LAST TEAM STANDING – THE STEAGLES
Another fascinating book about the Steelers that came out in 2006 is “Last Team Standing,” by Matthew Algeo. It tells the story about the Steelers' amalgamation with the Philadelphia Eagle in an attempt to keep football going in Pennsylvania for the 1943 season.
At the end of the 1940 season, Art Rooney sold the Steelers to Lex Thompson, a flamboyant rich kid looking to get involved with sports, while Rooney brought a fifty percent share in the Eagles from their owner Bert Bell.
Thompson’s intentions were to move the team to Boston, but when this met opposition from some of the other team owners, Rooney and Bell traded the Eagles for the Steelers prior to the 1941 season. This trade enabled Thompson to have a team on the East coast, nearer to New York, where all the action was.
Two weeks before the championship game, when the all-powerful Bears beat the Giants 37-9, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour. For the next few years, football would have to use innovation to survive.
Despite the adversity of war, President Roosevelt encouraged the continuation of sport as he deemed the people should have a chance of recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.
When the NFL’s commissioner Elmer Layden decreed that football would operate in the autumn of 1942, he cautioned that, “Nothing connected with it should or will be permitted to hinder the war effort.”
Significantly for the Steelers, 1942 saw the team register their first winning season with a 7-4 record.
With players, coaches and even owners continuing to be lost to the war effort, commissioner Layden was open to any ideas to keep the league operating in an effective manner.
With the Cleveland Rams deciding they didn’t have the resources to continue and would sit out for the year, careful consideration was given to any proposal to keep football teams operating.
With the requirements to expand the war on several fronts, the demand to increase the numbers in the armed forces was met by widening the draft. Available players to the NFL decreased while talk of merging the Eagles with the Steelers increased.
The full story of this union to form the Steagles can be found in Matthew’s book and any Steelers fan interested in their history, should make this book a definite read.
The story is also mentioned in Dan Rooney's book, but Matthew goes into more detail.
Matthew also provides readers with an insight into what life was like living in the United States during those exceptional times. I was surprised to read that Americans had to experience rationing just as we did in war time England.