[legendsport]

June 14, 2020: Maplewood, NJ:

Paul Crowe was in the "home theater" he'd built in the basement - a 60" 4K television and a pair of recliners flanking a table Cheryl had purchased. It was made from reclaimed wood... which Paul imperfectly understood as meaning it used to be the side of some old barn or something.

He had a streaming app open on the television and was intently watching something he'd found by chance when Cheryl walked in.

She frowned at him and said, "I know it's Sunday, but it's also nearly noon and you haven't showered or gotten dressed yet."

Paul waved a hand at her, then saw her face tighten. To forestall the impending lecture, he paused the video, looked at her and replied, "Yeah, I know. I found this and wanted to watch it. There might be something in here that I could use for the book."

Cheryl looked at the image frozen on the screen. An old, black and white photo of a group of three men in dirty football uniforms. Or what passed for uniforms back then - they looked like sweaters with a bit of padding added to the shoulders. None of the men was wearing a helmet - leather or otherwise.

She squinted and looked more closely. "Is that... Jack?"

Paul smiled and nodded. "Yep. That there is the Milwaukee Hawks backfield, circa 1923."

"Milwaukee? When did Jack play there? I thought he only played football for Chicago?"

Paul's grin widened. "Yes, that's what most people think. The records from that time are pretty sketchy."

With the video still paused, he explained to her that what he was watching was a Canadian TV production from the middle 1960s about the sporting career of Jack Barrell. "Apparently, they somehow got Jack to sit down and talk to them about his entire career... from hockey to baseball to football. Everything. And some of this is pure gold."

Cheryl walked over and plopped herself into the other recliner. "OK, so play it," she said, fluttering a hand at the screen.

Paul hit the play button and the video resumed.

A very sportcaster-like voice was speaking over the still photo: "... 1923 was an interesting year for Jack Barrell. Nominally a member of the Chicago Wildcats, Jack found himself playing for the brand-new Milwaukee club halfway through the season..."

The scene shifted to a closeup of Jack, sitting in a chair, his legs crossed, a wry grin on his face. This was a younger - but not young - version of the Jack she remembered from her childhood, which would have been probably twenty-ish years later. His hair, though mostly gray, still had some brown in it and his weatherbeaten face still had some firm ruddiness in it. He was probably in his early sixties. All of this flashed through Cheryl's mind before Jack began speaking.

"So... as I mentioned earlier, my brother Joe had gotten himself involved with the North Side Gang. This was during Prohibition and running liquor and money between the States and Canada was a big thing. Well, let's just say that to help my brother out of a jam, I agreed to run money from Chicago to Toronto."

Jack's face was replaced on-screen by another still image. This one of a grim-faced man. "That's Bugsy Moran," Paul told his wife. "He was the gangstar that Joe got mixed up with, in a roundabout way because of his affair with Charlotte Cleaves. That..."

"Shush, I want to listen," she said with a touch of irritation in her voice, her eyes never leaving the screen.

"The man Jack was working for was notorious gangster George Moran. Moran was one of the top members of the North Side Gang and would eventually head up the crime syndicate. 'Bugs' as he was better known, would later be involved in a turf war with the South Side Gang of the much more famous Al Capone. But in 1923, he was still rising through the ranks and he employed Jack Barrell as a courier."

The photo was replaced by another of a smiling Jack with his foot on the running board of a car. The voiceover continued, "Jack had been loaned an automobile by a local Chicago dealer. He would use this to pick up the cash, which he would then carry in his luggage as he traveled from Chicago to Canada, passing through the Detroit-Windsor crossing where he was well-known to the Customs officials on both sides of the border, none of whom would ever suspect that the friendly professional athlete was acting as an Organized Crime mule."

The interview footage of Jack resumed as he explained, "I felt bad. These customs guys were good folks and they trusted me. Not once did they ever ask to go through my bags. Things would have gone badly if they had. The whole scheme made me extremely uncomfortable."

The voiceover resumed: "And things got worse in the fall of 1923."

A photo of Jack running with the football appeared. Even Cheryl recognized the uniform of the Chicago Wildcats because of the piping on the shoulders.

"Jack concocted a scheme to throw a wrench into Moran's scheme. To do so, he enlisted the help of the Wildcats' coach and co-owner, Carl Boon. Boon and Joe Barrell were 50/50 partners at the time in the Wildcats and Boon was aware of Joe's 'issues' with the North Side mob. Jack explained the scheme as follows..."

Back to Jack's interview: "So I went to Carl and said, 'What if I were traded?' Now Carl, he liked me, but his concern, first and foremost was the health of the Wildcats. So he asked, 'Why in the world would I trade you? You're our second-best backfield player.'"

Jack paused and gave a small chuckle. "I explained that he was liable to lose me one of three ways anyway. First, I could get caught and go to prison. Second, I could refuse in which case Moran might have me - and Joe - killed. Or third, he could trade me, get something in return and there was a chance Moran would just find another solution."

"Once I put it that way, he agreed."

The voiceover resumed, over the earlier seen shot of Jack in the Milwaukee uniform. "So Jack Barrell went from being a Chicago Wildcat to being a Milwaukee Hawk. Now, even though the two cities are less than 100 miles apart, the logistics of moving the money from Chicago to Milwaukee and then to Canada were more complicated than Moran wanted. So Jack's plan, harebrained though it may have seemed at the time, actually worked."

Jack was shown laughing. "Moran was angry, but accepted my explanation that trades happen in pro sports and I hadn't made the choice - though of course it had been my plan all along. It wasn't like he didn't have other couriers... other options. He did. I think he really just liked having a couple of pro athletes under his thumb. Once I became unavailable he lost interest in both Joe and me. Soon he was too busy in the feud with Capone to worry about us football players. So we were able to get on with our lives."

The scene shifted back to another still. This one showed Jack with his brothers Joe and Danny. The youngest of the trio was in his Chicago Poly football uniform. Joe and Jack were both wearing suits, Jack with a straw boater perched jauntily on his head, Joe with a more somber bowler on his head and a serious look on his face. "That was a bad year for Joe," the voiceover continued, "and for Jack as well. But he ended up playing just seven games for Milwaukee before being 'traded' back to Chicago that winter, returning as a key member of the Wildcats backfield for several more seasons."

Paul hit the pause button and turned to his wife. "Did you know about any of this?"

She shook her head, "No. We all knew about Joe and Charlie Cleaves, of course. Not that it ever became public knowledge about Roger, you know..."


Paul nodded. He doubted that Charlotte's father, George Theobald, the baseball-playing Cleaves brothers and least of all Charlotte herself, would have wanted that story to get out into the public domain.

"But... Jack running cash for gangsters? No, and I'm surprised Jack talked about it. I mean this show had to be about a decade before I was born, but I still never heard about this."

Paul winked at her and said, "That's because it never aired."

Now Cheryl looked surprised and blurted, "What? Then how in the world is it on the internet?"

Paul shrugged. "At the time, I would guess maybe Charlotte Cleaves had it suppressed. Not that it explicitly mentions what Moran had on Joe, but I suppose people might have started wondering and uncomfortable questions might have been asked."

He shrugged and continued, "I suspect that since it's nearly sixty years old and the main participants are all dead... no one cares now. I think someone found this in the network archives and surreptitiously put the video up. With the coronavirus situation being what it is, people are doing some crazy stuff whether out of fear, frustration or boredom."

Cheryl snorted and said, "Well, that's certainly true."

They settled in and watched the rest of the program. Cheryl was intrigued. Her grandfather and Jack's "daughter" Agnes were half-siblings, something neither of them knew for a large chunk of their lives. And Jack and Cheryl's great-grandfather Jimmy Barrell were of course brothers. So she always found Jack interesting, though she still scorned hockey for some reason. "Football I like," she would say when asked about it, adding, "Hockey? Meh."

The program did fill in a few blanks for Paul. He knew most of the story of the early days of the AFA, but hearing Jack talk about it first-hand helped flesh it out. The seat-of-the-pants nature of the league in the 20s was interesting. Teams shuffled around, statistics were barely (and badly) kept, players jumped from team-to-team seemingly on a whim, and the sport lived very much in the large shadow of FABL baseball.

Jack explained how first Joe, and then he himself, decided to leave the game. He didn't touch much on Joe's career after football - understandable since the subject of the film was Jack himself. But he did explain how the Depression could have killed the AFA but instead empowered Jack Kristich to make the changes needed to turn things around and get the league started on the path to the multi-billion dollar juggernaut it was now. At the time Jack was interviewed, pro football was just beginning to take advantage of television and now television outlets threw increasingly ridiculous amounts of money at the league for the right to show its games.

The 1932 season was the one in which things turned thanks in large part to the steady, commonsense ideas of Jack Kristich. Statistics began to be strictly kept, the small-town teams were - mostly - gone (with the AFA now only willing to talk to well-financed parties in big cities) and the format settled into a two-division template that would last nearly twenty years before the postwar boom changed the landscape for all professional sports.

Paul looked down at his notebook where he had been jotting notes throughout the program. He wrote '1932' in big numbers... and then he circled it.