Clouds over the Goalpost

Gambling, Assassination, and the NFL in 1963

By Lew Freedman

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Lew Freedman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61321-398-8

CHAPTER 1

HALAS AIMS AT THE PACKERS

GEORGE HALAS COULD always be charming, but years inthe trenches had taught him how to win political battles, gethis way, advance the interests of his Chicago Bears, and thatgrowling and the tone of intimidation could be a useful weapon.

That’s why when people often speak about him, they mentionthe staring power in his eyes and how his chin would prominentlyjut out in defiance for what seemed to be a half-mile. What a chinit was, seemingly almost square and a facial feature that appearedto enter a room about ten seconds ahead of the rest of him.

Many who came across Halas in his role as protector of theChicago Bears and the NFL likely left the encounter thinkingthat the man should take a course in manners. It has long beena cliché about gruff football coaches—that it was their way orthe highway—but the saying was probably invented for Halas.

Halas had little governor on his tongue so he was viewed as ablunt-speaking man. And saying the first thing that popped intohis head while he prowled the sidelines during games was verymuch his habit. Nowadays, officials would slap Halas with amillion yards a game in penalties for his foul mouth and aggressivegesticulations on the sideline, including slamming his fedorato the ground. The only reason Halas didn’t get whacked withpenalties during his coaching days was that he was pretty muchthe godfather of the league. A referee who wanted to continueofficiating NFL games on Sundays did not want to raise Halas’ire too much. It was entirely possible that a confrontation whichescalated too far could result in a termination letter. Halas hadthat kind of power, and you didn’t want to get on his bad side.

When things didn’t go right for his team on the field—even ifofficials had nothing to do with it—he could be equally explosive.Paul Hornung, the star Green Bay halfback, said he actuallyenjoyed listening to Halas rant as he violated the rules uncheckedby storming down the sidelines almost to the end zone ratherthan staying at midfield near the team bench. “Coaches weren’tsupposed to be down there,” Hornung said, “and he would cusslike a sailor. I loved it. It was an absolute honor to have him cussme out during a ball game.” To Hornung, it was a big laugh. Ifyou viewed the situation with a certain attitude, Halas’ behaviorwas a howl. In the modern era, such a performance would goviral on the Internet before the end of the game.

As for officials who didn’t see the humor in Halas’ tirades theway Hornung did, they were better off being anonymous ratherthan arguing right from wrong on the field, as Halas alwaysthought he was right. He came by that opinion honestly. Hewas one of the league visionaries who had been there since itscreation, and throughout the decades between the ’20s and the’60s, he was a major player in every NFL decision; from teamexpansion and contraction to rule changes.

* * *

George Halas was born on February 2, 1895, in Chicago, Illinois.He attended the University of Illinois, and very brieflyplayed right field for the New York Yankees. He couldn’t hithis weight, going 2–22 with 8 strikeouts and recording a .091batting average in 1919, and soon enough a newcomer namedBabe Ruth took over the position and drove Halas back intofootball.

As an end, Halas played a season for the Hammond Pros,and then convinced the A. E. Staley Company—starchmanufacturers in Decatur, located a couple of hours south ofChicago—to allow him to fund a football team. The DecaturStaleys were the forerunners to the Bears.

The meeting which founded the first organized professionalfootball league took place in a Hupmobile dealership showroomin Canton, Ohio, on August 17, 1920. When the AmericanProfessional Football Association (APFA) began play onSeptember 17, there were eleven teams, including the Staleys.The league’s president was Jim Thorpe, who while still an activeplayer, was the most famous name in the room. By 1922, theleague was renamed the National Football League, but the starchcompany was experiencing financial difficulties. As a favor toHalas, the boss provided $5,000 in temporary support for onemore season, as long as the Staleys in Chicago advertised starchfor one final year.

Afterwards, Halas renamed the Staleys to the Bears because ofhelp from the management of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.He was also going to call the football club the Cubs, but decidedon the Bears, since football players were bigger than baseballplayers. Uniform colors were already orange and blue, selectedfor the Staleys because they were the colors of the University ofIllinois, Halas’ alma mater. The Bears played their home gamesat the Cubs’ Wrigley Field; an arrangement still in place whenthe 1963 season began.

The Chicago Bears were like family to Halas, but the NFLwas his baby. And he was protective of every single aspect ofthe franchise. This even included the team he loved to hate themost: the Green Bay Packers. Actually, when Halas wrote hisautobiography decades later, he called the rivalry “the happiestseries of games.”

Happiest, huh? That would be straining the definition of theword. Intense, competitive, hard-fought, grudge matches—allof those words might percolate to the top of the list beforehappiest. Players on both teams fed on the attitudes that Halasand Curly Lambeau, Packers founder and coach, brought to thetwo meetings each autumn.

George Musso, one of the Bears’ early Hall of Fame players,said he could tell that Halas and Lambeau were coaching friends,but when they played each other, friendship was not involved.”Hell, you’re not friends,” Musso said. “You’re out to win. Andyou win any damn way you can.”

A Packer lineman from the late ’30s named John Biolo saidthat Lambeau matched Halas’ sideline shenanigans. “During agame, nobody would want to talk to him,” Biolo said of hiscoach. An unnamed player in a biography of Lambeau, whodied in 1965, said that in the week of practice leading up toa Bears game, players thought the coach might blow a gasket.”… oh God, he hated ’em so bad.”

Another thing the two coaches had in common was penury.They headed two of the three (the third being the New YorkGiants) biggest-name teams in the NFL and by most assessmentsof their hired help were cheapskates when it came to forking overplayer raises. It was Mike Ditka, one of the stars of the ’63 Bearsteam, who uttered perhaps the most vivid description appliedto any sports team negotiator ever when he said of the owner,”Halas throws nickels around like manhole covers.” Similar toHalas, Lambeau was no more generous with his payroll.

There was irony in the Bears–Packers symbiotic relationship.Not only were they two of the founding franchises and playedeach other twice a season, but they were the two most successfulteams, winning the most championships, with the most numberof great players on each squad.

Like Halas, Curly Lambeau was a team organizer and was theteam’s coach for decades. While they had so many similarities,they had two distinct personalities. Halas was a strong familyman, married to the same woman from the 1920s until he diedsixty years later, while Lambeau was an acknowledged womanizer.He flirted with the Hollywood show business lifestyleduring the off-season and flirted with the actresses he met there.Too-public relationships with women not his wife caused himmuch grief during his Packers tenure.

Whatever it truly meant, Halas and Lambeau did notengage in the traditional gesture of sportsmanship involving ahandshake between coaches at the conclusion of a game. Therewas some tension between the two egotistical men, but Halasunderstood that the Packers were almost always going to be amajor obstacle between his Bears and a championship season.

Regardless of how Halas and Lambeau felt about one anotherpersonally, aside from respect for football acumen, Halas wasprobably the strongest owner-supporter of Green Bay’s existencein the league. This related to Halas’ strongest personality traitha—loyalty.If you helped him, he never forgot. If you were withhim when times were tough, you were always with him. If youdid him a favor, no matter how long ago, as the Packers hadwhen the Bears had financial troubles during the depression ofthe 1930s, he remembered.

As the old guard changed, all of the teams from smaller townsstarted to fade away. Green Bay began to lose money. The Packerswere playing before smaller crowds and some owners wantedto push them out in favor of a team that would provide thema larger road gate. The other owners sought to pressure GreenBay management to move the team to Milwaukee full-time,first at State Fair Park, and then in County Stadium, where theyplayed twice a season. Halas wouldn’t have it. He did everythinghe could to defend the Packers. To the astonishment of manyin Chicago-and in Green Bay-in 1956, Halas was a guestspeaker at a Green Bay sports banquet, where he waxed eloquentabout the importance of the Packer franchise and helped raisemoney for a new stadium. “He was a real friend,” said Art Daley,a Green Bay Press-Gazette sportswriter of the time.

Halas told everyone on his visit that the Bears-Packers rivalrywas one of the most important aspects of the NFL’s success andcontinuity.

That was the good side of Halas. But no matter how muchhe did for the Packers franchise, none of that graciousness everspilled over to game day. When it was time to play the Packers,there was not a single thing more important going on. Longevity,and Halas, played a large part in making Chicago–Green Baythe most intense rivalry in professional football.

It wasn’t really the same in the ’50s, when Lambeau, whopresided over six league championships, left for the ChicagoCardinals, and the Packers fell into the bottom ranks of theleague’s teams, posting such horrible records as 2–9–1 in ’53and 1–10–1 in ’58.

The arrival of Vince Lombardi in 1959 rejuvenated thePackers. By 1960, Lombardi had the Packers back in the titlegame, though they lost to the Philadelphia Eagles, 17–13. In ’61and ’62, Green Bay won back-to-back crowns and looked justas strong as the ’63 season approached. Add Lombardi’s wins inthose two seasons to the Lambeau total of six, and the Packershad eight titles on their resume as a franchise—at that momentone more than the Bears.

Lombardi had paid his dues. He played for Fordham as oneof the school’s famous “Seven Blocks of Granite” in the early1930s, had been a high profile assistant coach for Earl Blaik atArmy, and an even higher profile offensive coordinator for theNew York Giants’ powerful offense in the late ’50s. By the timesomeone entrusted him to lead an NFL team, Lombardi wasforty-six. He brought his East Coast accent and gap-toothedsmile to Northern Wisconsin and within three seasons had notonly become an icon in Green Bay, but was being acclaimed asone of the greatest coaches of all time.

Sometimes people left out the words “one of,” and that beganto get on Halas’ nerves. Lombardi was at least as much a dictatorto his players as Halas was, but Lombardi had savvy politicalinstincts and did not want to make an enemy out of one of theleague’s most powerful individuals. A former Chicago Tribunesports editor has recounted a story that he heard about a specialdinner between Lombardi and Halas—at Lombardi’s invitation—wherethe two men bonded, exchanged stories, shareddrinks, and walked out friends. That was in no small part toLombardi’s political instincts, where he apparently repeatedlycalled Halas the greatest football coach of all time. Not “oneof ” the greatest, either. This was a man whom Halas respected;who was the talk of the football world. And it probably feltmighty good for Halas to have his ego stroked by Lombardi. Itdidn’t matter in the least if Lombardi was sincere, and it madeno difference whatsoever to how either man prepared for thosetwice-annual gridiron collisions, Lombardi had paid tribute tothe older man, and that solidified their relationship in a way thatHalas and Lambeau never shared.

Whether or not he believed he was a better coach than Halas,even in front of his own team, Lombardi sometimes praised therival coach.

“Vince Lombardi loved George Halas because he had beenone of the founders of the league,” said former Green Bay centerBill Currie. “He’d say, ‘I love that old man and every single thinghe represents.'” The Packers couldn’t believe it when words likethat flowed from Lombardi’s mouth, but it was Lombardi takingnote of Halas being the personification of the history and traditionof the league. “We couldn’t believe he was expressing lovefor an opponent,” Currie said. “That just wasn’t his shtick.”

In comparison to Lombardi’s praise for Halas, Halas had greatrespect for Lombardi. He was impressed with what Lombardi hadbeen able to do in such a short time for the Packers. What thatreally meant, though, was the rivalry was back to its old level ofintensity and that Halas burned to beat Lombardi and Green Bay.

By the 1960s, the Bears had won seven championships onHalas’ watch. Chicago was an early league power, winning titlesin ’21, and again in ’32, ’33, ’40, ’41, ’43, and ’46. But Halasand the Bears had not won a title since. That was seventeen longyears without a crown, and a month into the 1963 season Halaswould turn sixty-eight years old. It was not clear how long hecould continue to handle the demands of being the owner andthe coach. Worse, though, his drought, coupled with Lombardi’sascension, meant that the Packers owned one more NFL titlethan the Bears and Halas. That was unacceptable.

As early as March of ’63, six months before kickoff of thenext season, Halas was on record with his optimism about howwell the Bears could do. His forum did not get wide circulationbecause his quotes were only recorded in the team newsletter,”Bear News.”

Halas had a lot to say about how the ’62 season had gonewrong, although 9–5 wasn’t really that bad.

Halas is noted as saying:

Actually, the 1962 season was a nightmare of improvisation.We had so many injuries to key backs and receivers that ouroffensive platoon didn’t really settle down till the last monthof the season. We have some rookies who figure to help us, butthe real improvement should come from smoother execution.

In 1962, the NFL draft consisted of 20 rounds. This was the heightof the war with the American Football League, though, so the selectionof a player did not guarantee his signing. The choice playerswho made the Bears from that draft were first round pick RonnieBull (7th overall), a running back from Baylor who was also pickedin the AFL draft by the Dallas Texans, second round pick BennieMcRae (21st overall) from Michigan, fourth round pick Jim Cadile(49th overall) out of San Jose State, and seventh round pick EdO’Bradovich (91st overall) from Illinois. They gained experience ina season pockmarked by injuries to many regulars.

Due to the competition for talent with the AFL, the NFL heldits draft earlier and earlier, just as the college and pro seasons wereending, so they could jump in and negotiate quickly. Halas wasalready talking about rookies in March of ’63 because that year’sdraft had taken place on December 4, 1962. In that session, heswung and missed more than connected in terms of pluckingimmediately employable players. The only memorable name wasdefensive back Larry Glueck, who was chosen out of Villanovain the third. Halas was wrong about his new draft class, but hewas lucky that the ’62 class made up for it.

In December of ’62, Halas attended a Lombardi football-relatedparty in Green Bay, and whether he was irritated byfawning over Lombardi, the comments of sportswriters aboutthe burgeoning Packer dynasty, or something else entirely, hedisplayed a very determined outlook. Chuck Mather, a Bearsassistant coach, said Halas returned from Wisconsin and said,”We’re going to beat that son of a bitch.” It didn’t matter that heand Lombardi were friendly, but it would not be untypical forHalas to refer to a football rival in such words.

It might even be said that Halas began obsessing over GreenBay long before training camp began. Mather told a Halas biographerthat the boss ordered him to study up on Packer playsand tendencies and dissect them thoroughly—and that was inJanuary, a month after the ’62 season ended and nine monthsbefore the ’63 season started.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Clouds over the Goalpost by Lew Freedman. Copyright © 2013 Lew Freedman. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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