Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  It wasn’t a flawless performance. Zimmerman, who’d injured his groin running into an unyielding turnstile at Parkside Field the night before, played in great pain and completed just three of 12 passes, and the Steagles fumbled four times. But the team’s overall performance was astounding, even considering the competition. Louis Effrat of the New York Times said the Steagles were “superb” against the Dodgers, operating with “smoothness, speed and general efficiency.” New York Giants head coach Steve Owen, whose team the Steagles would play next, watched the game from the press box at Shibe Park. He left Philadelphia “deeply impressed.”

  The Steagles were less impressive a week later against the Giants. They had two punts blocked and three passes intercepted. They fumbled ten times, setting an NFL record that still stands.

  And they still won.

  SHIBE PARK, THE HOME OF BASEBALL’S PHILLIES AND A’S, was a tough place to watch football. Unlike Forbes Field, it was poorly suited to the gridiron’s geometrics. With goalposts erected along the first base line and in front of the left field fence, the grandstands were close to the end zones and far from the sidelines. Kickoffs sometimes sailed into the upper deck. After the baseball season, temporary bleachers were erected along the sideline in the outfield. The bleachers brought spectators much closer to the action, but they were rickety, uncovered, and uncomfortable.

  “Shibe Park discouraged football fans,” writes Bruce Kuklick in his history of the ballpark, To Every Thing a Season. “Indeed, many Eagles patrons went to Shibe Park as much for the masculine thrill of braving the winter outside as for witnessing the team.”

  Due to the scheduling vagaries resulting from NFL teams sharing ballparks with baseball teams, the New York Giants’ game against the Steagles at Shibe Park on October 9 was their first of the season. (The Detroit Lions, by contrast, had already played three games.) The late start was just fine with Giants head coach Steve Owen. The big Oklahoman had an ace up his sleeve and he wanted to keep it there as long as possible. The ace was named Bill Paschal.

  Like Allie Sherman, William Avner Paschal, Jr., likely would not have played pro football if not for the war. Paschal was a football and track star at Tech High in Atlanta. In his senior year he hurt his knee when he fell out of the top bunk of a bunk bed. He still earned a scholarship to Georgia Tech, but played only three minutes before reinjuring the knee. After an operation to remove cartilage, Paschal dropped out of college and went to work as a switchman for the Central of Georgia Railway.

  In the summer of 1943, he bumped into his old college coach, Bill Alexander, who wired Grantland Rice in New York, asking him to pass Paschal’s name along to Giants coach Steve Owen.

  “With what I’ve got left,” Owen told Rice, “I’ll take a chance…. I can pretty near use anybody now.”

  When Paschal showed up at the Giants training camp at Bear Mountain, New York, Owen could hardly believe his eyes.

  “The kid is one of the best running backs I’ve seen in years,” Stout Steve gushed about his six-foot, 190-pound diamond in the rough. “He is not only a fast, quick starter, but he runs hard and drives on through.” And the best part was that, because of his knee, Paschal was 4-F.

  After their convincing win over Brooklyn, Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling worried that the Steagles might be overconfident going into the Giants game. It seemed an unwarranted concern. Since joining the league ten years earlier, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were a combined 7-31-1 against New York. The Eagles hadn’t beaten the Giants in five years. Greasy Neale was 0-4 against them since coming to Philadelphia in 1941, a record that profoundly embarrassed him, since he and Steve Owen were close friends. In 1921, Neale tried to persuade Owen to play for him at Washington and Jefferson. Owen declined, but the two young men—Neale was 30, Owen 23—struck up a friendship that endured over the decades. When Lex Thompson bought an NFL franchise in 1940, it was Steve Owen who urged him to hire Greasy Neale.

  On Friday, October 8, the Steagles got some good news: Speedy halfback Johnny Butler had failed his Army physical. He was 4-F due to poor eyesight and bad knees. (Like Bill Paschal, Butler had had the cartilage in one knee removed.) The next night Butler was in the starting lineup against the Giants.

  More than 15,000 fans passed through Shibe Park’s creaky turnstiles to see the game, a nearly 40 percent increase over the previous week’s attendance. The Steagles’ brain trust—Bert Bell, Art Rooney, and Harry Thayer—must have been very pleased. Sure, part of the increase was due to the end of the baseball season. But undoubtedly the team’s electrifying performance against Brooklyn had piqued fan interest. It also didn’t hurt that Lex Thompson was there with his latest girlfriend, a popular B-movie actress named Anne Shirley.

  Among Eagles fans, Thompson’s gossip-column lifestyle was as much discussed as the team’s performance on the field. The millionaire owner was constantly surrounded by an ever-changing retinue of famous and near-famous lovers, drinking buddies, and hangers-on. His appearance at a game never hurt the gate.

  The Steagles won the coin toss and elected to receive. Johnny Butler took the opening kickoff in the end zone. He ran out a few yards, then lateraled the ball to Jack Hinkle, who looked upfield to see a wall of blue jerseys converging on him. Hinkle was hell bent on having a good game. He wanted to show Giants coach Steve Owen a thing or two.

  At Syracuse University, Hinkle had been an unheralded blocking back who rarely carried the ball. He signed with the Giants in 1940, but was cut after three games.

  “I got into an argument with Steve Owen and they released me,” Hinkle recalled. When asked what the argument was about, all Hinkle would say was, “Something asinine.”

  In 1941, Hinkle played for a team called the New York Americans in one of the many incarnations of an American Football League. The season ended just in time for him to sign with the Eagles for the final game of the 1941 season—at Washington on Pearl Harbor Day. Though drafted into the Army, he was discharged after a year because of his stomach ulcers. The Eagles took him back in 1943, and in training camp Greasy Neale turned him into a running back instead of a blocking back, which delighted Hinkle. He wasn’t very fast—“They clocked me by the calendar,” he liked to joke—but he was tenacious.

  “When he gets in a game, he’s a slambang player,” Neale said. “A bull, that’s what he is.” He also had a good pedigree: One of his distant cousins was Clarke Hinkle, a legendary Green Bay fullback.

  It was also during the Steagles training camp that Hinkle met an 18-year-old brunette from Overbrook named Joane Haggerty. They would marry the following February. In the stands, Joane would cheer him on so vociferously—“LET’S GO, HONEY!”—that his teammates eventually gave Hinkle the nickname “Honey.”

  Yes, 1943 was shaping up to be a very good year for Jack Hinkle. And now he was going to make it even better. As he stood searching for a crack in the onrushing blue wall, Hinkle thought about how good it would feel to show Steve Owen just what he was missing. Then Hinkle dropped the ball. He barely managed to recover his fumble, collapsing on the ball on the six-yard line an instant before the blue wall came crashing down. Hinkle got up, brushed himself off, and sheepishly joined the huddle, where Roy Zimmerman gave him a shot at redemption by calling “41 Outside”—Hinkle’s favorite play.

  Three backs lined up behind Zimmerman. Johnny Butler was on the left. Ben Kish, a six-foot, 200-pound fullback who had recently been discharged from the military after suffering a head injury, lined up directly behind Zimmerman. Hinkle was on the right. Zimmerman took the snap, wheeled to his left, and faked a handoff to Butler. Then he pivoted 180 degrees to his right and stuck the ball in Hinkle’s belly. Hinkle slipped through a crack between Eddie Michaels, the deaf right guard, and Ted Doyle, the right tackle who’d taken the train in from Pittsburgh the night before. By the time the Giants collared him, Hinkle had advanced the ball 37 yards to the 43-yard line. The crowd was going wild.

  Up in the press box, though, Ross Kaufman, the official st
atistician, got the numbers all mixed up. On his scorecard, he mistakenly attributed the 37-yard run to No. 27 (Butler) instead of No. 43 (Hinkle). Officially, Jack Hinkle never ran those 37 yards.

  “I didn’t realize the mistake until the next practice,” Hinkle recalled. “The coach posted the stats and had me for a long gain of 16 yards! I knew that was wrong but I didn’t make a fuss. At the time, it hardly seemed worth correcting.”

  On the next two plays the Steagles were called for penalties, and on the third Zimmerman threw a pass that the Giants’ Len Younce intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Butler fumbled the ensuing kickoff out of the end zone for a touchback, so the Steagles kept possession, but on third down Hinkle attempted a surprise punt, which didn’t surprise the Giants, who blocked it and recovered the ball on the one. Bill Paschal strolled into the end zone on the next play. Less than four minutes into the game the score was 14-0 in favor of the Giants. Jack Hinkle wasn’t making much of an impression on Steve Owen (or anyone else), and the crowd wasn’t going wild anymore. Before the quarter ended, the Steagles had fumbled three more times and had a second punt blocked.

  At the beginning of the second quarter, the Steagles finally put together a drive without a fumble, interception, or blocked punt. From his own 42-yard line, Zimmerman completed a 44-yard pass to Bobby Thurbon, a rookie halfback from the University of Pittsburgh. Then Thurbon and fullback Ben Kish took turns carrying the ball to the four. From there, Ernie Steele followed a Vic Sears block and stepped into the end zone untouched. Zimmerman added the extra point to make the score 14-7.

  Early in the fourth quarter, the Giants nearly made it 21-7. They had a first down on the Phil-Pitt five-yard line, but four times the Steagles smothered Bill Paschal short of the goal line. Then, with less than six minutes remaining in the game, the Steagles tied the score on an 11-yard, fourth-down pass from Zimmerman to Thurbon. On their next possession the Steagles scored again, this time on a 31-yard pass from Zimmerman to rookie end Tom Miller. With less than two minutes left and the Steagles leading 21-14, the Giants threatened to even the score, until Jack Hinkle finally gave Steve Owen something to chew on: Hinkle intercepted a New York pass on his own five-yard line and returned it 91 yards to the New York four. It would be the longest run of his career, and it clinched the game.

  With time winding down, Neale sent Allie Sherman in for Zimmerman at quarterback, with strict instructions to run out the clock. But when Sherman reached the huddle, tackle Ted Doyle had something else in mind.

  “I had found that I could run over the guy opposite me on the line of scrimmage,” Doyle remembered. “So when he [Sherman] came into the huddle, I said to him, ‘Just duck in behind me and we’ll go.’ And so when the ball was snapped he took it and ducked in behind me and we went over for a touchdown.”

  It was a subversive display of camaraderie between a Steeler and an Eagle, one a grizzled veteran, the other a 20-year-old rookie. It was hard for Neale to be too angry, though. He’d finally beaten Steve Owen. The final score was 28-14.

  It was a wild game. The New York Herald Tribune called it “one of the most exciting games the professionals have turned up in a long time.” Rarely has a football team looked as bumbling as the Steagles and still won by two touchdowns. As in the Brooklyn game, all credit was due the linemen: Sears, Schultz, Graves, Michaels, Doyle, and their substitutes. Their average weight was around 215 pounds, small even for the time, and positively lilliputian by modern standards. (The average lineman in the NFL today weighs around 300 pounds.) But the Steagles linemen were moving in perfect synchronicity, each executing his assignment with crisp precision. On offense they blocked flawlessly, performing Greasy Neale’s complicated and highly choreographed T formation to, well, a T. On defense they simply stopped opposing running backs dead in their tracks. They held Bill Paschal to only about 30 yards rushing, and the entire Giants team to just 42 yards. In their first two games the Steagles had allowed just nine rushing yards in 56 rushing attempts—a ridiculously miniscule average of less than six inches per attempt! In fact, the whole team, line and backs, was playing great defense, much to the credit of Walt Kiesling. The Steagles had shut out Brooklyn and held New York to two cheap touchdowns (one was scored on an interception return and the other was the direct result of a blocked punt). For all the attention Neale’s T formation generated, it was Kiesling’s old-fashioned, hard-nosed defense that was largely responsible for the Steagles’ fast start. Tackle Bucko Kilroy, for one, believed Kiesling’s contributions were underappreciated. Kilroy called Kiesling “an innovator” and “the guy who started the basics” of modern NFL defenses.

  The win over the Giants, however, was undeniably ugly. The Steagles’ ten fumbles (half of which the Giants recovered) broke the previous record of eight, first set by the Redskins against the Steelers in 1937 and subsequently tied by five other teams. The Steagles’ record of ten fumbles has since been equaled three times but is still unsurpassed. In all, the Steagles fumbled 14 times in their first two games. One possible explanation: the ball. Both games were played at night, and at the time the NFL used a football that was dyed white (with a black circle painted around each end) for night games, to make it easier for fans and players to see. (Before television, the lighting in ballparks was frequently murky.) Some players complained that the white ball was harder to hold onto than the usual brown ball.

  “I didn’t like it,” Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham once said of the white ball. “The paint they used was slick…. It was very slippery.” But the slippery-ball theory fails to explain why the Steagles’ opponents in the first two games fumbled just five times. (The white ball went the way of the wing formation in 1956, when television networks demanded better lighting in ballparks.) Steagles tackle Bucko Kilroy blamed the T formation for all the fumbles.

  “You have to remember,” he said, “a lot of guys were just learning the T, where you exchange the ball on every play. In the single wing, the halfback takes the snap and runs with it. We exchanged the ball on every play. It took time to straighten that out.”

  Perhaps the numerous fumbles were indicative of the overall quality of play in the NFL in 1943. There was undoubtedly a diminution in talent, as lesser lights were recruited to replace departing stars. Sid Luckman, the Chicago Bears’ star quarterback, said the game slid back “about ten years or so” in 1943, and Walt Kiesling rated the league as “between 30 and 40 percent weaker than in 1942.” Statistics, to some extent, support that view. Between 1941 and 1943 the average number of points per game rose by a touchdown, from 32.9 to 38.9, as seasoned (and deferred) passers like Luckman and the Redskins’ Sammy Baugh took advantage of inexperienced defenses.

  “The caliber of play wasn’t top notch,” admitted Bucko Kilroy years later. “But the games were competitive and … we loved what we were doing.”

  League officials did not pretend the game was what it used to be. Before the 1943 season began, Giants owner Tim Mara said, “The 4-F boys playing the game this year will make it stand for ‘Fine, fast, furious football!’”

  Whatever its cause, the fumbling had to stop. The Steagles’ next opponent was the Chicago Bears—and they weren’t going to beat the Bears by two touchdowns if they fumbled ten times. Greasy Neale would work on that all week at practice, forcing his backs to “run a gauntlet” of teammates in an exercise designed to teach them, painfully, the price that must be paid to hold onto a football. For the time being, though, both Neale and Walt Kiesling were happy with how things stood: The Steagles were 2-0 and in first place in the Eastern Division.

  After the Giants game, Lex Thompson took the team to Bookbinder’s restaurant to celebrate. He treated them to lobster, which was not rationed and was fast becoming a fashionable alternative to steak, much to the delight of Maine lobstermen.

  Allie Sherman did not join his teammates, however. Feeling a little homesick, he was going back to Brooklyn for the first time since he’d come to Philadelphia for training camp. Right after t
he game, fresh from scoring his first NFL touchdown, he walked the six blocks from Shibe Park to the North Philadelphia train station on Broad Street. While he was waiting on the platform he saw a large group of large men approaching. It was the Giants. Sherman slipped into the background and listened while Steve Owen chewed out his players for losing to such a rinky-dink outfit as the Steagles.

  When he boarded the train, Sherman was careful to avoid the Giants’ car.

  BY NOW, RELATIONS AMONG THE STEAGLES were improving. Their common plight—working long hours in defense jobs all day in addition to playing professional football, a rugged and violent game—helped foster better relations. Mostly, though, the players were just getting to know each other better.

  “I think we all got a little better acquainted and appreciated each other,” said Ray Graves.

  It also helped that nearly the entire team lived together. As part of his effort to make football “a family affair,” Greasy Neale required the players, even the Pittsburghers, to live at the Hotel Philadelphian, an imposing, 600-room edifice on the southwest corner of 39th and Chestnut in West Philadelphia. (The handful of players who owned homes in Philadelphia were exempted from this policy, as was Ted Doyle, who didn’t want to leave his job at the Westinghouse factory and was allowed to commute to games from Pittsburgh.) The hotel was where Neale kept a suite, and where Walt Kiesling lived during the 1943 season. Vic Sears remembered that Neale did not give the players much choice in the matter.