DEPARTMENTS
ANTI-WAR
DEATH PENALTY
ELECTIONS
ENVIRONMENT
GLBT ISSUES
HEMP
INTERNATIONAL
NATIONAL
REVIEWS
|
Departments National Issues NFL---The untold story! A TOUGH GAME PLAYED BY TOUGH GUYS! In the beginning, it is not surprising that the National Football League (NFL) as we’ve come to know it would not have been recognizable among those early warriors that played that game. Beginning in 1919, but not made an official league until the following year, the NFL truly was a working class game. Based in the Ohio Valley area, most of those small, tough working class steel and coal towns along the Ohio River had NFL franchises. Teams were made up of hard-bitten former, or many times future or even present coalminers, steelworkers, dock workers or railroad men. The late, great Cleveland Browns kicker Lou Groza, who heralded from Steubenville, on the Ohio River, used to say, pointing to the local steel mill, then to the coalmine tipples, it really was true that, “if you didn’t make it there (football field), then you’d be going right back over there!” The pro football played in those days bore as little resemblance to the east coast college sport then played, primarily by well to do college students, as it does to the fast, highly financed, televised game of today. Players of those days could not imagine the safety rules, well-developed equipment or high wages paid to players today or the massive amounts generated for present day owners of teams. Players of those days played for survival, a little spending money on the side and, (oh yeah), for the love of the game! They generally had mill jobs or other jobs on the side. The six Nesser brothers that played for the Columbus Panhandles during the ‘20’s were no exception. The Nessers were all rail workers. Rail yard workers told stories of the Nessers leaping off the train to play hard-fought, bloody practice games on the cinder gravel by the tracks, just to “toughen themselves up!” GREEN BAY TAKES OVER THE PACKERS! While Chicago, Cleveland & Pittsburgh had early franchises, so did towns like Decator, Dayton, Portsmouth, Ironton, Duluth, Hammond, Muncie, Newark, Orange and Toledo. Frigid little Green Bay, Wisconsin, a packinghouse and fishing center on Lake Superior, also had a franchise. Green Bay’s was an original franchise in the NFL, organized by Curly Lambeau in 1919. Lambeau was an intense, resilient young football star from Green Bay who’d briefly attended Notre Dame. His family were mill workers, however, and he could not afford the high tuition. Returning to a job at Indian Packing House, Green Bay’s main industry, Lambeau went to work organizing a football team. The Packers were born, mostly manned by and named after, the local packinghouse workers. It is here that this story gets quite interesting. In 1920, and going forward, NFL team meetings were organized and held in Canton, Ohio, home of present day NFL Hall of Fame. Lambeau had little money, but he badly wanted to get to Canton. After trying to float loans from friends, family, local banks, all unsuccessfully, Lambeau worked out a deal to sell his share of the Green Bay Packers to the city of Green Bay, for the paltry sum of $200! From then on, Green Bay fans became the only fans in the NFL to be able to rightfully, when referring to their rooting interest/team, refer to them as “OUR Packers!” It is local legend that so many of the citizens of Green Bay have those early team shares that they purchased, framed and proudly displayed on their walls. Lambeau led the Packers to six championships, in 1929,’30,’31,’36,’39 & 1940. When the new stadium was built in ’58, it bore Curly Lambeau’s name. It was here, in the NFL films “frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wisconsin,” that Vince Lombari’s publicly owned Packers won six titles during the 1960’s. These included the first two Super Bowls, where the winning team now takes home the trophy bearing Lombari’s name. A PLAYERS LEAGUE! Besides being a league of tough guys, the early NFL of Lambeau’s time, was what we’d call a “player’s league,” meaning that it was run by and for the players. Many of the teams had “player-coaches,” who actually played for the team, as well as coached them. One of the best of those early player-coached teams was the Akron Pros. The Pros had been an African American semi-pro industrial team, founded in 1908, but shifted to paying its players, becoming a “pro” team in 1919. They were coached by the great Fritz Pollard, one of the greatest of the early running backs, finally elected to the NFL Hall of Fame twenty years after his death in 1965. Pollard was fast and illusive and, at only 5’8, 160 lbs, one of the toughest players ever to wear a uniform. Also part of that early, all African American Pros team, was the great singer, actor, activist and College Football Hall of Fame inductee, Paul Robeson. After tearing the league up as an all-league defensive end for Rutgers University, Robeson joined the Akron Pros of the new NFL, helping them to undefeated seasons in 1919 & ’20 and the first championships of the NFL. Robeson also played for Milwaukee in ’21, before launching into the rest his life, as a singer, actor and a fighter for political, economic and social justice, for which he is so well known. As a player’s league, that early NFL did not have any color line. Fritz Pollard opened the NFL’s first season as one of three African American coaches in the NFL. The tremendous Native American athlete, Jim Thorpe, was the NFL’s first league president, all the while also coaching and playing for the Native American football team in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. JIM CROW MAKES AN APPEARANCE! All that changed, like most of the nation, when the depression hit. For the young National Football League, it meant unmet payrolls, empty stadiums and teams going bankrupt. This is when the “new” NFL came to be, with big money from big cities. These new owners bought up the NFL franchises and moved (almost) all of them to major, big city markets. No more would pro football be the game played by tough workers of all creeds and colors, these new owners, like their fellow-owners in pro baseball, immediately established a color line for the NFL. No longer would pro football be a game played in those small working class towns, with one lonely exception. Up in the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wisconsin, the local mill workers, fishermen and regular folks still had their shares of the local team. They, and not big money, out of town financiers, were the owners of the Green Bay Packers. Try as they might, the new owners had to swallow this bitter pill! They could not move the Packers! The NFL owners even went so far as to write into the by-laws of that league that they would no longer allow any publicly owned franchise to be part of the league. But the publicly owned Packers would go on to win 14 championships (so far), most of any NFL team. They’ve done that playing football at Lambeau Field, an open air field in the coldest climate of any NFL city. There would never be, however, an empty seat there! THE BROWNS BREAK THE COLOR LINE! The disgusting color line remained in place, tainting that league, until the son of socialists in Ohio founded a new team in Cleveland. Paul Brown, whose folks had been long-time supporters of Ohio’s Socialist Party, set up the new Cleveland Browns after World War II. When Brown established the Cleveland Browns in 1945, the color line was not an issue for him. Bringing to the NFL a new, high-powered passing attack and bruising defense, Brown viewed the color line much the way he viewed opposing defenses. It was there to be torn down, period! Like North Carolina basketball coaching legend, Dean Smith, Brown did little talking about the color line, he just obliterated it! Brown helped found a new professional football league, the All American Football Conference (AAFC), which the young Browns treated with as much disdain as they did the color line. Cleveland won the AAFC every year, going 52-4 during that period & going undefeated in ’48. Playing in starring roles for the Browns were African American stars Marion Motley (fullback), Bill Willis (defensive end), Horace Gillom (punter), and Bill Ford (defensive lineman), all later inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. One interesting story of the early Browns concerned the Miami Seahawks team of the AAFC. Touted by their owners as being made up of all “good healthy white southern boys,” they adamantly refused the Browns’ request that all their players be treated the same. The Browns notified the Seahawks before the 1946 season that they would never travel to Miami if their African American players were to be treated unfairly. Miami then had to play all their games against the Browns, both home & away, in Cleveland. The Browns never lost to the Seahawks, and those games were never close! The Browns, the team of which I unfortunately am cursed with being a fan of, is now down on its luck, (but “coming back”). They are also one of the NFL’s “storied franchises.” Cleveland has won eight championships, AAFC & NFL, third amongst all NFL cities. Unfortunately for Browns fans, however, none since 1964, when the great Jim Brown was running the ball for them! INFLUENCE OF THE ONLY PUBLICLY OWNED TEAM! Part of being a Browns’ fan is to have a close relationship with disappointment and misery! In Cleveland we even have names for our losses; Red Right 88 (1980), The Drive (’87), The Fumble (’87), but, of course nothing comes close to The Move (1999) when owner Art Modell stole our team and moved it to Baltimore. The people of Baltimore have certainly also had their own close association with misery because their football team. Remember that horrible Miami team, with the racist owners? It folded after just one year and moved to, you guessed it, Baltimore. By 1953, that team had also folded, this time to be replaced with what is probably the worst team in NFL history. This time it was the former Dallas Texans team that went bust. Bad in its own right, the “team” that ended up in Baltimore made them look like champs! The new Colts went winless, but it was so bad that it became a joke! They couldn’t pay their players and didn’t even have a stadium to play in. In those days players got jobs during the off season. Some players there missed games because the jobs they now had paid more. The 60’s saw the arrival of John Unitas, one of the greatest quarterbacks in the game’s history, after he was cut by the then-hapless Pittsburgh Steelers. (The Steelers were horrible then, and didn’t get good until the 70’s, but they’ve been making up for lost time since, winning six Super Bowls, the most of any NFL team). Unitas led the Colts to two championships and Baltimore finally had real football respectability. People in Baltimore had a team to love! That was, of course, before the corporate financier Robert Irsay took over ownership of the Colts. Irsay loaded the Colts into Mayflower moving vans in the middle of the night in 1984 and moved them to Indianapolis, and broke the hearts of every true Baltimorian! Which brings us to Art Modell’s theft of the Browns, moving them to Baltimore, fifteen years later! Any real NFL fan knows that after that move, the city of Cleveland got a new, expansion franchise (& not a very good one, so far)! However, few know how or why that came about. There was nothing magnanimous about the NFL. In fact, there was absolutely no intention on the part of the rulers of the National Football League to put anything in Cleveland. That is, before the Cleveland and Lorain labor federations passed resolutions calling for use of eminent domain laws to “take the Browns away from corporate control and put the city of Cleveland in charge of the Browns, like the Packers are in Green Bay!” Cleveland city council followed suit and local radio stations began to make that call their own. The movement culminated on the last home game of the year against the publicly owned Green Bay Packers. An estimated 30-40,000 marched to the stadium demanding a new franchise. An issue of the People’s World, decked out in brown and orange, the Browns colors, was handed out at Municipal Stadium, itself a publicly built/owned facility. Soon after that, Cleveland Mayor White announced new meetings with the NFL to bring an expansion team to town. While the Browns haven’t been very good since, I’ve never forgotten how quick the big money folks were to jump as soon as the issue of public ownership was placed on the table. Also memorable was the fact that so many workers, many of them steelworkers who’d recently lost mill jobs, were ready to go out and demand public ownership for “their” Browns, when they never quite got that to point in regard to their mills. It really shows how much of an important role culture, in whatever form, plays in our lives. Finally, I’d like to close, remembering the most minor “uproar” that took place in Green Bay a few years ago. Those management types that were in charge of Lambeau Stadium were concerned, upset! “We MUST have a new stadium,” they cried! What they could not cry was the rest of that statement that has become so familiar to fans of all sports in our society; “or we’ll move the team!” Nope, the grandsons and granddaughters of those mill workers that bought those Green Bay Packer shares 91 years ago, told them! I’m not sure who officially carried the message back, but it got there clean and clear; “Nope, we like Lambeau! Revitalize it and shut up!” And that’s what happened! Stuff like that is easy when you’re the owner! |
|
Recent National Issues Articles Extraordinary interview: In love with tortured man -- Indefinite imprisonment, torture, terror inside California prisons through eyes of woman of courage Stop picking on the poor plutocrats Don’t mute Newt My declaration of war on Christmas Pvt. Manning and Imperative of Truth The Real Christmas Story The trial of Bradley Manning — Rule of law or rule of intimidation, retaliation & retribution Are Americans in line for Gitmo? Project Bugsplat Eliminate tax subsidies for big oil companies ? The last whistleblowers Lesson of White House Strafing: Limit Guns Now The bravest man I ever met I'm thankful for Occupy Occupy Crackdown: PCJF and NLG Demand Records of Federal Involvemen Mass day of action on 2-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street Seven arrested at demonstration at US Bank in downtown Columbus, Ohio Move to Amend gaining momentum Listen to the song: Occupy Wall Street From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the Neighborhoods Occupy movement demands home mortgages correction Will the 1% steal Ohio's labor rights referendum? Democracy key to fixing economic and eco crises, says Van Jones during visit to Columbus Former Tea Partier reaches out to Occupy Movement Official VFP statement regarding police assaults in Oakland Numbers justify Occupy Movement Occupy our chambers of commerce Arab Spring revolutionaries meet with Occupy activists in DC The abandoned class: Will Occupy Wall Street hold together long enough to cut to the deep chase? Jim Hightower tells Occupistas : just being out here is a big part of the battle Occupy The Hood Let's protest big banks at their Columbus branches Obama vs. jobs; Hope vs. reality Be a part of history. Help Occupy Columbus. Ohio Right of Life: Informed consent v. informed consent -- it's all situational Dr. Cornel West and 14 others arrested protesting corporate power at U.S. Supreme Court Occupy Columbus continues with gatherings at Ohio Statehouse and so-called Columbus Commons Class warrior from Wisconsin says building a movement requires courage, solidarity, and long-term organization Occupied -- What now? Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern : the movement is building Hey DC--You Look So Sexy ! To build a mass movement we got to care more and be uncomfortable, says flaming fundamentalist Columbus Free Press photos : Occupation in Freedom Plaza, D.C. Mass movement appears to be getting started, says David Swanson Our overripe moment We Are The 99 Percent The Progressive Humanifesto Declaration of the Occupation of New York City A judge grants dubious probation The old integrity You've convinced me...Now go out and make me do it. Fracking (if done right) is a way to combat Global Warming, says Congressman Tim Ryan The NFL will remember 9/11 in all the wrong ways I just found 29 million jobs 9/11 and the Orwellian redefinition of "Conspiracy Theory" An upcoming Charlottesville conference highlights the importance of whistleblowers when addressing the corruption present in military contracting How do we build a movement to defeat right-wing extremism? How the budget cutting Is going to go down Did Tenet Hide Key 9/11 Info? Equal and opposite lunacy Obama on the Backs of the Poor Budget deal Is a “Huge Mistake” If you declare bankruptcy, will everything be OK in a few days, weeks? Balance the budget on the backs of billionaires Move the budget debate to one of those democracies we're bombing into place The "There's Plenty of Money Act of 2012" King George III won: Happy Fourth of July! Fight Back Radio Show with Wayne Madsen In Memoriam: Gil Scot Heron Libertarians say restore freedom, repeal Patriot Act Perfecting the art of civil protest Down the rabbit hole with democracy and three urgent pleas The cure for plutocracy: Strike! White House website lying about your taxes Did you just call me a Socialist? Local and national political leader Norman Solomon officially launches his run for Congress in the North Bay Stand Up for Women's Health Rally Manning Marable and me In a Heartbeat: Ruling Class keeps the Bush tax cuts then attacks the middle class. Michigan fascism old news in DC The Green Bay Packers and the union backers Go to Wisconsin, President Obama The Push of Conscience and Secretary Clinton Fighting the 5 fascisms in Wisconsin & Ohio Fight yields victory, points the way! Ohio Republicans would execute Medicare recipients NFL---The untold story! Decades in the making: The U.S. police state Profiles of the Targeted: FBI Raided My Home, Wanted to Know About "My Indoctrination" An extremist for love: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Then and now A Time for Action -- Not Servility Following, not just commemorating, Dr. King – in Words. Deeds. Action… Bradley Manning and the rule of law The Tuscon shooting: We must place blame where it belongs Welcome to 2011: The american dream lives -- while you're asleep Repeal, replace, ... ridiculous Read National Issues Articles by Year: |
FREE PRESS EMAIL UPDATE
Donate to the Free Press Election Protection Fund to help us investigate and monitor election fraud in this year's election.
FOLLOW US ON
twitter
facebook
SEARCH THE FREEPRESS
1021 E. Broad St. Columbus, OH 43205 | 614.253.2571 | truth@freepress.org
All content © 1970-2012 The Columbus Free Press
Disclaimer