Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  The previous day’s winds had died down, and the weather that Sunday was clear and cool, a delicious day for football. At two o’clock the Bears’ Bob Snyder kicked off to the Steagles. Roy Zimmerman returned the kick to the Phil-Pitt 38. On first down, halfback Ernie Steele carried the ball two yards to the 40. On second down, Zimmerman tossed a long pass to Steele, who caught the ball on the Chicago 24 and ran it the rest of the way into the end zone. Zimmerman added the extra point, and just 80 seconds into the game the score was 7-0 Steagles. Wrigley Field was stunned into silence, but back at the Hotel Philadelphian loud shrieks of joy could be heard coming from one of the suites. As they did whenever the Steagles played away from Philadelphia, the players’ wives had gathered to listen to the game on the radio.

  After Steele’s touchdown, Zimmerman kicked off to the Bears’ Dante Magnani. Magnani had played for the Cleveland Rams in 1942. He was among the players distributed to the remaining clubs when the Rams folded for the season. The Bears literally picked his name out of a hat. Magnani took the kickoff on his own four-yard line. Somewhere around the 20 he burst through a wave of green-shirted Steagles and sprinted down the sideline. At the Phil-Pitt 12 he barely outran Ernie Steele’s desperate lunge. After that, Magnani could have run into the dugout, through the locker room, and all the way down Addison Street to the lake, and still no Steagle would have caught him.

  Magnani’s 96-yard kickoff return opened the floodgates. The Bears scored six more touchdowns before the Steagles tacked on two meaningless fourth-quarter scores. The final was Chicago 48, Phil-Pitt 21. It was the most points the Bears had ever racked up against either the Steelers or the Eagles. (The fact that it was also the most points either Pennsylvania squad had ever scored against Chicago was no consolation.) The Bears scored three touchdowns on passes, two on runs, one on a kickoff return, and one on a punt return. They rushed for 205 yards. The Steagles rushed for just 60. The Phil-Pitt line, so ballyhooed entering the game, “fell apart like a one-hoss shay,” according to the Philadelphia Record. Al Wistert, who started the game at right tackle, took some of the blame. It was the rookie’s first NFL game back in his hometown. “I got over-anxious,” he recalled.

  My main responsibility was to close the inside gap, between me and the guard next to me. Well, after a couple plays, I figured I would try to fake inside then slide outside, to stop the runner going that way, see. Well, Luckman figured out what was going on and they ran inside me a couple times. The linebacker expected me to close that gap, so they got good gains. I was going against Greasy’s orders and he gave me hell after the game. He said, “Where were you today? You were supposed to stop the inside run!” And I said, “Well, I tried to slide outside. I guess I gambled and lost.” And he said, “You didn’t lose; the team lost!”

  It wasn’t all Wistert’s fault, of course. There was plenty of blame to go around. None of the linemen performed well; it was almost as if they’d forgotten how to block and tackle. The running backs spun their wheels all day. Roy Zimmerman completed just six of 24 passes. (Sid Luckman, meanwhile, completed 13 of 25.) The defeat was total. In the Pittsburgh Press, Cecil Muldoon called it a “humiliation.” To Jack Sell of the Post-Gazette, the game was “a long story of disaster.”

  “They beat the pants off us,” was how Ernie Steele put it. Ted Doyle agreed.

  “We got the hell beat out of us,” said Doyle. “You try to forget that type of game.”

  The loss distressed Greasy Neale profoundly. In the locker room after the game, he lambasted the squad.

  “You can’t win ball games in this league by playing high school football!” he screamed. It was a long train ride home. At least the Steagles wouldn’t have to play the Bears again—unless they met in the championship game, a possibility that suddenly seemed much more remote.

  In Milwaukee, the Redskins had won their second straight game, throttling the Packers 33-7. And in New York, the Giants had clobbered the Dodgers 20-0, with rookie Bill Paschal scoring two touchdowns. The Steagles weren’t in first place anymore. The standings now read:

  At practice the following Tuesday, quarterback Roy Zimmerman tried to rally the dispirited Steagles.

  “Boys,” he told them, “we lost a ball game Sunday—but we’ve won two. We made mistakes against the Bears, plenty of them. Let’s get out there now and find out why we made them, and what we can do about it.”

  The mistakes needed to be corrected quickly: In five days the Steagles would play the Giants, and the Giants had revenge on their minds.

  ON THE MORNING OF SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, the Steagles took a train to New York to play the Giants. Due to a shortage of hotel rooms for “nonessential” travelers (and to save money), the team would return to Philadelphia immediately after the game. The Giants were eager to avenge their opening game loss to the Steagles, though Giants head coach Steve Owen wasn’t about to give them anything to post on their locker room wall.

  “The Steagles have a real good team,” he said a few days before the game, adding that he merely hoped the Giants would “give a better account” of themselves than they had a fortnight earlier. Among the bookies the Steagles were adjudged “slight favorites.”

  It was a cold, blustery day, but 42,681 fans filled the Polo Grounds anyway, setting attendance records for a Giants home opener and for any Steelers or Eagles game anywhere ever. Since the stadium was considered an attractive enemy target, certain wartime precautions were in place. Each of the 56,000 seats was labeled with instructions for fans to follow in the event of an aerial attack. Some were labeled “Follow Green Arrow,” some “Follow Red Arrow,” and some “Sit Tight.” Fans, the game program noted, were “expected to comply with these instructions” during a bombardment.

  In the first quarter the Giants scored touchdowns on a blocked punt return and a long pass. Early in the second quarter, Roy Zimmerman, who had badly bruised his hip making a block early in the game, limped off the field and never returned to the game. The Steagles were thoroughly demoralized. On the sidelines, Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling seethed. Neale prowled the sidelines constantly, his trench coat flapping behind him. From the opening kickoff until the final gun he harangued his players and the officiating crew in equal measure, chain-smoking all the while, littering the field with the butts. When Neale suffered a heart attack during a game late in the 1942 season, the only surprise was that it was mild.

  Walt Kielsing, dowdy in a baseball cap and sweatshirt, was no less demonstrative. His team could do little right in his eyes, even when it was winning, but especially when it was losing, and after every play he screamed at the offending parties in a manner that disheartened rather than motivated. Together on the sidelines, the two ranting coaches made for an odd sight, each always roaming and spitting invective, seemingly unaware of the other. They rarely interacted during a game, and when they did the tone was accusatory.

  “They would blame each other when something went wrong,” said tackle Bucko Kilroy. Occasionally an unlucky player would find himself the object of the two coaches’ wraths simultaneously, leaving him no choice but to ignore both.

  Nothing went the Steagles’ way that afternoon at the Polo Grounds. On those rare occasions when they did make a good play, it would inevitably be nullified by a penalty. It almost seemed like the cards were stacked against them.

  “I had a buddy, Len Younce, that played for New York,” said Vic Sears. “And every time we made a touchdown or a big play they [the officials] would give us a penalty. And he told me after the game, ‘You couldn’t win.’ And that’s the way it was. You couldn’t win. And the coach [Steve Owen] played golf with Greasy and told him the same thing: ‘You couldn’t win.’”

  It would be hard to blame the officials for this debacle, though. In the second quarter the Giants scored two more touchdowns, and in the third they scored two more—six in all. Bill Paschal ran for two, Emery Nix and Tuffy Leemans each passed for one, and two blocked punts were returned for scores. (Leemans, who had postponed his retire
ment after Pearl Harbor, would finally hang up his spikes after the 1943 season.)

  Allie Sherman, who played 55 minutes, performed admirably in relief of Roy Zimmerman. He passed for more than 100 yards and steered the Steagles to two touchdowns late in the fourth quarter, but by then the game had long been decided. The Giants won, 42-14.

  Once again the Steagles line was terrible. In the first two games it had been a brick wall. Now, wrote Cecil Muldoon, it was “a dish of jelly.” Muldoon’s sarcastic lead in the Pittsburgh Press the next day neatly summed up the Steagles’ plummeting fortunes:

  NEW YORK, October 25—Lost, strayed or stolen—one offense and one defense. Finder please return to Greasy Neale, Phil-Pitt coach, Philadelphia, Pa. Also liberal reward for anybody sending in book on fundamentals of football.

  The Steagles’ collapse mystified the team, as well as the sportswriters who covered it.

  “No one,” wrote Chet Smith in the Press, “has been able to offer a satisfactory answer as to what made the Steagles come apart after they had taken the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Giants in the first two games…. There is no adequate manner to explain a net difference of 42 points in the first and second contests with the Giants.”

  In the Philadelphia Record, Red Smith called the Steagles a “Jekyll-Hyde combination.” Jack Sell’s theory made as much sense as any. Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he noted how the team’s first two games were played at night and its second two during the day: “The Pittsburgh-Philadelphia Steagles are a peculiar bunch of pro gridders who seem allergic to daylight and sunshine.”

  After the game, the coaches threatened unspecified “changes” unless “some of the players [showed] an improvement.” An unnamed “spokesman”—probably Greasy Neale—told the papers, “We would be better off to have fewer players and have men who really wanted to win—not just go through the motions.” The Steagles’ collapse threatened the team’s fragile unity. Al Wistert for one had had enough of Neale’s profane rants:

  At the University of Michigan, the coaching staff was a gang of high class people. I never heard any cursing out there on the field. And of course I was raised mainly by my mother and my sisters and I didn’t hear any cursing around home. Greasy Neale, every other word he used was a swear word! And that shocked me and it threw me for a loop, so for that first year, I just despised the man, really, and I couldn’t get along with him. He wanted to know what was wrong with me. I was supposed to be an all-American football player. “Now what’s going on here?” he said. “You’re not performing that way.” And I said, “I just can’t play football for you. You don’t know how to handle men. And I can never play football for you.” Well, we never spoke the rest of the season.

  To fans the team was beginning to resemble a cross between the same old Steelers and the same old Eagles: The worst of both worlds. With the Redskins winning again, 13-7 over the Cardinals, the Steagles were now in third place, a long fall from the lofty perch they’d occupied just two weeks earlier.

  A fresh start was possible, though. The following week the Steagles would return to Pittsburgh to play their first regular season game at Forbes Field. And, fortunately for them, their opponent was the Chicago Cardinals.

  10

  Strikes

  ALTHOUGH THEY WERE OUTNUMBERED by the Eagles on the team, several Steelers made key contributions to the Steagles, notably end Tony Bova, halfback Johnny Butler, and tackle Ted Doyle. Yet many Pittsburghers felt their team’s contributions to the combine were being ignored by Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love seemed to be conveniently forgetting the fact that it shared its football team with the Steel City. Pittsburgh Press sports editor Chet Smith noted that Eagles owner Lex Thompson had even ordered the team’s radio announcer, By Saam, to refrain from uttering the words “Pittsburgh” or “Steagles” on the air when the team played the Bears in Chicago.

  “There was not the slightest suggestion on the air that the eleven on the field was a combination of two squads,” Smith wrote, “but in one way, the fact that the ears and minds of the good Quakers were not besmirched was entirely satisfactory, for they had to accept full responsibility for the awful shellacking that was administered.”

  The merger certainly brought the complex relationship between the two cities into sharp focus.

  “In Philadelphia,” Smith complained, “the merger has received virtually no recognition. There they are known as the Eagles and that is that.” It was true. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Art Morrow dismissed the setup as a “business merger only,” and, while the Inquirer and the city’s evening paper, the Bulletin, tended to call the team “Eagles-Steelers” on first reference in stories, the papers reverted to “Eagles” in subsequent references. James W. Cururin, a Steel City soldier stationed in Maryland, wrote the Post-Gazette to decry the short shrift given the Steelers.

  “I would like to know why Philadelphia papers I get here don’t give Pittsburgh any credit for a pro football team,” he wrote. “All I read about is the ‘Philadelphia Eagles.’ Why not give Pittsburgh some credit?”

  Although they share the same state and are connected by the Pennsylvania Turnpike, America’s first superhighway, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are divided, physically and psychologically, by the Allegheny Mountains, a sandstone curtain that bisects the state longitudinally. Today the Alleghenies can be easily traversed on the turnpike, but as recently as the nineteenth century the mountains were an insuperable obstacle to the westward expansion of the United States. As a result, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have quite distinct histories and personalities. In the mid 1700s, while the Founding Fathers were plotting a revolution in Philadelphia, Fort Duquesne (as Pittsburgh was then known) was little more than a swamp, “much infested with venomous Serpents and Muskeetose.” Philadelphia was a sophisticated colonial capital, rapidly emerging as the second most influential English-speaking city in the world. Fort Duquesne was a French-controlled outpost in the wilderness, 20 days away on horseback.

  In 1758 John Forbes captured the fort for the British and renamed it in honor of Prime Minister William Pitt. The British took advantage of the area’s most abundant natural resource, a resource they knew well from home: coal. Soon coal-fired glass-and ironworks were producing supplies for the pioneers making their way west. By 1817 Pittsburgh boasted more than 250 factories, but it wasn’t until the 1870s, when the iron horse finally conquered the Alleghenies, that the city really began to grow, its factories at last connected to the Eastern seaboard. Between 1850 and 1900 Pittsburgh’s population rose nearly sevenfold, from 46,601 to 321,616. By the time the United States entered World War II, Pittsburgh was the nation’s tenth largest city, with a population approaching 700,000. Philadelphia was the third largest, with nearly two million inhabitants.

  Both cities were major industrial centers during the war, but of two very different kinds. While Pittsburgh manufactured the raw materials (aluminum, glass, iron, steel), Philadelphia made the finished products (ships, light tanks, airplane parts, ammunition). Pittsburgh was aligned with the great manufacturing centers of the Midwest, Cleveland and Detroit, and its culture was deeply influenced by the waves of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe whose labors made possible its remarkable prosperity. Philadelphia was decidedly more Eastern, and still shaped by the patrician values of its WASP elite.

  Their coal was different, too. Eastern Pennsylvania’s homes and factories were fueled by anthracite, a hard coal that burns much cleaner than the softer bituminous variety prevalent west of the Alleghenies. As a result, Pittsburgh was dirtier than Philadelphia, and self-conscious about it. Philadelphians, meanwhile, struggled with their own perceived shortcomings. Wedged between New York and Washington, the two most important cities in the country, Philadelphia could not help but feel inferior. The city’s glories were long past. Even the skyline was stunted: A gentlemen’s agreement forbade the construction of buildings taller than the 500-foot tower of city hall. In 1940, the renowned Philadelphia architect and urba
n planner Edmund Bacon called his hometown “the worst, most backward, stupid city that I ever heard of.”

  Considering their disparate histories and personalities, it’s not surprising that the merger of their football teams presented certain difficulties. Philadelphia ignored Pittsburgh’s contributions, and Pittsburgh didn’t like it. Yet, to a remarkable degree, the Steagles also united the two cities, and in a way that geography and politics never could. In some tiny ways, the Steagles overcame the differences between their two hometowns. The “Phil.-Pitt.” that appeared in the agate type of the NFL standings in sports pages represented a breakthrough of sorts. The two cities shared in the unexpected joy of the team’s two wins, and commiserated in the misery of the two losses.

  “It is a compliment to the club that both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh claim the eleven as its own,” wrote Havey Boyle in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “They are in [a] better position than Charley Case, the one-time vaudevillian, who said that two cities had a row about his birth place. Chicago insisted he was born in New York and New York insisted he was a Chicagoan.”

  BEFORE A CHICAGO CARDINALS WORKOUT one day in early October 1943, Clint Wager, a six-foot-six-inch end, was practicing his punting. When a teammate called out to him unexpectedly, Wager was startled. He missed the ball completely and his knee smashed into his forehead. He went into the clubhouse, where the Cardinals’ head coach, Phil Handler, “noticed the forehead was dented” and urged him to go to the hospital. X-rays revealed a hairline fracture. By missing the ball and cracking his own skull, Clint Wager neatly (if painfully) epitomized the laughably inept Cardinals franchise.