Last Team Standing (12 page)

Growing up in St. Paul, Walter Andrew Kiesling was always bigger than the other kids. When he entered Cretin High School, the football coach took one look at him and put him on the line,
where he started all four years. Knute Rockne offered him a scholarship to Notre Dame, but Kiesling's mother wanted him to stay close to home, so, in 1922, Kiesling enrolled at St. Thomas. By then he was six-two, 235 pounds. His teammates called him Big Kies. One of St. Thomas's biggest rivals was Saint John's University in Collegeville, about 90 miles northwest of St. Paul. Saint John's had a flamboyant halfback named John McNally—later more famously known as Johnny Blood. Bitter opponents on the field, Kiesling and Blood became close friends off it, and their paths would cross many times in the ensuing years.

Kiesling was an outstanding college lineman—the Tommies went 29-5-1 in his four seasons there—but, like Greasy Neale, his first love was baseball. Kiesling could hit the ball a country mile, and after he graduated from St. Thomas in the spring of 1926, he signed a contract with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, just one step below the big leagues. There it was discovered that Kiesling couldn't hit a curve ball to save his life. The Millers' manager, Michael Joseph Kelly, gently suggested he consider another line of work.

On September 19, 1926, the Eskimos, with Kiesling on the line and Ernie Nevers and Johnny Blood in the backfield, opened the season by defeating the Kansas City Cowboys 7-0 in Duluth. The Eskimos then embarked on the most grueling road trip in the annals of professional sports. Convinced his team could get bigger gates away from Duluth, Haugsrud scheduled no more home games that season. Over the next five months the Eskimos played 28 league and exhibition contests from New York to Los Angeles, traveling 17,000 miles in the process. In the Eskimos' 29 games, Nevers played all but 26 minutes. Not that his teammates got much rest either. The team's roster usually comprised no more than 13 players, prompting Grantland Rice to dub them “the Iron Men of the North.” The Eskimos were a carnivalesque enterprise. In one stretch the team played five games in eight days. Paychecks were distributed irregularly at best. One time, owner Ole Haugsrud got stiffed by the manager of the St. Louis Gunners.

“I chased him right across the football field and up the steps of the grandstand and across an open causeway,” Haugsrud recalled. “I cornered the fellow in a toilet, and he gave me the seventy bucks.”

With Big Kies clearing the way, Nevers scored eight touchdowns and ranked second in the league in scoring. The Eskimos finished their long, strange season with a remarkable (considering the circumstances) 6-5-3 record in league games. In 1927, though, they finished 1-8-0, largely because the league had contracted from 22 to 12 teams, eliminating the weaker clubs. The Eskimos were overmatched.

After the season, Nevers returned to Stanford to become an assistant coach. Reluctantly, Haugsrud sold the franchise for $2,000 to a buyer who moved the team, first to Orange, New Jersey, then to Newark. In 1932, the franchise, now defunct, was purchased by George Preston Marshall and moved to Boston. The team that Ole Haugsrud bought for a buck in 1926 is now known as the Washington Redskins. In 1999, the Redskins were sold to Daniel Snyder, then a 34-year-old marketing executive, for about $800 million. (Ole Haugsrud did all right, though. When he sold the Eskimos, he secured from the NFL a promise that he would get the first crack at the next franchise granted in the state of Minnesota. In 1961, he became one of the original owners of the Minnesota Vikings.)

After playing one season with the Pottsville Maroons, Walt Kiesling was reunited with Ernie Nevers. In 1929 Nevers returned to the NFL to play for the Chicago Cardinals, and urged his new team to sign Big Kies. For the next three seasons Kiesling made the blocks that opened the holes through which Nevers ran all the way into the Hall of Fame. Nevers led the league in scoring in 1929 and finished second in 1931. On Thanksgiving Day 1929, he scored 40 points in a game against the Bears, a record that still stands. In each of Nevers' three seasons in Chicago, he was named an all-pro—as was Kiesling. Nevers retired for good after the 1931 season, but Kiesling stuck around. In 1934 he moved across town to play for the Bears, who went undefeated in the regular season
but lost to the Giants in the championship game. In 1936 he went to Green Bay, where he was reunited with Johnny Blood and won his only NFL championship. The following season, Blood was hired to coach the Pittsburgh Pirates and invited Kiesling to join him as a player and assistant. Kiesling finally retired from playing after the 1938 season but continued as Blood's assistant. When Blood quit three games into the 1939 season, Big Kies suddenly found himself top dog: Art Rooney promoted him to head coach.

“I plan no major changes in playing personnel at the moment,” Kiesling declared upon his hiring. It was a curious mission statement; the Pirates hadn't won a game in a year. They finished the season with a record of 1-9-1. In 1940, the team, now known as the Steelers, finished 2-7-2.

Before the 1941 season, Kiesling was replaced by Bert Bell, Rooney's new partner, in an ill-conceived experiment that lasted just two games. Bell was replaced by Duquesne University head coach Aldo “Buff” Donelli, who did not give up his college job. Donelli coached the Steelers in the morning and the Dukes in the afternoon. That experiment ended after five games, when Commissioner Elmer Layden gave Donelli an ultimatum: us or them. Donelli chose them. With nowhere else to turn, Rooney called on Kiesling once more. Somewhat reluctantly, he returned. Head coaching would prove to be a role in which Walt Kiesling was never entirely comfortable. He was a lineman and was unaccustomed to the spotlight.

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE KNOWN
simply as the Eagles—sans city—the team that resulted from the merger of the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia franchises came to be dubbed, perhaps inevitably, the Steagles. Chet Smith of the
Pittsburgh Press
appears to have been the first sportswriter to use that moniker, when, in a column published June 23, 1943, four days after the merger was approved, he said of the new hybrid, “perhaps we should call them the Steagles.” In Pittsburgh the name stuck almost immediately. In Philadelphia, however, the papers continued to call the team the Philadelphia Eagles, perhaps at the insistence of Harry
Thayer, acting on Lex Thompson's behalf to protect the Eagles' name. Elsewhere, sportswriters gleefully concocted all sorts of bizarre aliases for the team with two homes: Philpitts, Philburgs, Pitt-Phils, Steaglers. But as the season progressed, most papers outside Philadelphia, including the venerable
New York Times,
adopted “Steagles,” which had a nicer ring to it than the alternatives. The National Football League, however, refused to employ the portmanteau, instead referring to the team variously as the Eagles, Eagles-Steelers, and Steelers-Eagles, before settling upon “Phil-Pitt,” which is how the team is listed in the league's official record book. To this day the league takes great pains to point out that “Steagles” was a nickname, not a formal appellation. The league never even bothered to register “Steagles” as a trademark (something an enterprising fan did in 2004).

On Monday, July 21, 1943, on a field near the University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia, the Steagles held their first practice. Seventeen players showed up. The Steelers and the Eagles had more players than that under contract, but due to wartime travel restrictions, only those who lived in Philadelphia during the off-season were required to attend. The rest would not report until a more formal training camp opened in August. That meant that none of the Pittsburgh contingent was present. Even Steelers head coach Walt Kiesling was absent. He couldn't get away from his summer job back home in St. Paul, processing marriage-license applications for the Ramsey County Register of Deeds.

Among the players who showed up that first day were Johnny Butler and Jack Hinkle, two unheralded halfbacks who would contribute mightily to the Steagles. Bill Hewitt was there too, returning to the gridiron for the first time in more than three years. There was little camaraderie among the players, however; no “team chemistry,” as coaches describe it today. Due to the league's high turnover rate, the players barely knew each other. Only two of the 17 had played in the NFL the previous season.

For the next three weeks, the team practiced three nights a week under the tutelage of Greasy Neale. The practices were held
in the evening since most players worked in defense plants during the day. The practice field, known as River Field, sat wedged between railroad tracks and the Schuylkill River. Passing locomotives belched clouds of smoke that hung over the field. The players wore white T-shirts and white shorts, with black high-top football shoes and white socks. There were no lights: practice ended when dusk surrendered to the night. There was no locker room, either. Players had to change underneath a set of bleachers. Most took the trolley or walked to practice, since nonessential driving was banned at the time, and professional football practices were, as far as the government was concerned, not essential.

The Steagles were so hungry for players that anyone who showed up was likely to be given a tryout. That's how Tom Miller ended up on the team. Miller had just been discharged from the Navy and classified 4-F after suffering a serious head injury in a midair collision during flight training at Anacostia Naval Air Station outside Washington.

“I was flying trainers and another pilot came around the wrong way,” Miller remembered. “He was supposed to come around the left and instead he went around to the right. And when we came in for the landing we were a couple hundred feet off the ground and we just collided in midair there. I was banged up in my head a little bit, but he got off worse. My propeller got in his cockpit. He got his leg very badly cut.”

Still recuperating, Miller went up to Philadelphia to visit Jack Hinkle, a childhood friend. Hinkle himself had recently been discharged from the military for medical reasons (he had ulcers) and was trying out for the Steagles. At Hinkle's urging, Miller went to practice one day and began catching passes. Miller, who'd played football at tiny Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, was a decent receiver, fast, with good hands. Bert Bell was watching from the sidelines. He pulled Miller aside and asked him if he'd like to play professional football.

“I said, ‘I don't know. I never thought about it,'” Miller remembered. “So he said, ‘Come on in.' So he signed me to a contract—just like that. It was kind of funny. I had to be careful because I
couldn't work out for a couple weeks because of my [head] injury. I could run, just so long as I didn't have any contact.”

Greasy Neale devoted the early practices to teaching his charges the intricacies of the T formation. Today the T is the basis of every offensive strategy in football, but in 1943 it was still so new that most players had to learn it from scratch. Chicago Bears head coach Ralph Jones practically invented the modern T formation in the early 1930s, when he put the quarterback directly behind the center.

After taking the snap, the quarterback had a plethora of options. He could immediately hand the ball off to the fullback or one of the halfbacks. Or he could pass it. Or he could fake a handoff and then make a pass. Or he could fake a handoff to one back, then hand it to the other. Or he could fake it to two backs and then pass. Jones also added a man in motion, an offensive player who ran across the backfield parallel to the line of scrimmage before the snap. Opposing defenses never knew what to expect. They were bewildered and, quite often, beaten. The T formation emphasized speed, agility, execution, and a bit of trickery over brute force.

“Football became a game of brains,”
wrote Bears owner George Halas, using italics for emphasis. “Instead of knocking men down, Jones tried to entice the defense into doing something helpful for us. Best of all, the public found our brand of football exciting.”

At the time, most coaches still clung to the old single-wing formation, or its cousin, the double wing. In the wing formations, the center snapped the ball a few yards back to either a halfback or the fullback, who followed a wall of blockers plowing into the opposing line.