I had the fortunate opportunity to attend last week’s football game between my favorite team, the Washington Redskins, and our longtime rival, the Dallas Cowboys. The Redskins were victorious, amazingly enough, and we’re all looking forward to going to the playoffs this week, something that hasn’t happened in quite a while.
I was digging around for some old Redskins performance records and stumbled on this fascinating piece of history I’d never heard before, found at Wikipedia page titled Cowboys-Redskins Rivalry“:
In December 1961, an unknown number of Cowboys fans sneaked into D. C. Stadium, armed with bags of chicken feed. When Alaskan snow dogs were to drag Santa Claus onto the field during the halftime show, the pranksters would unleash dozens of hungry chickens onto the field – 75 white, one black. The significance of the black chicken was to symbolize how [Redskins owner George Preston] Marshall was the only owner in the league who would not recruit an African-American football player; Marshall stating, “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” [1]
Talk about a bizarre moments in football history.
Footnotes
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys%E2%80%93Redskins_rivalry#Cowboy_Chicken_Club