Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Stumbled upon the following auction listing which includes various bits of paperwork from the Atom Bowl (aka Atomic Bowl) played at Nagasaki on January 1st 1946.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/152812288451

LJP wrote:Stumbled upon the following auction listing which includes various bits of paperwork from the Atom Bowl (aka Atomic Bowl) played at Nagasaki on January 1st 1946.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/152812288451

Wow! Talk about being tone deaf!

Ouch! That's called rubbing it in.

LJP wrote:Stumbled upon the following auction listing which includes various bits of paperwork from the Atom Bowl (aka Atomic Bowl) played at Nagasaki on January 1st 1946.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/152812288451

I would wonder if anyone that played in the game (or watched it, or was even stationed there) wound up dying of radiation related cancer. That seems pretty close to the actual date the bomb was dropped. I wouldn't think it was really safe for American personnel to be there yet.

As for the rest of any political concerns, I personally am not an apologist for dropping the bomb. It saved a lot of American casualties an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have caused. It may have saved my own father who would have seen certain combat action in any such invasion, and by extension it probably saved me. (Assured me of being born.) Like President Truman and Colonel Paul Tibbets, I have no trouble sleeping at night over that decision either.

Today playing such a game and calling it the Atom Bowl would cause an outburst of protest and outrage from the Japanese and plenty of our own citizens who don't know or remember what the political climate of 1946 was like (which is to say drastically different from today in both Japan and the USA.) Today's "sensitivities" do not fit or apply to the the 1946 world is what I mean.

MarbleEye wrote: I would wonder if anyone that played in the game (or watched it, or was even stationed there) wound up dying of radiation related cancer. That seems pretty close to the actual date the bomb was dropped. I wouldn't think it was really safe for American personnel to be there yet.

The two big names in the game were Bears FB Bill Osmanski and (later, AAFC) QB Angelo Bertelli. Osmanski died aged 80 (1996) and Bertelli 78 (1999), both well above the norm.

Not sure about the rest of them, but can't imagine it was entirely the best place to be at the time. If anyone has a spare $15K floating around, the paperwork might still glow a little.