Last Team Standing (11 page)

I said “No, thank you,” and he said “Aw, c'mon,” and I said “Sorry,” and he said “Four hundred per game.” I said, “Are you going to hand me that pen or do we sit here and stall all night?”

Bell figured Hewitt was well worth the money. Good ends were hard to come by in 1943, even if they were pushing 34 and past their prime. Besides, due to an old football injury, Hewitt was 4-F: he had a perforated eardrum. (Men with perforated eardrums were rejected for military service because they were acutely vulnerable to chemical weapons.) Not only that, he'd found work at a trucking company—an essential industry. He was positively draft-proof. The only catch was that Hewitt would have to wear a helmet for the first time in his career. It was the rule now, whether he liked it or not—and the Offside Kid most certainly did not.

6

I
N THE EARLY DAYS
of professional football, head coaches were little more than figureheads, more akin to team captains. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Bears' George Halas), they were neither tacticians nor motivators. A head coach scheduled practices—if there were any—and taught his team a few simple plays. He had no game plan. He only had a game. Greasy Neale recalled what it was like playing for Jim Thorpe in 1917: “Why, we wouldn't see Thorpe when he was coaching the Canton Bulldogs until the day of the game. We didn't practice between games. Jim would give us three or four plays and then ask each man how long he thought he could play.”

Early coaches had neither the time nor the inclination to devote their undivided attention to football. Like their players, most held full-time jobs during the week, and many, like Thorpe, played as well as coached. So interchangeable were head coaches that it was not unusual for a team to have two or three simultaneously. The 1927 Frankford Yellow Jackets had four: Russ Daugherity, Charley Rogers, Ed Weir, and Swede Youngstrom. By having multiple coaches, a team could be relatively certain that at least one of them would show up on Sunday (or Saturday, in Frankford's case).

By 1940, the role of the head coach had changed significantly. Player/coaches like Halas, Steve Owen of the Giants, and Curly Lambeau of the Packers had hung up their football shoes to concentrate solely on coaching. They developed new strategies. They scouted opponents. They instituted regular training regimens. And the growing popularity of the National Football League made it possible for them (and, on most teams, one or two assistants) to be compensated well enough to do the job full time. There were still occasional coaching tandems. Hunk Anderson and Luke Johnsos jointly coached the Bears for more than three seasons while Halas was in the Navy during the war. But for the most part the head coach had become the lone general leading his troops, responsible for everything from negotiating contracts to handing out paychecks. The head coach had evolved from superfluous to indispensable. He had transformed football from a simple game to a very complex one. He was now firmly in charge, and he countenanced no challenges to his authority.

When the Eagles and the Steelers merged in June of 1943, both teams' head coaches, Earle “Greasy” Neale and Walt Kiesling, were of that ilk. Each had experience reaching back to the formative days of pro football. Each also had an outsized ego and a firm belief in his infallibility when it came to matters concerning the sport. Since neither coach would accept a demotion when the teams merged, they were named co-coaches. It was an unhappy compromise, a shotgun wedding that seemed destined to end badly.

E
VERYONE CALLED
A
LFRED
E
ARLE
N
EALE
“G
REASY.
” The rather unfortunate nickname was acquired at an early age, when he called a playmate “dirty” and the playmate retorted with “greasy.” In fact, Greasy Neale was quite unlike his nickname, dapper and handsome, with a pronounced widow's peak and a dimpled chin. But he never attempted to shed the sobriquet. Instead, he embraced it. When he took a coaching job at Yale in 1934, the school asked newspapers to refrain from using his nickname. But
Neale told reporters, “Yale or no Yale, if you fellows want to call me Greasy, go ahead.”

Born into a poor family in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he went to work at the age of ten as a paperboy and a pinsetter at a local bowling alley. He repeated the fourth grade and dropped out of high school in his freshman year to take a job at the mills of the Parkersburg Iron & Steel Company. In his free time he played sports.

“My first love was baseball,” he said, “and my consuming ambition was to become a big leaguer. The football I played as a youngster was merely a fill-in to keep busy until it was warm enough for baseball.” Realizing “there wasn't much future” in the mills, in 1909 he returned to Parkersburg High, where he played—and, one year, coached—football.

In the fall of 1912, Greasy entered West Virginia Wesleyan College, his chief aims being athletic rather than academic. Playing right end, he led Wesleyan to stunning upsets of mighty West Virginia in his freshman and sophomore years, scoring touchdowns in both games. At Wesleyan he also met a lovely coed named Genevieve Horner, whom he married in 1915.

“She opened an entire new chapter in my life and gave me added incentive,” he said. “She was the driving force I needed.” Because he now “had the responsibilities of a husband,” Neale left Wesleyan to take a job as the head football coach at tiny Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. He was just 23.

“Subconsciously, I suppose, I had always wanted to be a coach ever since my experience at Parkersburg High,” he wrote. “The immense possibilities of football strategy always had intrigued me, plus the even more involved details of handling a squad of football players.”

All the while, Neale continued to pursue his “consuming ambition” of becoming a big-league baseball player. His summers were spent toiling for minor league teams in Altoona, Saginaw, and Wheeling.

“God gave me a good pair of hands and speedy legs,” he said, “but not the keen vision a professional baseball player should
have.” Yet, through “application and determination” he achieved his goal: In the spring of 1916 he signed a contract with the Cincinnati Reds for $1,000. But after the baseball season ended, he always returned to football.

Over the next two decades, Neale moved Zelig-like through the landscape of American sports, an early-day Deion Sanders (another two-sport star) without the attitude or the endorsement deals. In 1917 he played professional football for the legendary Canton Bulldogs under an assumed name (“Foster”), since, at the time, he was also the head football coach at his alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan, a Southern Methodist school that frowned upon frivolous Sabbath activities like football. (The Reds would not have appreciated his moonlighting either.) In the fall of 1918, during World War I, he worked six days a week at the Wright Brothers' Dayton factory building warplanes. On Sundays he coached and played for the local pro football team, the Dayton Triangles, who finished the season undefeated. He hit .357 as the starting right fielder for the Reds in the 1919 World Series against the Chicago White Sox. Cincinnati won the series, though eight Chicago players were subsequently banned from baseball for life for conspiring to fix it. But Neale considered his achievement untainted: “I've always held to the opinion that the ill-famed Black Sox of 1919 tried to play it on the square after the first game and that our pitching was too much for them.” In all, Neale played eight seasons of major league baseball, retiring with a .259 batting average.

In 1921 he became head football coach at tiny Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, guiding the Presidents to an improbable victory over Pitt and an even more improbable appearance in the 1922 Rose Bowl, where they played California to a scoreless tie. In 1930 he coached the Ironton Tanks, an independent pro football team that beat the Chicago Bears, the New York Giants, and the Portsmouth Spartans (later the Detroit Lions) in exhibition games. He also played one game for the Tanks, a few weeks shy of his 39th birthday, again using an assumed name, this time so Genevieve wouldn't find out. (She
did, when he came home with a black eye.) He was the head football coach at six different colleges, compiling a cumulative record of 78-55-11. Along the way he invented the man-to-man pass defense and the fake reverse, and he championed “subsidization,” i.e., the awarding of athletic scholarships.

In 1934, Neale was offered the head coaching job at Yale. It was a prestigious position but there was a problem: Yale had never had a coach who wasn't an alumnus. Greasy Neale, of course, was not a Yalie, and the school's alumni, who wielded a good bit of influence, objected to his guiding their football team. A compromise of sorts was reached: Yale hired Raymond “Ducky” Pond, a Yale graduate, as head coach. Neale was made his assistant. It seemed like a step down for Neale, but in reality Pond was merely Neale's front man, a head coach in name only. Greasy ran the show and everybody knew it. For seven seasons he was the power behind the throne at Yale, a situation that was less than ideal for both men.

“I told Ducky my interests were the same as his—to see that Yale had a winning team,” Neale later said. “Once this difficulty was ironed out, we got along fine.” Privately, though, it must have been difficult for Neale to accept his new role. He had always been the head coach, even back at Parkersburg High.

Then, one day in 1940, Neale's secretary told him that a Yale grad named Alexis Thompson wanted to meet him for dinner.

“I'll be glad to have dinner with any alumnus of the school,” Neale answered, “but who is Mr. Thompson?” When the two men met for dinner at a New Haven restaurant called Mori's, Neale learned exactly who Thompson was: an extremely wealthy young man who planned to purchase an NFL team and had been advised (by New York Giants head coach Steve Owen) to hire Neale as head coach. Neale was surprised, but he was also inclined to accept the offer. He missed being a head coach in name as well as function. Besides, Yale's athletic department was $100,000 in debt and looking for ways to cut costs. It was a good time to go.

Neale told Thompson he'd take the job, but said he wanted a three-year contract for $12,000 a year. Thompson countered
with $10,000. “We settled on my figure with a minimum of bickering,” Neale later said. As soon as Thompson purchased the Steelers in December 1940, he named Neale head coach. When Thompson swapped franchises with Bert Bell and Art Rooney the following spring, he brought Neale along to coach the Eagles.

When he became the Eagles' head coach, Greasy Neale was nearly fifty years old. His brown hair had turned silvery gray, though he was still trim and fit enough to run pass patterns as well as his best receivers. He and Genevieve had been bouncing around football outposts most of their lives. It was time to settle down. Greasy promised Genevieve the Philadelphia job would be his last.

I
N
1926, O
LE
H
AUGSRUD,
a twenty-something wheeler-dealer from Duluth, Minnesota, bought an NFL franchise for one dollar. The franchise was the Duluth Kelleys (also known as the Kelley-Duluths), who were named after a local hardware store. Haugsrud, who also agreed to assume the club's debts, immediately signed the biggest prize coming out of college that year: Ernie Nevers, a handsome all-American fullback from Stanford. Nevers had captured the nation's imagination by recovering from two broken ankles to rush for more than 100 yards against Notre Dame in the 1925 Rose Bowl. Haugsrud was able to sign Nevers because the two young men were friends. They'd played high school football together in Superior, Wisconsin, just down the road from Duluth. With Nevers signed, Haugsrud renamed his team the Eskimos—the Ernie Nevers Eskimos, to be precise—and began looking for sizeable linemen who could block for his star player. Somebody told Haugsrud about a big German kid named Kiesling who'd just graduated from St. Thomas College down in St. Paul. He was as big as a boxcar and had a mean streak.