Thursday night’s game between the Washington Commanders and the Chicago Bears at FedEx Field doesn’t have much juice to it. The Commanders, with a 2-2 record, are a 6½ point favorite over the 0-4 Bears.
At one time, though, the rivalry between Washington and Chicago was as bitter as it can get. You think Commanders-Cowboys animosity runs deep? How about rival owners — George Preston Marshall and George Halas — fighting during a championship game? And they had once been close friends.
It was Halas, who was partners with Marshall in the American Basketball League, who recruited Marshall to buy the Duluth Eskimos and join the NFL.
After the Redskins moved from Boston to Washington in 1937 — and became competitive by drafting quarterback Sammy Baugh — the Bears became a hated rival, from the front office to the players and the fans. The NFL championship in those early days was often decided in a showdown between Washington and Chicago.
They met in Chicago that year for the 1937 NFL title on a frigid December day that saw Washington would come out on top 28-21. But before the game was over, some Bears players wound up sliding into the Redskins bench, and a brawl broke out.
Marshall jumped out of the stands and dove into the melee. Halas, who was owner and coach of the Bears, jumped in as well, and the story goes that the two owners were nose to nose and either nearly came to blows — or did wind up in a fistfight — depending on which story you believe.
Washington wouldn’t return to the title game until 1940, and there were the Bears, waiting for them.
The Redskins had beaten the Bears 7-3 during the regular season. Marshall, gleeful about beating his rival, told reporters, “The Bears are a team that folds under pressure against a good team. Don’t ask me why they lose the close games, except that they do. If I were to guess why, it would probably be that there is not too much harmony on that team. Too many stars, and stars are inclined to beef at one another when the going gets tough.”
This, as they say, was bulletin board material, and Halas used it to fire up his players before the championship contest. “Gentlemen, this is what George Preston Marshall thinks of you,” Halas told his players as he showed them the newspaper clippings of the comments. “Well, I think you’re a great football team, the greatest ever assembled. Now go out there on the field and prove it.”
A fired-up Bears team punched Washington in the mouth early and often. They scored 21 points in the first 13 minutes of the game, and then they poured it on with a record 73-0 beating. Chicago scored 11 touchdowns, and so many balls had been kicked in the stands for the extra point they had to use practice balls to finish the game.
That’s the kind of beating you give a rival.
It appeared that the game might have briefly been competitive. After Chicago took a 7-0 lead, Redskins end Charley Malone dropped a touchdown pass from Baugh. After the game, reporters asked Baugh if that play might have changed the game. “Yeah, it would have been 73-6.”
After the game, Marshall’s own players were angry with him.
“There was a lot of stuff in the newspapers that Mr. Marshall had put there in there about the Bears,” Baugh told me in an interview many years later. “I think any team would have beaten us that day. The team was mad at Mr. Marshall because he said some awful things about the Bears.”
Washington would get a measure of revenge two years later, when the two teams faced each other yet again in the league championship contest. The Bears were the defending champions and came into the game 11-0 and led by Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman. But the Washington defense shut down the high-powered Chicago offense and came away with a 14-6 win and their second NFL championship.
“The Redskins soundly trounced the supposedly invincible Bears before an incredulous and deliriously happy gathering of 36,036 in Griffith Stadium today to win the world professional championship,” New York Times columnist Arthur Daley wrote. “This was a team that was so much an underdog that the gamblers stopped giving 7-1 odds and handed out as much as 22 points. This was also largely the team that had been beaten 73-0 in the playoffs two years ago. Yet it cracked into the mighty Bears with disregard of the Chicagoans’ reputation and handled them as easily as if the Monsters were only P.S. 9.”
The Bears and Redskins would meet one final time the following year in the 1943 NFL title game. This time Chicago came out on top 41-21. Baugh, who also played safety, was knocked out of the game when he was kicked in the head while trying to make a tackle. But the game at Wrigley Field was noteworthy for another incident involving Marshall that would only add fuel to the rivalry fire.
Before the end of the first half, Marshall, for some reason, went on the field and sat on the Bears bench. Chicago general manager Ralph Brizzolara confronted Marshall, who refused to leave until he was taken away by police officers.
The Redskins owner was moved to an empty seat behind home plate, but Halas, watching from the press box, told an usher to ask Marshall if he had a ticket for that seat. Yet again police removed Marshall, this time from the seat. Both he and Brizzolara would be fined $500 by NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden for “conduct unbecoming of gentlemen.”
And then it was over. The red-hot rivalry was finished. Washington would reach the title game again in 1945, losing to the Cleveland Rams 15-14. But then came years of mediocrity and losing that would continue until Vince Lombardi arrived in Washington in 1968 and, after Lombardi’s passing, George Allen would bring the Redskins back to the NFL championship game — now called the Super Bowl — in 1972. The Bears won the 1946 championship but did not return to the title game until 1963.
Now? It’s a game between two of the most hapless franchises in the league in recent years, though Washington’s fortunes may change with the arrival of new owner Josh Harris — as long as he doesn’t try to sit on the Bears bench Thursday night.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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