HARRY WISMER
Owner
A FUNNY FOOTBALL TEAM OWNER
"Harry Wismer, owner of the New York Titans, American Football League, has got to be one of the world's funniest club proprietors. He's what you would have to call a compulsive talker. All the time. And when he talks he says funny things.
Last season Wismer charged that a New York columnist was anti-Titan and pro-Giant, the reason being that the newspaperman's son was the ball boy and mascot for the rival league's team. The funny thing was that the columnist and his wife were childless.
Harry was talking to a man from Los Angeles in New York's Waldorf Astoria bar last October. 'I can't bet,' Wismer said, 'but I know a man who'll bet you the Chargers would beat the Rams. And bad, too. They could play for the championship of lower California.
'Say,' Harry said later, 'why don't you people in Los Angeles run some special trains down to San Diego. We play there in three weeks. Come on down, if you can get tickets.' As he left, Wismer hollered to a man from Washington: 'Say hello to J. Edgar Hoover when you see him.'
Also in October, Harry said: 'Well it's all set. Sammy Baugh will be the new coach of the Redskins.'
By season's end Wismer, who had been critical of Baugh's handling of the Titans right along, said he planned to drop Sammy to assistant backfield coach. Baugh said the demotion 'would be just wonderful. I'd like to be an assistant at these prices.' (Sammy, who was demoted later, still has a year to go on a reported $25,000-a-year contract.)
Earlier, when AFL commissioner Joe Foss had canceled a secret draft by club owners, Wismer had some things to say: 'I want the players I drafted real bad so I can give the people of New York a team to be proud of. Now if Foss wants to do something about it let him try and stop me ... People don't come out to see the commissioner play football; they come out to see football players.'
Wismer didn't get his secret draft choices and there were reports there some other owners hoped to vote him out of the league. Baugh said: 'I wish I had a vote.'
Harry had trouble getting people out to watch his team all season. And sportswriters who covered Titan games qualified every attendance figure by saying 'it was announced as ... ' Some even said Wismer seemed to be counting his gate by twos.
Even at the Polo Grounds, though, Harry usually had something to say over the public address system. In the closing minutes of the final home game the Titans were losing while the Giants had already won their game in Philadelphia to clinch the NFL's Eastern Division championship, the public address announcer said: 'Harry Wismer congratulates Allie Sherman and the Giant coaching staff for the superb job of conditioning this season. (Wismer was never too pleased with his Titan conditioning.)
Still, no matter how much Harry Wismer talked or how funny he got, his team lost an estimated $380,000 last season after losing between $450,000 and $500,000 in 1960. Which isn't funny, even to a funny owner."
-Sport Magazine, March 1962
Head Coach
"If he can spread just 50 percent of the winning spirit he displayed as a player, New York will be in good shape. Generally regarded as one of the two greatest centers of all time, he was the pinwheel of the famed Bears throughout the '40s after bringing Hardin-Simmons to national fame as an All-American pivot.
He takes over his first head coaching assignment and will be vigorous about juicing up the offense, particularly the interior line."
-Don Schiffer, 1962 Pro Football Handbook
"If he can spread just 50 percent of the winning spirit he displayed as a player, New York will be in good shape. Generally regarded as one of the two greatest centers of all time, he was the pinwheel of the famed Bears throughout the '40s after bringing Hardin-Simmons to national fame as an All-American pivot.
He takes over his first head coaching assignment and will be vigorous about juicing up the offense, particularly the interior line."
-Don Schiffer, 1962 Pro Football Handbook
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