Refugee from Football

When shaggy-maned Jimmy Conzelman coached football at Washington University (St. Louis), he frowned on slugging. Never a man to pass up the deadpanned crack, he explained: "I found biting to be more effective." In after-dinner speeches, which he makes as offhandedly as he once handled a football, he likes to describe the best player he ever had in this department, a guard named Biter Jones. "He was terrific. In one season he bit seven guards, one center and a flanker back, and was so clever at it that he was penalized only 65 yards."

There was a near riot of pro-Conzelmen Washington students in 1940 when Jimmy resigned under alumni pressure. Last week (under no pressure) Jimmy Conzel-man resigned as coach of one of the most successful teams in pro football, the Chicago Cardinals. He was tired of traveling, and, at 50, he was moving back home to St. Louis to work full time at his job as an account executive for the D'Arcy Advertising Co. He also wanted to settle down to what he called "normal family life."

Old friends of Jimmy Conzelman were not sure what "normal" would prove to be. In the last 30 years his recreations had included such items as flame dives from the high board. He was also an actor (Good News), a record-making ukulele player, author of Saturday Evening Post articles and public speeches (his 1942 commencement address at the University of Dayton* was read into the Congressional Record). During World War I he won the middleweight boxing title at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, later played and coached pro football with five clubs (Decatur, Ill., Rock Island, Ill., Milwaukee, Detroit and Providence) before going to Washington University.

A good backfield man ("most valuable" player in the National pro league in 1928), slim Jimmy put on a mountain of weight as a coach, and with it a fat reputation as a football man who could talk without lacing his brows into a gridiron scowl. Once when he was Cardinal coach, he limped to his feet at a sport luncheon explaining that he was bothered by 1) an old knee injury, 2) a shot of morphine to quiet the knee, 3) a double Daiquiri to quiet the morphine. His stories usually pictured his own rampaging footballers (among them Marshall Goldberg and Charles Trippi) as shy, timid little fellows who screamed unless he kept buying them lollipops and tucked them into bed at night. The opposition were brutes who combed their hair with wildcat claws. He fancied himself as the depressed coach without material who concentrated on character-building--and wasn't very good at that either. "I've got a three-year-old son who sucks his thumb," Jimmy once said. "I've been trying to mold him out of that habit, but the only result is that I'm beginning to suck my own thumb."

Nobody knew how gregarious, piano-playing Jimmy Conzelman would succeed at living a quiet, normal life. But considering the Conzelman versatility, sportwriters agreed that he might do that, too. --

Another potential refugee from pro football is Alexis Thompson, 34, who last week hung a For Sale sign on his Philadelphia Eagles. Only last month Thompson's Eagles won the National Football League championship from the Conzelman-coached Cardinals in a blinding snowstorm. But because of the war with the rival All-America Football Conference (which has boosted halfbacks' salaries to as high as $20,000 a season), he finished $29,000 in the red with his championship team. Says Thompson, who in 1930 inherited $5,000,000 from his steel-baron father: "I no longer think football is a good investment."

*Entitled "The Young Man's Mental and Physical Approach to War."

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