Last Team Standing (5 page)

“Bert will go to Penn or he'll go to hell,” he liked to say.

Bert chose Penn. He played football for the Quakers from 1915 to 1919, with a year off for service in France during World War I. He was the team's starting quarterback in the 1917 Rose Bowl. After graduation, he coached at Penn and Temple. His family's fortune was nearly wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929, but when the NFL offered him the Philadelphia franchise four years later, Bell couldn't pass up the opportunity. He borrowed part of the franchise fee from the family of his wife, a former showgirl named Frances Upton. As part of the deal, he also agreed to pay off some of the debts of the now-defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets.

O
N
T
UESDAY,
N
OVEMBER
7, 1933, voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh overwhelmingly approved measures legalizing professional sports in their cities on Sundays between 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. (Pending the votes, the Eagles and Pirates had played their home games on Wednesday nights.) On November 9, election officials in Philadelphia certified the results, and Bert Bell was issued Permit No. 1 for a game between his Eagles and the Chicago Bears the following Sunday, November 12, at Philadelphia's Baker Bowl. Nearly 18,000 fans filled the rickety old wooden ballpark that day, lured, as the
Philadelphia Inquirer
put it, “by the novelty of a Sabbath game.” What they witnessed was indeed novel: The newborn Eagles held the reigning NFL champions to a 3-3 tie. It would be many years before the Eagles would come that close to beating the Bears again.

In Pittsburgh the wheels of bureaucracy turned more slowly. The election results still weren't certified when the Pirates hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers at Forbes Field the Sunday after the vote. A group of local ministers went looking for the superintendent of police, Franklin T. McQuade, to demand he put a stop to the technically illegal game, but they never found him—Art Rooney had invited McQuade to sit with him in the stands, in order to forestall such interference. With the city's top cop so disposed, the game went off without incident. The Pirates got hammered 32-0,
but the attendance (12,000) was good and as the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reported, “no sense of desecrating the Sabbath was experienced.” Two days later, the Pittsburgh vote was finally certified. The National Football League was now permanently established in Pennsylvania.

Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Art Rooney and Bert Bell hit it off immediately. Maybe it was because they were the two new kids on the block. Maybe it was because they were both devout Catholics (as well as devout Republicans). In any case they became devoted friends, and along with George Halas and George Preston Marshall, they would exert a powerful influence on the NFL. But unlike Halas and Marshall, their teams were lousy. After seven seasons, Pittsburgh's record was 22-55-4, Philadelphia's 18-55-3. Both teams were losing money—lots of it. Rooney's losses totaled about $100,000, which must have acutely embarrassed a man renowned for his business acumen. Bell was not much better off. At one point he borrowed $5,000 from Rooney to keep the Eagles afloat.

Before the 1940 season, Rooney tried to improve his team's fortunes by renaming it the Steelers, in honor of Pittsburgh's principal industry. Around the same time, a sportswriter introduced Rooney to a young New York playboy named Alexis Thompson, triggering a convoluted sequence of events that football historians have dubbed the Pennsylvania Polka.

Lex Thompson's late father had made a fortune in steel. In 1930, when he was just 16, Lex inherited that fortune—an estimated $3.5 million. After graduating from Yale, Lex and three classmates started a successful drug company that sold a popular brand of eye drops called Eye-Gene, but Lex was interested in more pleasurable pursuits. Tall, handsome, and dashing, with wavy brown hair and a dimpled chin, he enjoyed gin martinis, beautiful women, and carousing. He even dated screen legend Lana Turner for a time. His drinking buddies included Clark Gable and William Holden.

Lex Thompson was also a passionate sportsman. At Yale he lettered in soccer and lacrosse. He bobsledded in St. Moritz,
played jai alai in Florida, water-skied in Monte Carlo, and was a member of the U.S. field hockey team that competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. So, in the autumn of 1940, when he was 26 and had a little “spare time” on his hands, it was only natural that Thompson, in his words, “decided to look around for a sports hobby.” He first considered buying a professional hockey team, but was dissuaded by the small crowd attending a game at Madison Square Garden one Saturday night. So he turned to football.

Throughout the 1940 season, Thompson tried to persuade Rooney to sell him the Steelers. Rooney was sorely tempted, but he resisted Thompson's generous offers, mainly because Thompson intended to move the team to Boston, which was much closer than Pittsburgh to Thompson's New York home. Rooney did not want to leave his hometown bereft of professional football.

Then, in early December, just before the league championship game, Rooney and Thompson held a series of secret meetings with Eagles owner Bert Bell in Philadelphia. On December 9—the day after the Bears destroyed the Redskins 73-0 for the title—the results of those meetings were announced to an indifferent world: Rooney was selling the Steelers to Thompson and buying a fifty-percent stake in the Eagles, becoming a co-owner with Bell.

“I certainly hated to give up the franchise in the old home town,” Rooney said, “but it would have been poor business to refuse the proposition for a second-division ball club at the terms which were offered”—reportedly $160,000.

To further complicate matters, the two teams also pulled off a massive trade, with more than a dozen players changing hands. Rooney took many of his favorites from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Thompson picked up several Eagles in return.

What was not formally announced was Thompson's plan to relocate the Steelers to Boston after the 1941 season. But Pittsburgh would not be left without pro football. After the Steelers moved, Rooney and Bell intended to operate the Eagles as a statewide franchise that would split its home games between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and be known as the Keystoners (taking its name from Pennsylvania, the Keystone State). Rooney and
Bell even considered asking the league for permission to play all the team's games as home games—half in one city, half in the other.

“Rooney and I have been working on a deal for some months,” Bell revealed to a reporter. “We have agreed to the merger but don't know whether the league will okay the deal. Both of us feel, however, that consolidation is the real solution of our mutual problems, financial and otherwise.”

But the plan was doomed from the start. When Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall caught wind of it he was furious. Marshall had moved his franchise out of Boston just three years before, claiming a lack of fan support. He saw no reason why the city should get another one.

“He can sell if he wants to,” Marshall said of Rooney, “but I'll certainly vote to block any move to shift the Pittsburgh franchise to Boston or any other city. Nor will I stand idly by and permit a merger that would hurt pro football's standing in either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.”

Lex Thompson, just four years removed from Yale and new to the National Football League, was not inclined to antagonize the irascible Marshall. Neither, for that matter, were Rooney and Bell.

So, through the winter of 1940–41, Thompson owned the Steelers and Rooney and Bell owned the Eagles. Thompson announced he was renaming his team the Iron Men, and he hired a new head coach, Greasy Neale, a Yale assistant coach whom Thompson was familiar with from his college days. After that, though, Thompson did nothing. By the spring, he still hadn't even opened an office in Pittsburgh. Rooney called him to find out why. Thompson told Rooney he wasn't happy owning a team so far from home. Rooney told Thompson he wasn't crazy about running a team in Philadelphia.

“Then I got an idea,” Rooney later explained. “I asked him how he'd like to make a switch and let me stay in Pittsburgh and take over the Philadelphia territory himself. That suited him because Philadelphia is so much closer to his New York headquarters, and that's how it was worked out.”

On April 8, 1941, Rooney announced that he and Bell were the new owners of the Steelers and Thompson was the new owner of the Eagles. Basically the three men had traded franchises.

“I know we've gone around in circles,” Rooney said, “but I guess we're settled now.”

In the end, everybody was happy. Lex Thompson owned an NFL franchise close to New York, Rooney got to keep the Steelers (who never played a game as the Iron Men), and Rooney and Bell both got a much-needed cash infusion. Fans were bemused, though in 1941 the result of all the maneuvering was made clear: both teams still stank. The Eagles and Steelers won just three games between them—the same number they'd won the year before. Bell began the season as the Steelers' head coach. After losing the first two games, he asked Rooney, “What do you think we should do?”

“Bert,” Rooney answered, “did you ever think about changing coaches?” Bell never coached another game.

3

E
LMER
L
AYDEN HAD BEEN THE COMMISSIONER
of the National Football League for less than a year when America went to war in 1941. In his younger days, Layden was one of Notre Dame's fabled Four Horseman, the backfield immortalized by the hyperbolic sportswriter Grantland Rice: “In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction, and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.”

Layden was 37 and the head coach at Notre Dame when, in early 1941, the NFL hired him on the recommendation of the ubiquitous sports entrepreneur Arch Ward. The move from the Golden Dome to the pros must have been quite a shock to Layden. While college football in general—and Notre Dame in particular—was wildly popular, the professional game was held in considerably lower esteem. In those days, football was considered a pastime for college boys, not a respectable occupation. College coaches denigrated the pros relentlessly (conveniently ignoring their own financial interests in the game). Amos Alonzo Stagg, the legendary University of Chicago coach, called “Sunday professional football” a “serious menace.” He pleaded with college players to eschew the NFL, telling them “a real man would never turn to professionalism.”

Many listened, opting instead for more reputable (not to mention lucrative) careers. In 1936, the first player chosen in the first NFL draft, Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger, passed up a chance to play for the Bears to become a foam rubber salesman. (Berwanger eventually started his own foam rubber business and became a millionaire.)

This lack of respect translated into a lack of coverage in the press. NFL scores were almost impossible to find in newspapers outside the cities with franchises. Even within those cities the coverage was spotty. As late as 1948, the Eagles' general manager at the time, Al Ennis, lamented that Philadelphia's two evening papers, the
Evening Bulletin
and the
Daily News,
sent no reporters to training camp but instead “picked up their stories on our activities from the press service releases, and by rewriting the story which appears in the
Inquirer
every morning.”

As commissioner, Layden set about remaking the NFL's image. The league had been founded on September 17, 1920, when the representatives of ten Midwestern football clubs gathered in a Canton, Ohio, automobile showroom to organize the American Professional Football Association, which two years later was renamed the National Football League. At that meeting the attendees sat on the running boards and fenders of Hupmobiles, drinking beer.

Layden wanted to move the NFL to what he called a “high, dignified plane.” He barred players and coaches from “lending their name to advertisements for liquor, cigaret[te]s and laxatives.” He banned commercials over stadium PA systems whenever possible. Fed up with sloppy uniforms, he ordered players to wear knee-high socks, a curious preoccupation with hosiery that persists in the league to this day. (College players are permitted to wear their socks at their ankles if they choose.) Another of Layden's sartorial innovations: He ordered game officials to wear color-coded striped shirts. Referees wore black and white, umpires red and white, linesmen orange and white, and field judges green and white. One official ridiculed the dress code as a “circus on parade.”