Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  Kicking enjoyed a brief renaissance when the goalposts were moved forward to the goal line in 1933, but it took a big step backward the following year, when the shape of the ball was changed to encourage more forward passing.

  The maximum circumference around the short axis—the middle of the ball—was reduced to 21.25 inches. That was 1.75 inches slimmer than the ball that was used in the 1920s. (The maximum circumference around the long axis was unchanged at 28.5 inches.) The new, bullet-shaped ball—the familiar prolate spheroid—was much easier to throw, but it was nearly impossible to dropkick. Dropkicking specialists faded from the game. Detroit’s Dutch Clark was the last player to dropkick a field goal in the NFL, in a game against the Cardinals on September 19, 1937. And until Doug Flutie of the New England Patriots did it as a stunt in a game on New Year’s Day 2006, the last player to drop-kick an extra point successfully was the Bears’ Ray McLean in the 1941 championship game.

  By 1943, the familiar placekick—where the ball is snapped to a kneeling holder who places it upright on the ground for the kicker—was the only means employed to score points by foot. Not that it was employed very often. Green Bay’s Don Hutson led the league in field goals in 1943—with three. And with coaches underutilizing free substitution and rosters reduced by the war, there was no room for a kicking specialist. The duty fell to players as a secondary responsibility. It was an afterthought.

  Some of the most renowned kickers in league history played other positions primarily. Don Hutson was an end, the Cleveland Browns’ Lou Groza was a tackle, and George Blanda, who played for four teams between 1949 and 1975, was a quarterback. And they kicked the ball straight on, with their toes. It was a practical, unpretentious style. It wasn’t until rosters were expanded in the 1960s that teams began hiring kicking “specialists,” often Europeans who kicked the football the same way they kicked a soccer ball. Pete Gogolak, who was signed by the Buffalo Bills in 1964, was the first soccer-style kicker in the pros. The son of Hungarian refugees, Gogolak played football only because his high school in Ogdensburg, New York, had no soccer team. Soccer-style kickers proved so accurate that in 1974 the goalposts were returned to the back of the end zone.

  WITH THE STEAGLES LEADING 14-7 late in the second quarter, the Lions mounted an 11-play, 64-yard drive that culminated with Elmer Hackney plunging over the goal line from the two. The two teams lined up for the extra point. Detroit’s kicker was a six-foot, 234-pound lineman named Augie Lio, who, despite his bulk, was fairly accurate. He converted 21 of 23 extra point attempts in 1943, a success rate of 91 percent, not far off the league average of 93 percent. (Today the success rate is 99 percent—and the goalposts are ten yards farther away.) The ball was snapped. Ernie Steele—who wasn’t even expected to play because of a charley horse—slipped through a gap in the Detroit line. He raised his meaty right hand and the ball deflected off it.

  “I remember blockin’ that kick,” Steele said. “I remember goin’ up and getting the ball.” The half ended with the score 14-13 Steagles.

  Halfway through the third period the Lions were leading 20-14 when the Steagles engineered a 67-yard drive that ended with a two-yard Bobby Thurbon touchdown run. Roy Zimmerman converted the extra point, but the Steagles were offside. The ball was moved five yards back and Zimmerman had to try again. His second attempt sailed wide of the uprights, but this time it was the Lions who were offside. The ball was moved five yards forward to its original position. Zimmerman’s third kick was perfect, neither team was offside, and the score was 21-20 Steagles. Each team scored two more touchdowns in the fourth quarter, successfully converting the extra points each time. The Steagles won the game, 35-34. William “Red” Friesell, a retired NFL referee who’d officiated the Bears’ 73-0 win in the 1940 championship game, watched the game in the press box.

  “I guess I’ve seen everything now,” Friesell said as the final gun sounded.

  Art Rooney couldn’t have asked for a better way to end the season in Pittsburgh.

  “I’ve waited ten years for a game like that,” he said, “and I’m certainly glad it happened this season.”

  Jack Hinkle had his best game of the season, rushing for 132 yards, enough to move him into third place among the league leaders. But Johnny Butler stayed right on his tail, rushing 55 yards to move up to fourth place. On defense, the Steagles surrendered 379 total yards and their ranking dropped from first to third behind the Redskins and the Bears. Still, they held Frank Sinkwich to negative yards rushing, and he completed just seven of 11 passes for 125 yards, no touchdowns, and two interceptions.

  It was an exhilarating victory. The feeling in the steamy locker room afterwards was the opposite of the previous week at Ebbets Field. But there was disappointing news from Washington: Even with Sammy Baugh sidelined with an abscessed tooth and a bruised knee, the Redskins still managed to upset the Bears 21-7. It was Chicago’s first regular season defeat in 23 games. The star of the game was Baugh’s substitute, George Cafego, whom the Redskins had purchased from the Dodgers for $100 a week earlier. If he hadn’t been traded, it would have been Roy Zimmerman’s chance to shine in Washington. But he would get that opportunity the following Sunday, when the Steagles played the Redskins at Griffith Stadium.

  As expected, the Giants easily dismissed the Cardinals, 24-13, to keep pace with the Steagles in the battle for second place:

  The following Thursday, November 25, was Thanksgiving Day. In Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Chiang Kai-shek to coordinate operations in South Asia. Roosevelt and Churchill also spent part of the day preparing for their upcoming meeting with Stalin in Tehran. That night Roosevelt hosted a feast for Churchill that included two huge turkeys.

  “Let us make it a family affair,” Roosevelt said as he carved the birds, which he had brought from Washington for the occasion. After dinner, the president offered a toast.

  “Large families are usually more closely united than small ones,” he said, raising his glass, “and so this year, with the peoples of the United Kingdom in our family, we are a large family, and more united than ever before. I propose a toast to this unity, and long may it continue!”

  Then a military band entertained the guests and played the requests of Roosevelt (“Home on the Range”) and Churchill (“Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”). Roosevelt even sang “a little ditty of his own composition,” the Associated Press reported. It was in the key of E flat but the words and music were unrecorded.

  “I had never seen the President more gay,” Churchill later recalled.

  “All in all,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, “it was a delightful evening, one that would remain a high point in Churchill’s mind for years.”

  Around the world, America’s ten million servicemen marked the holiday much less extravagantly. The Office of the Quartermaster General had promised every soldier, sailor, and marine “at least a pound of turkey” on Thanksgiving. Nearly two million birds were procured to keep that promise. On battleships and in submarines, on battlefields and in boot camps, America’s troops—“the best fed fighters in the world,” as the War Department liked to brag—enjoyed roasted turkey with all the trimmings, including cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (though the side dishes were often of the canned or dehydrated variety).

  Even on the central Pacific island of Tarawa, which had been captured just two days earlier after four days of brutal combat and at the cost of 1,000 American lives (and more than 4,000 Japanese and Korean lives), the exhausted and bedraggled troops were fed turkey dinners, which were ferried ashore on landing boats.

  “We even got ice cream,” marveled one marine.

  The turkey promise was impossible to fulfill absolutely, of course. On board the U.S.S. Wake Island, newly commissioned and docked for supplying at Astoria, Oregon, sailors had to settle for Virginia baked ham. But, in a remarkable and commendable logistical achievement, practically every serviceman was served a special meal.

  Back home, turkeys were almost
impossible to find. The OPA had banned all sales of the birds in August to allow the military to stock up for Thanksgiving. The ban was lifted in late October, but by then all supplies were depleted. Turkeys, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the day before Thanksgiving, simply “weren’t to be had.” Across the country homemakers descended on meat and poultry markets, vainly searching for the birds. The owner of a Philadelphia market said he had put in an order for 500 turkeys. He received just 12, which he reserved for family and friends. On the black market turkeys in the city were selling for up to 85 cents a pound, well above the OPA ceiling of 53 cents. In Pittsburgh, black market birds were fetching 78 cents a pound and the OPA was powerless to stop the sales, since the city’s federal judges had gone home early for the holiday and temporary injunctions were unobtainable.

  Lacking turkey, most families substituted chicken or ham. To conserve ration coupons, the trimmings were frequently the product of Victory Gardens, assiduously preserved in Mason jars for the occasion. In that respect, it was much like the first Thanksgiving, in that much of what was consumed was produced by the people who consumed it.

  Around the table, the talk inevitably turned to General George Patton. It had recently been reported that Patton had slapped three hospitalized soldiers in August, saying to one suffering from a severe case of shell shock, “You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot.” Public opinion was fiercely divided. One congressman called for Patton’s dismissal, saying the “despicable incident” had “destroyed the general’s usefulness as commander of the Seventh Army or any other division.” But others said Congress should “let the Army handle its own problems.” In the end, Eisenhower reprimanded Patton and ordered him to apologize.

  Many Thanksgiving dinners were served later than usual in 1943, since most factories were operating at full capacity at the behest of the War Production Board. (Workers were paid time and a half.) In observance of the holiday, however, no men were drafted and those scheduled to depart for induction centers were allowed to delay their leaving one day to spend Thanksgiving with their families. There was no pro football either. The Detroit Lions, who had started the tradition of playing a home game on the holiday when they moved from Portsmouth in 1934, had suspended the practice for the duration.

  Although the country was engaged in history’s bloodiest war, Americans still had many reasons to give thanks in the fall of 1943. For one thing, despite persistent fear and paranoia, the war had not touched the homeland directly. American advances since the last Thanksgiving instilled confidence that the war would be won, sooner or later.

  “Things have come a long way in a year,” said an editorial in the Pittsburgh Press on the day before the holiday.

  And while it cannot be said too often that the war is far from won, the tide has turned…. Africa has been freed of Nazis, the Mediterranean is under our control, the submarine menace has been greatly diminished, the continent of Europe has been invaded, the Russians have gained their greatest victories and air raids on Germany are taking a tremendous toll on the enemy.

  We can see daylight ahead.

  For most of the Steagles, Thanksgiving Day was no different from any other. They put in a full day at the factories and shipyards, then reported for practice at Shibe Park at 6:00 p.m. After practice, however, Greasy Neale dispensed with his usual “skull session” and hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for the team at the Hotel Philadelphian. Afterwards, Neale and the Steagles played bridge while Genevieve and the wives listened to a star-studded holiday special on the CBS radio network featuring, among others, George Burns and Gracie Allen.

  The players had much to be thankful for. The Steagles had already exceeded all expectations. If they won one of their last two games, they would clinch a winning season. If they won both, there was still an outside chance they could end up tied for first place. Not least of all, though, the players were thankful for having escaped the front lines. Tens of thousands of Americans were already dead or wounded. Four NFL veterans had been killed in the service of their country so far:

  Keith Birlem, an end for the Redskins and Cardinals in 1939, was killed attempting to land a crippled bomber returning to England after an air raid on May 7, 1943. (Birlem was a teammate of Steagles quarterback Roy Zimmerman at San Jose State.)

  Eddie Doyle, an end for Frankford and Pottsville in the 1920s, was killed in the invasion of North Africa, November 8, 1942.

  Len Supulski, an end for the Eagles in 1942, died when his plane crashed during a training mission outside Kearney, Nebraska, on August 31, 1943. Several Steagles had been Supulski’s teammate in 1942, and his death hit them especially hard. “It was very sad because he meant a lot to the club,” said halfback Ernie Steele.

  Don Wemple, a Brooklyn end in 1941, was killed in the crash of an Army transport plane in India on June 23, 1943. (Wemple was a teammate of Steagles end Larry Cabrelli at Colgate.)

  The carnage was not invisible on the home front. That fall the Office of War Information permitted for the first time the publication of photographs depicting dead U.S. troops. This was done partly to placate Americans who had grown skeptical and weary of relentlessly upbeat coverage of the war. But it was also done to combat growing apathy on the home front. After two years of war, the government believed Americans needed to be reminded of its cost. The pictures of the dead, it was hoped in a kind of perverse logic, would renew enthusiasm for the war. It would also prepare Americans for the heavy casualties sure to come. The images, however, were carefully screened. The bodies were to appear whole. There was to be no gore.

  In its September 20 issue, Life magazine published a full-page photograph of three Americans gunned down on a beach on the Pacific island of Buna. Their bodies are sprawled in the sand, their faces not visible. Their wounds are not apparent. A half-submerged Japanese landing craft is visible in the water nearby.

  “And so here it is,” reads an accompanying editorial. “This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns.” In the photograph, the editorial continues, “We can still sense the high optimism of men who have never known oppression—who, however scared, have never had to base their decisions upon fear. We are still aware of the relaxed self-confidence with which the leading boy ran into the sudden burst of fire—almost like a halfback carrying the ball down a football field.”

  “When photographs of dead servicemen were printed,” writes Christina S. Jarvis in The Male Body at War, “their bodies became privileged symbols of sacrifice from which the goals of nation and the war could be discerned.”

  The photographs and their implicit messages were especially poignant to the millions of American men who could not fight. Of the 22 million men who registered for the draft between September 1940 and August 1945, five million were rejected as physically or mentally unfit. Many (if not most) of those classified 4-F felt deep guilt and even shame at having been denied the opportunity to serve and spared the horrors of war. They were also subjected to ridicule and scorn.

  There were stories of men committing suicide after being classified 4-F (suicidal tendencies, however, were a disqualifying condition; the overall suicide rate in fact plummeted during the war). On college campuses, women often refused to date them since there was obviously “something wrong with them.” They were mocked. A popular song among GIs was “Four-F Charlie,” in which the protagonist is “a complete physical wreck” who is both cowardly and impotent:

  Men won’t sing of his wild daring

  Girls won’t praise his marital daring …

  And his blood is thin as water

  He can never be a father.

  The Steagles were not immune to this kind of derision. On the contrary, as professional athletes, they were sometimes the targets of bitter vitriol. At games, fans often wondered, loudly and profanely, what the hell they were doing on a football field instead of a battlefield.

  They even got hate mail, recalled end Tom Miller.r />
  “We used to get letters from people who used to say, ‘You big husky guys are out there playin’ football and my son is out there fightin’ in the war!’ We used to get a lot of that. I didn’t feel bad about it because I’d been in the service. But I know it did bother some of the guys quite a bit.”

  “It was weird,” said center Ray Graves. “It was just hard for the fans to realize they could go to a football game while we were fighting. It was rough.”

  Professional athletes were also the object of special (and sometimes unfair) scrutiny by draft boards. Steagles tackle Vic Sears was called before his draft board in Eugene, Oregon, four times.

  “The son of the head of the draft board was deferred,” Sears recalled. “I guess they felt that I’d fill the gap, so they kept asking me to go in.” Each time, Sears was rejected due to his stomach ulcers.

  When Frank Sinkwich was honorably discharged from the Marines because of his flat feet, Senator Kenneth Spicer Wherry of Nebraska said he thought the armed forces ought to be able to “find a place” in which they could use Sinkwich.

  “What’s the matter with him?” the senator demanded. “Haven’t we got a place for him? Can’t he take the place of some man we can send across the water?”

  Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight boxing champion who was a Navy commander overseeing recreation programs in the South Pacific, couldn’t understand how a man deemed unfit for military service could play professional football.

  “If a man is physically fit to play football,” Tunney growled, “then he is physically fit for this bigger game.”

  Professional athletes had their defenders, too. In December 1943 the syndicated sports columnist Joe Williams published an interview with an unnamed doctor at a New York induction center. The doctor told Williams,