OK. You’re going to like this one.
You probably think the idea of a neutral-site game was invented by the men who invented the Super Bowl, and who saw a string of warm-weather paradises (and the occasional cold-weather dome dweller) allowing the games to be played in a measure of fair conditions and equal advantage.
Ah, but you are then not familiar with the full body of work of one George Preston Marshall.
What you know about Marshall is probably this: how he shamefully kept the Washington Redskins lily-white for almost 15 years after Jackie Robinson integrated professional sports in this country, how he inspired one of the greatest ledes of all time from the great Shirley Povich in the Washington Post: “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”
But in 1936, the Redskins played in Boston, and though Marshall’s team would win the NFL’s Eastern Division, it did so in relative anonymity. Part of that was Boston’s affinity for Harvard, Holy Cross and Boston College on Saturdays. Much of that was because, on a whim, after starting the season 2-1 on the road, Marshall suddenly raised the cost of games at Fenway Park from 55 cents to $1.10.
That kept the fans away but good, and if you think about it Marshall is lucky they didn’t revolt and dump all their tickets in Boston Harbor, as the local custom surrounding despots and dictators dictated. Still, this was the thick of the Depression, and doubling your ticket price wasn’t exactly inspired marketing.
So two thousand people showed up to watch the Redskins beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the season’s next-to-last week, a game that set the Skins up to win the division seven days later in New York. And when they beat the Giants in the Polo Grounds, Marshall, in another fit of dark inspiration, knew how he’d get back at his disloyal loyalists.
It was the Eastern Division’s turn to host the championship game. The most famous team in pro football — Green Bay’s Packers — would be the foe. Even Boston could get excited about that, though Marshall knew many New Englanders would probably root for the invaders out of spite.
So he moved the game.
To New York City. To the Polo Grounds. And this is where it gets good: Marshall — already plotting to move his team to Washington, despite his denials, and despite the fact that disgusted Hub residents probably would have helped him pack — couldn’t bring himself to admit he was fearful of empty seats or angry locals.
So this was the reason he gave:
“There’s the weather to consider,” he said. “You know how it is in Boston this time of year.”
Think about that, please. And forget the irony that, 77 years and two months later there would be all but open revolt at the idea of playing a football game in the New York area, which according to some panicky pundits is apparently only two subway stops south of the Arctic Circle.
No: It was only two years earlier the Giants had hosted the Bears in the NFL Championship Game on Coogan’s Bluff. Bitter cold and sleet had frozen the field the night before, and the Bears sloshed their way to a 13-3 lead, and at halftime a volunteer clubhouse worker named Abe Cohen was dispatched to Manhattan College where Brother Jasper, the AD (and later nickname namesake) handed over his supply of basketball shoes.
Cohen returned for the fourth quarter, the Giants scored 27 unanswered points to crush the Bears 30-13 in the very first NFL championship game ever decided in New York. The Sneakers Game was the most famous weather game of all until the Ice Bowl, and that includes some other unforgettable New York doozies like the Second Sneaker Game in ’56 (also against the Bears), the 1958 game against the Browns that Pat Summerall won (forcing a tiebreaker game the next week) with a 49-yard field goal into a gusting snow, and the 1962 title game against Green Bay in which Allie Sherman saw a gust of wind knock a Y.A. Tittle throw backward in warm-ups, and declare sadly, to no one: “We just lost our passing game.”
Yes. That’s the tropical paradise George Preston Marshall selected for the first neutral-site championship game in NFL history. New York didn’t mind; the Giants had been a pedestrian 5-6-1 in ’36, and welcomed one more football game to kick off the holiday season. And so it was that Curly Lambeau would win the fourth of his six championships, the Packers finishing off an 11-1-1 season on Dec. 13, 1936, by routing the Redskins 21-6.
Boston would little note nor long remember the Redskins’ final game, played within the city limits of its ancient civic rival, and the city’s final dalliance with pro football until the Patriots were born in the AFL in 1960. None of the Boston dailies staffed it. The big story in the sports pages the day after the game was about a New York yearling that had sold for a record price.
Marshall, with Boston in his rearview mirror, was heard to grumble: “Horse-crazy Boston.”