When the train reached Pennsylvania Station, Slip Madigan dashed over to the Waldorf to meet with his pals in the New York press corps. Stanley Woodward, the erudite sports editor of the Herald Tribune and president of the New York Football Writers’ Association, was there, along with Allison Danzig of the New York Times, Bill Corum of the Evening Journal, Joe Williams of the World-Telegram, Frank Graham of the Sun, and Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, among others. In one sentence, Runyon captured the philosophy of his brethren. “All of us dyed-in-the-wool New York sports writers from Pueblo, Colo., Memphis, Tenn., Waterbury, Conn., Chicago, Ill., Milwaukee, Wis., Boston, Mass., and way stations, are loyally pulling for the home team today, although it is pretty tough to pull against St. Mary’s after you’ve met Slip Madigan,” he wrote for his “Both BarrelS” column, published in the New York American the next morning. Wherever he went in the Waldorf, Runyon said, he was accosted by “inmates of California” wearing little red and blue caps, their “pockets stuffed full of pamphlets” about their home state. “As a matter of fact, we are commencing to suspect that St. Mary’s annual pilgrimage to the big town on the excuse of a football game with Fordham is nothing more nor less than an insidious publicity campaign for California.”
The Fordham men were thinking only football. The St. Mary’s contest was the first of three games in the middle of the schedule that looked as though they would define this promising season: St. Mary’s, then Pitt, followed by Purdue. After the first three games, the Rams had given up no touchdowns rushing and only two overall, both in the final minutes on fluke plays when the first string line was not in the game. But Crowley was still losing sleep over his offense and starting to take criticism for its lack of firepower. Dooley of the Sun, himself a former running back at Dartmouth, noted that Crowley “has never had an attack at Rose Hill which was even faintly reminiscent of the Four Horsemen.” Slip was getting all the ink, but Sleepy Jim was certain he had the better story. He was searching, as he often did, for something to inspire his team.
Crowley was at heart a showman. Once he invited the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey to talk before a game. Whenever his friend and fellow Horseman Don Miller was in New York, Crowley ushered him onto the field for practice, but invariably dispelled the Horsemen myth with his instinctive sarcasm. “This is Don Miller, boys,” he said once. “He used to play right halfback and block for me at Notre Dame. He is going to take the backs down to one end of the field and give them some tips. I want them to pay very strict attention—and when he has finished, forget everything he has said.” Crowley even tried secret potions. Lombardi later told the story of how Crowley, before one game in 1935, claimed that he had been working with “a scientist from the Swiss Alps” and had invented “a pill that will impart superhuman strength.” This was long before the era of uppers and greenies and steroids. It was a psychological con job; Crowley was using nothing more than sugar pills. The players came forward one by one, tongues out, to receive the wonder pill delivered on tweezers. Lombardi felt “HUGE,” as though he could stomp anybody, when he took the field for warmups that day.
For the St. Mary’s game, Crowley tried to inspire his men with stirring words. This was not his strong suit; he could never replicate the mystical oratorical powers of his old mentor Knute Rockne from the shadows of the Golden Dome. But in the locker room at the Polo Grounds on that October 24 Saturday, Crowley assembled his men and began a pregame speech that his players long remembered. There was a sellout crowd out there in the stands, he told them, and millions more would be listening to Ted Husing’s radio broadcast. Out of the multitudes, he wanted them to think of one special fan, his elderly mother, “sitting in her rocking chair out there in Green Bay, saying her beads” for her boy’s good luck, waiting to hear whether Fordham could compete with the best. They must not let her down. Crowley paused, turned to the team manager and, in a low voice that rose to a crescendo, sent his players on a wild charge into the sunlight with the words, “Son, you better open the door and get out of the way fast. HERE COMES MY FORDHAM TEAM!”
Crowley also unveiled a new offensive plan, sending his backfield men in motion, which almost proved the team’s undoing. Referee J. P. Egan determined that the Fordham backs were not coming to a complete stop after the shift, and he threw the flag on them seven times. Damon Runyon had his lead: “Penalty, penalty, who gets the penalty, seems to be the game the officials are playing this afternoon….” St. Mary’s took an early 6 to 0 lead, aided by the constant penalties and a powerful kicker, Lou Ferry, described by Runyon as “a human siege gun,” who kicked field goals of eighteen and forty yards. But Ferry was “lugged off the field by six of his teammates” after being hurt in the second quarter. Handy Andy Palau brought Fordham back by throwing a touchdown pass and kicking the extra point, and the Rams held on to win 7 to 6. “The locker room afterwards was one mad scramble of backslapping, songs and shouts of ‘What’s hot tonight?—see you at the Commodore!’ ” Paquin, the end and newspaper chronicler, recalled. “Crowley in the meantime was congratulating each player and had the broadest grin of all.”
The victory, Runyon noted in his game story, left “the team from Bronx county still undefeated and untied this season, with the old Rose Bowl dream flourishing up Fordham Road like a hot-house tomato.” Also flourishing was the Fordham front line, which held St. Mary’s to no touchdowns and only eight net yards for the afternoon. New York papers began running daily reports on Ram practices, focusing on the line. “Fordham Gets Blocking Drill in Scrimmage,” read one headline. “The line may not be everything in football, but it is very important,” wrote columnist Joe Williams. “It is practically impossible to score against the Fordham line.” Willard Mullin, the sports cartoonist, drew a half-page cartoon that week with the caption, “Just a Line to Let You Know,” over sketchings of Paquin, Franco, Pierce, Wojciechowicz, Lombardi, Babartsky and Druze. Below the players, Mullin sketched Sleepy Jim Crowley and a caption, “And So He Built a Line.” James Cannon of the New York American paid a visit to Crowley and posed the pressing question.
How good is this team of yours?
The greatest defensive team I’ve ever seen, said Crowley.
Not the best Crowley had coached, Cannon reported. The best he had ever seen, with a line that was superior to the Seven Mules who played in front of the Four Horsemen.
Assistant coach Hugh Devore returned from Pittsburgh with a scouting report on the next opponent, a team that had already beaten Notre Dame and Ohio State. Pitt’s program represented the best and most controversial aspects of college athletics in the 1930s. Under Jock Sutherland it played a precise, exciting style of football, but it was a de facto pro team. Pitt paid players so brazenly that Notre Dame complained and dropped the Panthers from its schedule after that season, while Sutherland soon decided to move on to the true professional ranks. The talent of that 1936 squad was made clear in Devore’s scouting report. He analyzed each player in the starting lineup and posted the findings on a wall next to Jake Weber’s barber chair in the basement of the Rose Hill gym, something for the Fordham players to study as they had their ankles taped. Jake added to the display, posting a picture of each Pitt player next to the report.
The prospects of a Rose Bowl, the emerging glory of a great line, the New York sports fraternity’s hunger for a new local star—sometime that week Fordham’s football team reached that ineffable moment when it was transformed into a phenomenon, the story people wanted to talk about, the team everyone wanted to see. Athletic director Jack Coffey noted a “salutary rush for tickets,” with even the upper deck in the Polo Grounds selling out for Pitt. One night that week the players took in a double feature on the Grand Concourse, and between movies the lights went up, the manager pointed out the Fordham athletes, and the audience rose to cheer.
There was no surer sign of Fordham’s new celebrity than the attention Damon Runyon paid the team. Now he was not only writing game stories, but also dipping into Fordham material
for features and columns. Runyon’s turn of phrase could make any story a corker, his humor evincing the universal in the particular. His story on Rameses VII, the team mascot, was a hilarious take on the use of animals on football field sidelines. “The Fordham boys up in the Bronx have a ram for a mascot, a ram being a gentleman sheep. This ram, whose name is always Rameses, is a sullen old bloke, who has to be dragged around by man-power whenever they want it to go anywhere, and it despises football. We believe Rameses would be much better off, and perhaps happier, as chops, or with curried rice.”
By 1936 football was a sidelight for the prolific Runyon, who by one estimate wrote 73 million words in newspaper stories, columns, screenplays and works of fiction during his career. One problem with football was that it was played in daylight and outdoors. He preferred “jernts” like Lindy’s restaurant to open air. He was on the town every night, usually stationed on a narrow stretch of midtown Broadway that he had adopted as his own since 1931, when he began writing short fiction about the “guys” and “dolls” who operated there. He could stay up all night, drinking forty cups of coffee, and look as fresh in the morning in his sharp clothes and glasses as his more subdued colleagues. From the hustlers and hacks he encountered at night came his characters, Harry the Horse, Sam the Gonoph, Bookie Bob. Runyon lived in the moment and wrote both his fiction and his Fordham game stories in the present tense.
But what can one write about a football game in which neither team scores and only once does either even threaten to cross the goal line? For the second straight year, Pitt and Fordham struggled to a scoreless tie. Runyon did his best: “’Tis a great football pulling and hauling that Fordham and Pittsburgh put on in the Giants’ yard this afternoon, with 57,000 customers teetering on the edge of their chairs throughout, but the upshot of it all is a dead heat, nothing to nothing. Ordinarily nothing from nothing leaves nothing, but in this case there remains to the observers the memory of one of the grandest gridiron shindigs in history—two teams battling each other to who-laid-the-chunk. You can’t say at the finish that one is better than the other by as much as an eyelash.” Runyon’s prose was no more panegyrical than that of many of his press box colleagues. Stanley Woodward, writing in the Herald Tribune, said the game “came close to the claims of the press agents and it is doubtful if better or more savage football was played on any gridiron.”
It was the front line, again, that stood out for Fordham: “transcendent,” wrote Danzig of the Times, “against one of the hardest running attacks in football.” The single scoring threat of the game came in the third quarter, when the spectacular Pitt running tandem of Marshall “Biggie” Goldberg and Bobby LaRue led the Panthers on a forty-six-yard drive, finally reaching the Fordham three-yard line. Fourth down, a yard and a half to go. Fordham had not given up a running touchdown all year. The front line was exhausted and wounded. Lombardi was playing hurt, a deep gash inside his mouth. He had been injured on offense earlier in the game, when Palau, to Vin’s increasing dismay, kept calling the same play, the halfback inside tackle, in which the quarterback and right guard try to double-team Pitt’s left tackle, an unmovable behemoth named Tony Matisi. One of Matisi’s flying elbows had smacked Lombardi in the jaw, hashing the inside of his mouth into a fleshy mess that would require thirty stitches after the game. He had been on the bench, recovering, when Pitt began its charge, but Sleepy Jim called him back and now he was out there at his own goal line, swallowing blood. Next to him stood Babartsky, his wrenched right knee throbbing with pain. Behind them was Palau, woozy as well, having been kneed in the head earlier while making a crucial tackle on the high-stepping Goldberg. Here, for Lombardi, was the beautiful controlled violence of his game, holy war and bloody rite, refusing to yield, ignoring the body’s fatigue. We do, or die.
On fourth down Pitt gave the ball to La Rue, running inside left tackle. Lombardi and Babartsky held firm. Wojy, the backer-up, came hurtling over, met La Rue with one of his blindman smacks and brought him to the ground two yards short of the goal. That was it for the game, no more scoring threats, and when it was over the Rams reacted as though they had won. Their fans stormed the field as the marching band played late into the autumn afternoon. Andy Palau won a coin toss with Pitt’s captain and brought the game ball back to Rose Hill on the bus.
As scores came in by Teletype from across the country that day, it became clear that Fordham stood as the finest unbeaten team in the East. This caught the attention of Henry Grantland “Granny” Rice, whose syndicated column, “The Sportlight,” along with his magazine articles and monthly film shorts, made him the most influential chronicler of American sports. His cherubic face framed by the trademark Confederate gray fedora, his manner always gentlemanly, his wit soft and self-deprecating, Rice lived the playful sportswriter’s life. He appeared at every major event, from boxing to horse racing to baseball to college football. He knew everyone, from presidents to jockeys; in any city he visited, his hotel room was the place to congregate after the games; and his prose and poetry were beloved by millions of readers. In the era before television, sportswriters served as the nation’s tribe of storytellers, popular artists invested with enormous powers to reinforce cultural mores and shape the public imagination. Rice was the wise man of his tribe, “the bringer of good news about games,” as he was later eulogized by William Randolph Hearst. It was Rice who had written the seminal bromide of good sportsmanship (“When the one great scorer comes/To mark against your name/He writes not that you won or lost/But how you played the game.”) It was Rice who had watched the great Red Grange run and called him the Galloping Ghost. And it was Rice who had immortalized Sleepy Jim Crowley as one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame.
Rice translated into poetry what he saw on the playing fields not merely to elevate play to a more literate (if sappily romantic) realm; he saw a natural, ineluctable connection. “Verse and sport together make up the menu perfectly,” he once explained. “Nothing else is needed where brain and brawn, heart and ligament are concerned. Rhythm, the main factor in both, is one of the main factors in life itself. For without rhythm, there is a sudden snarl and tangle.” Now, after Fordham’s front line had performed brilliantly for Jim Crowley, Rice looked down at a fresh piece of copy paper in his typewriter and found the rhythm for a new ode titled “Old Gibraltar.” Not exactly the “Ozymandias” of one of his favorite poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, but still moving to Fordham men everywhere.
Great, mighty Minnesota fell, upon a fateful day,
Both Yale and Army felt the axe, and tossed their crowns away,
Big Holy Cross, an early boss, hears no more winning hands,
Yes, strange things happened everywhere, but the Fordham Wall still stands.
Once Carthage ruled an ancient coast, but where is Carthage now?
The Grecian Phalanx no more wears the winning olive bough,
And where are Persia’s ruling hosts, that ruled all warring lands?
Their day is done, by sand and sun, but the Fordham wall still stands.
Who took the thrust of S.M.U. and rolled its chargers back?
Who stood the Gaels upon their heels and broke up each attack?
Who held young Goldberg at the line, with willing hearts and hands?
The answer rings from Coast to Coast: the Fordham wall still stands.
TIMOTHY SYLVESTER COHANE was already preoccupied with the Fordham wall and what he could do with it. Cohane, the school’s fresh-faced publicist, had taken a job in the sports information department as a student a few years earlier after Jack Coffey cut him from the baseball team. He wrote witty articles in Fordham football programs during his school days, while also editing the sports section of the Ram. After graduating in 1935 he emerged as the favored press agent of New York sportswriters. More than anything, this lanky son of a New Haven dentist wanted to be part of the press box brotherhood, a keeper of the myth. He wore a fedora, drank scotch, smoked cigars and told stories with a deep voice, exhibiting great command of t
he language. His sensibilities were those of the tribe: respect for coaches, loyalty to the home team, glory to the game, but all with a leveling touch of sarcasm. He loved the pageantry of football. Every Saturday morning he arrived at the press box before anyone else and sat alone studying the teams and the numbers. He knew all the fight songs and tried to write some himself.
As an ace public relations man, Cohane understood that his mission was to make people remember his team and its players, and that the most effective way to accomplish this was through the imagery of metaphor and nickname, the semiotics of myth. The year before he had called Fordham’s formidable front seven The Seven Samsons, but it failed to catch on, perhaps conjuring an image too archaic and hirsute. Cohane knew the myth of the Four Horsemen and Seven Mules, and he revered Granny Rice. The Seven Mules reminded him of something he had once seen in the New Haven Journal Courier back in 1930, when he was in high school. Fordham boasted of a powerful front line even then, under the coaching of Frank Cavanaugh, the Iron Major, whose teams went nearly two years without allowing a rushing touchdown. In the week between the Holy Cross and NYU games that 1930 season, an AP wirephoto ran in the New Haven paper under the cutline “The Seven Blocks of Granite.” Cohane exhumed the phrase from the graveyard of sports metaphors and applied it to the 1936 Fordham line, first using it as a headline in the program for the Pitt game. Paquin, Franco, Pierce, Wojciechowicz, Lombardi, Babartsky and Druze. The Seven Blocks of Granite.
Here, as with the Four Horsemen, phrase and image converged in the creation of a mythology that transcended its athletic reality. The number seven at once represented good luck and evoked an ancient and permanent lineage: seven seas, seven wonders of the world, seven blocks of granite. That the image was a wall of stone, an inanimate object, gave it a pureness beyond the human capacity, as philosopher Roland Barthes points out in his “Mythologies” essays: “We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life).” There could be no better time for a perfect and permanent object than in 1936: dust storms rage in the American heartland, the Germans storm into the Rhineland, depression and totalitarianism threaten life all around, but the Fordham wall still stands.
When Pride Still Mattered Page 7