The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [45]
I can’t believe that a movie or stage show hasn’t yet been made of the gamblers’ attempt to fix the 1946 NFL Championship Game between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears. This true story has more colorful characters than Guys and Dolls, and situations right out of Goodfellas. This story has great potential scenes. (How about a scene where Giants head coach Steve Owen, on the eve of the Championship Game, tries to enter the interrogation room where the police were attempting to beat a confession out of the suspected front-man for the gamblers and his starting quarterback and fullback? How about a beautiful B-list actress—dubbed a “tomato” by the tabloids of the time—telling the press of her dates with the married football stars? How about the pre-game prayer in the Giants’ clubhouse, where the team chaplain reminded the players that the game had sunk into the shadows of doubt? “It’s up to you to restore the fans’ faith in pro football,” he reportedly said.)
The 1946 NFL Championship Game marks one of the great sports conspiracies of all time, and despite the fact that authorities caught wind of the matter just days prior to the big game, it is my opinion that the game might still have been fixed. After all, one of the players who was approached, quarterback Frankie Filchock, played in the game and threw six interceptions. At the very least, the game was played under conditions where the soldout stadium didn’t know if the home-team players had “sold out” their honest effort for money.
Before addressing the particulars of the players and gamblers who conspired to fix this game, I have to set the scene. World War II had just ended, and the NFL was evolving. The league faced competition from a new rival, the All-America Football Conference. The NFL, forced to reduce roster size because of the war to twenty-eight players per team, had increased the rosters to thirty-three for the 1946 season. The threat of the AAFC forced the NFL to make some real changes. The 1945 NFL champion Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles to secure the west coast for the league. In doing so, they were able to use the Los Angeles Coliseum only by integrating and signing two former UCLA football stars (Kenny Washington and Woody Strode).
The New York Giants finished just 3-6-1 in 1945, but in the off-season, the Giants signed Filchock, a backup to Sammy Baugh at Washington, for a reported $35,000. With the new competing league, pro football players had a little leverage for the first time.
Also, before that 1946 season began, the NFL named Bert Bell as the new commissioner. According to Jeff Davis’ 2004 book, Papa Bear:
Some owners thought Bell was a clown, a football version of baseball’s Casey Stengel before he donned Yankee pinstripes. George Halas knew Bell as the man who dreamed up the draft and as smart, honorable, and an able negotiator. With [Steelers owner Art] Rooney’s endorsement and [Redskins owner George] Marshall’s help, Halas and his supporters stood fast for Bell and persuaded everyone to step in line. It was a move the National Football League never regretted.
Davis’ book also points out that right after the war there was another significant invention that changed pro football. “Nobody can say with any authority who devised the point spread system,” Davis wrote. “But it goes back at least to World War II. Any big-time bettor and a lot of small-timers agree with the anonymous gambler who told Nevada operator Peter Ruchman, ‘The invention of the point spread is the single greatest creation since the zipper.’”
Now that we understand the times in which this story unfolded, it’s time to introduce the main characters. First, there was Alvin J. Paris, a small, dapper twenty-eight-year-old man known around New York at the time as a playboy who escorted beautiful women around (think Leonardo DiCaprio, if we’re casting the movie). He worked in his father’s novelty store, but he made his real money