Last Team Standing (6 page)

But the bombing of Pearl Harbor rearranged Layden's priorities overnight. He stopped worrying about stockings. On December 8, he was asked to assess the league's future.

“Material will be scarce because the colleges will be hit and that of course hits us,” he answered. “We will do what is asked and make elastic rules as situations arise.” Elastic? Layden had no idea how far the league would be stretched.

The 1941 NFL season limped to a listless conclusion. On December 14, a week after Pearl Harbor, the Bears beat the Packers in the Western Division playoff, 33-14. In the championship game at Wrigley Field a week later, the Bears defeated the Giants, 37-9. The weather was mild, yet just 13,341 fans bothered to show up, the lowest attendance for a title game in league history. And that was in football-crazy Chicago. It was a bad sign.

The next month, President Roosevelt wrote a letter to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the rigid and humorless baseball commissioner. In what came to be known as the Green Light Letter, the president urged Landis to keep baseball going for the duration of the war:

There will be fewer people unemployed and everyone will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before…. As to the players themselves, I know you agree with me that individual players who are of active military or naval age should go, without question, into the services. Even if the actual quality of the teams is lowered by the greater use of older players, this will not dampen the popularity of the sport…. Here is another way of looking at it—if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of their fellow citizens—and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.

Roosevelt was a football fan, too. He had been captain of the freshman team at Harvard, and while he was too small to make
varsity, as editor of the
Harvard Crimson,
he ceaselessly extolled the team in editorials. Yet it's no surprise that he made no mention of football in the Green Light Letter. Baseball was the only professional sport that mattered then. Lesser sports were on their own. If pro football survived the war, it would have to do so without the president's imprimatur.

Still, Elmer Layden and the team owners assumed Roosevelt's widely publicized letter to Judge Landis as their own green light, and in the spring of 1942 Layden decreed that the National Football League would continue to operate in the fall, with all ten teams participating. The usual schedule of 55 games would be played.

“But,” Layden cautioned, “everything we decide today may have to be abandoned tomorrow. While we believe professional football has a definite place in the recreational program of a nation at war, nothing connected with it should or will be permitted to hinder the war effort.”

On average, each NFL team had lost fewer than five players to the draft in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, though, the floodgates opened. By May 1942, 112 of the 346 players under contract to the league's teams—nearly one-third—were in the service. Even more players were sure to be gone before the fall.

Finding replacements was problematic. Many colleges were abandoning their football programs, and Uncle Sam's appetite for able-bodied young men was insatiable. More than three million were conscripted in 1942, a 200-percent increase over the previous year. As they left the workforce for an armed force, the unemployment rate plummeted (from 9.9 percent in 1941 to 4.7 percent in 1942). Defense industries were already reporting manpower shortages. If General Motors couldn't find enough workers, what hope was there for the National Football League?

By the time the 1942 season kicked off on September 13, some teams were virtually unrecognizable from the preceding year. The Eagles had lost 28 players from their 1941 roster, including their leading rusher (Jim Castiglia) and top receiver (Dick Humbert). The Giants had lost 27 players, the Dodgers 25. Not
surprisingly, fan loyalty was tested. The constantly changing line-ups—not to mention more pressing concerns—caused attendance to plummet 20 percent, from an average of 20,157 per game in 1941 to 16,144 in 1942—the lowest average since 1936. When the final gun sounded on the championship game in Washington (Redskins 14, Bears 6) some owners were beginning to wonder if they shouldn't just put the league out of its misery for the duration.

W
HEN HE GRADUATED
with honors from the University of Nebraska in the spring of 1938 with a degree in animal husbandry, Ted Doyle had two options: take a job with the Hormel Company, where he would have a low starting salary but could work his way up the corporate ladder to a lucrative executive position; or play professional football for $200 a game. He'd just gone into hock buying a new suit and shoes for graduation. He'd just gotten married, too. He needed money fast—and so he chose football.

“I thought that was the right decision, to get the money [right away],” Doyle explained. “I don't know if it was or not—I guess it was the wrong one. Nevertheless it was the one I made, so I lived with it. I suppose I would have been in better shape down the road if I'd've went with the Hormels.”

The eldest of ten boys, Doyle was born in Maywood, Nebraska, on January 12, 1914. Growing up, he worked on his family's farm, “stacking hay and so forth.” He made his high school football team but was so small he didn't play much. During his senior year, though, his weight jumped from 113 pounds to 185—all muscle, thanks to stacking hay. He went to the University of Nebraska because “it was the only school I knew.”

“In those days,” he said, “they didn't do much recruiting and they definitely didn't have any scholarships or anything like that. You just went to school and went out for football. Whatever happened, happened.”

Doyle made the team and played tackle. In the summers he worked sorting fruit. By the time he graduated, Doyle was a beefy six-two, 224 pounds. He was a great tackle, too, a fact he attributed less to his physique than to his mind-set. Doyle said his greatest asset was his ability to psych himself up before a game. It was a slow, steady buildup, timed to peak at kickoff.

“If I could put enough pressure on myself, I could get some adrenaline flowing, and if I got that a-flowin' I could actually run over the guy opposite me.”

On December 12, 1937, the New York Giants selected Doyle in the eighth round of the third NFL draft ever held. The Giants then sold his rights to the Pittsburgh Pirates (as the Steelers were then known), probably because Pirates owner Art Rooney had a penchant for players with Irish-sounding names. The following summer, Doyle and his wife, Harriet, loaded the car and drove the 970 miles from Lincoln to Pittsburgh.

The 1938 Pittsburgh Pirates were a memorable football team, though not a very good one. Since joining the NFL in 1933, the Pirates had not had a winning season (though they managed to finish 6-6 in 1936). Fed up with losing, owner Art Rooney went after the most coveted prize in the 1938 draft: Byron “Whizzer” White, the University of Colorado's flashy all-American tailback. Convinced White would boost his team's fortunes at the turnstiles as well as on the field, Rooney offered him a one-year contract for $15,800—more than any other player in the history of the league. White had planned to forgo professional football; he'd been offered a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. But Rooney's offer was too good to pass up, and he deferred the scholarship until the end of the season.

The team's coach (and backup halfback) was John Victor McNally, better known as Johnny Blood. In his prime, Blood had been an outstanding runner and pass receiver. He had logged time with some of the league's most colorful and storied franchises—the Milwaukee Badgers, the Duluth Eskimos, the Pottsville Maroons, the Green Bay Packers—earning him the nickname the
Vagabond Halfback. He was also known as the Magnificent Screwball, due to his generally erratic behavior.

Blood took his pseudonym in 1924, when he and a friend named Ralph Hanson tried out for the East 26th Street Liberties, a semipro team in Minneapolis. To preserve their college eligibility, they decided to adopt assumed names. Riding McNally's motorcycle to the tryout, they passed a theater that was showing the Rudolph Valentino movie,
Blood and Sand.
McNally shouted back to Hanson, “I'll be Blood and you be Sand.”

Blood enjoyed reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, and dime novels. He was known to sign his autograph in blood by cutting his wrist. He frequented prostitutes merely for platonic companionship. “He liked an unusual conversation,” remembered Clarke Hinkle, one of Blood's teammates in Green Bay.

On the train home from a game one time, he so antagonized LaVern “Lavvie” Dilweg, another Green Bay teammate, that Dilweg chased Blood all the way through the train to the rear platform. To escape, Blood climbed to the roof and ran back up the length of the moving train, leaping the gaps between cars along the way. He climbed down into the cab, surprising the engineer and the fireman.

“I've always had this thing for trains,” Blood explained. “They bring something out in me.”

“He was a little wild,” Ted Doyle remembered. “[Blood] was a character. One time we were playing a game and he wasn't there. He was someplace else. He was playing a game in Buffalo.”

The Pirates opened the 1938 season with three straight losses. On October 3, Doyle broke his arm in a game against the Giants and was sidelined for more than a month. Whizzer White ended up leading the league in rushing but the Pirates were still awful: they finished 2-9 and attendance was little improved. As expected, White left the team to study at Oxford, though Doyle claimed he quit because he felt the linemen weren't blocking for him. If that's the case, Doyle can claim some credit for White's second career, which culminated with a seat on the United States Supreme Court. (White's Rhodes Scholarship would
be interrupted by the war, and he returned to the States to play for the Detroit Lions in 1940 and 1941.)

Blood returned to coach the Pirates in 1939, with the usual results. After the team lost its first three games, Blood abruptly quit on October 3—the first anniversary of the Pirates' last win. He was sick of losing.

“I would not say that my temperament was designed for coaching,” Blood later conceded.

In 1940, owner Art Rooney gave the Pirates a new name, the one they carry today: the Steelers. But they remained, in Rooney's words, the “same old Pirates,” finishing 2-7-2 in 1940 and 1-9-1 in 1941. (In later years frustrated fans would modify the phrase, derisively referring to the team as the “same old Steelers.”) In 1942 the Steelers finally had a winning season, finishing 7-4, and Ted Doyle had his best season ever.

After the 1942 season, Doyle, who, like most players, worked a second job in the off-season, was hired at a Westinghouse factory in East Pittsburgh. He told his family and friends he was building parts for navy boats, but he was really working on the Manhattan Project. Westinghouse manufactured equipment for Y-12, the government's nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“Frankly I don't think we knew what we were doing. We were making some parts. I assume that it was something that transferred uranium-235 to -238. That's what we figured out later anyhow.”

It's likely that Doyle was building components for the equipment used to enrich the uranium that was put in atomic bombs.

Doyle, always ambivalent about his football career, was even more so now that he was an important part of the war effort. In June 1943, shortly before the Steelers and the Eagles merged, he wrote a letter to Bert Bell, who had become a co-owner of the Steelers two years earlier.

“Dear Bert,” he wrote,

I would probably play football this fall if the proper arrangements could be made. At the present time I am working from
7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., and will have to continue to do so. I also would have to work six days per week most of the time. You see, we are building equipment which is wanted as fast as we can put it out. Last week we worked from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. six days, and then worked eight hours on Sunday.

I asked for my vacation early in September, but don't know whether I will get it then or not. In fact it looks like that may be one of our busiest periods….

I think it will be possible to carry on with football if we practice evenings and if we allow the boys to work as I do now. Much as I like football, we must do our part for the war effort first and furnish football recreation afterward.

Doyle's proposal would not fall on deaf ears. For more than a year, Bert Bell had advocated requiring players to work full time in defense plants during the football season. But neither man had any idea just how directly professional football—and the Steagles in particular—would contribute to the war effort.

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