Last Team Standing (10 page)

To allow Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to merge from the end of the meeting to the close of the National Football League season, that is, the week before the playoff game, retaining their players from both teams….

Bell's motion would overturn the Marshall coalition's motion and allow the Steelers and Eagles to pool their players. (Curiously, it also assumed the combine would not win a divisional title, since the merger would expire before the championship game.)

After what one observer described as “a long and bitter debate,” the motion passed by a 5-4 vote. Jack Mara had had a
“softening of the heart” and changed his vote. It was a rare instance of George Preston Marshall failing to get his way.

“When the Bears and Cardinals' application was withdrawn the membership readily was agreeable to the proposals we made,” Eagles general manager Harry Thayer said afterwards, rather understating the fractious deliberations. “It was felt we have legitimate reasons for wanting to combine our interests, while there was no need of the Chicago clubs doing the same.”

Rooney and Bell had convinced Thayer to make two minor concessions. The combine would be known simply as the Eagles, without a city designation, and it would play most—but not all—of its home games in Philadelphia. The three men also agreed to split expenses (after player salaries) 50-50 between their two teams. (They also agreed to split profits—in the unlikely event there were any.) The combine would be based in Philadelphia, with Eagles head coach Greasy Neale and Steelers head coach Walt Kiesling serving as co—head coaches. Each team would retain the rights to the players on its roster at the time of the merger, as well as the rights to any players it signed during the merger.

Finally there was the prickly issue of uniforms. Eagles owner Lex Thompson would not allow his players to wear anything other than the team's usual colors of kelly green and white. Bell and Rooney wanted the team to wear the Steelers' black and gold jerseys, at least when it played in Pittsburgh. In the end, Thompson won out. The team would wear Eagles jerseys for every game. Bell and Rooney probably gave in because it would have been too costly to clean and maintain two sets of uniforms all season anyway.

It wasn't everything Thayer and Thompson wanted, and Bell and Rooney practically gave up the farm. But, considering the circumstances, the principals were satisfied with the merger.

“Without it,” said Bert Bell, “we would have been pathetic and so would the Eagles.” Back in Pittsburgh, though, there was disappointment.

“So far as anyone in Pittsburgh need be concerned,” Chet Smith wrote in the
Press,
“there will be no National League
football here in the fall. The temporary merger of the Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles was worked out on anything but an equitable basis.”

Incredibly, at 10:45 that night, after many long hours debating contraction, the owners reconvened to discuss expansion. In a sign that better times were to come, the league had received applications for new franchises in Baltimore, Boston, and Buffalo. The owners voted unanimously to award a team in Boston to Ted Collins, the manager of singer Kate Smith (famous for her rendition of the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America”). Collins' team would not begin play until the 1944 season. The owners, however, were free to divvy up his $25,000 down payment on the $50,000 franchise fee immediately. Which they did before going to bed.

The next day, the owners tackled a bit of business that remained unfinished from the April meeting: the game schedule. One benefit of the merger was that it neatly reduced the league to two four-team divisions (the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh combine naturally having been placed in the Eastern Division). This made scheduling much more manageable than a nine-team league with two unbalanced divisions. Elmer Layden proposed that each team play two games against each of the other three teams in its division and one against each of the four teams in the other division. That would give each team ten games, one fewer than usual, but, for the first time, each team would play every other team in the league at least once. This the owners agreed to.

The hard part, as usual, was figuring out the home games. George Preston Marshall insisted on playing six of his Redskins' ten games at Griffith Stadium, which prompted Jack Mara to demand six home games for the Giants. And, since their newly constituted “Eagles” would be playing home games in two cities, Rooney, Bell, and Thayer felt entitled to an extra home game too.

It took sixteen hours of bitter and tedious negotiations over two days, but in the end, the Redskins, Giants, and Eagles got their six home games. It was decided the Eagles would play four home games in Philadelphia and two in Pittsburgh. (Each city would also get one pre-season exhibition game.) The Bears, Lions,
and Dodgers would play five home games each, the Packers four, and the poor Cardinals just three—and one of those would be played in Buffalo because of a scheduling conflict at Comiskey Park. (When “tight spots develop in National League huddles,” a Chicago sportswriter complained, “it always is the Cards who take a kicking around.”)

With the Father Draft looming, the owners also voted to begin tapping new sources of talent. Teams were allowed to sign college undergraduates attending schools that had discontinued football. It was a rare exception to pro football's ironclad ban on signing collegians before their classes had graduated. Layden defended the change in patriotic terms: “We believe football provides a boy with training he needs for the future and if he can't get it at the college he is attending and it isn't feasible to transfer to another one where the sport is in vogue we see no reason he shouldn't be given a chance to play with one of our teams.”

The owners also debated the merits of allowing active-duty military personnel to play. George Preston Marshall, who favored the idea, said, “I think that as far as this league is concerned we shouldn't pass any rule detrimental to a fellow in the service…. I see no reason why that fellow shouldn't play with a team in this league.” Besides, he added, “All of us know damn well that we are going to have one awful job getting 20 or 25 players.” (Marshall seemed to have ulterior motives: Washington was swimming in servicemen.) But other owners worried about what would happen if a grunt got hurt playing pro football. It was decided that a serviceman would be allowed to play only with the permission of his commanding officer.

After the league meeting adjourned on Monday, June 21, Bert Bell returned to his home in Philadelphia and called on an old friend who'd played for him back when he owned the Eagles. The friend hadn't played football in years, but Bell knew just what it would take to coax him out of retirement.

L
IKE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS
in the spring of 1932, Bill Hewitt was out of work. For three seasons he'd been a stalwart on the University of Michigan's football team. But now his eligibility was used up; he couldn't play college football anymore.

“I was a semester short of graduation,” Hewitt remembered, “but getting a diploma was not then my consuming passion.” So he was bumming around his hometown of Bay City, Michigan, not even sure “where my next few thousand meals were coming from.” Relief came in the form of a letter from Bears owner George Halas, who'd apparently heard about Hewitt from a Chicago sportswriter. Halas offered Hewitt $100 a game to play for the Bears. Hewitt countered with $110. Halas agreed, but when Hewitt showed up for training camp, he learned the contract didn't have a no-cut clause. Hewitt didn't want to take any chances, so he settled for $100 after all: “I swapped ten dollars a game for a written guarantee that I'd be kept on the payroll for the entire season.”

Halas got his money's worth. Hewitt immediately became the Bears' starting left end.

The NFL had never seen anything like Bill Hewitt. On offense he was a ferocious blocker and a nimble pass catcher. On defense he was an aggressive tackler with a mean streak. He covered kickoffs and punts with wild abandon. And he did it all with his head conspicuously uncovered. Bill Hewitt was one of the last professional football players to forsake headgear. He hated helmets. He said they “handicapped” his play. He also thought they were a little sissified.

On the field you couldn't miss him. He had a full head of blonde hair and a jutting jaw. He wasn't big, just five-nine, 190 pounds, but he was quick and agile and fearless. His teammates, rather courageously, nicknamed him Stinky because when he came to Chicago he owned just one outfit (a pair of corduroy pants and a blue Michigan sweater). Fans called him the Offside Kid because, when he was playing defense, he would burst across the line of scrimmage so quickly that it was hard to believe he wasn't committing a penalty.

Hewitt was “one of the great ends of all time,” George Halas said. “He had a flaming spirit.”

As a rookie in 1932, Hewitt played in one of the most unusual games in NFL history. After the Bears and the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans finished the season tied for first place, then-Commissioner Joe Carr ordered a one-game playoff to determine the champion. The game was supposed to be played at Wrigley Field, but a blizzard forced it to be moved indoors, to Chicago Stadium. With a six-inch layer of dirt covering the arena floor, the two teams slugged it out on a field measuring just 60 yards between the goal lines and 45 between the sidelines. To accommodate the smaller dimensions, several rules were modified. Teams kicked off from the ten-yard line. After a team crossed midfield the ball was moved back 20 yards to compensate for the shortened field. The goalposts were moved from the back of the end zone to the goal line, and no field goals were allowed. And, because the field was completely surrounded by hockey dasher boards, after a player went out of bounds, the ball was placed ten yards inbounds, instead of on the sideline, as was then the custom. (This last change proved so popular that it was subsequently adopted permanently.) The Bears won this early version of an Arena League game 9-0 on a disputed touchdown, prompting a Portsmouth newspaper to denounce the game as a “sham battle on a Tom Thumb gridiron.” (The Spartans did win the NFL championship three years later—but only after the team, renamed the Lions, had moved to Detroit.)

In 1933, Hewitt became a truly dominating player. Opposing teams would assign two or even three players to cover him, but to no avail.

“I never saw anything like it,” his teammate Red Grange recalled. “I don't believe he made a mistake all year.”

Hewitt was named an all-pro and the Bears won the championship again.

In 1934, Halas finally gave Hewitt a raise—to $130 a game. There his salary stayed for the next three seasons. His meager compensation—and the low salaries of pro football players in
general—continually frustrated Hewitt. It wasn't merely customary for players to work second jobs in the off-season; it was usually necessary. Until the late 1950s, football cards often listed a player's second occupation. Hewitt complained that “the average professional football player is the peon of big-league sports.” Not only that: It was also impossible for players to secure meaningful, well-paying employment away from the gridiron. “Employers don't hand out good jobs in January, jobs with a future, to men who will quit next August and spend four months playing at games.”

By the end of the 1936 season, Hewitt had had enough. He told Halas he was through. Halas wasn't convinced, though, so he traded Hewitt to Philadelphia, leaving it up to Bert Bell, then the owner of the Eagles, to convince the Offside Kid to keep playing. Bell offered Hewitt $200 a game and a $24-a-week off-season job as a grease monkey at a gas station. Hewitt was convinced. (In game programs, the Eagles rather generously described Hewitt's second occupation as “lubrication and fuel oil salesman.”)

Although the Eagles were a miserable team, Hewitt's play did not suffer. In his first season in Philadelphia he was again named an all-pro, the first player to achieve the honor with two different teams. In 1939, his third season in Philadelphia, Hewitt got a raise to $250 a game. But the game was finally beginning to take a toll on him.

“I could remember when I laughed at the veterans lined up in the trainer's room after a game. Now I was first in line, and when I'd had one rubdown I would go to the tail of the queue and start all over.”

After the season, Hewitt retired, seemingly for good. He settled down in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter and started looking for a job with a future.

Then, a little more than three years later, in the summer of 1943, Bert Bell, now the co-owner of the Steelers, came calling again.

Like Ted Doyle, Hewitt was ambivalent about pro football. He loved the game, but he didn't mind walking away from it.

“It left me wary of people, unable to meet strangers. Years of
backslapping and insincere praise made me suspicious of almost everyone.”

So, Hewitt wrote, when Bell invited him to join the newly merged Philadelphia-Pittsburgh team,