Last Team Standing (8 page)

Fritz Pollard could not use the Pros' locker room; he dressed for games at a nearby cigar factory. Nor could he eat in most Akron restaurants. On the road, he was prohibited from staying in the same hotel as his white teammates. Opposing players constantly took cheap shots at him. When he was tackled, he would roll on his back and kick his feet in the air to deter late hits.

Despite that hostility, black athletes found the NFL considerably more hospitable than professional baseball, where a “gentlemen's agreement” had kept them off the field since the late nineteenth century. Baseball's ban was strictly enforced by Judge Landis, the dogmatic commissioner, despite his public statements to the contrary. In 1943 Landis declared that “any major league club is entirely free to employ Negroes.” Yet that same year, Landis scuttled Bill Veeck's attempt to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies, after rumors surfaced that Veeck was planning to stock the team with Negro League stars.

Landis frequently pointed out that there was no rule banning blacks. There was, but it was unwritten, and the owners of the 16 major league clubs adhered to it unconditionally, even when it was not in their best interests to do so. Many teams would have been vastly improved by integration. Perennial bottom feeders like the Browns and the Phillies certainly could have used a Satchel Paige or a Josh Gibson. As sports historian Alan H. Levy writes, “The fact that the leaders of the worst baseball clubs would not, could not, venture onto such a pathway to excellence, and preferred to be perennial league doormats, speaks poignantly to the depths to which the influence of Jim Crow, and the Commissioner's office, penetrated.”

The early NFL was under no such influence. Teams were free to sign African-Americans. This was partly a matter of geography. Pro football was almost entirely a product of the Midwest, where racial attitudes were, in the main, less hardened and hostile than in the South. Of the 18 NFL franchises in 1922, 12 were based in just four states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin) and one (the Oorang Indians) was a traveling team composed entirely of Native Americans.

It was also a matter of practicality.

“It was hardly clear that any pro football league would survive,” writes Levy, “much less one that was all black or all white. The idea of segregation, or any other sort of segmenting, could not be considered, no matter how some owners may have wished to do so.” Considering the league's tenuous finances, a color line would have been unenforceable anyway. Clubs that violated it could have been fined or boycotted, but what good would it have done the fledgling league to drive clubs out of business?

“It was not that owners of early professional football teams wanted African-American athletes to play,” Levy writes, “they simply could not do much to stop anyone else from employing them.”

Then George Preston Marshall came along.

Marshall was a failed actor who made his money in linen: He owned a chain of laundries in Washington. In 1932, he and two partners bought a defunct NFL franchise in Newark and moved it to Boston. They christened the team the Braves, after the city's National League baseball team (now the Atlanta Braves), with whom they shared a ballpark (Braves Field). The Braves lost $46,000 in their inaugural season. Marshall's partners wanted out and he obliged them. In 1933, Marshall renamed the team the Redskins and moved it a mile east to Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.

Marshall shook up the nascent NFL. His was the first team to hire a marching band and put on lavish halftime shows. He persuaded his fellow owners to split the league into two divisions and stage an annual championship game, presaging the Super Bowl
by more than three decades. He also convinced them to change the rules to make the game more exciting. Restrictions on throwing the ball were lifted. The forward pass, formerly as popular as a soup line, suddenly became fashionable. Marshall was a showman and an innovator.

He was also a racist. Born in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1896 and raised in Washington, D.C., Marshall was the product of a rigidly segregated culture. In the Washington of his youth, every public institution maintained separate facilities for whites and blacks: schools, churches, restaurants, hotels, trolleys, swimming pools, ballparks. It seemed only logical to him that professional football should be likewise constituted.

At a league meeting shortly after the conclusion of the 1933 season, Marshall urged his peers to adopt a color line just like baseball's. The discussion was off the record, naturally, but Marshall's argument is easy to surmise: The country is in a depression. With so many whites out of work, how will it look if we go on hiring Negroes? It could lead to trouble.

Marshall was not beloved by his colleagues. He was arrogant, boorish, and a bit of a bully. Perhaps that's why the other owners often acquiesced to his demands. On the whole, it was easier to go along with George than to fight him. Or, perhaps, they held deep biases of their own. Whatever their motives, pro football's owners made their own “gentlemen's agreement.” And with the league now financially stable, the agreement was enforceable.

Joe Lillard, a black halfback who had led the Chicago Cardinals in scoring in 1933, was not invited back to the team in 1934. Ray Kemp, who'd played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1933, was likewise dismissed. In fact, African-Americans would not be welcomed back to the NFL for 13 years.

Years later, the owners would deny colluding to exclude African-Americans. Steelers owner Art Rooney explained that good black players were simply too hard to find. Yet the sports pages were filled with their names: Brud Holland (Cornell), Wilmeth Sidat-Singh (Syracuse), and Ozzie Simmons (Iowa) were three of the most famous college football players in the country
in the late 1930s. All were African-American. None was offered so much as a tryout with an NFL team. In December 1969, the football broadcaster and writer Myron Cope broached the subject with Bears owner George Halas in an interview:

There had been no ban on black ballplayers [Halas] said—“In no way, shape, or form.”

Why then, had the blacks vanished?

“I don't know!” Halas exclaimed. “Probably it was due to the fact that no great black players were in college then. That could be the reason. But I've never given this a thought until you mentioned it. At no time has it ever been brought up. Isn't that strange?”

In 1937, supposedly frustrated by a lack of support in Boston, George Preston Marshall moved his team to Washington. He marketed the Redskins as the Team of the South. He commissioned a fight song (“Hail to the Redskins!”) that included the line “Fight for old Dixie!” (now rendered “Fight for old D.C.!”). The team played exhibition games in the Carolinas and Virginia, and its games were broadcast on radio (and, later, television) stations throughout the South. And long after every other team in the league had integrated, the Redskins remained lily white and Marshall remained committed to excluding African-Americans.

“We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites,” Marshall defiantly declared in 1962. Later that year, threatened with eviction from the new, publicly owned D.C. (now RFK) Stadium, the Redskins finally started signing African-Americans.

5

I
N EARLY
A
PRIL
1943, Lex Thompson—millionaire playboy, international sportsman, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, habitué of Toots Shor's—was a buck private stationed at Camp Davis, a mosquito-ridden antiaircraft-artillery training center in rural eastern North Carolina. The nearest town was miniscule Holly Ridge, which the troops nicknamed Boom Town: “Boom, you're in and boom, you're out!”

Thompson had enlisted in the Army the previous October, motivated by patriotism as well as by his thirst for adventure. The war also appealed to his competitive spirit. It was a game in which he wanted to play. So, while his civilian colleagues were attending the league meeting at the swanky Palmer House, Thompson was attending officer training school and practicing his skills on the artillery range. From this distant outpost, Thompson did his best to keep tabs on developments in Chicago. Once or twice a day he spoke on the telephone with Eagles general manager Harry Thayer, who was running the team in Thompson's stead and representing him at the meeting.

In one of those phone calls, Thayer told Thompson that he had been approached by Art Rooney with a curious proposition: Rooney wanted to know if the Eagles would be interested in merging
with the Steelers for the upcoming season. Rooney was desperate. The Steelers had just six players under contract.

“The prospects of continuing on our own look very bad,” Rooney confessed to the
Pittsburgh Press.

Rooney and his partner, Bert Bell, were determined to keep the Steelers alive in some form. The team was coming off its best season ever and they wanted to capitalize on that success. In the topsy-turvy NFL of 1942, with players coming and going like Grand Central Station at rush hour, the Steelers had managed to finish 7-4, posting the first winning season in the history of the franchise and finishing second to the Redskins in the Eastern Division. Attendance was up. The fans were excited.

The Steelers' turnaround was largely due to a rookie named Bill Dudley. Dudley was a small, slippery halfback nicknamed “Bullet Bill,” not for his speed—he could barely outrun some line-men—but because he always hit his target when carrying the ball. He led the league in rushing that year and was named an all-pro.

But now Dudley was in the Army Air Forces. So was tailback Andy Tomasic. Guard Jack Sanders and quarterback Russell Cotton were in the Marine Corps. Practically the whole damn team was in uniform now: Vernon Martin, Curtis Sandig, George Gonda, Tom Brown, Milt Crain, Joe Lamas, John Woudenberg—19 in all, just since the season ended. They were disappearing so fast that Rooney had a hard time keeping track. To make things tragically worse, starting right guard Milt Simington, an all-pro, had died of a heart attack in January at age 24. It almost seemed like the franchise was cursed.

But abandoning play, as the Cleveland Rams had done, was not an option. The 1942 season had given Steelers fans something to look forward to, and Rooney was going to give them, well, something.

The merger proposal did not immediately enthrall Eagles owner Lex Thompson. He'd sunk too much money into the Eagles to have them turned into a two-headed monster. He feared the merger would hurt the team's image and debase its name. Thompson sold a million bottles of Eye-Gene a year, so he knew a
thing or two about branding. That made him an anomaly among the owners, most of whom simply named their clubs after baseball teams.

Thompson also wasn't sure about going into business with Rooney and Bert Bell. Besides, he thought he didn't need to merge with the Steelers—or anybody else. Thayer told Thompson he was “reasonably sure” the Eagles could field a team all by themselves. In addition to the 16 players the Eagles still had under contract, Thayer said they had “strings attached” to about a dozen more. That meant the Eagles would probably have enough players to fill the new, reduced roster size of 25—as long as Uncle Sam didn't get his hands on them before the season began.

But Thompson was not entirely unsympathetic to the Steelers' plight. After all, the Eagles had just lost two of their best players to the service: their star quarterback, Tommy Thompson (no relation to Lex), and their leading scorer, Len Barnum. Thompson also remembered how Rooney and Bert Bell had done him a great favor two years earlier, when they swapped franchises with him. That had spared Thompson exile in Pittsburgh, which, in his opinion, would have been only marginally better than Holly Ridge.

In some ways the merger was logical, given the wartime exigencies and the inextricably linked histories of the two teams. Merging with the Steelers might actually be good for the Eagles. Who knew? Just because they could field a team by themselves didn't mean the team would be any good. In fact, judging by their record the previous season (2-9), they were likely to be awful. Pittsburgh still had a couple of pretty good players under contract and the Eagles could use all the help they could get.