Last Team Standing by Matthew Algeo Page A

1925 Rose Bowl. Haugsrud was able to sign Nevers because the two young men were friends. They’d played high school football together in Superior, Wisconsin, just down the road from Duluth. With Nevers signed, Haugsrud renamed his team the Eskimos—the Ernie Nevers Eskimos, to be precise—and began looking for sizeable linemen who could block for his star player. Somebody told Haugsrud about a big German kid named Kiesling who’d just graduated from St. Thomas College down in St. Paul. He was as big as a boxcar and had a mean streak.
    Growing up in St. Paul, Walter Andrew Kiesling was always bigger than the other kids. When he entered Cretin High School, the football coach took one look at him and put him on the line,where he started all four years. Knute Rockne offered him a scholarship to Notre Dame, but Kiesling’s mother wanted him to stay close to home, so, in 1922, Kiesling enrolled at St. Thomas. By then he was six-two, 235 pounds. His teammates called him Big Kies. One of St. Thomas’s biggest rivals was Saint John’s University in Collegeville, about 90 miles northwest of St. Paul. Saint John’s had a flamboyant halfback named John McNally—later more famously known as Johnny Blood. Bitter opponents on the field, Kiesling and Blood became close friends off it, and their paths would cross many times in the ensuing years.
    Kiesling was an outstanding college lineman—the Tommies went 29-5-1 in his four seasons there—but, like Greasy Neale, his first love was baseball. Kiesling could hit the ball a country mile, and after he graduated from St. Thomas in the spring of 1926, he signed a contract with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, just one step below the big leagues. There it was discovered that Kiesling couldn’t hit a curve ball to save his life. The Millers’ manager, Michael Joseph Kelly, gently suggested he consider another line of work.
    On September 19, 1926, the Eskimos, with Kiesling on the line and Ernie Nevers and Johnny Blood in the backfield, opened the season by defeating the Kansas City Cowboys 7-0 in Duluth. The Eskimos then embarked on the most grueling road trip in the annals of professional sports. Convinced his team could get bigger gates away from Duluth, Haugsrud scheduled no more home games that season. Over the next five months the Eskimos played 28 league and exhibition contests from New York to Los Angeles, traveling 17,000 miles in the process. In the Eskimos’ 29 games, Nevers played all but 26 minutes. Not that his teammates got much rest either. The team’s roster usually comprised no more than 13 players, prompting Grantland Rice to dub them “the Iron Men of the North.” The Eskimos were a carnivalesque enterprise. In one stretch the team played five games in eight days. Paychecks were distributed irregularly at best. One time, owner Ole Haugsrud got stiffed by the manager of the St. Louis Gunners.
    â€œI chased him right across the football field and up the steps of the grandstand and across an open causeway,” Haugsrud recalled. “I cornered the fellow in a toilet, and he gave me the seventy bucks.”
    With Big Kies clearing the way, Nevers scored eight touchdowns and ranked second in the league in scoring. The Eskimos finished their long, strange season with a remarkable (considering the circumstances) 6-5-3 record in league games. In 1927, though, they finished 1-8-0, largely because the league had contracted from 22 to 12 teams, eliminating the weaker clubs. The Eskimos were overmatched.
    After the season, Nevers returned to Stanford to become an assistant coach. Reluctantly, Haugsrud sold the franchise for $2,000 to a buyer who moved the team, first to Orange, New Jersey, then to Newark. In 1932, the franchise, now defunct, was purchased by George Preston Marshall and moved to Boston. The team that Ole Haugsrud bought for a buck in 1926 is now known as the Washington Redskins. In