1921 Green Bay Packers Affair

The Green Bay Packers are a well followed and beloved franchise in the National Football League. Their history is intertwined with great memories and players for most of the League's existence. The Packers lore has the most NFL Titles of any other, the Ice Bowl and key figures like Vince Lombardi, Curly Lambeau, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Brett Favre, Ray Nitschke, Aaron Rodgers and more. If we dig a little deeper though through these great memories we find a bit of a darker day for the Green Bay franchise, one so bad that they were given the boot out of the NFL.

The story starts in 1921 as Pack joined the American Professional Football Association right when it was starting its second season. August 27, 1921 The Green Bay Packers were admitted into the APFA as J.E. Clair of Green Bay's ACME Packing Company is granted a franchise. The Green Bay population was just over 31,000 and this made the Packers the second smallest town to have an NFL franchise, next to only to the Tonawanda Kardex. The Packers had to play almost exclusively on the road in larger cities where attendance could be expected to give a better count at the gates thus give the Green Bay team a larger cut in revenue than they could expect at home. The 1921 season was shakey at best for the franchise as games were scheduled on a week to week basis by the home teams, who predominantly scheduled opponents by what attendance they could expect to draw.

The Packers though decided to try and gain an edge on their opponents though, as just like today victories put butts in the stands and that produces more revenue. A story on Packers.com tells us that the roster of the Green Bay franchise was not set in stone and changed like the wind,  "in 1921 as they replaced their local players, mostly products of Green Bay's East and West high schools, with recruits who had played college football, mostly at Notre Dame and other Midwest schools." This caused the Packers to end up practicing near Chicago that season because most of their signed players worked and lived near the Windy City.

The Packers started off their 1921 campaign with four non-league opponents and used the roster of locals that they played with during their independent seasons of 1919 and 1920. The teams they played though were far from serious contenders and more of warm up fodder for the upcoming APFA schedule. Those fisrt four teams on their schedule were the Chicago Boosters which they beat 13-6, the 49-0 drubbing of the Rockford Olympics, the 40-0 blanking of the Chicago Cornell-Hamburgs and the Beloit Fairies that they scooted past 7-0. An undefeated 4-0 record sounded pretty good going into their first APFA opponent the Minneapolis Marines on October 23, but if you remember in our football history headlines episode for that day, the Packers had to win that game or their APFA charter would have ended.

Just before their first APFA game against Minneapolis, the Packers added three players with pro experience within 48 hours of kickoff.

At Hagemeister Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin - Green Bay Packers played in their very first NFL game against the Minneapolis Marines. The website Packershistory.net enlightens us with just how dramatic of an ending that first Green Bay NFL game had. With time running out in the fourth quarter the Marines had the ball and a 6-0 lead over the Packers. Then in one of the moments that teams on the bottom side of the score dream of, defensive end Dave Hayes¹ of the Pack recovered a fumble at the Minneapolis 35 yard-line! Halfback Buff Wagner made a spectacular catch of a Curly Lambeau pass to advance the ball to the 14 to keep the comeback alive. Then with little time remaining in the contest, running back Art Schmaehl eventually plunged over from the 1 and Lambeau’s extra point proved to be the game winner in the 7-6 come from behind victory. The story get’s more interesting as years later historian Jack Rudolph, a colleague of Packers co-founder George Whitney Calhoun, wrote that it was rumored and some believed the Packers were admitted to the loosely-organized league, formed in a Canton automobile showroom, on a conditional basis and if they hadn’t beaten the Minneapolis Marines they would have been dropped from what was then the American Professional Football Association. Remember that most teams in that era, including the Packers essentially scheduled their league games from week to week. 

Soon after that victory over the Marines, Green Bay added two more new players to bolster their roster to prepare for an OCtober 30 meeting with another APFA squad the Rock IslandIndependents. Of those five new players, four played at Notre Dame with Curly Lambeau in 1918 or the season of 1919 in Irish gear. Rock Island was too much for the Pack that day as they defeated the Lambeau squad 13-3. The roster continued to change as the Packers then got back into the "W" column by knocking of the Evansville Crimson Giants and the Hammond Pros. In this early era of football the games were quite often scheduled from week to week and the teams with the biggest draws had all of the scheduling power. With these competitive victories the Chicago Cardinals and the Chicago Staleys decided to schedule games against Green Bay as they might get some fans to travel from Wisconsin to watch the games.

We need to go back to the Packers.com articles for the next part of this tale of the game with the Racine Cardinals:

"According to The Milwaukee Journal, the Packers also practiced in Chicago before the Racine game. Meanwhile, rumors flew all week that Racine was loading up with ringers for the game. The result was a 3-3 tie. The next day, the Racine Journal-News reported, "Green Bay has (sic) several Notre Dame men from this year's lineup with her." The Journal-News listed them as Buck Shaw, Hunk Anderson and Fred Larson. What's more, among the lineups that appeared in the Racine, Green Bay and two Milwaukee papers, there were three positions at which three different starters were listed for the Packers. In all, a total of six different names were listed that hadn't previously played for them. News traveled slow in those days, and it wasn't until eight days later that the South Bend Tribune reported Anderson, Larson and Arthur Garvey, all of whom had eligibility remaining, had played for the Packers in Milwaukee, and that Notre Dame had declared them ineligible and stripped them of their football letters."

This story simmered on the back burner for a time. The Packers continued their season with a 49-0 drubbing at the hands of George Halas and his Staleys and then finished off their 1921 campaigh in a 3-3 tie with the Racine Legion. The pot would be stirred back up soon though.

The league meeting was held on January 28, 1922, at the Courtland Hotel in Canton, Ohio. During the conference J. Emmett Clair, who had run the Green Bay franchise with his brother John Clair during the 1921 season, offered to withdraw it following a discussion with other club owners, according to Packers.com who references the league minutes on file in the Pro Football Hall of Fame archives.

The Packers had been caught red handed playing college athletes with eligibility remaining under assumed names on their roster. J.E. Clair apologized profusely to the other owners and his offer to withdraw from the league was recognized by the other members in attendance. There are some conspiracy theories out there that do have some merit.

Some feel that George Halas was behind the plot as the story first broke in the Chicago Tribune. Soon after that there were school board minutes at the University of Notre Dame that some of the school's players had participated. It wasn't until days later that Head Coach Knute Rockne had found out about the incident. Rockne, who at the time was also Notre Dame's athletic director,  back-handed a statement against pro football calling on college coaches to take a stand against the pros. Halas brother, Walter was an assistant under Rockne and could have given him some good intel. It is quite suspicious that just before the start of the 1922 season that Halas signed three of these players; Anderson Garvey and Larson to contracts with the Bears.

So with the Packers out of the young pro football league how is it that we call them an NFL franchise today? About 6 months after the meeting the APFA under Joe Carr changed its name to the National Football League. Curly Lambeau approached the executives of the League and petitioned for reentry by the Packers under his leadership as seperation from the Clairs had taken place due to the scandal. Curly and his $50 entry fee were convincing and the Green Bay Packers became a member of the newly named NFL.

The picture in the banner above is from the Wikimedia Commons' collection and is a photo of inside Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Original picture taken by en:User:HollyAm en:Lambeau_Field_bowl.jpg.