Rozelle

  for Grange, who was his client.

  After Halas threw them both out, Pyle ran around the country

  seeking cities for a rival league, with Grange as its centerpiece.

  Grange would be co- owner along with Pyle of a team in Yankee

  Stadium. Pyle’s circuit was called the American Football League,

  and it was an economic disaster.

  The semirise and meteoric fall of that league was best sum-

  marized by Wellington Mara, whose dad owned the Giants. The

  Polo Grounds was directly across the Harlem River from Yankee

  Stadium. On game days the teenage Wellington would sit in the

  Giants’ center- field clubhouse and train his field glass on Yankee

  Stadium.

  Decades later he would recall for me the time his father stormed

  into the room and ranted in four- letter words about how Grange

  was keeping the Giants’ crowds down by playing on the same

  day. The teenage Wellington replied, “Don’t worry, Pop. There’s

  nobody over there, either.”

  The nfl survived its first serious challenge to exclusivity by

  understanding it was in a war. Over the next two decades, the nfl

  found a niche driven by the heady octane of monopoly. The Pyle-

  Grange American Football League was just a long- gone memory.

  Then a new rival called the All- American Football Conference

  (aafc) emerged in the 1960s to challenge the status quo. The nfl’s

  attitude toward it would be fueled and encouraged by the contempt

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  91

  and narrow- mindedness of an old guard that had learned nothing about business competition since the war of Red Grange and

  C. C. Pyle. “There probably wouldn’t have been this new league,”

  a man named Sam Cordovano once said, “if the nfl had treated

  us decently, that is to say if Don Ameche, the actor who wanted

  a franchise in Los Angeles, Tony Morabito, who wanted one in

  San Francisco and myself, who wanted one for Buffalo had been

  treated with respect.

  “They could have accepted our bids for entry into their league

  after World War II ended,” Cordovano said. “But what they did

  instead was an insult. Now it’s going to cost them.”

  And it did— particularly because after all the fighting and money

  spent, Los Angeles and San Francisco ultimately became nfl cites

  anyway.

  The new league was called the All- America Football Confer-

  ence. It received massive media exposure through the enthusiasm

  of Arch Ward, the Chicago Tribune sports editor, who was so influential that earlier he had actually created the Major League Base-

  ball All- Star Game.

  The league began operations in 1946 with franchises in New York,

  Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami,

  and Brooklyn. Its determination to sign college prospects and its

  impact on the cost of doing football business should have been

  apparent right at the start when Dan Topping, owner of the nfl

  Yankees, withdrew from the league and accepted a franchise in

  the aafc, giving the aafc the added edge of having a team in Yan-

  kee Stadium.

  The shortsighted handling of the situation by the nfl and its

  commissioner, the old Notre Damer Frank Layden, almost enabled

  it to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It laughed at the thought of the two West Coast franchises. It compounded its disrespect

  when Layden commented about the new league’s future, “First let

  them raise enough money to buy a football.”

  92 The 100-Yard Armageddon

  The war lasted until December 1949. It cost the old guard two million dollars, and in those days that was considerable money.

  Before it was over one nfl owner, Alexis Thompson of the Eagles,

  would even sell his team, declaring the fight just wasn’t worth the

  money he was losing.

  Looking back it is legitimate to understand that the acceptance

  of Morabito’s San Francisco bid would have averted the whole

  thing. The nfl had actually gone to LA because Paul Brown’s

  aafc Cleveland team had chased the nfl Rams out of town. Out

  of sheer self- defense the nfl took in the 49ers, the Browns, and

  the Baltimore Colts, to create the peace it thought would last for-

  ever. When it was achieved key owners around the league publicly

  vowed this would never happen to them again. Right.

  Within a decade they would again ignore two newcomers that

  logic, geography, and common sense said they should have accepted,

  a kind of twin reincarnations of Tony Morabito. And this time

  the battle would last twice as long and cost the kind of money that

  defies counting. Their names were Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams.

  Who is to say they would have been ignored if Pete Rozelle

  had been the commissioner? But Rozelle was out in Los Angeles

  as general manager of the Rams with nothing to say in such mat-

  ters. The gathering storm that Bert Bell, then commissioner, had

  failed to see on his 100- yard horizon would morph into Rozelle’s

  inheritance.

  As for Hunt and Adams, very few people outside of the state of

  Texas had ever heard of either of them. Lamar was the son of H.

  L. Hunt of Dallas, an oil baron, whose fortune in 1957 was specu-

  lated to be at least between four hundred and seven hundred mil-

  lion dollars. Nobody actually knew what he was worth or, for that

  matter, the financial worth of his son, Lamar. But when somebody

  told the old man that Lamar could lose another forty million dol-

  lars a year with his football venture, the old man replied, “Well,

  that only gives him fifty years to make it.”

  Bud Adams, the son of another oilman, had a similar story. Both

  wanted a little sunshine for their egos. As their point man they

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  93

  sought out another Texan, Davey O’Brien, who had been an All-America tailback at Texas Christian University, following in the

  footsteps of another tcu All- America, Sammy Baugh. O’Brien,

  the smallest quarterback in the nfl with the team least likely to be

  able to protect him, played three years with the Eagles and then

  joined the fbi. He was so battered by his team’s lack of an offensive

  line that today instead of the fbi, he probably would have sought

  out the witness protection program.

  Hunt believed that demographics, geography, and a growth heav-

  ily fueled by oil money would dictate that the nfl look to Dallas

  for what he thought would surely be its expansion. Since the eco-

  nomics of travel and so forth could only be helped by the inclu-

  sion of a second Texas team, why not the inclusion of the “other

  oilman’s kid,” Bud Adams over in Houston? And who better to

  introduce him to Bell than a Texas All- America turned fbi agent,

  who had actually played for Bell in Philadelphia?

  O’Brien did his part, and Bell listened because at first Hunt

  sought simply to buy the financially troubled Chicago Cardinals.

  That deal fell through, so in 1959 he and Adams formally met with

  Bell in Philadelphia to make their case for expansion. They were

  told that the nfl had absolutely no interest in either expansion or


  Texas or even them. Confused and frustrated, Hunt told Bell that

  he and the other oilman’s kid just might start a league of their own.

  Coincidentally, since Bell had already been scheduled to tes-

  tify before Congress about the nfl monopoly, he smiled and said

  for public relations purposes, “It’s up to you. After all, competi-

  tion is the American way.”

  Hunt went home and began calling local sportswriters to see if

  they knew of any other cities that had tried to get into the nfl and

  failed. He uncovered failed bidders such as Bob Howsam in Den-

  ver and H. P. Skoglund and an old- line sports promoter named

  Max Winter in Minneapolis. Both cities wanted in.

  And then, with absolutely no warning at all, Harry Wismer, a

  man who could make Charles O. Finley sound like Saint Fran-

  cis of Assisi, telephoned Hunt from New York (knowing Harry,

  94 The 100-Yard Armageddon

  the wonder is that the call didn’t come collect) and proclaimed in decibels loud enough to shatter all the glass window in the original Notre Dame: “There is no longer cause to worry. Your new

  league will have a team in New York that cannot possibly fail

  because I will be the owner.”

  When Bert Bell, in an effort to show that the nfl was not the

  big, bad monopolistic monster that some said it was, leaked the

  news of the new league during a congressional hearing, it took less

  than a day for Hunt to hear from yet another petitioner.

  Ralph Wilson, a wealthy insurance man, had always dreamed of

  owning an nfl team in Miami, but the University of Miami had a

  lease for its football team to play at the Orange Bowl and told him

  in no uncertain terms that it would never let him in. Convinced

  that there would never be room at the nfl’s inn, Wilson saw Hunt’s

  experiment as a real possibility. He told him he wanted to come in

  to the new league with a team in Buffalo, a city many insisted had

  been shafted during the aafc- nfl merger. Ultimately, Buffalo’s

  response would prove that the earlier critics of this northern outpost were incorrect. It would, indeed, be a hell of a pro football town.

  Next came Barron Hilton, the hotel king, who opted for Los

  Angeles, and finally Billy Sullivan, who capitalized his venture

  with the public sale of ownership stock in his Boston Patriots. In

  the early days Sullivan would spare no expense to bring players

  into Boston from as far away as, well, Boston.

  All of these unfolding events in 1959 meant little to Rozelle. He

  was still the general manager of the Rams and fighting his own war,

  trying not to get caught in the vitriolic cross- fire between Reeves

  and Pauley that grew more intense day by day. At league meetings

  Reeves and not Rozelle was the Rams’ spokesman. “Those meet-

  ings were nothing like the ones we had much later on,” Rozelle

  recalled. “The big thing was that Marshall and Halas would argue

  over things like whether the team rosters should be frozen at thirty-

  two or thirty- five men. Some of us thought they did that to keep

  most of us confused because on the big issues, except for expan-

  sion, they seemed to agree.”

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  95

  Surprisingly, the embryonic afl was the subject of little conversation among the nfl owners. Even Paul Brown, the hero of

  the old All- America Football Conference, who, himself had forced

  that merger with the nfl, didn’t really see how this ragtag band of

  upstarts represented any kind of major threat to the establishment.

  In their euphoria nobody thought to look toward the heavens. If

  they had, they would have seen between the sky above and earth

  beneath a coast- to- coast, seemingly endless electronic orchard of

  television antennas. By not doing so, they failed to understand the

  biggest single hole card in the fledgling afl’s arsenal— a subsequent

  and totally unexpected afl deal with abc that would keep the reb-

  els alive through its early financially challenged times.

  In August 1959 Lamar Hunt, as president of the new entity,

  had indicated it would jump off the drawing board the follow-

  ing year with eight teams, one of which would be the Minneapo-

  lis— St. Paul franchise.

  But Lamar had no idea that one player on the nfl side did not

  think the new league was a joke, and he was a player who held a

  powerful hole card. It was John Brodie of the 49ers, who was in the

  last year of his contract and ultimately played one league against

  the other for a payoff when the war settled of close to a million

  dollars to avoid his threatened lawsuit.

  During the marathon election that ultimately anointed Pete

  Rozelle as commissioner, George Halas had consistently abstained

  from voting so as not to anger anyone who might object to his

  real agenda, which was nfl expansion. At that meeting he ulti-

  mately touted Dallas as his target and never mentioned another

  city that was also very much dead center in his crosshairs. When

  Rozelle appointed a subcommittee as his first act to study expan-

  sion with Halas as the chairman, the cagey charter member of the

  league was free to move behind the seasons and deal the afl what

  he hoped would be a mortal blow.

  One of the partners in the Minneapolis— St. Paul franchise

  announced by the afl was a man named Max Winter, who had

  immigrated as a child from Austria with his family to Minneap-

  96

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  olis and became Americanized enough to win a basketball scholarship to Hamline University. A businessman and restaurateur

  by trade, he became part owner of the Minneapolis Lakers of the

  nba in 1947.

  By the mid- 1950s he attempted to induce the nfl to expand to

  Minneapolis but failed. When Hunt called to offer a franchise in

  the new league, Winter immediately accepted. But George Halas,

  the ultimate competitor, never forgot anything about football in

  general and the nfl in particular. He recalled Winter’s earlier

  failed nfl bid and immediately contacted Winter with an offer

  he couldn’t refuse.

  Ironically, the afl was that very week holding its organizational

  meeting in Minneapolis. “Stall them,” Halas advised him, “and I’ll

  take care of the rest.” Halas delivered as promised, and the week

  after Pete’s election Winter and his partner defected to the nfl

  to become the league’s fourteenth franchise.

  With that unexpected defection the afl was off- kilter with

  seven instead of eight franchises. To bring it back into balance,

  it reluctantly awarded a franchise to Chet Soda and the Raiders,

  who seemed to have more partners than Methuselah had chil-

  dren. Actually, Soda had seven partners, and they are still fondly

  remembered for having threatened to punch each other out dur-

  ing a home game in their inaugural season. It actually happened

  in the press box, but all of them wondered the next day how the

  story got out.

  And then there were the New York Titans. Their success, it was

  felt, would be critical. If you can make it there, as the song goes,

  you can m
ake it anywhere. Remember, it had been their owner,

  Harry Wismer, who had called Hunt and promised him that the

  league’s future was ensured because Harry would deliver all of

  New York from river to river. The truth was that Harry’s printer

  couldn’t even deliver tickets to the Titans on time because the

  printer had to wander around the east side of New York trying to

  find their office.

  If you had set out to write a novel in which the antihero threw

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  97

  obstacles in his own path, discovered empty six- lane highways, and then tried to drive on the shoulder of the road, Harry Wismer could have sued you for invasion of privacy. He was a man

  who would call a press conference to help sell tickets for Sunday’s

  game and then, bloody Mary in hand, publicly abuse the oppo-

  nent’s visiting advance man because “your team stinks and we will

  bury you.” His office (which was also his apartment) had a Park

  Avenue address, but its entrance was on Madison.

  It was the summer of 1961 when I went to interview him, and

  I was convinced that somebody had stolen 277 Park Avenue. That

  was the address all the media ads listed for the offices of the newly

  whelped New York Titans. Even in Manhattan, where people are

  so obsessed with their own needs they step over heart- attack vic-

  tims to get the next subway train, you’d think somebody would

  have noticed the kidnapping of an entire apartment house.

  I was desperately looking for 277 Park. It was a steamy ninety

  degrees, and I had walked up and down the block eight times.

  Finally, an obliging doorman saved me.

  “It’s Madison Avenue around the corner,” he said.

  “Then why does it have a Park Avenue address?”

  He responded with, “So why does New York need another foot-

  ball team?”

  When I finally located the joint and rang the bell, I was greeted

  by a Swedish maid who demanded: “Vat you vant? You vant buy

  tickets? You vant job? You vant see Harry?”

  When I stepped inside the office/apartment of the Titans, I

  was crossing into the Twilight Zone. The dining room was the

  ticket office. The coaching and scouting staffs met in his bedroom.

  Next to the kitchen, the publicity director, Ted Emery, turned out

  releases on an ancient mimeograph machine in an alcove along-

  side the bathroom. When I arrived he had just used that facil-