggressive tackler with a mean streak. He covered kickoffs and punts with wild abandon. And he did it all with his head conspicuously uncovered. Bill Hewitt was one of the last professional football players to forsake headgear. He hated helmets. He said they “handicapped” his play. He also thought they were a little sissified.
On the field you couldn’t miss him. He had a full head of blonde hair and a jutting jaw. He wasn’t big, just five-nine, 190 pounds, but he was quick and agile and fearless. His teammates, rather courageously, nicknamed him Stinky because when he came to Chicago he owned just one outfit (a pair of corduroy pants and a blue Michigan sweater). Fans called him the Offside Kid because, when he was playing defense, he would burst across the line of scrimmage so quickly that it was hard to believe he wasn’t committing a penalty.
Hewitt was “one of the great ends of all time,” George Halas said. “He had a flaming spirit.”
As a rookie in 1932, Hewitt played in one of the most unusual games in NFL history. After the Bears and the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans finished the season tied for first place, then-Commissioner Joe Carr ordered a one-game playoff to determine the champion. The game was supposed to be played at Wrigley Field, but a blizzard forced it to be moved indoors, to Chicago Stadium. With a six-inch layer of dirt covering the arena floor, the two teams slugged it out on a field measuring just 60 yards between the goal lines and 45 between the sidelines. To accommodate the smaller dimensions, several rules were modified. Teams kicked off from the ten-yard line. After a team crossed midfield the ball was moved back 20 yards to compensate for the shortened field. The goalposts were moved from the back of the end zone to the goal line, and no field goals were allowed. And, because the field was completely surrounded by hockey dasher boards, after a player went out of bounds, the ball was placed ten yards inbounds, instead of on the sideline, as was then the custom. (This last change proved so popular that it was subsequently adopted permanently.) The Bears won this early version of an Arena Le
ague game 9-0 on a disputed touchdown, prompting a Portsmouth newspaper to denounce the game as a “sham battle on a Tom Thumb gridiron.” (The Spartans did win the NFL championship three years later—but only after the team, renamed the Lions, had moved to Detroit.)
In 1933, Hewitt became a truly dominating player. Opposing teams would assign two or even three players to cover him, but to no avail.
“I never saw anything like it,” his teammate Red Grange recalled. “I don’t believe he made a mistake all year.”
Hewitt was named an all-pro and the Bears won the championship again.
In 1934, Halas finally gave Hewitt a raise—to $130 a game. There his salary stayed for the next three seasons. His meager compensation—and the low salaries of pro football players in general—continually frustrated Hewitt. It wasn’t merely customary for players to work second jobs in the off-season; it was usually necessary. Until the late 1950s, football cards often listed a player’s second occupation. Hewitt complained that “the average professional football player is the peon of big-league sports.” Not only that: It was also impossible for players to secure meaningful, well-paying employment away from the gridiron. “Employers don’t hand out good jobs in January, jobs with a future, to men who will quit next August and spend four months playing at games.”
By the end of the 1936 season, Hewitt had had enough. He told Halas he was through. Halas wasn’t convinced, though, so he traded Hewitt to Philadelphia, leaving it up to Bert Bell, then the owner of the Eagles, to convince the Offside Kid to keep playing. Bell offered Hewitt $200 a game and a $24-a-week off-season job as a grease monkey at a gas station. Hewitt was convinced. (In game programs, the Eagles rather generously described Hewitt’s second occupation as “lubrication and fuel oil salesman.”)
Although the Eagles were a miserable team, Hewitt’s play did not suffer. In his first season in Philadelphia he was again named an all-pro, the first player to achieve the honor with two different teams. In 1939, his third season in Philadelphia, Hewitt got a raise to $250 a game. But the game was finally beginning to take a toll on him.
“I could remember when I laughed at the veterans lined up in the trainer’s room after a game. Now I was first in line, and when I’d had one rubdown I would go to the tail of the queue and start all over.”
After the season, Hewitt retired, seemingly for good. He settled down in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter and started looking for a job with a future.
Then, a little more than three years later, in the summer of 1943, Bert Bell, now the co-owner of the Steelers, came calling again.
Like Ted Doyle, Hewitt was ambivalent about pro football. He loved the game, but he didn’t mind walking away from it.
“It left me wary of people, unable to meet strangers. Years of backslapping and insincere praise made me suspicious of almost everyone.”
So, Hewitt wrote, when Bell invited him to join the newly merged Philadelphia-Pittsburgh team,
I said “No, thank you,” and he said “Aw, c’mon,” and I said “Sorry,” and he said “Four hundred per game.” I said, “Are you going to hand me that pen or do we sit here and stall all night?”
Bell figured Hewitt was well worth the money. Good ends were hard to come by in 1943, even if they were pushing 34 and past their prime. Besides, due to an old football injury, Hewitt was 4-F: he had a perforated eardrum. (Men with perforated eardrums were rejected for military service because they were acutely vulnerable to chemical weapons.) Not only that, he’d found work at a trucking company—an essential industry. He was positively draft-proof. The only catch was that Hewitt would have to wear a helmet for the first time in his career. It was the rule now, whether he liked it or not—and the Offside Kid most certainly did not.
6
Greasy and Walt
IN THE EARLY DAYS of professional football, head coaches were little more than figureheads, more akin to team captains. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Bears’ George Halas), they were neither tacticians nor motivators. A head coach scheduled practices—if there were any—and taught his team a few simple plays. He had no game plan. He only had a game. Greasy Neale recalled what it was like playing for Jim Thorpe in 1917: “Why, we wouldn’t see Thorpe when he was coaching the Canton Bulldogs until the day of the game. We didn’t practice between games. Jim would give us three or four plays and then ask each man how long he thought he could play.”
Early coaches had neither the time nor the inclination to devote their undivided attention to football. Like their players, most held full-time jobs during the week, and many, like Thorpe, played as well as coached. So interchangeable were head coaches that it was not unusual for a team to have two or three simultaneously. The 1927 Frankford Yellow Jackets had four: Russ Daugherity, Charley Rogers, Ed Weir, and Swede Youngstrom. By having multiple coaches, a team could be relatively certain that at least one of them would show up on Sunday (or Saturday, in Frankford’s case).
By 1940, the role of the head coach had changed significantly. Player/coaches like Halas, Steve Owen of the Giants, and Curly Lambeau of the Packers had hung up their football shoes to concentrate solely on coaching. They developed new strategies. They scouted opponents. They instituted regular training regimens. And the growing popularity of the National Football League made it possible for them (and, on most teams, one or two assistants) to be compensated well enough to do the job full time. There were still occasional coaching tandems. Hunk Anderson and Luke Johnsos jointly coached the Bears for more than three seasons while Halas was in the Navy during the war. But for the most part the head coach had become the lone general leading his troops, responsible for everything from negotiating contracts to handing out paychecks. The head coach had evolved from superfluous to indispensable. He had transformed football from a simple game to a very complex one. He was now firmly in charge, and he countenanced no challenges to his authority.
When the Eagles and the Steelers merged in June of 1943, both teams’ head coaches, Earle “Greasy” Neale and Walt Kiesling, were of that ilk. Each had experience reaching back to the formative days of pro football. Each also had an outsized ego and a firm belief in his infallibility when it came to matters concerning the sport. Since neither coach would accept a demotion when the teams merged, they were named co-coaches. It was an unhappy compromise, a shotgun wedding that seemed destined to end badly.
EVERYONE CALLED ALFRED EARLE NEALE “GREASY.” The rather unfortunate nickname was acquired at an early age, when he called a playmate “dirty” and the playmate retorted with “greasy.” In fact, Greasy Neale was quite unlike his nickname, dapper and handsome, with a pronounced widow’s peak and a dimpled chin. But he never attempted to shed the sobriquet. Instead, he embraced it. When he took a coaching job at Yale in 1934, the school asked newspapers to refrain from using his nickname. But Neale told reporters, “Yale or no Yale, if you fellows want to call me Greasy, go ahead.”
Born into a poor family in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he went to work at the age of ten as a paperboy and a pinsetter at a local bowling alley. He repeated the fourth grade and dropped out of high school in his freshman year to take a job at the mills of the Parkersburg Iron & Steel Company. In his free time he played sports.
“My first love was baseball,” he said, “and my consuming ambition was to become a big leaguer. The football I played as a youngster was merely a fill-in to keep busy until it was warm enough for baseball.” Realizing “there wasn’t much future” in the mills, in 1909 he returned to Parkersburg High, where he played—and, one year, coached—football.
In the fall of 1912, Greasy entered West Virginia Wesleyan College, his chief aims being athletic rather than academic. Playing right end, he led Wesleyan to stunning upsets of mighty West Virginia in his freshman and sophomore years, scoring touchdowns in both games. At Wesleyan he also met a lovely coed named Genevieve Horner, whom he married in 1915.
“She opened an entire new chapter in my life and gave me added incentive,” he
said. “She was the driving force I needed.” Because he now “had the responsibilities of a husband,” Neale left Wesleyan to take a job as the head football coach at tiny Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. He was just 23.
“Subconsciously, I suppose, I had always wanted to be a coach ever since my experience at Parkersburg High,” he wrote. “The immense possibilities of football strategy always had intrigued me, plus the even more involved details of handling a squad of football players.”
All the while, Neale continued to pursue his “consuming ambition” of becoming a big-league baseball player. His summers were spent toiling for minor league teams in Altoona, Saginaw, and Wheeling.
“God gave me a good pair of hands and speedy legs,” he said, “but not the keen vision a professional baseball player should have.” Yet, through “application and determination” he achieved his goal: In the spring of 1916 he signed a contract with the Cincinnati Reds for $1,000. But after the baseball season ended, he always returned to football.
Over the next two decades, Neale moved Zelig-like through the landscape of American sports, an early-day Deion Sanders (another two-sport star) without the attitude or the endorsement deals. In 1917 he played professional football for the legendary Canton Bulldogs under an assumed name (“Foster”), since, at the time, he was also the head football coach at his alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan, a Southern Methodist school that frowned upon frivolous Sabbath activities like football. (The Reds would not have appreciated his moonlighting either.) In the fall of 1918, during World War I, he worked six days a week at the Wright Brothers’ Dayton factory building warplanes. On Sundays he coached and played for the local pro football team, the Dayton Triangles, who finished the season undefeated. He hit .357 as the starting right fielder for the Reds in the 1919 World Series against the Chicago White Sox. Cincinnati won the series, though eight Chicago players were subsequently banned from baseball for life for conspiring to fix it. But Neale considered his achievement untainted: “I’ve always held to the opinion that the ill-famed Black Sox of 1919 tried to play it on the square after the first game and that our pitching was too much for them.” In all, Neale played eight seasons of major league baseball, retiring with a .259 batting average.
Last Team Standing Page 7
