Washington Massacre

There were more red feathers in downtown Washington last Sunday than had been seen all fall at Harvard, Cornell and Stanford put together. Not since the World Series of 1924 had there been so much excitement in the U. S. Capital. Louisville might have its Derby, Indianapolis its auto race, but this year Washington had the show of shows: their beloved Redskins were playing the Chicago Bears for the professional football championship of the world.

Into Griffith Park Washingtonians poured, chanting the Redskin battle cry:

Scalp 'em, swamp 'em,

We will take 'em big score,

Read 'em, weep 'em,

Touchdown we want heap more. . . .

The Bears had a great team, all right. They were big and fast -- and from their T formation those 250-lb. tanks masquerading in football pants could whizz along like an armored column. But 8-to-5 favorites? Nuts! Washington had His Excellency Slingin' Sammy Baugh, "the best football pitcher in the world." The Redskins also had three of pro football's best pass receivers. Only two clubs had succeeded in stopping Washington's air attack all season. And the big, bad Bears were not one of them.

Only three weeks ago, the Redskins had taken the Bears 7-to-3. They had just averted defeat, to be sure, with a miraculous tackle on the one-yard line in the next-to-last play of the game. But the score is what counts. Thus Washington residents, from Cabinet members to White House flunkeys, mesmerized by the big talk of the Redskins' Big Chief, George P. Marshall, trooped into Griffith Park last week, convinced that it was all over but the whoopee, and all set to drape the Washington Monument with red bunting after the game.

The whistle blew. Two plays later, Chicago's Osmanski, swinging wide around his own left end, hurtled 68 yards to a touchdown, leaving a wake of Redskins biting the dust behind him. Okay, okay, thought Washington fans. Now watch our team come back. Come back they did -- running the kickoff back to the Bears' 40-yd. line, pushing on to the 26. Then Sammy Baugh pitched a magnificent touchdown pass to his favorite receiver, Charlie Malone, who was standing all alone on the Bears' 2-yd. line. Malone muffed it.

What happened after that was a waking nightmare to the Washington fans. The Bears began to roll -- like the German Army rolling through France. Dazed onlookers waited for the defenders to make a stand -- in Belgium, at the Somme, at Dunkirk -- but the juggernaut kept rolling, rolling, rolling. They chalked up 21 points in the first quarter, seven in the second. Radio fans, tuning in at half time, thought they were listening to a basketball game -- or an Atlantic City auction. By sixes and sevens, the score jumped: "35, 41, 47, no 48, 54." Those who actually saw the game were even more dumfounded. With Sid Luckman, onetime Columbia star, calling the plays with the genius of a clairvoyant, the Bears were a perfect football machine. By the end of the third quarter, the game had become an undignified rout. At the end of the last quarter, it was a massacre -- 73-to-0.

"It was just one of those days," ex plained proud Owner-Coach George Halas, who had taken over the Bears as mere cubs 20 years ago. "Everything we did, we did right. Everything they did, they did wrong."

Explained Big Chief Marshall: "Some of our boys apparently have been playing on their reputations. But that tackling, my, my!"

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