Last Team Standing Read Online Free

game.
    The
Tribune
all-star game took place on the night of Wednesday, August 25. The attendance was 48,000, about half of what it would have been at Soldier Field, but there was no reduction in fanfare. War or no war,
Tribune
sports editor Arch Ward always pulled out all the stops. The pregame ceremonies featured a military drill team, marching bands, and a “pageant” of WACS, WAVES, and SPARS (the last being the Coast Guard’sfemale reserve). At 8:30 p.m., the stadium lights were extinguished and each player was introduced under the dramatic glare of a single spotlight. Wistert, the all-star team’s co-captain, got a special introduction.
    The collegians not only upset the NFL champions, they buried them, 27-7. Sammy Baugh threw for 273 yards, but the all-stars completely shut down the Redskins’ running game. The
Tribune
heaped praise on Wistert, “whose mighty line play had a lot to do with bottling up the Redskins’ attack.”
    Wistert’s play particularly impressed Tony Hinkle, one of the all-star team’s assistant coaches. In peacetime Hinkle was the head football (and basketball and baseball) coach at Butler University in Indianapolis. For the time being, though, he was in the Navy, coaching the football team at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago. Great Lakes was one of the country’s most powerful service teams, with a schedule that included college titans like Michigan and Notre Dame. It was an all-star team in its own right, its roster dotted with all-Americans and NFL veterans, ostensibly sent to the base for naval training. Hinkle knew Wistert was due to be inducted and asked him if he wanted to play for Great Lakes. Wistert thought it sounded like a good idea, especially since his contract with the Eagles would be nullified if Uncle Sam did indeed come calling.
    About a week after the all-star game, Wistert reported to a building in Chicago’s Loop for his physical.
    â€œI zoomed through it,” Wistert remembered. “They hardly looked at me.” But after the exam, Wistert was asked several questions about his medical history. One of them was: Have you ever had surgery?
    â€œI told them about an appendectomy and the wrist being operated on. And they wanted to take some more x-rays of the wrist. And pretty soon they had half-a-dozen different doctors come in and look at those x-rays and everything and discuss whether they were gonna take me in the service or not.”
    The doctors told Wistert that his draft board would be in touch with him shortly.
    While he waited, Wistert and Ellie packed up and moved again, this time to Philadelphia. On Sunday, September 5, 1943, Wistert reported to his first NFL training camp.
    â€œI was there for a day or two before somebody told me that some of these guys are from Pittsburgh.”
    Wistert was floored. He had no idea that the Eagles and the Steelers had merged.
    â€œI had heard nothing about it and I didn’t know that we were combined with the Pittsburgh Steelers at all—this was something that was unknown to me.”
    Al Wistert had just found out that he was a Steagle.

    N EARLY THREE YEARS EARLIER , on October 29, 1940, on a stage in a crowded auditorium in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was blindfolded with a piece of cloth taken from a chair in Independence Hall. On a simple wooden table in front of Stimson sat an enormous glass bowl filled with 9,000 inch-long, cobalt-blue capsules. Inside each capsule was a tiny piece of paper with a number from one to 9,000 written on it. Stimson sunk his hand into the bowl, slowly withdrew a single capsule, and handed it to President Franklin Roosevelt.
    The president, standing behind a large podium, broke open the capsule and removed the piece of paper. He leaned into the forest of microphones carrying the ceremony into anxious living rooms across the country and solemnly intoned, “1-5-8.”
    America’s first peacetime draft