Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  Three days after the surrender, the Office of Defense Transportation lifted all travel restrictions affecting athletic events. ODT director J. Monroe Johnson thanked sports organizations for their cooperation during the war. He said, “The example set by athletic leaders, both professional and amateur, in voluntarily cutting travel was probably the strongest single factor in impressing upon the general public the urgency of the wartime transportation situation.” Monroe thanked in particular the commissioner of the National Football League, Elmer Layden.

  On August 22, in a sign of professional football’s growing prominence and influence, Layden called on Harry Truman at the White House. Layden presented Truman with a gold-engraved lifetime pass, which the smiling president promised to use. (Truman, as it turned out, was too busy. A sitting president wouldn’t attend an NFL game until 1966, when Lyndon Johnson took in a preseason affair at D.C. Stadium.)

  The Philadelphia Eagles did some reconverting of their own in the days after the war ended. General manager Harry Thayer announced that players could quit their day jobs if they so desired.

  “It is not necessary,” Thayer said. “But the club itself will no longer demand they keep outside jobs.”

  Art Morrow, who covered the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer, lamented the end of compulsory moonlighting.

  “Players did not have so much leisure between games for the type of extracurricular activities that make for Sunday fumbles,” Morrow wrote, apparently forgetting that the Steagles had led the league in fumbles in 1943.

  When Japan surrendered, NFL training camps were just getting under way. Players who’d gone off to war began trickling back. Sometimes they went right to work. Ken Kavanaugh played two seasons with the Bears before joining the Army Air Forces in 1942. He flew 25 missions over Germany. Kavanaugh was mustered out shortly after V-J Day and reported back to the Bears the day before they played the Eagles in an exhibition game in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

  “George Halas made me play, and I scored three times,” Kavanaugh recalled with a laugh.

  Among the returning servicemen was Jack Sanders, a lineman who had played for the Steelers in 1942. Sanders lost part of his left arm in the fighting at Iwo Jima. While recuperating at the Naval Hospital in South Philadelphia, he decided to try out for the Eagles. He appeared in three games in 1945.

  Many former soldiers were unable to reacclimatize themselves to professional football. Physically and psychologically, it was a difficult transition. After missing three seasons while in the Navy, Eagles tackle John Eibner reported to training camp in 1946. He knew he was out of shape, so he asked his friend and teammate Vic Sears for help. When Eibner was playing defense in scrimmages, Sears would give him a signal to let him know which play was going to be run. The coaches were impressed with Eibner’s seemingly telepathic ability to find the ball carrier, and he made the team.

  “This was the only time I ever did anything like that,” said Sears. “I just loved the guy and never was sorry for it.”

  In 1945, Tommy Thompson, who’d been the Eagles starting quarterback before the war, returned from the service only to find his position already occupied by Roy Zimmerman. Thus began the first quarterback controversy in Eagles history. It ended after the 1946 season, when the Eagles traded Zimmerman to the Detroit Lions.

  Zimmerman retired from football after the 1948 season to pursue his first love: pitching. He became one of the country’s top fast-pitch softball hurlers. He once struck out 30 batters in a 14-inning game, and his team, the Fresno Hoak Packers, won the International Softball Congress championship in 1950 and 1952. On August 22, 1997, Zimmerman died of cancer. He was 79.

  The waves of returning servicemen did not displace all the 4-Fs who’d replaced them during the war. That’s because professional football was one sector of the postwar economy where jobs were plentiful. Not only had the NFL increased the maximum roster size to 33 again; there was a whole new league looking for players.

  In 1946, Arch Ward, the Chicago Tribune sports editor and sports impresario, launched the All-America Football Conference with franchises in eight cities. At first, NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden did not take the new rival seriously. When AAFC officials approached Layden before their inaugural season to discuss issues of mutual concern, including territorial rights, Layden dismissed them out of hand.

  “Let them get a football and play a game,” Layden quipped, “and then maybe we’ll have something to talk about.” He miscalculated badly. Arch Ward promoted the league relentlessly, in the Tribune and elsewhere, and when Dan Topping announced he was moving his Brooklyn Tigers (nee Dodgers) from the NFL to the AAFC, the upstart gained instant credibility. (By switching leagues, Topping was finally able to achieve his goal of playing in Yankee Stadium. To further confuse sports historians, he renamed his team the New York Yankees.)

  Players were offered big raises to jump to the AAFC. Salaries went up overnight, and a full-fledged war broke out between the two leagues. One of its first casualties was Layden himself. Partly because of his weak response to the new competitor, Layden’s contract was not renewed in 1946. His replacement was none other than Bert Bell, founder of the Philadelphia Eagles and co-owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Before taking the job, Bell sold his interest in the Steelers to Art Rooney, who once again became the team’s sole proprietor. The two leagues finally made peace before the 1950 season, when three AAFC franchises (the Baltimore Colts, the Cleveland Browns, and the San Francisco 49ers) were admitted to the NFL.

  A welcome postwar development in pro football was integration. In 1946, former Ohio State University and Great Lakes Naval Station head coach Paul Brown signed two African-Americans, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, for his Cleveland Browns franchise in the AAFC. The new league, like the early NFL, had no “gentlemen’s agreement” barring blacks, and no way to enforce one if it did. As sports historian Alan H. Levy writes, “Brown was a meticulous individual who, in his desire to bring the game of football to a more precise scientific level, cared little about the pigment of a man’s skin.” Brown knew good football players when he saw them. Both Motley and Willis ended up in the Hall of Fame.

  The National Football League also integrated in 1946, though under less noble circumstances. When the Rams moved into the Los Angeles Coliseum, the city’s African-American leaders made an interesting argument: Since the Coliseum was a public facility, and the NFL was segregated, wasn’t the city required to build a “separate but equal” stadium for blacks? Los Angeles had no intention of building a second 90,000-seat stadium, of course, and city leaders pressured the Rams to integrate, which they did, much to the chagrin of George Preston Marshall. (Coincidentally, a similar tactic would be used to force Marshall to integrate his Redskins 16 years later.) The Rams signed two former UCLA stars, Kenneth Washington and Woodrow “Woody” Strode. Neither performed exceptionally well. Washington was 28 and had bad knees. Strode was 32 and lasted just one season. Like Jackie Robinson, who integrated major league baseball the following year, pro football’s black pioneers were forced to endure cheap shots and verbal abuse on the field.

  “If I have to integrate heaven,” Strode once mused, “I don’t want to go.” To say they opened doors would be an understatement. In 2004, 69 percent of the players in the NFL were black.

  In 1947—just four years after merging as two of the weakest teams in the league—the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers tied for first place in the Eastern Division. The Eagles won the playoff at Forbes Field, 21-0, but lost the championship game to the Chicago Cardinals, another surprisingly resurgent team. The Steelers would not appear in another playoff game for 25 long years and they wouldn’t win their first title until January 12, 1975, at the conclusion of the franchise’s forty-third season. By then, of course, the championship game was known as the Super Bowl (and had been since 1967). The Steelers would win three more Super Bowls for Art Rooney before their beloved owner died in 1988 at age 87. They won another Super Bowl in 2006.
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br />   In 1948 the Eagles won their first NFL championship, defeating the Cardinals in a blizzard at Shibe Park, 7-0. Five former Steagles were on the roster: tackle Bucko Kilroy, fullback Ben Kish, tackle Vic Sears, halfback Ernie Steele, and tackle Al Wistert. A year later the Eagles won the title again, beating the Rams 14-0 in a pouring rain at the Los Angeles Coliseum. At Greasy Neale’s insistence, the team returned to Philadelphia by train.

  Despite their success on the field, the Eagles still struggled financially. Lex Thompson claimed the team lost more than $30,000 in 1947 and $80,000 in 1948, mainly due to the bidding war with the AAFC.

  “Salaries have gone crazy,” Thompson complained in a 1948 article in Sport magazine:

  My payroll in ’41 was $41,000. Last year it inflated to $225,000. Now it’s up past $250,000 and still climbing. The average starting wage for a first-year man in the National [Football] League used to be $1,500…. After December, we operated job-placement bureaus that provided good off-season employment. Today, ballplayers laugh at you if you suggest they work in the off-season…. Tackles and guards have no drawing power, but I’m paying mine $7,000 a season.

  On January 15, 1949, Thompson sold the Eagles to a syndicate of 100 Philadelphia businessmen for $250,000. A little less than six years later, on December 20, 1954, Thompson, 40, was found dead of a heart attack outside the door of his suburban New York apartment.

  The syndicate that bought the Eagles was known as the “100 Brothers.” It was headed by James P. Clark, a trucking company tycoon and inveterate meddler. Clark got along with Greasy Neale about as well as Walt Kiesling had. After a 7-3 loss to the Giants near the end of the 1950 season, Clark burst into the locker room and berated Neale in front of his players.

  “The team made plenty of mistakes,” Clark exclaimed, “and you made mistakes.” Typically, Neale’s response included a copious amount of colorful profanity. Clark fired Neale after the season. At 59, Greasy Neale, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, was unemployed.

  “I had a reputation for being a great handler of men,” Neale said. “The only one I couldn’t handle was Jim Clark.” When he’d taken the job in Philadelphia, Neale had promised his much-traveled wife Genevieve—his “driving force,” as he called her—that it would be his last. Two months after he was unceremoniously fired, Genevieve died. Neale was shattered. But, true to his word, he never coached again. In 1969 Greasy Neale was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He died on November 2, 1973, three days shy of his eighty-second birthday. He held the Eagles’ record for most wins by a head coach (66) until Andy Reid surpassed him in 2004.

  After four seasons in Green Bay, Walt Kiesling returned to the Steelers in 1949 as an assistant coach. Before the 1954 season, Art Rooney fired head coach Joe Bach and, once again, asked Big Kies to take over. After three losing seasons Kiesling stepped down as head coach but stayed with the Steelers as an assistant, the job he always preferred. Kiesling remained with the team until he passed away on March 2, 1962, at age 58. At the time of his death, Kiesling’s tenure in the National Football League was second only to George Halas’s. In recognition of his longevity, Kiesling was posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966. The Steagles, therefore, were coached by two Hall of Famers, albeit two who never got along. In Canton their busts sit just a few feet apart.

  As commissioner, Bert Bell presided over the National Football League’s phenomenal growth after the war. He assumed control of scheduling, ending the owners’ tiresome practice of endlessly haggling over the particulars of each and every game. The owners, weary themselves, trusted Bell and were glad to hand him the task. Bell drew up each season’s schedule by labeling his sons’ dominoes with the various team names, then arranging them on a giant cardboard calendar on his dining room table. His philosophy was simple.

  “Weak teams should play other weak teams while the strong teams are playing other strong teams early in the year,” he said. “It’s the only way to keep more teams in contention longer into the season.” The result was to become the league’s hallmark: parity. (Bell is often credited as the source of the famous quote, “On any given Sunday, any team can beat any other.”) The stranglehold that the Bears, Redskins, Giants, and Packers had on the championship game was broken. Even the Cardinals and the Eagles had a shot at the title now.

  Bell also ushered football into the television age, shrewdly exploiting the medium to both promote and protect the league. By 1956, CBS was broadcasting every regular season game, and paying more than $1 million for the privilege, while NBC had the rights to the championship game. But the networks weren’t showing injuries or fights. Bell, ever protective of the game’s image, prohibited that.

  “We don’t want kids sitting in the living room to see their heroes trading punches,” he explained. “That doesn’t teach good sportsmanship.” Bell was also known to call play-by-play announcers after games to critique their performance. (Runners were not to be “tripped up” or “wrestled to the ground”; they were always to be “tackled.”) His attention to detail paid off handsomely. Ratings skyrocketed. The famous 1958 championship game, in which the Colts beat the Giants 23-17 in overtime, was watched in 10.8 million homes, establishing professional football as the nation’s preeminent televised sport.

  But Bell was wary of the young medium as well.

  “Television creates interest and this can benefit pro football,” he said. “But it’s only good as long as you can protect your home gate. You can’t give fans a game for free on television and also expect them to pay to go to the ballpark to see the same game.” Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? So Bell banned the free milk. In 1951 he decreed that a team’s home games could not be televised locally. The blackout policy angered many fans and was challenged by the Justice Department as an illegal restraint of trade. But Bell stood firm and a federal court upheld the policy. Attendance rose by 72 percent through the 1950s, from 25,356 per game in 1950 to 43,617 in 1959. (In 1972 Congress passed a law lifting blackouts for home games that are sold out 72 hours before kickoff. The legislation was said to be the result of frustrated congressmen who couldn’t get Redskins tickets and wanted to watch the games on TV.)

  Yet even as he helped build the National Football League into the wealthiest sporting enterprise in the nation, Bell never lost his passion for the game itself. On an autumn Sunday afternoon there was only one place he wanted to be, and that was at a football game. As a man of power and privilege, he could have sat, for free, in the most expensive box in the stadium. But he always preferred to buy his own tickets and sit in the stands, among the “working stiffs,” as he called the league’s bread and butter. That’s where he was on Sunday, October 11, 1959, when he suffered a massive heart attack that killed him almost instantly.

  “It was almost as though he were allowed to choose time and place,” wrote the sports columnist Red Smith.

  Bert Bell died at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, where he’d starred at quarterback for the University of Pennsylvania four decades earlier. He was watching the Eagles play the Steelers.

  Postscript: 2003

  HEINZ FIELD, THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS’ CURRENT HOME, overlooks the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, not far from the very spot where General Forbes wrested Fort Duquesne from the French. The stadium exemplifies all that the National Football League has become since World War II: enormous, flashy, and rich. Built at a cost of $281 million (of which taxpayers contributed $158 million), Heinz Field is a spectacular venue, a glistening glass-and-steel horseshoe with impeccable sightlines and breathtaking views of downtown. Each of its 64,450 seats is the color of yellow mustard, and the three-story-tall video screen at the open end of the stadium is topped by two giant bottles of Heinz ketchup.

  Heinz Field could scarcely be more different from Forbes Field, the Steelers’ first home. It is thoroughly modern in every way, from its state-of-the-art sound system to its turf, a blend of natural grass and synthetic fibers call
ed DD GrassMaster. But when the Steelers hosted the Philadelphia Eagles in a preseason game on August 16, 2003, the atmosphere inside the stadium was decidedly retro. No garish logos adorned the field. Big band music, not rock, blared from the sound system. On the giant video screen, all the pictures were in black and white. For on that muggy Saturday night, the Steelers turned the clock back to 1943 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Steagles.

  The event was the brainchild of Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who was 11 when what was then his father’s team merged with the Eagles.

  “It was a time in America that was so meaningful,” Rooney said.

  At halftime, faded images of the Steagles were shown on the video screen while the public-address announcer, Randy Cosgrove, briefly explained to the incredulous throng the hybrid team’s strange saga. Then Cosgrove read the names of the three former Steagles who were unable to attend the evening’s festivities.

  “Tackle Ted Doyle.”

  Ted Doyle retired from the Steelers after the 1945 season. Or rather he wasn’t invited back. A new coach, Jock Sutherland, had taken over.

  “I never heard from him so I guess he didn’t want me,” Doyle said. “I didn’t go back.” Doyle never pursued the matter with Art Rooney because he “didn’t want to interfere with anything.” So he and Harriet and their two children moved back to Nebraska. Doyle managed a bowling alley in the town of Fairbury for a time, then went to work for an agricultural products company. He retired for good in the mid 1980s. He and Harriet live in Gretna, Nebraska. Doyle still thinks he would’ve been better off taking that job with Hormel back in 1938.

  “Halfback Jack Hinkle.”

  Jack Hinkle would never have another season like 1943. Steve Van Buren replaced him as the Eagles’ No. 1 running back the following season. Hinkle was switched back to a blocking back, a position he filled quite adeptly until his retirement after the 1947 season. In 1951 he became an assistant football coach at the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia. In 1958 he was named head coach. After three losing seasons he resigned to take a sales job with a brass and copper company. He and his wife Joane, who still calls him “Honey,” live outside Philadelphia.