Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  Even for the woeful Dodgers, the attendance for the Steagles game on November 14 was disappointing: 7,614. It was the league’s smallest crowd of the season. One reason was the bitterly cold weather. Another was Sid Luckman. Just 15 miles from Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds was packed with more than 56,000 fans eager to see Luckman and his Chicago Bears square off against the Giants.

  Of all the league’s scheduling problems, the New York situation was the most intractable. Dodgers owner Dan Topping was also the president of the baseball Yankees, and when he bought the football team in 1934 he’d hoped to move it into Yankee Stadium. But Giants owner Tim Mara blocked the move because he felt it would infringe on his franchise’s territory. (The Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were less than a mile apart and within sight of each other.) As a result of their feud, Topping and Mara frequently scheduled their teams at home on the same date, to the detriment of both, but mostly the Dodgers.

  On Sunday morning, Greasy Neale took Allie Sherman aside and told him he would not be the starting quarterback after all. Roy Zimmerman said he felt well enough to play at least part of the game, so Neale had decided to use him—but only on passing plays. Halfback Johnny Butler would move under center and take the snaps on running plays. Sherman was not happy. He thought Neale had made a bad decision. It was, in fact, a staggeringly bad decision, certainly one of the worst of Greasy Neale’s long and storied coaching career. He completely undermined the cornerstone of the T formation—or any formation for that matter: the element of surprise.

  It didn’t take long for the Dodgers to figure out exactly what was going on: When Zimmerman limped gingerly onto the field, the Steagles were going to pass. When Butler lined up at quarterback, they were going to run. The Dodgers adjusted their defense accordingly and, except for a three-yard touchdown run by Bobby Thurbon midway through the first period, they completely shut down the Steagles. Brooklyn scored touchdowns on a one-yard run in the second quarter and a 65-yard pass in the third and won the lackluster game 13-7. The result even surprised Dodgers owner and Marine captain Dan Topping, who had just returned from action in the Pacific and was attending his first game of the season.

  “Why, this Brooklyn team isn’t as bad as I had pictured it to be,” Topping said afterwards. “I did not learn the results until after the first four games had been played, so when the bad news came all at once I expected the worst. But now that I’ve had a look at them, I’d say the boys are pretty fair.” It was the first time Topping had seen his team win a game in person since December 7, 1941, when the Dodgers spoiled Tuffy Leemans Day at the Polo Grounds.

  The Steagles had once again played stellar defense, holding the Dodgers to just 176 total yards, but on offense Neale’s strategy had failed miserably. Roy Zimmerman completed just one pass. He also threw an interception that led to the first Brooklyn touchdown. The feeling in the locker room after the game was one of utter dejection. Coming so soon after the ecstasy of the Redskins game made the loss doubly hard to take. There was no lack of second-guessing in the papers the next day, and although the criticism was mild compared to today’s vituperative sports radio shows, for the time it was quite pointed. In the Pittsburgh Press, Cecil Muldoon wrote, “There was little doubt today—or all yesterday afternoon for that matter—that the Steagles could have won from the Dodgers if Neale hadn’t kept sending the injured Zimmerman into the game.”

  “It was a heartbreaker for the crippled Steagles to lose,” wrote Jack Sell in the Post-Gazette, “… it would have been better had Zimmy been kept on the sidelines.”

  The fans who went to the Polo Grounds instead of Ebbets Field that day made the right choice. Sid Luckman completed seven touchdown passes to break Sammy Baugh’s two-week-old record as the Bears mauled the Giants 56-7. Not to be upstaged, Baugh set a different record that day: He made four interceptions in the Redskins’ 42-20 declawing of the Lions. Both records have since been equaled, but neither has been broken. By virtue of the Giants loss, the Steagles maintained possession of second place. However, their odds of winning the division had been reduced to the dreaded “mathematical possibility.” Under the headline “DODGERS KNOCK LOCALS OUT OF RACE,” the Philadelphia Daily News erroneously reported the next day that the Steagles had “lost their chance” for the title. It wasn’t true, but unless the Steagles won their remaining three games—and the Redskins fell apart—it would be. The new standings:

  11

  Thanksgiving

  ONE HOT SUMMER DAY IN 1939, somewhere on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio, University of Georgia assistant football coach Bill Hartman pulled his Plymouth into a filling station and asked the attendant to fill the tank and check the oil. Hartman was on his way home from a fruitless recruiting trip. Head coach Wally Butts had sent him north to convince the best high school back in Ohio to play for the Bulldogs, but by the time Hartman reached the kid he’d already decided to go to Ohio State. Now Hartman had a day and a half to figure out how to break the news to Butts. That’s how long the drive back to Athens would take.

  Noticing his Georgia plates, the attendant asked Hartman what had brought him up to Ohio. When Hartman told him, the attendant said, “Well, the best back in the state really lives right down the street here, about three or four blocks.”

  “Who is that?” Hartman asked.

  “Well,” said the attendant, “that’s Frank Sinkwich.”

  Two and a half years later, on New Year’s Day 1942, five-foot-ten, 185-pound Frank Sinkwich, now a junior at Georgia, passed for three touchdowns and ran for another as the Bulldogs demolished Texas Christian 33-7 to win the Orange Bowl. Exactly one year after that, Sinkwich scored the only touchdown in a 9-0 Georgia win over UCLA before 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl. “Fireball” Sinkwich ended his college career with 2,331 yards passing and 2,271 yards rushing—4,602 total yards, 322 more than Red Grange had amassed at Illinois. Sinkwich also passed for 30 touchdowns and rushed for 30 more. He won the 1942 Heisman Trophy—the first player from the Southeastern Conference so honored.

  On April 8, 1943, the Detroit Lions made him the first overall pick in the NFL draft, but Frank Sinkwich had a prior engagement—with the Marine Corps. On Thursday, July 15, he reported for boot camp at Parris Island. By the following Monday his feet were blistered and sore from all the marching.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Sinkwich. “I knew it was tough.” If he survived another six and a half weeks, he’d be sent to Quantico for officer training school. His goal, Sinkwich said, was to get the war over “as soon as possible” so he could play pro football. It wouldn’t be soon enough for Lions owner Fred Mandel. His team desperately needed Frank Sinkwich.

  The Lions joined the NFL in 1930 as the Portsmouth Spartans. Portsmouth sits on the north side of the Ohio River in southernmost Ohio, just across from Kentucky. In 1930 it was an industrial town of 42,000 with a passion for football. Led by coach George “Potsy” Clark, the Spartans finished second in the league in 1931 and barely missed capturing the title the following season, losing the famous and controversial (in Portsmouth, anyway) indoor championship game to the Bears.

  By the 1933 season the Spartans and the Green Bay Packers were the only two “town teams” left in a league that just seven years earlier included franchises in Pottsville, Duluth, Dayton, Racine, Canton, and Hammond (Indiana). The Spartans and the Packers had something else in common: Both clubs were hemorrhaging cash. In Green Bay local residents kicked in $15,000 to save the Packers, reorganizing the team as a publicly owned nonprofit corporation with a local board of directors. (It is still the only publicly owned pro sports team in North America.) To raise cash the team could periodically sell stock. If the team was sold, the profits were to go to the local American Legion post. (In 1997 the beneficiary was changed to the team’s charitable arm, the Green Bay Packers Foundation.) Portsmouth, although its population was slightly larger than Green Bay’s, was much harder hit by the Depression and simply couldn’t raise that kind of money. The city’s love of foo
tball was undiminished, but few could afford the luxury of paying fifty cents to watch it, much less buy shares in a team.

  “Hell,” recalled Earl “Dutch” Clark, the team’s star passer, “we’d get 4,000 or 5,000 people out to watch practice and at game time we’d be lucky if we had 2,000.” By the end of the 1933 season the team couldn’t meet its payroll.

  Early the following year, a radio executive named George A. “Dick” Richards swooped in and bought the franchise, moving it to Detroit and renaming it the Lions, a nod to the city’s baseball team, the Tigers. The change of scenery did not diminish the team’s performance. With Potsy Clark still at the helm, the Lions won the 1935 championship. In 1940, Richards sold the team to Fred Mandel, a Chicago department store magnate, for $200,000. Nineteen forty was also Potsy Clark’s last year as head coach and the Lions finished 5-5-1. In 1941 they finished 4-6-1—the team’s first losing season since its inaugural campaign in Portsmouth. In 1942 the bottom fell out: 0-11. Age and war had taken their toll. With their best players retired and no replacements available, the Lions were hapless. They scored only five touchdowns all season and never scored more than seven points in a single game. Even worse, their average attendance fell 40 percent from the previous season, to 14,000 a game.

  In 1943, Mandel asked Charles “Gus” Dorias to right the ship. Dorias was something of a football revolutionary. Playing for Notre Dame against Army on November 1, 1913, he completed 14 of 17 passes for 243 yards and three touchdowns. One completion went for 40 yards—the longest passing play in football history to that time. Never before had the forward pass been used so effectively. In 1925 Dorias became the head coach at the University of Detroit, a position he held for 18 seasons (17 of them winning). When the school suspended its football program for the duration, Fred Mandel immediately hired him to coach the Lions.

  Dorias was a proponent of what (for the time) was considered wide-open football. Although his preferred formation was the Notre Dame box (naturally), his teams threw a lot of passes—even deep in their own territory, a risk that most coaches considered insane.

  Although Dorias faced a major rebuilding effort when he took over the team, the Lions were not completely bereft of talent. They had Harry “Hippity” Hopp, a decent back who could run as well as pass. They also had Alex “Wojie” Wojciechowicz, who had been one of Fordham University’s famed “Seven Blocks of Granite.” Quick and versatile, the five-eleven, 217-pound Wojciechowicz played center on offense and linebacker on defense. He was renowned for his vicious hits on pass receivers. Still, it would take more than Hippity Hopp and Wojie to make the Lions roar again.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, Gus Dorias got some very good news.

  As boot camp progressed, Frank Sinkwich’s feet never got better. They were always sore. It didn’t seem unusual at first: Recruits’ feet always hurt. But after a month, Sinkwich was still in agony. One morning he fell out on sick call and limped to the dispensary, where an examination revealed something missed in his induction physical: flat feet. As they prevented a marine “from properly performing his duty”—i.e., marching—the Marine Corps considered flat feet a disqualifying condition. On September 11, 1943, less than two months after his induction, Sinkwich was given an honorable discharge for physical disability. It was an ironic and slightly humiliating turn for the Heisman Trophy winner and first overall pick in the NFL draft, and Sinkwich promised himself he would somehow find a way to get back into the service. In the meantime, he would play pro football.

  On September 14, three days after his discharge, Sinkwich signed a contract with the Lions. Five days after that, Sinkwich made his professional debut against the Chicago Cardinals. Although he had practiced with the team for just two days, Sinkwich threw a 17-yard touchdown pass in Detroit’s 35-17 victory. In their first game of the season the Lions had managed to score as many touchdowns as they had in all of the previous campaign.

  The schedule-makers were kind to the Lions. The following week they played Brooklyn and dispatched the Dodgers with ease, 27-0. Reality intervened on October 3 in the form of the Chicago Bears, though the loss was not as substantial as might have been expected: 27-21. By the time they met the Steagles in Pittsburgh on November 21, Detroit’s record was 3-5-1—not spectacular, but a drastic improvement over the previous season. (Due to the league’s unusual scheduling, their game against the Steagles would be the Lions’ tenth and final contest of the season. By contrast, the Redskins and Giants had played just six each.)

  Frank Sinkwich had lived up to his advance billing. He led the Lions in rushing and passing. Harry Hopp was the team’s leading scorer, primarily as the beneficiary of Sinkwich’s passes. If you discounted that 0-0 game against the Giants in the quagmire, the Lions were averaging three touchdowns a game. Not bad for a team that had not scored more than seven points in a single game the previous season. Improved, too, was attendance: at 30,750 per game, the Lions were averaging more than twice as many fans as in 1942.

  The Steagles were not taking the Lions lightly, particularly after the previous week’s fiasco in Brooklyn. They still had a lot to play for. If they lost, all hope of catching the Redskins and winning the division would be lost as well. There was also second place to think about. The third-place Giants were only percentage points behind the Steagles, and this week they were playing the Chicago Cardinals, practically an automatic win.

  Second place was not just a moral victory. The runner-up in each division got a share of the championship game pot. A year earlier, each of the Steelers had collected $108.06 for finishing second in the East. That was nothing to sneeze at. The Steagles were also eager to maintain their standing as the best defensive team in the league, having yielded to their opponents an average of just 182.1 yards per game. There were personal goals to achieve as well. Heading into the game, Jack Hinkle was the sixth leading rusher in the league with 263 yards, and Johnny Butler was right behind him in seventh place with 256. A rushing title was not out of the question for either player.

  Just before the game, the Steagles got some good news: Lions center/linebacker Alex Wojciechowicz would not be able to play due to an injured knee. As far as the Steagles were concerned, his timing was perfect. Their receivers could breathe a little easier. The Steagles, on the other hand, would be at full strength. The gash in quarterback Roy Zimmerman’s leg had healed so well that he was expected to play the entire game. Only Ernie Steele, who had suffered a bad charley horse in the Dodgers game, was questionable.

  Steelers co-owner Art Rooney was hoping even harder than usual for a big crowd for what would be the Steagles’ final appearance at Forbes Field. Bert Bell had been ribbing him mercilessly about the record-breaking attendance at the Redskins game in Philadelphia two weeks earlier. Ever since the two men had become partners after the 1940 season, Bell, the Philadelphian, had chided Rooney, the Pittsburgher, about Philadelphia’s superiority as a football city. When he saw the crowds waiting to get into Shibe Park before the Redskins game, Rooney had moaned sarcastically, “I was hoping for a nice little rain, but look how the sun is shining. I can hear Bell poppin’ off already.” Rooney even joked about going door to door to ensure an impressive turnout for the Lions game. He didn’t need to. Interest in the game was high in Pittsburgh, mainly because it marked the local debut of Frank Sinkwich, who hailed from just across the border in Youngstown. At least a thousand fans from Sinkwich’s hometown were expected to attend the game.

  Rooney couldn’t have asked for better weather on Sunday, November 21. It was an unusually clear, crisp day in Pittsburgh, and when the Lions kicked off to the Steagles at 2:30 that afternoon the stands were filled with more than 23,000 fans, 7,000 more than had seen the Steagles’ previous game at Forbes Field. They were treated to what one sportswriter called “one of the wildest games ever played in the National Football League.” High up in the University of Pittsburgh’s 42-story Cathedral of Learning building, the school’s basketball coach, Henery “Cliff” Carlson, was settling in fo
r an afternoon’s work when he went to a window and glanced down at Forbes Field. The game was just getting under way:

  There was the kickoff and another play, I believe. Then suddenly a backfield man was streaking out in the open. Afterwards I learned that was Jack Hinkle loose on a 56-yard run with Frankie Sinkwich tackling him from behind. Somehow, I sensed that this was to be “the ball game” of the year. I made a beeline for the elevator, borrowed an overcoat from a friend and rushed to the ballpark. My hunch was right, too. That was some battle.

  The Lions scored touchdowns on a 98-yard kickoff return, a two-yard run, an 88-yard pass-and-lateral, a 71-yard pass, and a one-yard run—five in all. The Steagles’ touchdowns were less spectacular but equally numerous: a four-yard run, a one-yard run, a two-yard run, a seven-yard pass, and another two-yard run. It was an offensive display rarely seen before in pro football. The ten total touchdowns were just one short of the league record at the time. The lead changed hands four times. It was a game that either team could have won. And it all came down to an extra point.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF KICKING IN FOOTBALL has waxed and waned. Before 1900 a field goal was actually worth more points (five) than a touchdown (four). (A kicked goal after a touchdown was worth two points.) Players were prized for their kicking abilities, a vestige of the game’s hazy origins in soccer and rugby. Most players employed the dropkick, where the ball is dropped and booted at the moment it hits the ground. Since the ball was shaped like a watermelon, it bounced true and was easy to kick. Stories of early pros dropkicking field goals of 50 yards or more are common (though difficult to verify). But by the time the National Football League was formed in 1920, the touchdown (six points) had long supplanted the field goal (three points) as the preferred mode of scoring, and by 1932 kicking had fallen so out of favor that just six field goals were made all season—an average of only one every ten games!