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A fter considering the possibility of merging with the Cleveland Rams, who were returning to the league after a one-year absence, Bert Bell and Art Rooney finally reached an agreement with Charles Bidwell, the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, to combine forces for the 1944 season. The owners got together at the NFL’s spring meeting on April 23 and decided that Walt Kiesling would share the coaching duties with Chicago’s Phil Handler and that the club’s headquarters would be located in Pittsburgh . The Card-Pitts were placed in the Western Division so that the Eastern Division could accommodate the addition of the new Boston Yanks franchise that was slated to begin play in 1944 under the ownership of singer Kate Smith and her business manager, Ted Collins. In July, Bell invited all of the holdovers from Pittsburgh’s contingent of the 1943 Steagles to a meeting at the Steelers’ office at the Fort Pitt Hotel. Only five players showed up. The owners were so desperate to find players that they invited Warren Heller, who had played halfback for the club from 1934 to 1936, to try out. He didn’t make the team. Following preseason practice at the Cardinals’ training facility in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the Card-Pitts opened the exhibition season at Philadelphia ’s Shibe Park with 28 players on their roster. It would be the first time that players from the previous year’s Steagles would be facing each other. With Babe Ruth and other members of the New York Yankees in attendance, the visitors allowed three touchdowns in the first quarter and suffered a lackluster, 22–0, loss to the Eagles. Afterward, Bell told reporters the Card-Pitts were the worst team he had ever seen. When the regular season began, the Card-Pitts got off to a fairly promising start by hanging tough against the Cleveland Rams in their opening game. But they dropped a 30–28 heartbreaker before the largest crowd of their three home games, 20,968 fans. Despite a 17–16 win over the New York Giants in a hastily scheduled exhibition game after Week 1, the rest 17. The Card-Pitts The Card-Pitts • 107 of the season turned out to be a disaster on the field as the owners bickered and blamed each other’s players for the dismal record, according to author Andrew O’Toole. In addition to losing all 10 games, they earned a new nickname after Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor Al Abrams quoted a letter written by a disgusted fan in his column, saying, “Why don’t they call themselves the Car-Pits? I think it’s very appropriate as every team in the league walks over them.” They drew a crowd of 17,743 for a 27–6 loss to the Detroit Lions, but only 9,069 fans came out for their season finale at Forbes Field, a 49–7 humiliation by the Chicago Bears. Fullback John Grigas, the Card-Pitts’ leading rusher with 610 yards, took one look at the muddy, partially frozen Forbes Field playing surface and refused to play against the Bears, possibly passing up the league’s rushing title, and went home to Massachusetts. Card-Pitts crowds in Chicago were worse: 14,732 attended a 33–6 loss to Cleveland and only 7,158 were on hand for their other home game in the Windy City, a 35–20 defeat at the hands of Green Bay. The low point came at midseason. After watching their team being blown out in Chicago by the Bears, 34–7, Bell and Rooney had seen enough. Four starters were fined $200 for indifferent play and for missing practice. One of them, Johnny Butler, the league’s seventh leading rusher the previous season, was suspended and put on the trading block. Infuriated , the players decided to go on strike immediately, according to Joe Ziemba in When Football Was Football: The Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL. “Instead of showing up for practice, we’d go to a bar instead,” recalled veteran tackle Chet Bulger. “We did that Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday. . . . We did this all week and finally Art Rooney called us all in to a meeting and told us that Johnny would get his check. He told us to be ready to practice on Friday. So what do we do? We all get to practice early and hide like a bunch of kids from the coaches so they’d think...

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