Last Team Standing (27 page)

Tie games frustrated players and fans alike. Between 1920 and 1932, 11 percent of all games ended without a winner (or a loser). After the 1932 season, the league moved the goalposts from the back of the end zone, where they had been since 1927, up to the goal line, to encourage more field goal attempts and, in the process, reduce the number of ties. To some extent it worked. The number of tie games dropped from ten to five in a year. But throughout the 1940s, 4.3 percent of all games still ended inconclusively, and in 1943 the figure was 7.5 percent. What's more, the league did not count tie games in the standings until 1972. Before
then, a tie was disregarded. Since then, it has counted as half a win and half a loss. So, after a bruising 60 minutes on the gridiron, the game between the Steagles and the Redskins simply never happened, at least as far as the standings were concerned. (The NFL finally added one extra period of sudden-death overtime in 1974, and in the ensuing 30 years there were only 15 ties—an average of one every two seasons, or 0.2 percent of all games.) Still, a tie was better than a loss, and the Steagles had regained sole custody of second place:

The Steagles' odds of winning the division were still long, but surmountable. For one thing, the schedule was in their favor. The Redskins still had to play the Lions, the Bears, the Steagles, and the Giants (twice), opponents with a cumulative record of 14-8. The Steagles only had to face the Dodgers, the Lions, the Redskins, and the Packers, who were a combined 12-12. Looking ahead to the next two weeks, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's
Jack Sell could not resist daydreaming: “The ideal set of results for local fans … would have the favored Steagles repeat over Brooklyn with the underdog Detroit upsetting the Redskins. That would place emphasis on the meeting of the Steagles and Lions in Forbes Field on Sunday, November 21, and, with the Chicago Bears invading Washington that afternoon, might eventually have the Steagles boosted into a tie for the Eastern lead by nightfall on the twenty-first.”

Sell's math was a little off: if the Steagles won their next two games and the Redskins lost theirs, Phil-Pitt would actually claim sole possession of first place by mere percentage points (0.714 to 0.667). It was a preposterous notion.

Two days after the Redskins game, Bill Hewitt quit the Steagles. The ostensible reason for his departure was patriotism.

“I presume he felt he could not do justice to his war job and still play with us,” Bert Bell said. But the truth was, the Offside Kid was washed up. In six games he had caught just two passes and scored no touchdowns.

“It was a shame, but that's the way it was,” said tackle Vic Sears. “Nobody beats old age.” At 34, Bill Hewitt just couldn't play anymore—and he didn't want to, not even for $400 a game.

“Candidly,” he wrote a year later of his abortive comeback, “I wasn't worth the money. Nobody would be at the age of thirty-three [sic], after three years away from the game. But in my poorest season as a player I enjoyed the one big financial year I have had since I left college. Maybe there's a kind of poetic justice in that.”

Bill Hewitt never did find meaningful, well-paying employment outside football. After the war he took a job as a purchasing agent for a milk company, but that didn't work out. Then he decided to open his own automobile dealership, to take advantage of the postwar boom in car sales.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 14, 1947, he was driving home alone from a business meeting when his car skidded off the road and crashed into a culvert along Route 309 in eastern Pennsylvania, about halfway between Bethlehem and Philadelphia. A passing motorist found the football great unconscious behind the wheel and drove him to Grandview Hospital in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. There Hewitt regained consciousness. He asked the doctors to “go easy” when telling his wife of the accident. Although he had suffered a broken rib and punctured lung, Hewitt minimized the extent of his injuries. A few minutes later he was dead. He was 37. The cause of the accident was never discovered. At the time, police said, the road was “not unduly slippery.”

In 1971, Bill Hewitt was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

B
RUISED AND BATTERED,
the Steagles began preparing for their upcoming game against the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Roy
Zimmerman, who had injured his groin and hip earlier in the season, was now nursing a wounded leg. It had taken six stitches to mend the gash he'd suffered in the Redskins game. When he showed up for practice on Tuesday, he was on crutches. It scarcely seemed possible he could play the following Sunday, though the Dodgers probably didn't know that. At the time teams were not required to publicly disclose player injuries. (The NFL changed that in 1947, mainly to prevent gamblers from exploiting inside information.)

Zimmerman wasn't the only aching Steagle. The locker room resembled an infirmary. Jack Hinkle was still suffering the lingering effects of a concussion he'd sustained in training camp. Vic Sears was playing with a broken finger. Bobby Thurbon had a pulled muscle in his leg. Ben Kish had a bruised knee.

In pro football's early days, players were left to treat their injuries on their own time and at their own expense. A few enterprising and sympathetic owners made arrangements with local doctors to provide care, such as Art Rooney, whose early Hope-Harvey team in Pittsburgh was named in part for one Dr. Harvey, who treated injured players. But most owners were not nearly so accommodating.

“We didn't even have a trainer,” Tuffy Leemans recalled discovering upon joining the Giants in 1936. “In those days, if you wanted to get rid of a charley horse, there was only one method they knew of. They would take a broom handle and roll it out. They would lay you down on a table and roll that broom handle over your thigh. You'd have tears in your eyes as big as lemons.”

By the 1940s most teams kept a doctor on call to tend to major injuries, often in exchange for free tickets. The Steagles' doctor “wasn't the greatest in the world,” said halfback Ernie Steele: “Mostly he'd just talk to you and try to make you feel good. Moral support. If we really had a problem we'd go to the hospital.” Sprains, contusions, and other less serious ailments were treated by the trainer, Fred Schubach, who doubled as the team's equipment manager. The treatments were rudimentary, often nothing more than a warm bath followed by a rubdown. Some players lathered their body in pungent liniments, as Bill Hewitt
had. Halfback Jack Hinkle would “get in the tub with the Epsom salts and stay there for hours and hours.” The player shortage, not to mention machismo, compelled many injured players to try to “walk it off” or simply play through the pain, however excruciating.

“We had a saying,” tackle Bucko Kilroy said. “Don't get hurt, because if you get hurt you have to play anyway.”

Al Wistert remembered limping to the sideline in the middle of a game: “Greasy Neale looked at me and he's puzzled and he says, ‘What's the matter?' And I said, ‘I think I've broken my leg.' And he says, ‘Well get back in there until you're sure!' That's the way it was in those days.” (Wistert's leg, it turned out, was not broken.)

Neale kept warning the Steagles not to take the Dodgers lightly. He was worried about a “letdown” after their “brilliant performance” against the Redskins. Neale also knew Brooklyn had improved vastly since getting steamrolled by the Steagles on October 2. After opening the season with four straight shutout losses, the Dodgers managed to post 21 points against the Bears and ten against the Redskins in laudable losing efforts. Then, just a week before facing the Steagles again, they finally broke into the win column with a 7-0 victory over the Cardinals.

Injuries had plagued the Dodgers early in the season. In his first game back after recovering from the torn muscle he'd suffered when he tripped over his helmet in training camp, Dean McAdams, the team's ace passer, broke three bones in his hand. Merlyn Condit, another passer, tore a muscle in his leg. Considering the circumstances, head coach Pete Cawthon had done a remarkable job simply keeping the team afloat.

“What with the injuries on top of a general lack of material,” Cawthon said, “we have to do a bit of juggling to keep all eleven positions filled for the sixty minutes of a game.”

But now the Dodgers were finally healthy. McAdams and Condit had played well against the Cardinals. So had Andy Kowalski, a rookie end from Gloucester, New Jersey, by way of Mississippi State. Kowalski had appeared unannounced at the Dodgers'
training camp and asked for a tryout. Against the Cardinals he caught five passes and “was quite a busybody” on defense. Even Cawthon's Texas Tech alums were much improved. To ready the Dodgers for the Steagles' T formation, Cawthon had them scrimmage Brooklyn College at Ebbets Field. The Kingsmen were still running the T that Allie Sherman had helped head coach Lou Oshins install two years earlier. On the eve of the Steagles game, Cawthon pronounced the Dodgers “better prepared for this game than for any other contest” all season.

The Steagles couldn't be faulted for feeling overconfident, though. After all, they'd held the Dodgers to minus 33 yards rushing in their first encounter. The Steagles were still ranked second in the league in overall defense and first in rushing defense. On offense, the line was blocking so effectively—and the backs were running so efficiently—that four of the top 16 rushers in the league were Steagles: Johnny Butler, Ernie Steele, Jack Hinkle, and Bobby Thurbon. The mood of the team was good, too. In the
Post-Gazette,
Havey Boyle noted the “friendly atmosphere” among the players in the wake of the Redskins game.

If only their starting quarterback was healthy.

On Friday night Roy Zimmerman was still on crutches. Allie Sherman, who had practiced with the first team all week, was named Zimmerman's replacement. Sherman was confident. Although he had played only sparingly, his statistics compared favorably with Zimmerman's. In fact, Sherman had a higher completion percentage (40%) than Zimmerman (33%). At the same time Sherman, a 20-year-old rookie from Brooklyn, couldn't help but feel nervous and excited. Not only would he be starting his first NFL game, he would be doing it in his proverbial backyard, at a ballpark he'd always dreamed of playing in: Ebbets Field.

Ebbets Field secured its place in pro football history on October 22, 1939, when the Dodgers hosted the Eagles. It was one of the most monumental football games ever played—though hardly anybody who was there knew it at the time. The Dodgers won, 23-14, with Brooklyn's veteran fullback Ace Gutowsky making
a brief appearance and rushing for seven yards—just enough to make him the league's all-time leading rusher with 3,399 yards. But what made the game historic was the fact that it was the first NFL game to be shown on television. NBC station W2XBS, which had broadcast a baseball game from Ebbets Field earlier that year, carried the game as an experiment. The 13,000 fans watching the game in person probably outnumbered the television audience. There were only about 1,000 TV sets in all of New York City. A few hundred curious visitors to the World's Fair in Queens also watched, on monitors set up at the RCA Pavilion. The announcer was Allen “Skip” Waltz, a former NYU football star who covered sports for W2XBS. Two cameras were used, one next to Waltz in the mezzanine and one on the field.

“It was … a cloudy day,” Waltz later said, “and when the sun crept behind the stadium there wasn't enough light for the cameras. The picture would get darker and darker and eventually it would be completely blank and we'd revert to a radio broadcast.”

But W2XBS deemed the experiment a success. At least football was easier to follow on television than baseball. The fledgling station decided to carry more Dodgers games that season. None of the players who took part in the game had any idea it was being televised, even many years later, and the papers made no mention of the fact the next day. But out of those first faint, flickering black-and-white images grew a colossus. In 1949 the league's television revenue totaled $75,000. By 2005 the NFL had signed contracts with CBS, DirecTV, ESPN, FOX, and NBC collectively worth more than $3 billion annually.

Even for the woeful Dodgers, the attendance for the Steagles game on November 14 was disappointing: 7,614. It was the league's smallest crowd of the season. One reason was the bitterly cold weather. Another was Sid Luckman. Just 15 miles from Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds was packed with more than 56,000 fans eager to see Luckman and his Chicago Bears square off against the Giants.

Of all the league's scheduling problems, the New York
situation was the most intractable. Dodgers owner Dan Topping was also the president of the baseball Yankees, and when he bought the football team in 1934 he'd hoped to move it into Yankee Stadium. But Giants owner Tim Mara blocked the move because he felt it would infringe on his franchise's territory. (The Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were less than a mile apart and within sight of each other.) As a result of their feud, Topping and Mara frequently scheduled their teams at home on the same date, to the detriment of both, but mostly the Dodgers.