NFC Championship Game notes

Times wires
Saturday, January 22, 2011

SURVIVORS FROM '41 TALK ABOUT HISTORY

Today the Bears and Packers will play for the 182nd time. It will be their second postseason meeting.

Neither John Siegal nor Ed Frutig remembers much from the first. But they are thought to be the last surviving players who were there.

"Been that long?" Siegal told the New York Times. "That is amazing."

It was Dec. 14, 1941, a week after the attack at Pearl Harbor. Siegal was a two-way end for the Bears who caught a pass that day from Sid Luckman, his friend and teammate from Columbia. Frutig, a two-way end, too, caught three passes for Green Bay, two more than Hall of Famer Don Hutson.

"Everybody was all over him," Frutig said. "They didn't care about a little pipsqueak like me."

Siegal and Frutig are 92 now. Their memories are fading. They do not remember each other. But they represent the final threads of a frayed connection.

The 1941 Bears and Packers finished 10-1 and split two meetings. That forced a playoff game on a 19-degree day at Wrigley Field in front of 43,425, about a quarter of them cheering for the visitors.

George Halas' Bears beat Curly Lambeau's Packers, 33-14, scoring 24 points in the second quarter. One week later at Wrigley, the Bears beat the Giants, 37-9, for the NFL championship.

Details have been lost to Siegal and Frutig in the intervening 69 years.

"I remember playing in it," Frutig recalled from Vero Beach, where he retired after working and raising a family in the Detroit area. "I remember getting tackled, and I remember tackling. I remember catching a pass. Things like that."

Siegal, born about three months before Frutig in 1918, made Pro Bowls from 1940 to 1942.

"It was a great experience," Siegal said of his playing days. "Halas was a great man to play for. I was with a winner. … Let's see, I was 20 years old, I guess, when I went with the Bears. It was an honor to play for the Bears. Halas was a great man."

ODD ODDS: The Bears are the No. 2 seed in the NFC playing at home against the No. 6 Packers. Yet, "We're underdogs," Bears CB Danieal Manning said with a smile. Not just underdogs but growing underdogs — Green Bay opened as a 3-point favorite according to the Glantz-Culver line and is now favored by 31/2. "It takes all the pressure off of us," Chicago return ace Devin Hester said. "We're not the highly touted team. It works in our favor. We like being the underdogs. In the end, we try to have the last laugh."

Times wires

Source: http://www.tampabay.com/sports/nfc-championship-game-notes/1147157

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