Interference (6 page)

Among Bidwill's holdings were the majority interest in Hawthorne racetrack in Chicago, dog tracks in Jacksonville, Miami Beach, and Tampa, as well as a string of Chicago apartment houses. He also owned stock in a large printing company that published the programs and eventually the pari-mutuel tickets of America's racetracks.

Another new owner entered the league in July 1933. Thirty-two-year-old ex-amateur boxer Arthur J. Rooney bought the Pittsburgh Pirates—renamed the Steelers in 1940—for $2,500. The team was operated out of the Fort Pitt Hotel in downtown
Pittsburgh.
⁴
Like Halas, the quiet and stocky Rooney was a former baseball player who turned to football after a career-ending injury.

Born in 1901 in Coulterville, Pennsylvania, Rooney came from a family of steelworkers and coal miners. The Rooney family had moved to Pittsburgh in 1903 and opened Rooney's Saloon on the city's North Side. The Rooneys' tavern became a renowned hangout for sports fanatics and those who booked their bets. The bar also became a favorite retreat for local politicians and led to young Rooney's flirtation with politics. A staunch Republican who attended Duquesne and Georgetown universities, he once ran for local registrar of wills and lost.

Another big-time gambler who allegedly became the most powerful layoff man in Pittsburgh, Art Rooney once hired a coach for the Steelers because he owed Rooney money from gambling. The coaching job was to help work off the debt. Remaining a heavy gambler while an NFL owner, Rooney, like Bidwill, later purchased several horse- and dog-racing tracks.

Rooney reportedly once won $256,000 after two days of betting at Empire City and Saratoga racetracks. Recounting the story of that now-legendary day of gambling, Rooney once told columnist Red Smith, “I had Tim Mara's figures but sometimes I'd see something the charts didn't see, like a change of jockeys or post position, and I'd use my own judgement [
sic
]. I was betting with Peter Blong, who was working in the ring for Frank Erickson that day … If Erickson had been there I'm sure he would have kept taking my action. Anyway, I came close to sweeping the card.”
⁵

So close were Art Rooney and Tim Mara that Rooney and his wife named one of their sons Timothy in honor of Mara.

“Bookmakers in those days were such a different brand of people from what they are today,” Rooney told reporter Myron Cope. “They were great people. They had class.”
⁶

On July 9, 1933, the day after Rooney purchased the Steelers, his close friend deBenneville “Bert” Bell, another racetrack gambler with ties to the Erickson gambling syndicate, bought the Frankford Yellow Jackets in Philadelphia and changed the name to the Philadelphia Eagles. Bell and his partner, Lud Wray, paid $4,000 for the club; Bell became the team's coach.

Five feet eight and 195 pounds, Bert Bell was a star quarterback for the University of Pennsylvania in 1916 and 1917 before
leaving school to work in an army hospital in France during World War I. He returned to Penn after the war and became the captain of his college team. He remained on as the backfield coach at Penn after graduating with a bachelor's degree in English. He served under head coach John Heisman, for whom the Heisman Trophy—the annual award for the best college football player—is named.

Bell coached at Penn until 1928. He then operated the family-owned Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia for two years before leaving to resume coaching at Temple University. While at Temple, Bell and Wray got together and decided to buy a professional football franchise in 1933. Bell had already married Francis Upton, a popular musical-comedy star and member of the Ziegfeld Follies, who gave him the money to buy the Eagles.

“Bert Bell was born to great wealth,” his son Upton Bell told me. “But he chose both sides of the track. He was just as comfortable with Alfred Vanderbilt as he was with Al Capone. Oh, sure, he knew Al Capone.
⁷
He knew all the gamblers because he was a gambler himself at one time. He was a young man during Prohibition. All the rich people in those days knew all the gangsters. He knew those people, and they trusted him.

“Before he married my mother, he was engaged to a society woman. My grandfather, who was extremely wealthy, tried to talk him into settling down with this woman and gave him fifty thousand dollars. My father took the money and lost it all in one day at Saratoga racetrack. When my father came back, he said that he was sorry that he had lost the money, and that he was not going to marry the woman. My grandfather banished him from the house and cut him out of the will.”

In June 1934, the NFL team, the Portsmouth Spartans, was sold for $21,500 to Detroit investor George “Dick” Richards, a former automobile dealer and another heavy gambler, who then moved the team to his hometown and renamed it the Detroit Lions. Although it was against the league rules for any member of the NFL—owner, coach, or player—to gamble, Harry Wismer, a radio announcer and onetime part owner of the Lions, wrote, “Everyone knew Richards gambled, as did many of the other owners. They always bet on their own team, and in those days odds, not points, were used to indicate the difference between the teams. In the letters he had foolishly written … Richards revealed that he had bet heavily on a number of the Lions' games
and called for everyone's best efforts to win for him.”
⁸
He once claimed to have bet $50,000 on a single NFL game.

The famed Earl “Dutch” Clark, one of Richards's star players, talked about the owner's gambling habits. “[Richards] liked to bet on the Lions and he would get some of the players to go in with him … Richards figured they'd play twice as hard to win twenty-five bucks, or maybe fifty bucks. So he got them going along with him.”
⁹

Richards sold the Lions in 1940, after he was caught paying off a college player to play on his professional team. He sold out for $225,000 to Fred Mandel, who owned a Chicago department store.

Three years earlier, in 1937, a group of investors organized the Cleveland Rams, selling the team in 1941 for $100,000 to twenty-nine-year-old New York businessman Dan F. Reeves, a very slight and fine-boned little man who was the son of the founder of a chain of grocery stores based in New York. Young Reeves became the heir to the family business, which sold its six hundred stores to Safeway in 1940 for $11 million. An officer in the Army Air Force in World War II, Reeves suspended play by the Rams in 1943 while he was in the service. When Reeves returned from the war, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

Later, in 1946, Reeves moved his stock brokerage firm to Beverly Hills and, with his NFL team in tow, created the Los Angeles Rams. After suffering losses of over $200,000 from his football investment the following year, he took on four partners, one of whom was entertainer Bob Hope.
¹⁰
Each of the partners bought in for a mere $1—with the proviso that they share in the losses of the team. It would be one of the worst deals Reeves ever made because the Rams rarely lost money after that. Meantime, he had given away two thirds of the team for a total of $4.

When Rooney sold his Pittsburgh team in 1940 to Alexis Thompson, a New York drug manufacturer, he became Bell's partner in the Philadelphia franchise. Rooney and Bell then swapped teams with Thompson the following year—with Rooney regaining the Steelers. And then, because of the war, the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia teams merged and became the Phil-Pitt Steagles. This hybrid team played together only for the 1943 season.
¹¹
However, Bell remained with Pittsburgh, serving as the team's president and general manager.

4 The Baugh Surveillance

IN THE LATE FALL of 1943, rumors began to circulate that members of the Washington Redskins—particularly Sammy Baugh, the Redskins' quarterback sensation—were associating with Washington gamblers who were linked to Frank Erickson's gambling syndicate. Talk of game fixing had already begun after a November contest between the Redskins and the Phil-Pitt Steagles.

The Redskins' “Slingin” Sammy Baugh was one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game of football. He was an all-American at Texas Christian University in 1936 and signed with Washington the following year. In his first season as a pro, Baugh electrified fans with a spectacular passing offense and led the once-failing Redskins to their first NFL championship.

The next year, after threatening to quit football if he didn't receive more money, Baugh negotiated a three-year contract for $25,000 with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. A West Virginia-born laundry owner in Washington who had bought the Boston Braves football team in July 1932, Marshall had moved the team to Washington, D.C., forming the Washington Redskins in February 1937. Marshall, a onetime horse-racing enthusiast and gambler, had reformed himself and begun beating a tambourine in his efforts to prevent sports gambling. Always a showman, Marshall was determined to make professional football respectable.

Although the Chicago Bears had destroyed the Redskins, 73-0, in the 1940 NFL championship game, it took Baugh only
two years to avenge the Redskins and take the title back from the Bears. “I guess this kinda makes up for that thing in 1940, don't it?” cowboy Baugh told newsmen after the game.

The Bears' running sensation, former all-American George “One-Play” McAfee, a 9.8 sprinter in the hundred on a cinder track back, told me about the 1940 game, saying, “The funny thing about that game was that two or three weeks earlier, the Redskins had beaten us, seven to three. We left there with some hard feelings because we thought we had gotten some bad calls from the officials. And when we came back to play them, we wanted to get even. But ol' Sammy, he was a great quarterback. We played both ways in those days—so I was in the backfield offensively and played in the secondary on defense. I remember on one play I felt someone bumping me. When I turned around, it was Sammy blocking me downfield. And he was the quarterback. Sammy always played full out.” McAfee intercepted a pass and ran thirty-four yards for a touchdown during the Bears' rout of the Redskins.

Baugh also remembers the 1940 rivalry with the Bears, especially the championship game. Baugh told me, “We played the Bears on the last day of the regular season that year, and we beat them, seven to three. In fact, McAfee ran the ball down to the one yard line. And before they could score, the officials said that the game was over. That left a real bad taste in their mouth.

“But there was no doubt in my mind that the Bears were the best team in the league that year, game in and game out. We had more good players that year than I could ever remember playing with. But I doubt that we were as good as they were. We might have been a little lucky to have beaten them in that seven-to-three game. But when they left that field they were madder than hell. They just couldn't believe that we beat them.

“On the day of the championship, we were a damn tired team. We were practicing really hard the week before the game. We would have been better off had we not worked quite so hard.”

In 1943, Baugh had led the Redskins to sixteen consecutive games over two seasons without a defeat. Then, Washington was beaten by the Steagles on November 28. Earlier that month, the Steagles had tied the Redskins, 14-14, ending Washington's consecutive victory streak at thirteen. Prior to the loss to the Steagles, the Redskins were 6-0-1 and in first place in the NFL's Eastern Division. The Steagles were 4-3-1 and in second place.

Baugh entered the November 28 game with a knee injury he had received in a game two weeks earlier. The Steagles had held the Redskins scoreless until the final seconds of the third quarter when Baugh threw a touchdown pass. With the score 14-7 in the fourth quarter, Baugh led the Redskins downfield hoping to tie the game. However, a Baugh pass was intercepted, which led to another Steagles touchdown. When the Redskins got the ball back, Baugh attempted a quick kick (a surprise punt before fourth down) that was blocked and recovered by the Steagles on the Redskins one yard line. The Steagles then plunged in for another score. Baugh, who was twice booed by the Redskins fans because of his performance, threw a second touchdown pass in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. Too little too late, the Steagles won, 27-14.

In early December, two sportswriters for
The Washington Times-Herald
, Vincent X. Flaherty and Dick O'Brien, began reporting on the rumors circulating in Washington about Baugh and the Redskins. Although dismissing such talk as “pool hall gossip,” Elmer Layden—a member of the legendary Four Horsemen of Notre Dame who had become the first commissioner of the NFL in 1941
¹
—reported, “So far I have not been able to find the slightest bit of factual evidence of collusion between anyone in the league and gamblers.”

Infuriated over Flaherty and O'Brien's report, Redskins owner Marshall denied that members of his team had been gambling and said defiantly, “Anyone connected with professional football who is gambling or has gambled on a game in our league should be thrown out immediately.” Marshall then offered a $5,000 reward for any proof of any gambling by any member of the Redskins.
The Times-Herald
could not advance their case further and dropped the story.

“We heard those rumors weeks ago,” Baugh told the two reporters during their investigation. “The boys on our team just laughed at them.”

I asked Baugh about the charges of gambling against the Redskins players. He explained that the entire team had first been confronted prior to its game with the Detroit Lions earlier in the 1943 season. “The first time we heard about it was in our dressing room before the game,” Baugh says. “Someone came in and said that there was a rumor going around that we were throwing the game that day. I remember that shocked everybody, and we just made up our minds to beat the hell out of
Detroit if we could.” The Redskins ran up the score and won, 42-20.