Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  “In my mind I know I won it,” Hinkle said.

  Hinkle’s achievement did not go unrewarded, however. Owner Lex Thompson gave him a raise (subject to wage-control guidelines, of course).

  Ernie Steele rushed for 96 yards against the Packers to finish the season with 409, good enough for sixth place on the rushing list. Steele surpassed teammate Johnny Butler, who sat out the game with a broken thumb, though Butler still finished seventh in the league with 362 yards. With 291 yards, Bobby Thurbon finished eleventh, giving the Steagles four of the league’s top 11 rushers, a testament not only to the talents of the running backs themselves, but also to the dexterity of the linemen who blocked for them. Steele and Thurbon led the team in scoring with 36 points each. Half-blind Tony Bova was the team’s leading receiver with 17 catches for 419 yards, a whopping average of 24.6 yards per catch, best in the league.

  After the season, seven Steagles were named to the various all-pro teams selected by the wire services: Tony Bova, Ray Graves, Jack Hinkle, Elbie Schultz, Vic Sears, Ernie Steele, and Roy Zimmerman. Perhaps most surprisingly—and certainly most important, as far as Messrs. Bell, Rooney, and Thompson were concerned—the Steagles were a box office smash. Their cumulative paid home attendance of 129,347 was a record for both franchises. A “combination official” confided to the Inquirer that it was “the most successful season financially either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh ever had.” Bert Bell said, “We took in more in the six home games this year than the Eagles and Steelers did together in ten games last year.”

  On the whole the players were satisfied with the season.

  “I think we surprised ourselves,” said Al Wistert. “We did pretty well in spite of the fact that we were a hybrid team.” Vic Sears credited Greasy Neale for the Steagles’ unexpected success.

  “We got better all the time,” Sears said. “Nobody stays the same with Greasy Neale.”

  A farewell banquet was held for the team at the Hotel Philadelphian the night of the Packers game. The next morning the players scattered. Although they were not required to, many players kept working at their war jobs in Philadelphia. Bobby Thurbon joined a Teamsters basketball team in Pittsburgh. Walt Kiesling went back to his off-season job in the Office of the Register of Deeds in St. Paul. Vic Sears’ draft board ordered him to return to Oregon for yet another physical, which, due to his ulcers, he again flunked. Rocco Canale reported back to Mitchell Field. Bucko Kilroy returned to convoy duty on the North Atlantic. Roy Zimmerman went back to his California farm. Ernie Steele went home to Seattle and found work in a shipyard. Ray Graves, who like Allie Sherman aspired to be a head coach someday, went back to his alma mater, the University of Tennessee, where he was hired as an assistant. (He wouldn’t return to the Eagles until 1946.) Ted Doyle, of course, just kept working on the Manhattan Project at the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh.

  Ironically, when the Giants played the Redskins in the final game of the regular season a week later, the Steagles were rooting for the Redskins to win. Having already been eliminated from the title chase, the Steagles still hoped to finish tied for second with the Giants. Alas, the Giants won and the Steagles missed out on the portion of the championship pot that would have come with sharing second place: $52.83 each.

  On December 19, on their fourth attempt, the Redskins finally clinched the division by defeating the Giants 28-0 in a one-game playoff at the Polo Grounds. Sammy Baugh threw for 220 yards and one touchdown. He also intercepted a pass to set up a touchdown and got off a 65-yard punt, one of the longest in playoff history.

  In the championship game a week later at Wrigley Field, the exhausted Redskins took on the Bears, who hadn’t played a game in four weeks. The contest was billed as a showdown between football’s two greatest passers, Baugh and Sid Luckman, but early in the game Baugh suffered a concussion (while tackling Luckman, ironically) and never regained form. Luckman threw five touchdown passes as the Bears won handily, 41-21. Thirty-five-year-old Bronko Nagurski scored a touchdown for Chicago in what would be his last NFL game.

  The game’s most memorable moment occurred shortly before halftime, when Redskins owner George Preston Marshall was spotted sitting on the Bears bench. Marshall claimed he’d only come down from his box to visit and thought the half would be over by the time he arrived. But Bears general manager Ralph Brizzolara suspected Marshall was trying to steal the Bears’ plays and asked police to remove him. Marshall, dressed in a full-length raccoon coat, was briefly detained beneath the stands before being allowed to return to his box.

  “You can say for me that Brizzolara is not a gentleman,” Marshall shouted to reporters. “And I’ll never speak to him again.”

  The game was a sellout, and each Bear took home $1,135.81 for winning the title. Each Redskin’s take was $754.60. Sid Luckman was named the league’s most valuable player.

  The National Football League had not merely survived in 1943, it had actually thrived. Not only had average per-game attendance hit an all-time high; according to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor Havey Boyle, “every club made a nice profit except Brooklyn and the Cardinals.” Nineteen forty-four would present its own challenges—namely the Father Draft—but the future, in the long run anyway, looked quite bright. So bright, in fact, that Branch Rickey, the forward-thinking president of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, was worried. On the last day of 1943 Rickey warned his fellow baseball executives that pro football was on the verge of becoming America’s new national pastime.

  “I see post-war pro football expanding into six or eight leagues,” Rickey predicted. “They will have two games a week. With all this progress in air travel, it will be simple for a team to play on Sunday in San Francisco and the following Wednesday in New York.” He was off on the particulars, of course—but Branch Rickey was definitely on to something.

  Epilogue: V-J Day

  ALTHOUGH THE STEELERS-EAGLES MERGER technically ended at the conclusion of the Packers game on December 5, 1943, the Steagles did not formally dissolve until the following month, when the two teams announced they would be going their separate ways.

  “Last fall,” explained Steelers co-owner Bert Bell, “in our very cordial relationship with the Eagles, most of the home games were played in Philadelphia, but in 1944 we feel we owe it to our fans to give Pittsburgh the fuller season.” How this would be accomplished was an open question: The Steelers still had only six players under contract.

  In Philadelphia, Eagles owner Lex Thompson promised to “keep faith with Philadelphia fans and give them the team and the home games to which they are entitled.” Thompson, who had entered into his partnership with the Steelers somewhat reluctantly in the first place, and wouldn’t even let his radio announcer utter the word “Steagles” on the air, was happy enough to see the merger end. Besides, the Eagles had about 20 players under contract, enough, probably, to go it alone in the fall.

  With the Father Draft ramping up, players would be harder to find than ever, but Commissioner Elmer Layden was determined to forge ahead. He instituted an “anti-pessimism” policy.

  “The best thing to do in these uncertain times is to adopt a policy of ‘go on living’ instead of being pessimistic,” Layden said. “We are going ahead with plans for a 1944 schedule.” On April 6 those plans were dramatically bolstered when the Army announced that it had reached its goal of 7.7 million men. Two days later, Selective Service director Lewis Hershey ended the induction of most men 26 or older. While the NFL would still lose some players to the service, Hershey’s order was a welcome reprieve.

  Other changes were afoot in the NFL that spring. At a meeting in Philadelphia in late April, the owners finally voted to allow coaching from the sidelines. They also voted to retain unlimited substitution for the duration. (It would be repealed in 1946, but reinstated permanently in 1950, officially beginning the era of two-platoon football in the NFL.) As usual, the one thing the owners were unable to agree on was a schedule. With the Cleveland Rams deciding to return t
o the league after their one-year hiatus, and a new franchise in Boston (known as the Yanks), the league now had 11 teams, an especially unwieldy number for scheduling purposes. On April 22, after many hours of tiresome negotiations, Lions owner Fred Mandel made a motion:

  The League requests the Chicago Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers to merge for the season of 1944. This request is based on the fact that the League being composed of eleven clubs, it is found that many difficulties face the League in the making of the schedule. The League realizes the problems imposed upon these two members, but faced with this urgent condition, they [sic] ask in the interest of the League that these members so merge.

  Steelers co-owners Bert Bell and Art Rooney were not enamored of the proposal; after all, they had split with the Eagles in pursuit of more home games in Pittsburgh. But they went along with it anyway, mainly out of deference to Elmer Layden, who had supported their merger application a year earlier. Besides, the Steelers were still desperately shorthanded.

  “Since the close of the past campaign we have tried to line up new material with absolutely no success,” Rooney lamented. Bell and Rooney would probably have preferred to merge with the Eagles again, but Lex Thompson was adamant that his team fly solo. So the Steelers merged with the Cardinals, who had gone winless in 1943. Bell and Rooney were, at least, able to get three regular season games scheduled in Pittsburgh, one more than in 1943. As for Charlie Bidwill, the Cardinals owner, he was simply grateful for any help he could get. The combine, which was officially christened with the distinctly unpleasant-sounding name “Card-Pitt,” was based in Chicago and was placed in the Western Division with the Bears, Packers, Lions, and Rams.

  To put it mildly, the results of this merger were disastrous. Practices were haphazard at best. The team went 0-10 and held a lead just twice all season. Part of the problem was the coaches—though it wasn’t that they didn’t get along. While Walt Kiesling and Greasy Neale were barely on speaking terms, Kiesling and his compatriot in 1944, the Cardinals’ Phil Handler, actually hit it off—maybe a little too well. They both enjoyed going to the track, and at times it seemed they were more interested in the horses than in their football team. Rooney complained that Kiesling “carried the Racing Form more than the playbook.” After Card-Pitt’s third game of the season, a 34-7 embarrassment at the hands of the Bears, Kiesling and Handler fined three players, including halfback Johnny Butler, $200 each for “indifferent play.” Butler, who had performed so admirably for the Steagles a year before, refused to pay the fine and was kicked off the team. That same week, a disgruntled fan wrote the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, suggesting the combine be called the “Carpits,” since “every team in the league walks over them.” On the eve of Card-Pitt’s final game of the season, the team’s leading rusher, John Grigas, quit. Grigas, who had played for the Cardinals in 1943, was fed up with losing. After all, he had played 19 games in the National Football League without winning even one.

  Walt Kiesling was fed up too. After the Card-Pitt debacle, he left the Steelers to take a job closer to home, as Curly Lambeau’s assistant in Green Bay.

  “That wasn’t a very good year,” remembered Ted Doyle, one of five former Steagles on the team. (Besides Johnny Butler, the others were Tony Bova, Elbie Schultz, and Bobby Thurbon.)

  Why was Card-Pitt so bad?

  “Talent,” explained Doyle. “The Cardinals didn’t have much. And we didn’t have a helluva lot left over either. So there just wasn’t the ability there.”

  “The whole bunch from Chicago were fine fellows,” Art Rooney said after the season, “but we all know now that these combines just won’t work out.”

  “The season couldn’t have turned out any worse than this one,” added Bert Bell bluntly. The Steelers and the Cardinals went their separate ways at the conclusion of the season.

  The Eagles’ season, on the other hand, couldn’t have turned out much better. Greasy Neale cut his own salary from $12,000 to $3,000 because he believed he “couldn’t produce an improved team with the material on hand.” He was wrong. The Eagles finished the season 7-1-2 and missed winning the Eastern Division by a whisker. Many Steagles were instrumental to the Eagles’ success, including Jack Hinkle, Bucko Kilroy, Ernie Steele, Al Wistert, and Roy Zimmerman. But the team’s biggest star was Steve Van Buren, a rookie halfback from Honduras by way of Louisiana State University. Van Buren, the team’s No. 1 draft choice, led the Eagles in rushing in 1944. He would go on to become one of the greatest running backs in NFL history and the first Eagle player to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Only a 28-7 loss to their longtime nemesis, the Chicago Bears, prevented the Eagles from winning the Eastern Division in 1944. They finished second to the Giants, who went 8-1-1. What made it all the more remarkable was the fact that owner Lex Thompson once again required the players to work full time in defense plants.

  The war finally took its toll on the Bears in 1944. Of the 28 players on the 1943 championship team, 19 were lost to the armed forces, including Harry Clark, Hampton Pool, and Clyde “Bulldog” Turner, three of the players investigated by the War Manpower Commission for leaving war jobs to play for the Bears.

  “We tried to get replacements,” co-coach Luke Johnsos recalled. “We held tryouts at Cubs Park [Wrigley Field] and signed up anybody who could run around the field twice. We had players forty, fifty years old. We had a very poor ball club.” Johnsos exaggerated, of course. Despite the massive personnel losses, the Bears still managed to finish the season 6-3-1, tied with Detroit for second place in the West behind Green Bay.

  The Brooklyn Dodgers changed their name in 1944 but not, as the saying goes, their stripes. Owner Dan Topping hired a new general manager, a former fight promoter named Tom Gallery, who quickly tired of fielding phone calls and getting mail intended for the baseball Dodgers.

  “It drove me nuts,” Gallery said. “So one day I decided to change the team name. I looked up and saw a framed design on the office wall—the snarling tiger drawn by Walt Disney for Topping’s air wing. Why not the Brooklyn Tigers?” The change gave the NFL, for the first time, Lions and Tigers and Bears. These Tigers, however, had no teeth. They matched Card-Pitt by going winless and finishing the season 0-10. (Fortunately for fans, the two teams did not play each other.) The Tigers even managed to finish behind the newly-minted Boston Yanks, who went 2-8.

  In the 1944 championship game, the Packers beat the Giants 14-7. Although he didn’t score a touchdown, one of the stars of the game was none other than Don Hutson. It turned out Hutson’s game against the Steagles was not his last after all.

  “I kept announcing that I was going to retire from football and devote my entire time to my business interests,” Hutson explained. “But I kept coming back, until 1945 anyway. It was damn near impossible for me to quit football in Green Bay. You know what the Packers meant to the town and I’d been having some good years. I got the feeling they wanted me to play forever. But the time had come. Before the 1945 season, I told Curly I’d play that year only if he promised not to ask me to play again the next year. He said all right, and he was good to his word. And that was it.”

  Because the Giants double-teamed Hutson throughout the championship game, Green Bay used him as a decoy and passed the ball to other receivers, who were usually wide open. Hutson only caught two passes, but his mere presence was instrumental in Green Bay’s victory.

  On December 9, 1944, the drafting of men 26 and older was resumed. With the fighting still raging on two fronts and preparations under way for a possible invasion of Japan, the Army’s appetite for able-bodied men once again turned ravenous. Attendant with the renewed demand for manpower was an even greater scrutiny of 4-F athletes. James F. Byrnes, the head of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (and later secretary of state), asked Lewis Hershey to re-examine all professional athletes who were deferred for physical reasons.

  “It is difficult for the public to understand, and certainly it is difficult for me to understand, how thes
e men can be physically unfit for military service and yet be able to compete with the greatest athletes of the nation in games demanding physical fitness,” Byrnes said.

  What ensued was blatantly discriminatory. A professional athlete—a “P.A.” in Selective Service jargon—was likely to be inducted whatever his infirmities. On January 15, 1945, Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Ron Northey was ordered to report for induction, even though he was 4-F with a perforated eardrum, a heart ailment, and high blood pressure. Frank Sinkwich, the Detroit Lions’ star halfback, beat Selective Service to the punch. As he’d hoped, Sinkwich found a way back into the military. He joined the Army Air Forces, which, being more concerned about flying than marching, didn’t consider flat feet to be an issue. Sinkwich, however, didn’t spend much time in the air. He played football for the AAF team in Colorado Springs, where he suffered a serious knee injury that ended his promising football career.

  On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the winter White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was succeeded by his vice president, Harry Truman, who as a senator had occasionally attended Redskins games at Griffith Stadium. Truman authorized the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally. World War II was over. The headline in the next day’s Philadelphia Inquirer read, simply, “PEACE.” Immediately the nation began the painful process of reconverting to a peacetime economy. The armed forces began demobilizing. Over the next year, more than seven million men and women would be discharged. Conscription continued, but inductions were slashed nearly in half and all men 26 or older were made exempt. The military cancelled contracts worth more than $23 billion. Unemployment soared overnight. In the four days after the surrender, more than 70,000 workers were laid off from war plants in Philadelphia alone. The government-funded day-care centers were closed. Manpower controls were lifted. Rationing ended for most goods (though some, including sugar, would continue to be rationed until 1947, when the Office of Price Administration was finally disbanded).