I was born in 1932 after the Spartans became the Detroit Lions, and as a blue collar worker's, but a great man's son, I will always love Portsmouth, Ohio.
Read on, friends, especially Jim Fout (Ashland, KY and Jack H Plymale (Costa Rica):
Note also: There are a few pictures included which you should get the Disppatch to see. I'll try to add the pics a little later this morning.
Sam
A footnote in NFL lore
Sunday's extravaganza between the Packers and Steelers is a direct descendant of a little-known title game in1932 between the chicago Bears and the Spartans Of Portsmouth,Ohio
Saturday, February 5, 2011 02:50 AM
By Todd Jones
The Columbus Dispatch
PrO FOOTBALL HALL OF FAME
Portsmouth's 3-year-old NFL team lost to the Bears in 1932 in an unscheduled title game forced indoors by a winter storm in Chicago. The league's first postseason game broke a tie atop the standings; its success during the Depression prompted an annual title game.
BROOKE L aVALLEY
DISPATCH
Spartan Municipal Stadium, named a state historical site in 2003, should be preserved, says the Portsmouth Spartans Historical Society. Envisioning ghosts of pros of 80 years ago are, from left, Randy Nickles, Paul O'Neill and Jim Kennedy.
Pro Football Hall of Fame
The 1932 NFL playoff drew 11,000 fans indoors to Chicago Stadium to see the Bears defeat the Portsmouth Spartans 9-0 on an 80-yard field. Excited by the size of the crowd, owners of the 10 teams created two divisions for the 1933 season to allow for an annual title game.
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A NFL logo is taped to the refrigerator in the Portsmouth stadium's visitors locker room. The aging structure is still used for football, but razing it has been discussed.
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio - Once home to an NFL team, the simple structure now looks its age of 81 years. The concrete grandstands are cracked and chipped. Wrought-iron gates creak when opened. Rust stains the light poles. The weathered Spartan Municipal Stadium is an antithesis of the gleaming, $1.2 billion football palace in Arlington, Texas, that will host Super Bowl XLV between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers on Sunday.
Although the 3 million-square-foot Cowboys Stadium reflects today's NFL and its annual revenue of $7.8billion, Portsmouth's old field by an Ohio River floodwall is a testament to the league's humble, small-town roots.
Spartan Municipal Stadium was home to the Portsmouth Spartans when they played in the fledgling NFL for four seasons, beginning in 1930, at a time when the league's office was in Downtown Columbus.
Hear the sound of a nearby train, and you can imagine those Spartans traveling to Chicago to play for the NFL championship on Dec.18, 1932. They didn't call it the Super Bowl or even a championship game when visiting Portsmouth lost to the Chicago Bears in the league's first postseason game.
Two years later, the Spartans left town. The NFL churned on, leaving behind an era when Ohio had nine cities with franchises - including Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton, Akron, Canton and LaRue - playing in the league at various times from 1920 to 1934.
Proud history at Spartan Municipal Stadium provides visitors with brief refuge from the harsh economic realities that have ravaged once-booming Portsmouth, the seat of Scioto County, and its 11.7 percent unemployment rate.
Visitors gaze at the footprints on the snow-covered field about 90 miles south of Columbus and see the ghosts of leather-helmeted players taking Portsmouth to the precipice of a world championship.
"It makes you proud to say that this little, crappy town once had an NFL team that played with the big boys," said Jim Kennedy, a member of the Portsmouth Spartans Historical Society.
Hard times in town
A tattered American flag flies above the tallest building in downtown Portsmouth, where voters overwhelmingly decided in December to recall Mayor Jane Murray in the first year of a term that began with her firing several city administrators.
She is the second mayor since 2004 to be recalled in financially strapped Portsmouth, which is battling dysfunction on many levels.
Portsmouth's population topped 42,000 when the Spartans played here.
Today, about 21,000 live in the city. Chipped paint and boarded-up storefronts on Chillicothe Street, the city's main thoroughfare, scar a place once known as the "Peerless City" because it had everything going for it.
Portsmouth's steel and other manufacturing industries created so much optimism in 1929 that residents voted to fund a bond issue to build a new football stadium, which enabled the Spartans to join the NFL a year later.
Two years after that, Portsmouth and Chicago ended the regular season with the same winning percentage; at the time, the NFL used that statistic - ties didn't count - to determine its champion. NFL president Joe Carr, a Columbus native, honored the requests of the Bears (6-1-6) and Spartans (6-1-4) to decide the 1932 championship on the field.
Bears owner George Halas and Spartans owner Harry Snyder also hoped another gate receipt would help their teams' red-ink finances, hurt by the Depression. Each winning player received $240; losers were paid $175.
Portsmouth could afford to take only 16 players to Chicago. The Spartans were missing Earl "Dutch" Clark, their quarterback, punter and kicker. The future Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinee didn't play because the game wasn't on the regular schedule, and he had already committed to coach basketball at Colorado College.
"That says a lot about pro football at the time," said Joe Horrigan, vice president at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "He got paid more to coach basketball."
An unusual title game
A stench literally surrounded the NFL's first postseason game.
The Spartans and Bears were scheduled to play at Wrigley Field, but a winter storm blew in. Fearing a small crowd because of the inclement weather, Halas moved the game indoors to Chicago Stadium, which had dirt and dung on its floor from hosting a circus a few days earlier.
"The players said you could smell that there had been animals in there," said Chris Willis, head of the research library at NFL Films and author of Old Leather, an oral history of early football in Ohio.
Sod, bark and wood shavings were added to the dirt "field," which was shortened to 80 yards because of the arena's configuration. Players said footing was treacherous. Both offenses were slowed by the conditions, and field goals weren't allowed because of the low-hanging ceiling.
Portsmouth squandered two chances for first-half touchdowns. The game was scoreless in the fourth quarter when two NFL legends hooked up for Chicago: Bronko Nagurski threw a 2-yard TD pass to Red Grange.
The Spartans argued to no avail that Nagurski had broken a rule in place then that passes had to be thrown from at least 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage. Chicago later added a safety for a 9-0 win.
The Bears, however, weren't officially awarded the championship until two months later at a league meeting.
Team owners, still buzzing about how the Portsmouth-Chicago game drew 11,000 fans, wanted a repeat in the 1933 season. So the 10-team league split into eastern and western divisions, with the winners meeting in an official NFL championship game. Today, it's the Super Bowl.
The owners also adopted three rules changes because of the Portsmouth-Chicago playoff game. They moved the goal posts up to the goal line, allowed passers to throw from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage, and established hash marks for field position.
"That game in particular opened their eyes to make the game more entertaining and different than the college game," said Willis, a Columbus native.
A more-open style of play came too late to save the Spartans. They had battled financial woes since operating as a semipro team in 1929 and joining the NFL a year later. The team faced a $27,000 debt after two seasons.
"It was the height of the Depression, and people couldn't pay for tickets," Willis said. "Unfortunately, there weren't enough fans in Portsmouth."
Desperate for revenue, the Spartans scheduled a game in December 1933 against the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Steelers) to be played in Columbus at Red Bird Stadium (now Cooper Stadium). An ice storm canceled the game. Portsmouth never played another official one.
A radio executive bought the franchise for $16,000 in 1934. The Spartans moved to Detroit and were renamed the Lions, leaving Green Bay as the NFL's only small-market team.
Detroit won the 1935 NFL championship with the Spartans' former coach, Potsy Clark. Many of that team's players were once cheered in Portsmouth, where time is melting their legend.
"I work with a lot of young guys," Kennedy said, "and when I tell them we had an NFL team, they say, 'What?'"
New stadiums elsewhere
Numerous metal signs throughout downtown point visitors to Front Street, where civic pride sparkles along a 2,000-foot stretch of concrete wall.
Portsmouth put murals on the floodwall in the early 1990s to depict the city's history, and the 20-by-35-foot paintings give life and color to the nearby small, vibrant section of town called the Historic Boneyfiddle District.
One of the 66 murals is of another famous 1932 game in which Clark defiantly refused to substitute as his Spartans beat the defending NFL champion Packers. Recently, however, that depiction of players in the "The Iron Man Game" had to be temporarily removed because of water damage.
While the Spartans' mural awaits new paint, the Super Bowl buildup rages on in Texas. The mega-event's flash is reflected in the shiny buildings of downtown Dallas, not far from where the Packers and Steelers will play in a game projected to generate $600 million for that area's economy.
Our nation is riveted by the Super Bowl: Last year's game was the most-watched American television program in history, drawing 106.5million viewers. Places such as Portsmouth grapple with the cold, hard reality of outsiders' lack of interest.
The city reportedly has a $1.2 million deficit. Last year, the water and sewer systems fell out of compliance with environmental regulations. Black mold was discovered in the city building. Portsmouth had three major water-main breaks in December.
"We're in disarray," said Paul O'Neill, a member of the Portsmouth Spartans Historical Society, as he stood in empty Spartan Municipal Stadium on a gray winter day.
The NFL's past swirled around him. Dutch Clark and Gene Alford played on this field. So did Roy "Father" Lumpkin, so tough that he refused to wear a helmet, and Glenn Presnell, an All-Pro who died in 2004 at age 99, the last of the Spartans.
Beyond the concrete grandstand, where fans cheered the Spartans to a 19-2-4 home record in their four NFL seasons, lies the faded downtown of Portsmouth, once a leading U.S. shoe producer that also had a bevy of steel mills and the largest railroad yard east of the Mississippi.
"We don't even have a department store here anymore," Kennedy said. "If you need cologne, you've got to go to Columbus."
Portsmouth factories closed in the 1970s. The steel industry suspended local operations in 1981. Marting's, a 100-year-old family-owned retailer, went out of business. The old Norfolk & Western rail depot was torn down, as were several other landmarks.
"Most towns try to preserve that stuff. Portsmouth just levels it," Kennedy said.
In recent years, city officials have debated razing Spartan Municipal Stadium because of safety concerns and upkeep costs.
A short drive away is the new Portsmouth High School football stadium, opened in 2009 as part of an athletic complex built by the school system. Most of its $10 million cost was covered by a private donation from the Clark Foundation.
"This is where the $10million should have gone - to refurbish this place," Kennedy said as he stood inside Spartan Municipal Stadium, designated a state historical site in 2003.
The city-owned facility remains the 6,287-seat site of home games of Portsmouth Notre Dame High School and a semipro football team from across the river in Kentucky.
And it's where some men go to see the past to smile in the present.
"Everybody thinks new is better," O'Neill said. "Man, just look at the history here."
tjones@dispatch.com
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