Read Online Last Team Standing by Matthew Algeo - Free Book Online Page B

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 athing 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.
    Thompson was also aware that the merger would, in his words, “contribute substantially toward ironing out the sport’s difficulties.” Without the merger the Steelers might have no choice but to fold, and the league was anxious to prevent that from happening to a second team.
    Thompson told Thayer he’d have to think about it a while.
    On June 15, 1943, at a press conference at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, the Eagles publicly addressed the merger proposal for the first time. General manager Harry Thayer, making it clear that he was speaking for Thompson, said “on the whole” the Eagles would prefer to go it alone. However, Thayer continued, the team was willing to merge with Pittsburgh—but only if the combine was known as the Philadelphia Eagles and played the Eagles’ regular number of home games in Philadelphia.
    It was a lot to ask,