The NHL’s Brooklyn Americans and the NFL’s Brooklyn Dodgers would fold because of the war.
Pearl Harbor was attacked 84 years ago today, December 7th, 1941. There are not many around today who can clearly recall the words of John Charles Daly as he read about the attack on CBS radio. The attack occurred around 1 o’clock New York time and there was a game at the Polo Grounds between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The radio broadcast of the Giants-Dodgers game on WOR was interrupted with an announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The public address made a disturbing announcement while the Giants management was holding “Tuffy Leemans’ Day” in honor of their star running back. The announcement was simple. William J. Donovan (wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services) call Operator 19 in Washington. Then came another announcement. All servicemen were to report to their units. The crowd at the Polo Grounds was not aware of the Pearl Harbor attack.
The Dodgers would win the game 21-7 and Leemans did not do much that day as he rushed for just 18 yards. What was more notable than the score or Leemans’ lackluster day was what was happening in the stands.
Throughout the game the public address announcer was continually calling on military personnel who were attending the game to contact their offices. Immediately after the game, Giants management and Polo Grounds staff started pushing men from the Army and Navy to leave the stadium and report to their stations.
The United States was finally drawn into a global conflict which started in 1939. Canada was already involved in the war when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Sports owners did not know what to do but there was a Presidential urging from Franklin Roosevelt to baseball owners that said, keep playing.
Roosevelt sent Major League Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis a letter which gave baseball the green light to play. “There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.” Other leagues such as the NFL felt the Presidential letter applied to them. Baseball was the king of American sports and with that letter, other sports leagues according to the late owner of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who was just a boy in 1942, interpreted it to mean sports could go on.
The National Hockey League’s Brooklyn Americans suspended operations indefinitely because the team ownership thought too many of the Americans’ Canadian-born players would enter the war and it was not worth playing until the war ended. The team never did reform after the war as no arena was built in Brooklyn and Madison Square Garden was only too happy to keep a second hockey team out of New York so the Garden’s Rangers franchise would have no competition.
In the NFL, Pittsburgh partnered with Philadelphia in 1943 and the Chicago Cardinals in 1944. The Cleveland Rams suspended operations in 1943.
The war ended in 1945. The Dodgers NFL franchise did not last too much longer after the start of the war. Then, World War II depleted the team’s roster and the team finished in last place. In 1944 the team changed its nickname to the Tigers. In 1945, the Dodgers owner Dan Topping merged his Brooklyn team with Boston and the combined team played one game in Brooklyn. Topping was also the co-owner of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees starting in 1945. Topping wanted to move the Dodgers football team into Yankee Stadium.
Tim Mara, owner of the New York Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds, held NFL territorial rights and denied Topping’s request to move from Brooklyn to the Bronx even though Mara’s team played in Manhattan. But the Polo Grounds was fairly close to Yankee Stadium, separated by the Harlem River.
Topping left the NFL to join the new All-America Football Conference. The NFL took the team away from Topping. A new Brooklyn Dodgers franchise was formed in the AAFC with no involvement from Topping. Topping owned the AAFC’s New York Yankees. In 1949, the Dodgers and Yankees franchises merged for what would be the AAFC’s final season.
The NFL passed on adding the Yankees franchise in the consolidation. The NFL added a second team in New York in 1949, the New York Bulldogs. Some of Toppings players ended up with the Bulldogs. That team was renamed the Yankees in 1950 and folded in 1951. The remnants of that team ended up in Dallas in 1952. That team folded and the remnants of that team ended up in Baltimore in 1953. Leemans was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1978.
The attack on Pearl Harbor had a profound impact on sports in New York.
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The Brooklyn Dodgers Bennie Feathers running the ball against the Pittsburgh Steelers
