Peace Scare

For three years, pro football's civil war had raged hot & heavy. Last week, seeing victory in sight, the bosses of the old and established National Football League met in Chicago's Blackstone Hotel and ordered up drinks. They waited calmly for the young and struggling All-America

Conference (meeting across the street in the Stevens Hotel) to collapse.

The A.A.C.'s two strongest teams, the Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers, were supposed to be anxious to bolt and join the old league. Three other A.A.C. teams, having lost close to $500,000 among them last season, were counted ready to quit. Then burly Ben Lindheimer, part owner of the A.A.C.'s Los Angeles Dons, took over. Argued Lindheimer: "People are crazy when they say professional football has reached the saturation point." He insisted that there was plenty of room for two pro leagues.

For four days, while the old league bosses chewed their nails, A.A.C. conferred. Their decisions for 1949: unnamed angels had been found to put a fresh $300,000 behind the sagging Chicago Rockets; Brooklyn's football Dodgers would merge with New York's football Yankees; A.A.C. would operate as a seven-rather than as an eight-team league. Peace had just been a scare.

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