-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Interference Dan E. Moldea©1989 William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, NY ISBN 0-688-08303-X ---[3]-- 4 The Baugh Surveillance IN THE LATE FALL of 1943, rumors began to circulate that members of the Washington Redskins—particularly Sammy Baugh, the Redskins' quarterback sensation-were associating with Washington gamblers who were linked to Frank Erickson's gambling syndicate. Talk of game fixing had already begun after a November contest between the Redskins and the Phil-Pitt Steagles. The Redskins' "Slingin" Sammy Baugh was one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game of football. He was an all-American at Texas Christian University in 1936 and signed with Washington the following year. In his first season as a pro, Baugh electrified fans with a spectacular passing offense and led the once-failing Redskins to their first NFL championship. The next year, after threatening to quit football if he didn't receive more money, Baugh negotiated a three-year contract for $25,000 with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. A West Virginia-born laundry owner in Washington who had bought the Boston Braves football team in July 1932, Marshall had moved the team to Washington, D.C., forming the Washington Redskins in February 1937. Marshall, a onetime horse-racing enthusiast and gambler, had reformed himself and begun beating a tambourine in his efforts to prevent sports gambling. Always a showman, Marshall was determined to make professional football respectable. Although the Chicago Bears had destroyed the Redskins, 73-0, in the 1940 NFL championship game, it took Baugh only two years to avenge the Redskins and take the title back from the Bears. "I guess this kinda makes up for that thing in 1940, don't it?" cowboy Baugh told newsmen after the game. The Bears' running sensation, former all-American George "One-Play" McAfee, a 9.8 sprinter in the hundred on a cinder track back, told me about the 1940 game, saying, "The funny thing about that game was that two or three weeks earlier, the Redskins had beaten us, seven to three. We left there with some hard feelings because we thought we had gotten some bad calls from the officials. And when we came back to play them, we wanted to get even. But ol' Sammy, he was a great quarterback. We played both ways in those days—so I was in the backfield offensively and played in the secondary on defense. I remember on one play I felt someone bumping me. When I turned around, it was Sammy blocking me downfield. And he was the quarterback. Sammy always played full out." McAfee intercepted a pass and ran thirty-four yards for a touchdown during the Bears' rout of the Redskins. Baugh also remembers the 1940 rivalry with the Bears, especially the championship game. Baugh told me, "We played the Bears on the last day of the regular season that year, and we beat them, seven to three. In fact, McAfee ran the ball down to the one yard line. And before they could score, the officials said that the game was over. That left a real bad taste in their mouth. "But there was no doubt in my mind that the Bears were the best team in the league that year, game in and game out. We had more good players that year than I could ever remember playing with. But I doubt that we were as good as they were. We might have been a little lucky to have beaten them in that seven-to-three game. But when they left that field they were madder than hell. They just couldn't believe that we beat them. "On the day of the championship, we were a damn tired team. We were practicing really hard the week before the game. We would have been better off had we not worked quite so hard." In 1943, Baugh had led the Redskins to sixteen consecutive games over two seasons without a defeat. Then, Washington was beaten by the Steagles on November 28. Earlier that month, the Steagles had tied the Redskins, 14-14, ending Washington's consecutive victory streak at thirteen. Prior to the loss to the Steagles, the Redskins were 6-0-1 and in first place in the NFL's Eastern Division. The Steagles were 4-3-1 and in second place. Baugh entered the November 28 game with a knee injury he had received in a game two weeks earlier. The Steagles had held the Redskins scoreless until the final seconds of the third quarter when Baugh threw a touchdown pass. With the score 14-7 in the fourth quarter, Baugh led the Redskins downfield hoping to tie the game. However, a Baugh pass was intercepted, which led to another Steagles touchdown. When the Redskins got the ball back, Baugh attempted a quick kick (a surprise punt before fourth down) that was blocked and recovered by the Steagles on the Redskins one yard line. The Steagles then plunged in for another score. Baugh, who was twice booed by the Redskins fans because of his performance, threw a second touchdown pass in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. Too little too late, the Steagles won, 27-14. In early December, two sportswriters for The Washington Times-Herald, Vincent X. Flaherty and Dick O'Brien, began reporting on the rumors circulating in Washington about Baugh and the Redskins. Although dismissing such talk as "pool hall gossip," Elmer Layden—a member of the legendary Four Horsemen of Notre Dame who had become the first commissioner of the NFL in 1941[1]—reported, "So far I have not been able to find the slightest bit of factual evidence of collusion between anyone in the league and gamblers." Infuriated over Flaherty and O'Brien's report, Redskins owner Marshall denied that members of his team had been gambling and said defiantly, "Anyone connected with professional football who is gambling or has gambled on a game in our league should be thrown out immediately." Marshall then offered a $5,000 reward for any proof of any gambling by any member of the Redskins. The Times-Herald could not advance their case further and dropped the story. "We heard those rumors weeks ago," Baugh told the two reporters during their investigation. "The boys on our team just laughed at them." I asked Baugh about the charges of gambling against the Redskins players. He explained that the entire team had first been confronted prior to its game with the Detroit Lions earlier in the 1943 season. "The first time we heard about it was in our dressing room before the game," Baugh says. "someone came in and said that there was a rumor going around that we were throwing the game that day. I remember that shocked everybody, and we just made up our minds to beat the hell out of Detroit if we could." The Redskins ran up the score and won, 42-20. After the allegations of team associations with bookmakers were first made public, Baugh continues, "someone was talking about Mr. Marshall taking us down to the newspaper office and make the sons of bitches prove it. Some said not to pay that much attention to it-just let the damn thing go. I told them that I'd rather make them prove it-if they had any proof. 'Let us see it.’" However, Baugh did not know that George Marshall had secretly recorded the quarterback's conversations with known bookmakers during the week Flaherty and O'Brien had broken their initial story. The surveillance was arranged through a D.C. police officer, Joe Shimon, who had been hired by Marshall via publisher William K. Hutchison. "Hutchison ran a news service in Washington and was very close to Marshall," Shimon told me. "Hutchison had some newsreel cameramen who filmed Redskins games. Then he and Marshall would invite some friends to see the films. "Hutchison called me and asked how to wire a room for sound. When I asked why, he told me that Marshall suspected that some of his players were fixing games and wanted to prove it. So I arranged for Hutchison to get the equipment he needed to do the job. "I didn't hear anything more about it until several years later when Hutchison died. He had left me some of his personal effects and included was a stack of the recordings of Baugh, some other players, and bookmakers talking about the Redskins games." The surveillance of the conversations, recorded on old seventy-eight phonograph records, has been obtained for this book. They include conversations in which Baugh and other players were heard discussing point spreads, player injuries, inside information, bets, and their bookmaker friends. In 1943, most of the Redskins from the 1942 NFL championship team had been drafted into the military and gone to war. Baugh, who had joined the team in 1937, was not among them. He had received a deferment because he was the sole source of support for five people, including his wife and two children. He also was a rancher and in 1941 had purchased a sixty-five-hundred-acre cattle ranch in Rotan, Texas, an hour north of Sweetwater and at the foot of Double Mountain in East Texas. The government wanted ranchers ranching and providing food for the troops overseas. Later, Baugh developed his property into a twenty-one-thousand-acre spread. During the recorded conversations, Baugh told those present, "I wish I had [the] ranch in Texas paid for." Baugh brought Pete Gianaris's name into one of the discussions. Gianaris was a Washington gambler who had been convicted of bookmaking in 1938 and once owned a 25 percent interest in boxer Rocky Marciano. He was the personal Washington representative of Frank Erickson on the local gambling scene. In an earlier taped conversation, Gianaris had been recorded telling a Redskins player from whom he'd been receiving inside information and placing bets, "I'm the only one that books football.... The story is out that I've been fixing the [Steagles] game. Gianaris was alleged to have bet $40,000 against the Redskins at 4 to 1 odds and won $160,000 on the game. Gianaris guarded his words during the discussion and never admitted during the recording to have paid off any Redskins players. When he was asked by another person in the room, "Don't you understand that people think you're fixing Baugh?" Gianaris flat out denied it. "I am not," Gianaris said. "I've never given him a nickel in my life." When Gianaris's name was brought up at a subsequent conversation, Baugh asked, "You know what I'm worried about?" "I do know Pete Gianaris. See, he's been down that [road with Marshall]—just like [Baugh then recites the names of three gamblers /bookmakers] and all us boys." "What's the difference, Sam?" someone asked. "Well, that's the only gamblers I know, see? ... Well, people know I know Pete, and they see me with Pete, see? And there's talk come of it that makes it look bad." "Well, when they come and ask you, I'd say, 'I certainly know him,' I wouldn't try to deny it." "I don't try and deny it," Baugh replied. "So what the hell's the difference? You're going out with a gambler. You know a gambler. So [why] the hell are three gamblers owning three clubs in the league? ... How about Charlie Bidwill? . . . And you've got Tim Mara. And you've got Art Rooney. So what the hell, 'Why sure I know gamblers. They're friends of mine.' Goddamnit, they don't own our club, though." Although there is no evidence on the recordings that Baugh or any other Redskins player ever threw a game in 1943, the evidence is clear that Baugh and perhaps as many as four other players had personal and/or financial relationships with gamblers and bookmakers. Nevertheless, even with the evidence in hand, Elmer Layden and George Marshall issued a joint statement-simply declaring that their investigation of Redskins' associating with gamblers had "turned up absolutely nothing." Later that year, the Redskins became the Eastern Division champions but lost the NFL championship game to the Chicago Bears, 41-21. I told Baugh that his room had been ordered to be bugged by Marshall, and I read him a portion of the transcripts of the recordings in his hotel room. Baugh became furious and replied, "Now wait just a goddamn minute! There wasn't anybody in that room beside football players! I never knew any bookmakers! I never made a damn bet in my life, and I won't today!" When I specifically asked him about Pete Gianaris, Baugh explained, "You know what I remember about Pete Gianaris? One of the boys [a Redskins player], I don't remember who it was, asked me if I wanted to go have dinner at a fan's house one night. It was Pete Gianaris. I never knew Pete Gianaris was a gambler. I never knew what Pete Gianaris did. I won't deny that I knew Pete Gianaris ... "I never made one damn bet in my life on a football game. I made one bet in my life on a horse race. It lost, and I [vowed] that I was never going to bet again. The horse didn't get the call." Reflecting on his life playing football, Baugh says, "I enjoyed it all my damn life. Money wasn't that important then. You did it because you enjoyed the game." pps. 51-56 --[notes]— CHAPTER 4 1. NFL president Joe Carr had died in 1939. Bert Bell was one of the few NFL owners who had objected to Elmer Layden's appointment as NFL commissioner. --[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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