Last Team Standing (2 page)

Not to be outdone by the Giants, Redskins owner George Preston Marshall orchestrated two “days” at Griffith Stadium that Sunday. One was for Bob Hoffman, a Redskin who was stricken with tuberculosis midway through the season. Hoffman was recovering nicely but was “believed to be under heavy expense.” Collection boxes were placed throughout the stadium, the contents of which would be forwarded to the ailing player. It was also “Georgetown Day,” to honor the four Hoyas taking part in the game: Clem Stralka of the Redskins and Lou Ghecas, Joe Frank, and Jim Castiglia of the Eagles. In a pregame ceremony each was presented a brand new suitcase by Al Blozis, a Georgetown senior and star tackle on the school's football team, who had the honor of representing the student body.

Of the three games that Sunday, the only one that really meant anything was at Comiskey Park in Chicago, where the
Cardinals were hosting their cross-town rivals, the Bears, before a crowd of 18,879. Usually the rivalry was phlegmatic—the Bears almost always won, and easily—but this game was different because there was a lot on the line. If the Bears won, they would tie the Green Bay Packers for first place in the Western Division, forcing the first divisional playoff game in league history. (The Packers had already finished their schedule, and many of them were in the stands to root the Cardinals on.) The Cardinals had something to play for as well. They were out to avenge a 53-7 whipping that the Bears had administered to them eight weeks earlier. There were no “days” at Comiskey that Sunday, only football.

The games in New York and Washington kicked off at 2:00 p.m., Eastern Time. The Chicago game began 30 minutes later.

At Griffith Stadium in D.C., the Eagles, who were 14-point underdogs, surprised everybody by quickly taking a 7-0 lead over the Redskins. Eagles halfback Jack Banta, who'd been cut by the Redskins earlier in the season, gained a measure of revenge on his old team by scoring the touchdown on a nice seven-yard run. Nick Basca, a rookie from Villanova, added the extra point. At the top of the stadium, in a rickety press box reeking of cigar smoke, the sportswriters, lined up behind their Underwoods and L.C. Smiths, kept one eye on the field and another on the Associated Press Teletype machine, which was spitting out reports from the other two games. In Chicago, the Cardinals were leading the Bears 7-0 in the first quarter. In New York, the Dodgers were beating the Giants by the same score early in the second quarter. It was shaping up to be a day of upsets.

Then, at around 2:45 p.m., the Teletype machine pounded out an enigmatic message: CUT FOOTBALL RUNNING.

Pat O'Brien, the AP man at the Eagles-Redskins game in D.C., turned to his friend from the
Washington Post,
Shirley Povich, and shrugged: Must be a problem with the wires.

But then came this: PEARL HARBOR BOMBED.

Then this: WAR ON.

The writers huddled close around the machine, silent and disbelieving. They were the only people in the stadium with any knowledge of the events unfolding, at that very moment, half a world away.

“For a few moments it was our exclusive secret,” Povich later wrote. “And hard to grapple with was the stupefying news.”

Jesse Jones—commerce secretary, presidential confidante, and one of the most powerful men in Washington—was enjoying the game from a box seat on the 50-yard line. An usher approached and handed him a note. Jones read it, got up, put on his coat and hat, and left the stadium in silence.

Another usher was dispatched to locate Edward A. Tamm, the assistant director of the FBI, and escort him to the stadium switchboard. Tamm was patched into a call with J. Edgar Hoover, who was in New York for the weekend, and Robert L. Shivers, the special agent in charge of the bureau's Honolulu office. Shivers held the phone out his office window. Tamm and Hoover could hear the explosions emanating from Pearl Harbor.

Soon Griffith Stadium echoed with cryptic announcements.

“Admiral W.H.O. Bland”—the head of the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance—“is asked to report to his office at once,” the public address announcer solemnly intoned, the words bouncing around the stadium like a wayward punt.

“Mr. Joaquin Elizande”—the resident commissioner of the Philippines—“is asked to report to his office.” The announcements grew more frequent, and urgent. Newspaper reporters and photographers were asked to report to their offices as well. The press box rapidly depopulated. By halftime, just a single photographer was on the sidelines.

But the big news—the outbreak of war—was never officially announced at Griffith Stadium.

“We don't want to contribute to any hysteria,” the Redskins' general manager, Jack Espey, said at the time. Years later, though, Redskins owner George Preston Marshall gave a more prosaic explanation: “I didn't want to divert the fans' attention from the
game.” So, between the four-star pages, the PA announcer droned on with the usual announcements.

“Seymour hit off tackle and picked up about three yards.”

“That pass, Baugh to Aguirre, was good for about eight yards.”

But the crowd knew something was amiss.

“By the end of the half, there was a buzzing in the grandstands,” the
Washington Post's
Shirley Povich wrote. “Inevitably, shreds of the story began to ripple beyond the vicinity of the press box.”

But those ripples never reached the players on the field.

“We didn't know what the hell was going on,” Sammy Baugh, the Redskins' star passer remembered. “I had never heard that many announcements, one right after the other. We felt something was up, but we just kept playing.”

Similar scenes unfolded in New York and Chicago: big shots were paged, the games went on, and the fans in the bleachers were oblivious. Perhaps it was just as well, considering the hard times ahead. For tens of thousands of Americans, a professional football game would be their last carefree diversion for many years. For some—including some on the field—it would be their last ever.

In the end, December 7, 1941, wasn't a day of upsets. The Redskins came from behind to beat the Eagles, 20-14. The Bears came back too, beating the Cardinals to force a playoff with the Packers. Only the Dodgers held their early lead, beating the Giants 21-7 and ruining Tuffy Leemans Day. Fans streaming out of the stadiums were greeted by newsboys hawking extra editions that confirmed the dreadful rumors: “U.S. AND JAPS AT WAR.” More than 2,300 sailors, soldiers, and civilians at Pearl Harbor were dead.

The next day, President Roosevelt went before Congress and declared, “The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Both chambers passed a declaration of war, with only one lawmaker—Montana Representative Jeanette Rankin—dissenting. Across the country, shock gave way
to panic, and in San Francisco, air raid sirens wailed as dozens of “hostile planes” were sighted over the city. The planes weren't real, but the fear was.

Football was rendered utterly inconsequential. The day after Pearl Harbor, reporters asked Giants head coach Steve Owen what he thought about the upcoming playoff game between the Bears and the Packers. Owen, a rotund and usually jovial Oklahoman, answered gravely in his slow Southern drawl: “I don't know what is going to happen.” He seemed so serious. It sounded as if he were talking about the war, not a football game.

Professional football players contributed mightily and often heroically to the war effort. Those who could fight, fought. Bob Hoffman, the tubercular Redskin, recovered well enough to serve four years in the military, not returning to the NFL until 1946. Each of the four Georgetown alums honored before the Eagles-Redskins game on Pearl Harbor Day also went off to war, as did Al Blozis, the Hoya football star who presented them with luggage. Blozis, however, never returned. After Georgetown, he played two seasons with the Giants. Then he enlisted in the Army, only to be killed on a battlefield in France. Nick Basca, the Eagles' rookie kicker that day, would meet a similar fate.

In all, 638 NFL players served in the military during World War II. It's an impressive number, especially considering the league only had about 330 total roster spots when the U.S. entered the conflict. Three hundred fifty-five NFL players were commissioned officers. Sixty-nine were decorated. Nineteen (including Al Blozis and Nick Basca) died for their country. Two—Jack Lummus of the Giants and Maurice Britt of the Detroit Lions—were awarded the Medal of Honor.

By the spring of 1943, with the war still raging and no end in sight, the 23-year-old National Football League was facing a crisis unimaginable today: a shortage of players. The Pittsburgh Steelers had just six under contract. The Dodgers had none. Front offices suffered, too. The owners of the Dodgers, the Eagles, the Bears, and the Cleveland Rams were on active duty. But the league persevered. Aging stars were lured out of retirement, and
a few active servicemen managed to get leave for games—though not always through official channels.

But mostly the league subsisted on players who'd been deferred from the draft. Some had families to support. Others worked in essential war industries. The lion's share, though, were physically unfit for military service. They had ailments that precluded military careers but not football careers: ulcers, flat feet, partial blindness or deafness, perforated eardrums. It was these men—known, sometimes derisively, as 4-Fs (for their draft classification)—who really kept the NFL alive.

One team in particular emblematized the lengths to which the NFL was forced to go during World War II: the Phil-Pitt Steagles. Created by merging the Steelers and the Eagles, the Steagles were a wartime anomaly, like ration books and air-raid drills. The team's center was deaf in one ear, its top receiver was half-blind, and its best running back had ulcers. Yet, somehow, this woebegone group—including center Ray Graves, tackles Ted Doyle, Frank “Bucko” Kilroy, and Vic Sears, halfbacks Johnny Butler, Jack Hinkle, and Ernie Steele, and quarterbacks Allie Sherman and Roy Zimmerman—melded to form one of the finest pro football teams either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia had ever seen, and captured the hearts of sports fans nationwide. And they did it all while working full time in defense plants, and in spite of the fact that their two head coaches could not abide each other. Perhaps no team in NFL history has overcome more enormous and unusual obstacles and adversities than did the Steagles.

Professional football's 4-Fs didn't storm the beaches of Iwo Jima or Normandy. They couldn't. But they were, in smaller ways, heroic. In America's darkest hours, they gave the nation something to cheer about, and their accomplishments, often in the face of long odds, exemplified the spirit that won the war. They also saved professional football. Without them, today's NFL, its 32 franchises now worth a combined $26 billion, might not exist. They didn't know it, but they were pioneers. This is their story and the story of their times.

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ISTERT NEVER EVEN WANTED TO CARRY THE BALL.
He was a tackle, for crying out loud. Halfbacks carry the ball. Fullbacks. Even quarterbacks sometimes. But not tackles. Tackles hunker down on the line of scrimmage. On offense, they make blocks. They give the quarterback time to pass. They clear a path for the real ball carriers. If a tackle touches the ball, something's gone horribly wrong: there's been a fumble. But Wistert's coach at the University of Michigan, the innovative and mercurial Herbert “Fritz” Crisler, thought, since nobody ever expects a tackle to run with the ball, why not have him run with the ball? It was the kind of contrarian brainstorm that Crisler loved. Wistert had his doubts, though. He'd never carried the ball in a real game. Ever. But who was he to question the legendary Coach Crisler?