Football footnote
They played five years in Boston, but those Redskins were never more than a footnote
Yellowed and frayed, the newspaper clippings are all that remain of a story rarely told and never embraced.
Warm memories? Not really. Truth is, the Boston Redskins for five turbulent seasons were forgettable, and the passing of several generations has made them even more so. They were an NFL team with a minuscule fan base and even less appeal to sports editors whose papers were the link between the teams and the public in those years before television.
It was 70 years ago that the story should have had its most brilliant chapter; on Dec. 13, 1936, the Redskins played the mighty Green Bay Packers for the NFL championship. It should be part of our city's sports pride, ranking with the Red Sox of 1918 and 2004, the Celtics of countless seasons, the Bruins of Orr and Esposito, the Patriots of Brady and Belichick.
Instead, 1936 is a source of embarrassment -- Bostonians having long ago cast aside that NFL Championship game like an unwanted pair of socks. And why not? As the "home" team that year, the Redskins chose to take on Don Hutson, Johnny "Blood" McNally, and the Packers not at Fenway Park, but at the Polo Grounds in New York, a move that all but assured the divorce between city and team was official.
Cite the old standby, if you will -- irreconciliable differences -- because the Redskins packed up after that game in New York and bade Boston farewell, content to forge a storied existence in Washington. But to George Preston Marshall, the bombastic owner of the Redskins, Boston didn't appreciate pro football. (Boston would get an NFL franchise a few years later, but the Boston Yanks went 12-30-2 from 1944-48 and also proved an unwelcome entity.) Feeling his team had been ignored by the mighty Boston press for five seasons, Marshall was so bitter that he did not even attempt to make an amicable split.
Marshall had complained constantly about huge crowds attending Harvard and Boston College football games on Saturdays, only to see smaller gatherings show up to see the Redskins on Sundays. That's because Sunday was a day for church, Marshall was told. Yet he knew that to thousands of Bostonians, Sunday was really a day to go to the tracks.
"The Boston sporting heritage had passed through the pari-mutuel windows," wrote a New York sportswriter with glee after the Redskins-Packers game had been shifted to the Polo Grounds.
If Bostonians were insulted, they didn't show it. Then again, many of them had never paid attention to Marshall and his Redskins in the first place.
Marshall, who had inherited his father's laundry business and brilliantly expanded it so that he was extremely wealthy, saw great potential in football. He had nurtured a friendship with George Halas, and it was while attending a Bears-Giants game in 1931 that he convinced three business partners from the Wall Street world -- Jay O'Brien, Vincent Bendix, and Larry Doyle -- that it was a worthwhile $2,500 investment to buy a franchise.
Washington, which is where Marshall lived and ran his business, was rejected by NFL organizers as "too Southern." Boston was agreed upon, and the reason was simple: The Sunday sports law had been passed in Massachusetts to allow for professional games on that day.
"We'll lose $25,000 before we make a profit," Marshall, then 36, warned his partners, but he was smitten with football. Years earlier, at age 14, Marshall demonstrated the showmanship skills that would last a lifetime; he put together a barnstorming football team that played in the Washington area.
He quickly discovered that his team played in a city with provincial sports passions: the Red Sox, the Bruins, boxing, and, much to Marshall's disgust, horse racing. When only 3,000 fans turned out for the team's debut in 1932, he fought to maintain his composure. "Pro football has come to Boston to stay," said Marshall, whose team went 4-4-2 that season. While attendance for some home games reached 10,000, the financial loss was estimated in the tens of thousands. Before the next season, the three partners had been bought out.
Marshall's team went by the name Boston Braves that first season, but only because it played at Braves Field. When a deal was struck to move the team to Fenway Park in 1933, Marshall changed the name, though he wanted to keep the Indian theme. He settled on Redskins, and as another example of his desire to seek any angle of publicity, Marshall chose an Indian, Lone Star Dietz, to coach.
The Philadelphia Eagles used the first pick on the first Heisman Trophy winner, Jay Berwanger, whose demand of $25,000 for two years in an era when players were getting $100-$200 a game was flatly denied so he went into the foam-rubber business. Marshall selected quarterback Riley Smith of Alabama with the second pick. He added fullback Ed Smith of NYU in the third round, fullback Don Irwin of Colgate in Round 7, then made perhaps the key pick when he got a third future Hall of Famer, Wayne Millner, in the eighth round.
Born in Roxbury and raised in Salem, Millner had honed his gridiron skills at Notre Dame, where he was immortalized for a touchdown catch he made in the closing seconds to help the Irish stun powerhouse Ohio State, 18-13. Quarterback Bill Shakespeare had delivered that pass, but now Millner had been delivered to the Redskins and Marshall was ecstatic. So, too, was his new coach, Ray Flaherty, who had taken over after a one-year experiment with Eddie Casey was deemed a miserable failure (the Redskins went 2-8-1 in 1935.
Years later, Marshall said the Casey experience had provided even further evidence to support his fears that Boston was not a football town. Having respected the job Casey did with Harvard's football team, Marshall paid a visit to Cambridge for an audience with Abbott Lawrence Lowell. The legendary president of Harvard listened intently to Marshall's request to hire away Casey, then leaned across his desk and asked, "Who's Casey? Does he coach one of our minor sports?"
Incensed, Marshall came away convinced that Lowell mirrored Boston's apparent disapproval of professional football, yet the incident made him even more committed to hire Casey. And being a man who often got what he wanted, Marshall succeeded, only to dismiss the former Harvard coach after one dismal season. He then turned to Flaherty, a no-nonsense assistant with the New York Giants, who surveyed the '36 draft and pronounced that Millner was so talented, "We could win a championship with that big Yankee at end."
Flaherty was doing what Marshall wanted -- stirring up interest. Little did reporters know how close Flaherty was to being right.
Overrun with joy, Marshall quickly became overcome with greed. He knew the demand for bleacher seats surpassed the supply, so an hour before game time, he ordered that ticket prices be raised from 55 cents to $1.10. Fans were outraged. So, too, were sportswriters, many of whom had never hidden their dislike of Marshall ("the luxurious laundryman," they would smugly write).
"It was done to the painful embarrassment of some of the people who had come with bankrolls amounting to 75 cents, inclusive of carfare both going and coming," wrote Austen Lake, who considered that day to have sealed the Redskins' fate in Boston. He may have been right, as barely 5,000 people showed up at the next home game and save for one exception (12,000 attended a visit from the heralded Packers), that was the norm for the remainder of that ill-fated 1936 campaign.
It didn't matter that the Redskins were in a fight with the Giants and Pittsburgh Pirates for the Eastern Division title, or that Battles was continuing to shine as the NFL's premier runner, or that Ed Britt of Holy Cross and BC's Flavio Tosi had become key members of the Redskins, or that Millner had clearly shown himself to be one great pro football player. The wedge between Marshall and the Boston papers had clearly been driven too deep for repair.
With another football team in town making news -- the Boston Shamrocks with the great Hank Soar played in the American Football League for 1936-37 -- gridiron fans had a suitable Sunday option, though clearly Saturday games involving BC, Holy Cross, and Harvard were still the ticket.
Newspapers hardly needed the Redskins to supply material for readers in those fall and winter days of 1936. On a daily basis, the heated love affair between King Edward VIII and Mrs. Wallis Simpson filled page after page, and there was the news of Pope Pius being stricken. On the sports front, Max Schmeling had arrived from Germany to begin negotiations for a match with heavyweight champion James Braddock; young dynamo Joe Louis had KO'd someone named Eddie Sims with one punch; the Bruins' Milt Schmidt was being heralded as one of the NHL's best rookies; a court ruled that 17-year-old phenom Bob Feller was the property of the Cleveland Indians; baseball was buzzing with the possibility of Dizzy Dean leaving the Cardinals; and to prove that the more things change, the more they remain the same, the Hot Stove League was alive and well, thanks to the news that the Red Sox had traded for Pinky Higgins and the Boston Bees (the National League entry, known as the Braves from 1912-35, but as the Bees from 1936-40) had acquired Vince DiMaggio.
The Redskins? No one seemed to care. Only a few thousand people showed up at Fenway Park Nov. 29 to watch a 30-0 trouncing of the Pirates that pushed the team to 6-5. Marshall had had it. Even as his team prepared to play the regular-season finale in New York against the Giants, where a victory would give his team the Eastern Division title, Marshall was determined to leave Boston. He didn't hide his feelings, but he and Joe Carr, then the president of the NFL, danced around rumors that the Redskins had already decided to play the NFL Championship game in New York and not Boston.
"I'm up in the air," said Marshall Dec. 5.
If he was, the owner came down the next day, not long after Irwin and Battles had scored touchdowns to lead the Redskins over Steve Owens's Giants, 14-0, to finish 7-5 and cop the division. It set up a championship game with the Western Division Packers, who had rolled to a 10-1-1 record, and Marshall confirmed that the game would be at the Polo Grounds. The owner swore it had nothing to do with any dislike of Boston, only with one aspect of the city.
"There's the weather to consider. You know how it is in Boston this time of year," he said, as if New York were a Caribbean outpost.
Sportswriters went on the attack, and on the pages of the Boston Globe, Paul Craigue wrote: "I'll admit, Boston is no tropical paradise this time of year, George, but the only palms I noticed in New York over the weekend were those extended by ticket-takers at the Polo Grounds. You noticed them, too, I guess."
If Marshall and Carr needed ammunition against public outcry, they had the perfect one: A move to the Polo Grounds would assure more fans, which would in turn be more lucrative to the players, since they got a share of the gate. Players bought into it and offered little resistance. It was, for sure, a far more homespun era and the game was so much different back then.
Rosters had 20-25 players, most all of them required to play both offense and defense. Three players generally lined up behind the quarterback, whose job was to call plays and direct traffic as much as anything. Four Redskins backs -- Battles, Britt, Ed Smith, and Pug Rentner -- attempted more passes in 1936 than QB Riley Smith, and while the team did score five touchdowns through the air in 13 games, there were a whopping 22 interceptions, a rather normal ratio back then.
Different times, for sure, but Musick was back in a Redskins uniform for 1935, then again in 1936, though he got hurt and played in just five games that season. Sidelined, Musick wasn't able to aid the Redskins' title effort against the Packers at the Polo Grounds, though it probably wouldn't have mattered. The Packers, with Arnold Herber throwing completions at will to Hutson and McNally, were a dynamic team and had their way with the Redskins, 21-6.
Whatever early momentum Marshall's team sought was gone on the 10th play of the game. A fumble was recovered by the Packers, who needed three plays to go up, 7-0, on a 48-yard scoring strike to Hutson. The Redskins' Rentner capped off a scoring drive minutes later, but when Riley missed the kick, the Packers were still in front, never to be passed. A pair of second-half touchdowns assured the Packers their fourth league title in eight years.
Redskins players were comforted by their prize, $180 each. Marshall? He was comforted by gazes around the Polo Grounds, where an enthusiastic crowd of 30,000 had gathered. That is what he envisioned in Washington, and history has proven him correct: The Redskins have one of the most loyal fan bases in the league.
When Marshall made the move to Washington official just a few days after the loss to the Packers, Boston sports editors barely made note of it, save for a few paragraphs deep into the paper. They found the room, however, for a lengthy story about a New York horse auction in which yearlings had gone for record prices.
"Horse-crazy Boston," snarled Marshall.
