The '63 Steelers by Rudy Dicks

Author:Rudy Dicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781606351437
Publisher: Kent State University Press

GAME 11

VERSUS CHICAGO BEARS

AT FORBES FIELD

NOVEMBER 24

Half-a-million people were expected to turn out to greet President Kennedy in Chicago on Saturday morning, November 2, 1963, the day he was scheduled to attend the Army–Air Force game at Soldier Field. However, press secretary Pierre Salinger announced at the last minute that the trip would be canceled because the president had to tend to the worsening situation in South Vietnam, a military coup that overturned the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem.1

Ten days later, as the Bears prepared for their first-place showdown against the Packers at Wrigley Field, and scalpers prepared for a big payoff, coach George Halas was asked if he would invite President Kennedy to the game. “I’m sure if the president wants to see the game, I can find a seat for him,” Halas replied.2

College football had been revered by fans for decades, and 1963 would mark the tenth straight year in which attendance rose, this time to a record of more than twenty-two million fans. But pro football was turning into a mania. An Illinois couple getting a divorce became embroiled in “the bitterest fight of all” over custody of Bears season tickets. Packer fans’ only hope of getting home tickets was by being bequeathed them in a will. “Such is the phenomenal and growing popularity and hypnosis of the gladiatorial encounter known as professional football,” wrote Steve Snider of UPI.3

In fact, interest in the pro game had been surging for several years, not unlike the frenzy that accompanied the popularity of Elvis and Sinatra. After fans stormed the field at Yankee Stadium before the finish of a Browns-Giants game in December of ’59, forcing players and Browns coach Paul Brown to flee the field, and delaying the game for twenty minutes, New York Times columnist Arthur Daley commented that pro football “has become engulfed by an emotionalism that now approaches hysteria.”4

And that hysteria knew no bounds. Giants coach Jim Lee Howell, a native of Lonoke, Arkansas, observed: “New York fans are just like the fans in Lonoke, Arkansas, only there are more of ’em here.”5

In 1934, the NFL had fewer customers than the number of people who awaited Kennedy in Chicago. Ten years later, spectators topped one million. In 1952, the thirty-third year of the NFL’s existence, attendance reached two million. In 1962, the total was a record 4,003,421, and that figure was likely to be broken by the end of the ’63 season. Television sparked the boom in interest, and the NFL profited handsomely. The fourteen teams split profits of $4,650,000 from TV, and the NFL took in $926,000 for telecast rights to the championship game, with much of the sum directed toward a player pension fund. On an average Sunday in the fall, fifteen million TV sets were tuned in to NFL games. Interest in pro football was about to explode, and no longer did baseball enjoy an unchallenged claim as the national pastime.6

Chicago fans had as intense an interest as anyone in the nation over the NFL telecasts scheduled for Sunday, November 24.

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