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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 countryin 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?
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWe’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
Hatching the Steagles
    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 mergingwith the Steelers for the upcoming season. Rooney was desperate. The Steelers had just six players under contract.
    â€œThe 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