The Business of Sport: Thanksgiving Game Has Deep Roots in the NFL



By EVAN WEINER
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
November 21, 2007

National Football League never had any road map that led it to the
financial success and status it has today. Instead, the league arrived
at its station in life not because of any great planning by Chicago's
George Halas, long-time owner and commissioner Bert Bell, Pittsburgh's
Art Rooney, Green Bay's Curly Lambeau, the Giants' Tim Mara, or any of
the other owners that populated the league from the 1920s to the '50s.
In 1934, the idea of the Detroit Lions hosting a Thanksgiving Day game
came about only after team owner George A. Richards, who was looking for
ways to increase attendance at Lions games, decided to follow the lead
of high school and college teams and play a game on the holiday.

Richards's game wasn't the first NFL contest to be played on
Thanksgiving, as other teams scheduled contests on the holiday - but it
would become the most historic.

Before the onset of the 1934 season, Richards, who also owned the
powerful WJR radio station in Detroit, purchased the financially failing
Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans for $15,000, paid off the Spartans' $7,952.08
debt, and moved the team to Detroit. It was Detroit's fifth shot at the
NFL. Richards's team was good, as the Lions had lost just one game prior
to playing the undefeated Bears. But getting people to the University of
Detroit's stadium to see the Lions was a problem. And so, the Lions
played the Chicago Bears after Detroit's annual Thanksgiving Day parade.

The promotion worked for Richards, as a sold-out crowd of 26,000 people
saw the Bears-Lions contest. His team lost, but he had more than twice
the normal attendance in the building for a game. Richards also
convinced NBC Radio to carry the game live coast-to-coast - and it was
the first time an NFL game received national coverage.

Richards was a visionary, but he was not in the football business very
long. Richards got in trouble with the league in 1940 over a tampering
charge with a college player prior to the draft. Richards was fined
$5,000 and then sold the team. Other than the 1934 Thanksgiving game,
Richards has been largely forgotten.

Detroit stopped hosting the Thanksgiving game after 1938. The league
played just one game in 1939 and 1940, and completely dropped the game
in 1941. The Lions then re-emerged as the host of the annual game in
1945 after World War II had ended, and the only other teams in the first
half of the century to host the Thanksgiving Day contests were the
Chicago Cardinals in 1950 and the Dallas Texans in 1952.

The Texans' "home" game was played at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio, as
part of a morning high school, afternoon NFL game doubleheader. The
Dallas Texans, the present day Indianapolis Colts, can rightfully claim
the title of "America's Team," not the Dallas Cowboys.

The Texans' roots were in the All-American Football Conference, starting
in 1946 as the Miami Seahawks; they moved in 1947 to became the
Baltimore Colts. Baltimore then joined the NFL in 1950 but folded, and a
number of the Colts players were picked up for the "merged" New York
Yankees in 1951. The Texans played for exactly one season, in 1952. (The
Yankees lasted just three years first as the Bulldogs, and then the
Yankees in both the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. The Bulldogs had
moved to New York in 1949 following a five-year stay in Boston as the
Boston Yanks. Boston had merged with the Brooklyn Tigers in 1945, and
the Tigers disbanded in 1946.) The Dallas Texans, therefore, had roots
in Boston, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Baltimore, and would
eventually, at the end of 1952, land in Hershey, Pa., and Akron, Ohio,
as well.

The Texans' franchise averaged only 15,000 people per game in their
first three home contests, and the owners gave up after the fourth game,
one that was supposed to solidify the Dallas franchise. The Los Angeles
Rams, the NFL's glamour team of the day, was to sell out the Cotton Bowl
in its game against the Texans. But it rained, and the bad weather kept
people from the Cotton Bowl. Dallas' owners gave back the franchise to
the league, which moved the Texans first to Hershey, then to Akron. The
NFL sold the team to Carroll Rosenbloom in January 1953, who moved it to
Baltimore to become the Colts.

Today, it's all show business in Dallas during Thanksgiving Day,
complete with a big halftime show. But back in 1952, the league played
its two Thanksgiving Day games in Detroit and Akron. Both games were
just that - games with a band performing at halftime. The two 1952
contests would be the last time the NFL would play two games on
Thanksgiving until 1966. In that year, commissioner Pete Rozelle offered
the second game to the entire 15-team league, and there was only one
team who wanted the game: Tex Schramm's Dallas Cowboys. The Thanksgiving
Day move would play into Schramm's vision of building Dallas into
America's Team.

Schramm, who had been the assistant director of CBS Sports in the late
1950s, insisted that Dallas be placed in the NFL Eastern Division. This
was because, when the NFL expanded in 1960, Dallas would play in New
York annually to give the team more visibility on Madison Avenue.
Schramm's scheme worked. Jerry Jones's Cowboys franchise is valued at
more than a billion dollars; two other Dallas teams failed.

The Green Bay Packers traveled to Detroit annually between 1950 and 1963
to play the Thanksgiving Day contest. Packers' coach Vince Lombardi
hated the idea of playing the game, because it disrupted his weekly
planning for Sunday games, and also because he missed an early
Thanksgiving Day dinner with his family, according to Jerry Kramer, who
was a starting guard with the Packers in those days.

It is fitting that the Indianapolis Colts are playing tomorrow, 55 years
after the team's appearance in Akron. Indianapolis should be playing
every Thanksgiving to keep its roots as the Texans alive. Rosenbloom
held onto the franchise until July 13, 1972. As part of a tax deal,
Rosenbloom traded his ownership for the Baltimore Colts in exchange for
Robert Irsay's Los Angeles Rams. In 1980, Rosenbloom took his Los
Angeles Rams to Anaheim. Fifteen years later, Rosenbloom's widow,
Georgia Frontiere, moved her Rams to St. Louis. Irsay, meanwhile, moved
his franchise to Indianapolis under the cover of darkness and snow on
March 29, 1984.

The Colts and Rams should play one another on every Thanksgiving for the
title of America's Team as the third game of the day (one most Americans
can't watch because cable operators will not carry the NFL Network
because it is too costly). The game would be a reminder of the early
days when franchises moved around and games were only seen in a stadium
or heard on radio. It should be called the NFL's Retro-Bowl with the
winner getting the Richards Trophy - a fine way to remember an NFL
pioneer.

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