Sport: Doom in Chicago

Shaggy-haired Jimmy Conzelman may not be the best coach in pro football, but he is a favorite of sports writers anyway. No one else has so ingratiating a way of passing off his victories, or so good-natured a way of explaining his defeats. He almost gives the impression that he thinks football is a game, not a business.

After winning seven out of eight games, Jimmy’s talented Chicago Cardinals got their brains beaten out two Sundays in a row. What had happened? Struggling for the answer, Jimmy got to his feet before lunching sports writers in New York a fortnight ago. His explanation: he was being hoodooed by a radio announcer.

Said he: “The Cardinals refer to him, in hushed tones, as Fearless Bert Wilson. He has fixed upon the Cardinals a cold, disapproving eye, and frankly, we are not up to meeting it. We have lowered our own eyes. He has been predicting for weeks that the Cardinals would fold up.”

This week, WIND’s Fearless Bert Wilson was at the mike as usual when Conzelman’s Cardinals stalked the crosstown Chicago Bears in a battle royal at Wrigley Field. And as usual, Wilson had made his partisanship clear: “I don’t care who wins, as long as it’s the Bears.” The temperature was a chilly 35°, but Conzelman’s boys were hot. By beating the Bears, they won the National League western division championship, and silenced—at least for the moment—radio’s voice of doom. Score: Cardinals 30, Bears 21.

Other winners:

¶ For the second straight year, the Cleveland Browns beat the New York Yankees for the All-America Conference pro football championship. One of the big men for Cleveland: rubber-armed Quarterback Otto Graham, who completed 14 of 24 passes. Sometimes his receivers had to work hard to make the catch. The score: Cleveland 14, New York 3.

¶Notre Dame’s Johnny Lujack, 22, quarterback extraordinary, won the Heisman Memorial Trophy, by a landslide, as the year’s No. 1 collegiate football player. The coach-of-the-year, in a New York World-Telegram poll of 272 college coaches, was Michigan’s smart Fritz Crisler.

¶ Jake Kramer, who has already turned pro, was rated the nation’s No. 1 amateur tennis player; after him, and thereby the heir apparent, came robot Frank Parker.