The Pecan Park Eagle

Glenn McCarthy was once the most flamboyant wildcatter millionaire in the  Oil Capitol of the World. Worth about $160,000,000 (or much more) by 1949, the former newsboy turned Aggie, where he also “got the boot for baring”, according to an Associate Press retrospective story in 1949. on his way to additional stuudent tenures at Tulane and Rice before making it  big in the raw, black goald millions by the barrel word of becoming of becoming one of the best at making some of the biggest and earliest finds in the  great oil patches that was Texas from the 1930s forward. It  wasn’t all a straight up rocket shot either. McCarthy lost his shirt several times over before wealth began to stick more often than it happened to disappear.

McCarthy would always have some money problems. Managing money was not his forte. His innate talent rested in the high ceiling of his belief in life’s possibilities. It was that same passionate drive in McCarthy that spurred him to build the great Shamrock Hotel in Houston in 1948. It was such an outlandish accomplishment for its time and place in the middle of the 20th century that made an indelible impression on fiction writer Edna Ferber. By the time that Ferber later published her seminal stereotype of good old boy Texas in the 1950s, Glenn McCarthy had become her model for Jett Rink, the hard-drinking, wealthy S.O.B. who also opened a “bigger than Heaven, but more fun than hell” hotel in Houston for the same crowd of folks.

Glenn McCarthy
1907-1988

At any rate, most people don’t realize that Glenn McCarthy probably was the first to formally suggest a final game of the professional football season that could have become that sport’s first “Super Bowl”. He simply did not have that language to wrap around his idea. McCarthy called his game “The World Series” of pro football. It was a plan he devised to (1) raise money for charity; and (2) help the NFL settle their differences with the upstart newer league that had sprung up to compete for players and fan dollars as the All America Conference (ACC).

McCarthy proposed a game between the champions of each circuit at an agreed upon major city venue at either New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago. The winning team would receive $75,000, the losers $50,000, with profits going to the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, the Shriners’ Crippled Children’s Hospital, and the  National Kids’ Day Foundation.

The fledgling AAC jumped all over the idea with approval, even offering to donate their earned share to charity, but the NFL flatly turned it down through Commissioner Bert Bell.  As a public relations counter move, Bell did offer to play an all-NFL All Star Game for Charity, but McCarthy and his backers were not enthused. They simply had to come to terms with the fact that the established NFL, even nine years prior to their big 1958 TV championship game breakthrough with Baltimore at New York had no interest in establishing an inter-league championship game in 1948 that would be tantamount to their recognition that the ACC even had a right to exist.

Some issues that exist in every power struggle never change.