Last Team Standing (7 page)

O
n Tuesday, April 6, 1943, the NFL opened its annual meeting at the Palmer House hotel in downtown Chicago, where, it so happened, Elmer Layden kept a suite. Layden and the representatives of the league's ten clubs gathered around a large table in the hotel's ornate Crystal Room, a far cry from the Canton automobile dealership in which the league had been founded 23 years earlier. The room was filled with the sweet smell of cigar smoke, courtesy of Art Rooney's ever-present and pricey stogie.

Layden convened the meeting at 10:20 a.m., saying, “I don't believe there is any need to tell you that this is a very important meeting. I think we are all aware of the fact that the public will be scrutinizing our words and our actions very carefully throughout this meeting.” He was being a bit self-aggrandizing—the public had much more important things to worry about that spring—but it was obvious that the league was imperiled. Another 150 players had been lost to the service since the end of the 1942 season. Some clubs were in ruins. The Eagles had just 16 players under contract, and they were in better shape than most other teams. Cleveland and Green Bay had just 14 players each. New York, 13. Detroit, 12. The Cardinals, ten. Pittsburgh, only six. Even the owners were marching off to war. Lex Thompson of the Eagles was an Army private, Dan Topping of the Dodgers was a Marine
captain, George Halas of the Bears was a Navy lieutenant commander, and the two co-owners of the Cleveland Rams, Fred Levy and Dan Reeves were, respectively, a lieutenant colonel and a captain in the Army.

“It'll be a miracle if we operate,” one coach told the
Chicago Daily Times.

The owners had another concern, though. Professional football, hardly a lucrative business before the war, was even more risky now. Most clubs were losing money. Given the player shortage and the precipitous attendance drop the previous season, some owners simply felt it wasn't worth carrying on. By one newspaper's estimate, four of the ten clubs favored suspending operations for the duration. But the league's two most outspoken and influential owners—the Bears' George Halas and the Redskins' George Preston Marshall—adamantly opposed folding. Halas, who was training aviation mechanics at the Naval Air Technical Center in Norman, Oklahoma, was so determined to keep the league running that he managed to finagle a leave to attend the crucial meeting and lobby his colleagues. Marshall threatened to keep playing even if every other club voted to shut down: “We're going to operate if our only opposition is Georgetown University or if we have to scrimmage among ourselves.” In fact, Marshall couldn't understand what the problem was.

“We're fortunate, unlike baseball, in that we only play on Sundays,” he said. “Many fellows in defense work could find time to practice and play—at least in the home games. Nope, it won't be the highest caliber of football, but it'll be football.” Marshall had 9,000 reasons to keep playing: that's how many season ticket orders the Redskins had already received.

Elmer Layden also opposed any cessation, insisting “we can and will play football.” Of course, he didn't have much choice: the alternative was to incur the wrath of Halas and, most especially, Marshall. (Layden's resolve was further boosted by a “war clause” in his contract that stipulated he would not get paid if the league ceased operations. His annual salary was $25,000, roughly ten times the national average in 1943.)

On Tuesday afternoon, the Cleveland Rams—represented by their head coach, Charles “Chile” Walsh, and Percy Cowan, a Chicago financier who was “handling certain business affairs” for the absent owners—asked the other clubs for permission to drop out of the league for the duration of the war. With Rams co-owners Levy and Reeves in the Army, their representatives said, and with so many players lost to the service, it was no longer feasible to operate the club. (Unlike the other owners on active duty, Levy and Reeves had not assigned a full-time caretaker to look after their club.) Some owners weren't happy about it, but Cleveland's motion passed unanimously. You couldn't very well force a team to play when it didn't want to. There was a caveat though: the suspension would be for the 1943 season only, not the duration. The Rams would have to ask again if they wanted to keep sitting out the following season.

There was a silver lining to Cleveland's withdrawal: the 14 players it still had under contract would be disbursed among the league's nine remaining teams. This was accomplished by drawing the names out of a hat.

Cleveland's departure left the league with a major scheduling problem. Normally, each of the ten teams played 11 games: two against each of the other four teams in its division and three against teams from the other division. But with the league reduced to nine teams—five in the East and four in the West—that arrangement was impossible. A new schedule would have to be drawn up.

Scheduling was always a prickly matter for the NFL, particularly in the days before profit sharing. Naturally, each team was eager to schedule home games against the most popular opponents (e.g., the Redskins, Bears, and Giants). Conversely, nobody wanted the Cardinals on their home schedule. The snag this time was the Redskins-Bears game, always one of the biggest draws of the year. Here, Halas and Marshall could not agree. Each wanted the game for his home field. Layden, whose painstakingly crafted 55-game, ten-team schedule had been rendered moot by Cleveland's sudden departure, could not resolve the impasse.

The following day, the owners approved several rule changes intended to address the wartime conditions. The maximum number of players each team was allowed to carry on its roster was lowered from 33 to 25. This helped alleviate the manpower shortage (as well as reduce costs). The change also mollified the Office of Defense Transportation, which had ordered the league to reduce travel to conserve fuel and rubber for the war effort. Layden said the smaller rosters, coupled with other modifications, would cut the league's “man miles” by 37 percent from the previous season. The smaller rosters also prevented more powerful clubs from cornering the market by signing all the best available players. The owners further eliminated the minimum roster size of 22, leaving it up to Layden to determine when a team was too shorthanded.

“If a squad should drop down, for example, to 16 players,” Layden said, “then I might deem it necessary to take measures to bolster the squad roster.”

To get the most out of their smaller rosters, the owners approved another rule change: unlimited substitution. From its inception in the late nineteenth century, football was an endurance contest. The 11 players who started a game were expected to be on the field for all 60 minutes, playing both offense and defense, with little or no respite. The NFL permitted a player to enter a game just once each quarter, except for the fourth, when he could enter twice. Substitutions were also allowed when a player was injured—but it had better be serious. For the 1943 season, though, all restrictions were lifted. Teams were free to replace players as often as they pleased. Besides helping teams maximize their rosters, the new rule was also intended to reduce injuries, since rested players were less likely to get hurt. Most coaches, conservative by nature, opposed the change.

“I don't want a player who can't play both offense and defense,” grumbled Greasy Neale, the Eagles' head coach. The owners approved unlimited substitution for the 1943 season only, citing wartime constraints, but the writing was on the wall. The change heralded the beginning of the end of the league's heroic “60-minute men.”

The owners also voted to make helmets mandatory for the first time. Nobody had played bareheaded in the NFL since the Bears' Dick Plasman retired after the 1940 season, but the owners weren't taking any chances. They might have to cajole a few old-timers out of retirement and they didn't want them getting hurt. Not that the leather helmets then in use afforded much protection. Concussions were a common injury. In 1939 the John T. Riddell Company had patented a new plastic helmet that was lighter and stronger than leather (and it didn't get moldy when wet, either). But plastic was needed for the war effort, so players were stuck with the high-crowned leather headgear. Webbing inside the helmets held them in place on a player's head. Facemasks were practically nonexistent. Ted Doyle may have been the only player in the league wearing one.

“I had a cap put on my tooth and didn't want to have to replace it, so I had them put a nose guard on my helmet,” Doyle explained. “'Course it wasn't a fence to hide behind like they have now, it was just a single bar that came down and another that came across the front.”

The helmets were hard to decorate, though some teams tried. The Eagles painted theirs green and white, but the paint constantly chipped off, giving the helmets a shabby look that must have driven fashion-conscious Elmer Layden crazy.

One rule change the owners considered but rejected would have allowed coaches to call plays from the sidelines. Ironically, coaches were largely barred from coaching during games. The quarterback or halfback was supposed to call all the plays. The rule was a vestige of the days when coaches also played. The owners' rejection of the change was largely meaningless, though, as the rule was almost comically ignored. Every coach in the league had secret signals for calling plays. Greasy Neale used a game program. Depending on how he held it—rolled up, flat, right hand, left hand—his team knew which play to run.

The meeting concluded on Thursday, April 8, with the league's eighth annual draft. Back in 1935, Bert Bell, who still owned the Philadelphia Eagles at the time, had come up with the
idea of holding an annual draft of college players, with teams choosing in the inverse order of their finish in the previous season. Prior to that, college players who had exhausted their eligibility were free to sign with any team. Inevitably the best players signed with the best teams. The draft, inaugurated in 1936, brought about the first semblance of parity to the league, and it is a credit to owners like the Bears' George Halas, the Redskins' George Preston Marshall, and the Giants' Tim Mara that they went along with the idea, putting the league's interests above their own teams'.

During the war, the league renamed the draft the “preferred negotiations list,” so as to avoid any militaristic connotations. By any name, though, the 1943 draft was a fruitless exercise. Few of the draftees were expected to be available to play professional football in the fall, given their military obligations. (In 1942 only about 28 percent of all NFL draftees reported to training camp. The figure for 1943 would be closer to five percent.)

“The draft will be little more than a token affair,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
's Edward Prell, “teams staking out claims on players, the claims to be in effect when the war is over.”

To better the odds of actually landing a player or two, the league increased the number of players each team was permitted to draft from 20 to 30, prompting one official to quip, “It's just a matter of selecting 30 men who aren't going to play instead of 20.”

By virtue of their perfect 0-11 record in 1942, the Detroit Lions were awarded the first pick in the draft. They chose Frank Sinkwich, an all-American halfback from the University of Georgia. But Sinkwich had already enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and would be reporting for active duty as soon as he graduated.

The meeting adjourned at ten o'clock that night with much unresolved. A new schedule still had to be ratified. And there were some rumblings that one or more teams might join Cleveland on the sidelines before the fall. There was even a
rumor going around that the Eagles and the Steelers were planning to ask the league for permission to merge—a rumor that Eagles general manager Harry Thayer emphatically denied.

“At no time have officials of the Eagles and Steelers discussed this possibility,” Thayer huffed. He should have told Art Rooney that. When asked about the rumor, the Steelers' co-owner was characteristically forthright. According to the
Chicago Tribune,
he “admitted that such a deal might be a remote possibility in the event it became apparent later in the year that neither team could recruit a squad large enough to enter the race.”

To resolve the outstanding issues—and to clarify each club's status once and for all—Layden and the owners decided to hold another meeting in June. For his part, the commissioner was optimistic about the future.

“I believe we'll be able to find enough draft-exempt men to keep going,” he said after the April meeting concluded. “It won't be easy, I know. Our easy source of playing material—college football ranks—is gone for the duration. We'll have to uncover new sources of supply.”

One source of supply Layden and the owners did not uncover was right under their noses. It would have solved the league's manpower shortage overnight. But it would have meant exhibiting a kind of courage they did not have.

A
FRICAN-AMERICANS WERE WELCOMED
, though not always warmly, in the National Football League's early days. Fritz Pollard, an all-American from Brown, was one of the stars of the Akron Pros, the league's first champions in 1920. The following season Pollard was named one of the team's two co-coaches. He scored seven touchdowns to boot, tying him for the league lead.

One of Pollard's teammates was his friend Paul Robeson, who managed to play professional football on weekends, while attending Columbia University Law School and singing in New York nightclubs the rest of the week. Robeson would take the train from New York to Akron (or wherever else the Pros were
playing) on Friday night, practice with the team on Saturday, play the game on Sunday, and return to New York immediately afterwards.

Between 1920 and 1933, 13 African-Americans played in the NFL, often under great stress. Each had to endure the usual epithets and indignities. In newspaper reports they were inevitably described in racial terms: “ebony panther,” “dark menace,” “dusky,” “an Ethiopian in the woodpile.”