“It was kind of a nightmare for me,” recalled Wistert. It took him several days to figure out what was going on—and many more to convince his teammates that he was actually making less than they assumed.
Around 11:00 a.m. Neale and Kiesling finally showed up, to be greeted by much ribbing from their players, who jokingly threatened to fine them. It was a rare moment of levity in a training camp that, in just ten days, had grown extremely tense. Wistert could tell immediately that the two coaches couldn’t stand each other.
“Kiesling and Neale got along like a cat and a dog,” Wistert said. “At times they would argue on the field in front of all the players. It was just crazy.”
Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling barely knew each other when their respective teams merged in June. In their long football careers, they had met on the gridiron just three times, as opposing coaches when the Eagles played the Steelers in 1941 and 1942. (The results: one Eagles win, one Steelers win, and one tie.)
They got off on the wrong foot when Kiesling arrived in Philadelphia on August 18 and discovered that Neale had unilaterally installed the T formation while Kiesling was still in St. Paul. Big Kies was an old fashioned single-winger. He despised the T, which he found unnecessarily complicated and a bit effete.
In appearance, disposition, and coaching style, Neale and Kiesling were complete opposites.
On game days Neale always wore a jacket and tie, with a trench coat and a fedora. He was curious, quick-witted, and unafraid of change (as evidenced by his late conversion to the T formation). He was also gloriously profane.
“He was creative about it,” said Al Wistert. “He never said ‘son of a bitch’ or ‘goddamn.’” Among Neale’s favorites: “You couldn’t knock a sick whore off a shit pot!” “You stand around like a bear cub playin’ with his prick!” “They killed Christ and let you live!”
Neale was hard on his players. He’d fine them for the most innocuous infractions. But he was always fair and never mean and whatever his faults his players would come to adore him.
“I loved Greasy,” halfback Jack Hinkle said. “He was like a father to me. The only players who didn’t get along with Greasy were the first-year men. Greasy loved the veterans. He’d say, ‘Give me a team of veterans and I’ll win the title.’”
Neale believed in making a football team “a family affair” and enjoyed golfing and playing bridge with his “boys” while his wife Genevieve socialized with their wives.
“It is to be doubted,” wrote the New York Times sports columnist Arthur Daley, “that any coach ever inspired deeper loyalty and affection from his players than did Greasy.”
“He’s in my prayers every night,” said Vic Sears, a soft-spoken tackle who played nine seasons for Neale in Philadelphia.
Disheveled and stern, Walt Kiesling was less revered. After his playing days, his weight ballooned to more than 300 pounds. His clothes always seemed a size too small, and in photographs his tie is invariably crooked. He was dull and unimaginative. He liked to begin every game with the same play, running his fullback into the middle of the line. When Steelers owner Art Rooney finally insisted he begin a game with a pass, Kiesling sabotaged the play by ordering one of his linemen to jump offside.
“If this pass play works,” he told the team, “that Rooney will be down here every week giving us plays.” He constantly berated his players, loudly and publicly.
“Seldom did Kiesling praise the athletes he coached,” wrote the longtime Steelers broadcaster Joe Tucker. “He had been a standout by performance and expected and demanded that everyone who wore the Pittsburgh uniform play to his potential.”
On one especially hot day at the Steagles training camp, Kiesling ordered all the water buckets removed from the field.
“You can’t get into condition by swilling water down your throats,” the corpulent coach roared, apparently ignorant of the benefits of hydration.
In Pittsburgh, his players disliked him so much they once threatened to go on strike. Art Rooney liked him, though, and that was all that mattered.
“He was a tremendous coach,” Rooney said, “and not only that, a great guy.” Indeed, Rooney seemed to have a better opinion of Kiesling’s head coaching skills than even Kiesling himself.
“The thing about Walt was that he preferred to be an assistant,” said Ole Haugsrud, who signed Kiesling to his first pro contract in Duluth. “He was available whenever the Steelers needed somebody, yet he would much rather be an assistant than the boss.”
Neale and Kiesling were fundamentally different people.
“Greasy had a sense of humor, and he was a confident, upbeat guy,” recalled Frank “Bucko” Kilroy, a rookie tackle on the Steagles in 1943. “I wouldn’t say Kiesling didn’t have a sense of humor, but he was more serious.”
The two coaches clashed incessantly. Neale, having toiled in Ducky Pond’s shadow at Yale for seven long seasons, was not prepared to share the spotlight with Kiesling. Inflexible and dogmatic, Kiesling was incapable of compromising with Neale.
“They hated each other,” recalled Vic Sears matter-of-factly. But they did have one thing in common: Both men suffered from an overabundance of self-esteem.
“When Greasy Neale is the head coach there is nobody else gonna be the head coach,” Al Wistert said. “He was a very domineering person.”
“Kies was a great coach,” Rooney said of Kiesling, “but everything with Kies was that nobody knew football better than Kies.”
As training camp wore on, the animosity between the two coaches only deepened. Wistert said, “I can remember one day when Greasy Neale got all upset and he threw his cardboard armful of plays that he had down on the grass field and stomped off the field! He was quitting! It was pretty bad, I’ll tell ya.”
To ease tensions, Steelers co-owner Bert Bell suggested the two head coaches divide their duties rather than collaborating: Neale would coach the offense, Kiesling the defense. It was a division of labor rarely attempted in pro football; until then, coaching duties were usually divided between the line and the backfield, not offense and defense. It was a good arrangement, said Ray Graves, a lantern-jawed center who played for the Steagles.
“I think Kiesling was more of a defensive coach and felt like that was the most important part of the game and I think Greasy Neale was a little more wide open and wanted a little more offense. I think he stressed offense more.”
On the whole, the players didn’t get along much better than the coaches at the beginning of training camp. Only about ten of the 30-odd players who eventually reported to camp were under contract to Pittsburgh. In the minority and far from home, the Steelers naturally formed a clique and tended not to socialize with the Eagles.
“There was a little antagonism,” recalled Eagles tackle Vic Sears. “There were tensions. It wasn’t a good situation for anybody.”
The merger also produced all sorts of unexpected job competition. Eberle “Elbie” Schultz had been a starting tackle for the Steelers the previous season. After the merger he was supplanted by the Eagles’ Sears, who said Schultz was quite disgruntled: “He hated my guts. He absolutely hated me.” (Schultz eventually won a starting job, but as a guard, not a tackle.)
Mostly, though, it was the Eagles who felt aggrieved. Steelers co-owners Art Rooney and Bert Bell and Eagles general manager Harry Thayer had informally agreed to a quota system, guaranteeing the outnumbered Steelers a minimum number of starting positions. This unavoidably fostered resentment. When Ray Graves, the Eagles’ starting center in 1942, reported for training camp, he suddenly found himself demoted to second string behind Al Wukits, a Steelers rookie.
“There were some personal feelings there” was how Graves put it, diplomatically, many years later. (Graves eventually won back his starting position.) Al Wistert, an all-American at Michigan, was not pleased to learn he would be playing behind Steelers tackle Ted Doyle—and that Doyle would not even be practicing with the team during the week. (Doyle did manage to get enough time
off from the Westinghouse plant to attend training camp for a week.)
“I didn’t like that very much,” Wistert said. “I had never been second string. So I was not very happy.” Nor was Wistert happy when Greasy Neale moved him from left tackle to right tackle.
Nowhere was the job competition more intense than among the quarterbacks. Then as now, the quarterback was the key to the T formation. This was even more true then, when the quarterback, not the coach, called (or, at least, was supposed to call) all the plays. The Eagles had lost a splendid one when Tommy Thompson went into the Army after the 1942 season. (The Steelers had lost their best passer, “Bullet” Bill Dudley, to the Army Air Forces.) In the early practices, Greasy Neale had auditioned several candidates for the position, including Steve Sader, a Philadelphia sandlot player with no college experience, and Donald MacGregor, an ex-con from Des Moines who’d led his prison team to the Iowa Semipro Championship. Even the burly end Bill Hewitt, who knew the T formation from his days with the Bears, took a few snaps. But none of the candidates sufficiently impressed Neale, so he invited a dozen quarterbacks to training camp. One was a diminutive southpaw named Alexander Sherman.
If not for the war, Allie Sherman might never have played a down in the National Football League. Born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jews, he was an exceptionally bright student who graduated from high school at 16. He enrolled at Brooklyn College, where, although he weighed just 120 pounds, he tried out for the football team. Head coach Lou Oshins was so desperate for personnel that he installed the underage, undersized egghead into the starting lineup—as a blocking back in the single wing. It was not a successful venture. The Kingsmen usually got pummeled.
The summer before Sherman’s junior year, Oshins decided to switch to the T formation, and anointed Sherman his quarterback. Oshins bought a copy of The Modern T Formation, a how-to book by George Halas, Ralph Jones, and Clark Shaughnessy. Each week, he ripped a chapter out of the spiral-bound book and sent it to Sherman, who was waiting tables in the Catskills. Sherman studied each chapter religiously. He learned the T well, and the Kingsmen’s fortunes improved.
By the time he graduated (cum laude) from Brooklyn College in 1943, Allie Sherman was five-ten, 160 pounds—and barely 20 years old. He looked more like a law student than a football player. But he knew the T formation inside out—which is exactly what Greasy Neale was looking for. The Eagles sent Sherman a letter inviting him to training camp.
Another quarterback competing for the starting job was Henry Leroy “Roy” Zimmerman, a tall, lanky Mormon whose background differed markedly from Allie Sherman’s. Around 1930, when Zimmerman was 12 years old, his family’s farm in Tonganoxie, Kansas, was obliterated by a dust storm. With their scanty belongings strapped to a Model A, the Zimmermans joined the great western migration depicted in John Steinbeck’s celebrated novel, The Grapes of Wrath, eventually settling in southern California.
As a high school halfback, Zimmerman caught the eye of San Jose State College head coach Dudley DeGroot, who offered him a scholarship. On the gridiron Zimmerman could do it all: run, pass, punt, kick, and play defense. In 1939, his senior year at San Jose State, he led the Spartans to a perfect 13-0 record. The following spring Zimmerman signed a contract with the Washington Redskins.
Unfortunately, Zimmerman’s experience in Washington was not entirely positive. As Sammy Baugh’s backup he learned a lot but didn’t get much playing time. In his first three seasons he completed just six passes (and threw five interceptions). He had trouble getting along with his teammates. According to Merrell Whittlesey, who covered the team for the Washington Post, “Zimmerman made few friends in his three years with the Redskins.” He also had a nasty run-in with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall.
Zimmerman’s dispute with Marshall concerned money. As the reigning NFL champions in the summer of 1943, the Redskins were scheduled to play a team of college all-stars in the annual game sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. (This was the same game in which Al Wistert played for the collegians.) Zimmerman felt he deserved extra compensation for the game, since it wasn’t on the regular league schedule. Marshall felt otherwise. Eagles general manager Harry Thayer, who was in Chicago for the game, caught wind of the dispute and immediately broached trade talks with Marshall. Zimmerman barely played in the game on August 25, as the college team humiliated the Redskins, 27-7. The very next day, Marshall traded Zimmerman to Philadelphia for two second-stringers, center Ken Hayden and end Jack Smith. The trade, it was reported, was Marshall’s “form of punishment” for Zimmerman’s recalcitrance. It was one of the most lopsided trades in league history, made possible by Marshall’s arrogance and Thayer’s shrewdness.
Greasy Neale was elated. Although Zimmerman had never played the T formation, he was big (six-two, 200 pounds) and he had an exceptionally strong arm. In fact, Zimmerman had been a major league pitching prospect until a knee injury ended his baseball career. He was also a superb punter and kicker. Furthermore, he was extremely unlikely to be drafted by the military. Not only was he a father, he also helped run his family’s farm in California and was a part-time police officer, both grounds for deferment.
Zimmerman couldn’t have been happier either. He was relieved to be out of Baugh’s shadow and from under George Preston Marshall’s thumb. With the Steagles, he would finally get a chance to prove himself in the National Football League. There were opportunities for revenge, too: The Steagles would play the Redskins twice. Zimmerman had already circled the dates on his calendar.
But first he would have to win the starting job.
IF TRUTH IS THE FIRST CASUALTY of war, then the rigorous screening of inductees is the second. As a war drags on and the need for soldiers heightens, the physical standards for their induction decline proportionately. This was the case during World War II, during which, for example, the minimum uncorrected eyesight requirement was lowered from 20/100 in each eye to 20/200. Of the first one million men drafted, some 400,000—40 percent—were rejected as unfit for service, mainly due to bad teeth, poor hearing or eyesight, or illiteracy. By 1943, though, men lacking some fingers and toes were likely to be inducted, as were illiterate draftees and men with VD. Even amputees got a good hard look before being classified 4-F.
In the fall of 1943, as the Father Draft neared, opponents of it applied enormous pressure on the War Department and Selective Service to reduce the minimum physical requirements even further, so as to prevent the drafting of fathers.
But the military, perhaps to its credit, considered some standards immutable. The minimum height (60 inches) and weight (105 pounds) requirements went unchanged throughout the war. The maximums—78 inches and “overweight which is greatly out of proportion to the height”—went unchanged too, winning deferments for a handful of oversized football players, notably Green Bay’s Buford “Baby” Ray, a six-six, 250-pound tackle. Likewise, some defects were deemed unacceptable no matter how dire the need for soldiers. A host of maladies large and small—ulcers, perforated eardrums, high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic sleepwalking—earned otherwise able-bodied men an automatic 4-F classification, rendering them unfit for military service but not for professional football.
Such was the case with Al Wistert. On September 20, 1943, 15 days after he reported to training camp, the former Michigan tackle got a telephone call from his draft board back in Chicago. Wistert wouldn’t be going into the service after all. He was 4-F. The x-rays taken of his left wrist during his draft physical had revealed evidence of osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone that sets in when a bone is broken or operated on. Wistert had broken his wrist playing football at Michigan, and had had it operated on twice thereafter. When he learned that he was being rejected for military service because of osteomyelitis, Wistert had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was “kinda worried.” Osteomyelitis was especially dangerous before the widespread use of antibiotics (penicillin was still an experimental drug in 1943). The infection, if it spread, could result i
n amputation or even death. On the other hand, Wistert said, “I wanted to play pro football. And the sooner I could get to playing pro football the better I liked it. So I don’t know that I was real disappointed when they turned me down.”
Wistert was just one of many 4-Fs who would prove invaluable to the National Football League during the war, and to the Steagles in particular. Fifteen of the 24 players who appeared in five or more Steagles games were military rejects—a whopping 62 percent.
Eagles tackle Vic Sears had ulcers, and since ulcers can bleed, sometimes profusely, the military refused men who had them. Sears wanted to fight: He’d been in the ROTC program at Oregon State.
“All my buddies who were with me in college went to the South Pacific for four years,” Sears recalled. “Never got a leave. But I didn’t go. I always had trouble with stomach ulcers. One year I damn near bled to death the night before a game.”
Eagles center Ray Graves was born deaf in his left ear. He volunteered for the Army Air Forces anyway and managed to hide his disability for six months, until he was assigned to a base near Atlanta, where he underwent a rigorous physical.
“When they found out,” Graves said, “they said they didn’t want any deaf pilots. So I was 4-F right there and they discharged me.”
Steelers end Tony Bova was nearly blind in one eye and not much better off in the other. He wore contact lenses, which at the time were made of glass or hard plastic. Contacts were so uncommon, in fact, that Bova was never asked whether he was wearing them when he took the eye exam for his Navy physical. He passed the exam but, like Graves, his defect was eventually discovered, and Bova was discharged. He wore the contacts when he played football.
“He was a legitimate receiver,” remembered Dan Rooney, Art’s son, who was 11 in 1943 and occasionally traveled with the team. “I guess he could hear the ball coming.”
Last Team Standing Page 10
