-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Interference Dan E. Moldea©1989 William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, NY ISBN 0-688-08303-X ----- 2 Getting Organized EARLY PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL POSSESSED little finesse and only basic strategies. The public's draw to the game was based upon its display of legal violence. During his eight-year tenure as president, Theodore Roosevelt had actively tried to ban the game because of its inherent brutality. For the most part, the players—who looked like faces on a post office wall—were picked for their size and toughness rather than their agility, intelligence, and speed. Many of them carried railroad ties, chopped wood, and cow-poked during the rest of the week. Fans came to football games to see dogfights—and to gamble. The only known successful bribery incident in the pre-NFL period took place back in November 1906, in the midst of an early attempt to organize a professional football league. During a two-game series between the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers in Ohio, Blondy Wallace, the head coach of the Canton team, and Walter R. East, a key Massillon player, made a deal in which Canton was to win the first game and Massillon was to win the second, forcing a third game-with the biggest gate-to be played legitimately. Several gamblers involved with Wallace and East had also offered a $5,000 bribe to the Massillon coach and members of his team, but without success. When the rumors of the attempted bribery became widespread, East, who had boasted of fixing a college football game the year before, as well as a baseball game that same year, was fired from the Massillon team. The Canton-Massillon incident became the first known case of professional gamblers' attempting to fix a professional sport. Professional football had emerged during the early part of the twentieth century in small towns and cities without major colleges. In the large cities, college football was still king. The American Professional Football Association (APFA) was officially formed on August 20, 1920, during a meeting at the brick, threestory Odd Fellows building that housed the Hupmobile and Jordan automobile dealership of Ralph Hay, the general manager of the Canton Bulldogs in Canton, Ohio. By the beginning of its first season, the association consisted of fourteen teams from five states.[1] Each owner was required to pay $100 for his franchise. Among those initial teams created in 1920 were the Racine (Avenue in Chicago) Cardinals, organized in 1899 by South Side Chicago contractor Chris O'Brien. Another was the Decatur Staleys, sponsored by a manufacturing company and represented by twenty-five-year-old ex-sailor George Halas. Formerly a New York Yankees right fielder, Halas's baseball career had been cut short by a hip injury. Later, after receiving loans from his mother and Chicago businessman Charles Bidwill, an associate of the Al Capone mob, Halas bought the football team from his employer, A. E. Staley. In 1921, Halas moved his team to Cubs Park in Chicago where it became the Chicago Bears. The legendary Jim Thorpe, whose mentor had been coach Glenn "Pop" Warner, was elected the first president of the association. Four years earlier, while Thorpe was playing for the Canton Bulldogs, he and a fan of the rival Massillon Tigers had a heated exchange about which team was better. Just hours before a game between the two teams, Thorpe slapped down a blank check and filled it out for $2,500, challenging the fan, a wealthy local businessman, to respond in kind. A local newspaper, which reported the betting incident, took the matter in stride. "Massillon had plenty of money to stake on the outcome of the game," the paper reported, "while many of the Canton bugs were rather shy. They evidently feared the hoodoo which Massillon has been in former years. Now that the jinx has been chased the wagering in years to come is likely to be more lively." One of Thorpe's star Bulldog players, Joe Guyon, recalled, "Gamblers tried to buy us off. They would approach us at the hotel, where we stayed on the weekend ... 'They didn't fool with me ... But there were guys who took their money ... We had one guy. Oh, he was a high traveler. A halfback. We saw his contacts at the hotel. Then we saw his play. He was detailed to cover a man, and when he didn't, why, we said it was an accident. But the second time, it was too obvious. I said, 'What the hell is going on?' I went over to the bench and said, 'He didn't cover his man, Jim. This guy is not covering his man.' Jim braced him right there. He fired him. "[2] Thorpe was replaced as the president of the professional football league in 1921 by Joe Carr of Columbus, Ohio, a highly respected sports reporter and promoter. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his crusade to prevent NFL teams from snagging college players for pro ball until they had graduated.[3] In 1922—the year that the APFA changed its name to the National Football League—a scandal involving the year-old Green Bay Packers erupted. The team's owner was disciplined by Carr for hiring college athletes who used aliases and were paid for playing in NFL games during the 1921 season .[4] With the Packers' ownership in deep financial trouble in the wake of the scandal, local businessmen in Green Bay purchased the team for $2,500 and made it a public, nonprofit corporation in 1923. Citizens purchased stock in the team for $5 a share. Today, the Green Bay Packers are still the only team owned by the citizens of the city that it represents. Most of the early owners were viewed as "sportsmen" who gambled heavily on horse racing, baseball, and any other sporting events available. Gambling was widely practiced and accepted, particularly in those early days of professional football when the fledgling sport wasn't thought to be in the same league as professional baseball. Wagering at baseball games had become a part of the ballpark spectacle. It was common knowledge that bookmakers usually operated in the right-field bleachers of nearly every stadium in the country. Halas said, "Fans bet heavily, but I forbade my players to gamble on any of our games. Betting on one's own team to win may not be harmful, because one player cannot make a team win. "One player can make a team lose, however, by fumbling or missing a pass or failing a tackle. Although players have a sixth sense for detecting when a teammate is not doing his best, there is a terrible temptation to bet against the team. No gambler has ever approached me. Perhaps the word got around that gamblers would, at best, be wasting their time."[5] In the early days of professional football, an NFL owner had to have what was then an enormous cash flow, over $100,000 a season. Generally, only gamblers and robber barons had that kind of money. Unfortunately, the names of the sports gamblers and bookmakers with whom the "sportsmen" did business were unknown to most sports fans-whose loyalty to the home team was usually backed up with their wagered cash. "You always used to hear this game or that was fixed," a longtime amateur sports gambler told me. "If a name like Al Capone or Arnold Rothstein or even some big-name player wasn't involved, it really wasn't something you'd worry about. You might wait and watch, but when things blew over you placed your bet on the next game." Feared by the public and protected by Tammany Hall, Rothstein had been the most successful bookmaker in the country during the early part of the century. Along the way, he was thought to have committed numerous other crimes, including extortion and murder. During his career, Rothstein gambled and did business with, among others, Julius Fleischmann, the heir to U.S. Steel; Canadian distiller Joseph Seagram; U.S. Senator Edward Wolcott of Colorado; and Percival H. Hill of the American Tobacco Company. With the advent of Prohibition in 1919, Rothstein had already solidified his power and served as an intermediary for the new Mafia families emerging in New York. Bootleggers crawled out from under every rock and began to make their fortunes. And organized-crime figures who engaged in the illegal liquor business, like Rothstein, also became involved in other rackets, including sports gambling. By allegedly fixing the 1919 World Series in the Chicago "Black Sox" scandal, Rothstein established himself as the all-time king of notorious sports gamblers. A larger than life American figure in the eyes of some, Rothstein was. the inspiration for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Ralph Salerno, New York's former supervisor of detectives, told me, "It was the White Sox players' idea to do the fixing, but Rothstein was behind the fix. There's no doubt about that. Everyone was coming to him, trying to get him to finance the whole deal. But Arnold, who didn't want to have direct responsibility, sat back and sent out his beard, who met the players and made the deals. It was no wonder that the players were cheated out of their money, and Rothstein made an untraceable fortune. And, best of all, Rothstein could deny any involvement. "His beard was indicted. But being the only man who could implicate Rothstein, he left the country. As the case was coming to court, the prosecution's evidence just disappeared while its witnesses developed amnesia or simply vanished." The case was eventually dropped-with no official court record that the 1919 World Series had ever been fixed. Nevertheless, Rothstein became even a larger legend. But he, too, overestimated his own power and invulnerability. In 1928, he was shot to death upon the orders of a rival mobster. The 1919 scandal forced baseball team owners to hire an outsider to administer league policy and to police baseball personnel. He was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was honest, distinguished, and grandfatherly. Judge Landis's job was to clean up the image of baseball and bring wholesome family entertainment back to the game. Landis decreed, "No player that throws a game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooks where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball." As major-league baseball had, the NFL added a rule to its charter prohibiting gambling by any owner, coach, or player. But, as in baseball, gambling in football would continue to flourish. Meantime, in September 1931, three years after Rothstein's murder, the traditional Sicilian Mafia, became Americanized; thus, disorganized crime became organized crime, which included a cadre of Jewish gangsters. A national crime syndicate was established by twenty-nine-year-old Meyer Lansky of New York and Chicago mobster Johnny Torrio. As part of the plan, the United States was divided into twenty-four subdivisions, each controlled by the most powerful Mafia families in these various geographic areas. Nine of the leaders of these twenty-four crime groups were selected to sit on a national crime commission that would settle jurisdictional disputes. The crime syndicate* was created to stop the infighting among the crime families, which interfered with the mob's primary goals-to make money and to stay out of jail. With the increased stability and decreased exposure, mob financiers like Lansky were free to find legal and illegal moneymaking ventures, raise the necessary capital from participating crime families, launder funds through "friendly" banks, buy political protection, and oversee the fair distribution of profits from these activities. Professional sports, particularly the NFL, would be among the underworld's biggest money-makers. pps. 39-44 --[notes]-- CHAPTER 2 1. There is some confusion over the actual founding date of the APFC. Most of the old-timers, including George Halas, claimed that it was created on September 17, the first meeting Halas attended. However, NFL records show that the initial meeting was on August 20 in Hay's auto showroom. The charter teams were the Akron Professionals, Buffalo All-Americans, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Hammond Pros, and Rochester Jeffersons. The teams from Buffalo, Hammond, and Rochester were not present at the first meeting but formally applied for membership in writing. Most reports also include the Massillon Tigers as a charter member, but no team from Massillon, a powerhouse in pre-1920 play, was entered. At the second meeting in Hay's showroom on September 17, the original seven teams were joined by the Racine [Chicago) Cardinals, Halas's Decatur Staleys, Muncie Flyers, and Rock Island Independents. Three additional teams participated in the 1920 season: the Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandles, and Detroit Heralds. The Akron Professionals finished the 1920 season in first place with an 8-0-3 record. 2. Myron Cope, The Game That Was. The Early Days of Pro Football (New York: World Publishing Co., 1970), p. 41. 3. Carr instituted the college draft in 1936. 4. In 1925, the Milwaukee Badgers Club placed four high school players on its roster. When Carr discovered this blatant violation, he forced the Badgers' owner, Ambrose McGurk, to sell his franchise and banned for life a member of the team who had recruited the four youngsters. 5. George Halas with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey, Halas by Halas: The Autobiography of George Halas (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1979), pp. 62-63. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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