Alive And Well

The AFL has been gone for decades, but the impact it had on the NFL still exists today

IT'S GENERALLY ACCEPTED THAT the Baltimore Colts-New York Giants overtime championship game in 1958 started the pro football boom in America. But while there's no doubt the drama of that game helped increase the popularity of the sport, its significance pales compared to the event that really started pro football down the road to becoming the nation's passion: the founding of the American Football League in 1960.

Although the AFL lasted only a decade before being absorbed by the NFL, its impact is still felt today. And since this year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the AFL we felt this would be a good time to point out how different pro football would be if the league had newer existed.

To start with, there wouldn't be a Super Bowl, the single biggest event on the sporting scene. What's more, the NFL title game may never have been moved to a neutral site; it's hard to imagine the NFL owners taking that step without the AFL in the picture.

If not for the AFL the configuration of the NFL would be strikingly different. Certainly, the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders wouldn't exist because the NFL wouldn't have created teams that competed in the same markets as the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers. There's also a chance the NFL might not have put a team in Buffalo.

Despite initially being tabbed the "Mickey Mouse League" by the haughty NFL, the AFL proved that there was seemingly no limit to fans' appetite for the sport on television. Today, the NFL is considered the ultimate TV sport.

Given how big pro football is today, it's hard to fathom what it was like back in 1959, a year before the AFL came along. The NFL had only 12 teams, with a mere two--the Los Angeles Rams and the 49ers--west of the Mississippi. The team farthest south was the Washington Redskins, who never had a black player before the AFL was born.

The NFL was cautious about expanding because a team had failed in Dallas--yes, Dallas--as recently as 1952. The Dallas entry finished out the season as a road team in Hershey, Pa., before morphing into the Baltimore Colts in 1953.

That was the pro football scene in 1959, when Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams--sons of Texas oilmen who were frustrated in their attempts to secure an NFL expansion team--decided to create their own league. Besides the teams they formed for themselves (Hunt in Dallas and Adams in Houston), there were to be franchises in New York, Minneapolis, Denver, and Los Angeles. However, they lost Minneapolis when Max Winter was promised an NFL team and pulled out, so the franchise eventually was placed in Oakland.

Each potential owner had to put up only $100,000 in a performance bond and contribute $25,000 of earnest money. That turned out to be a lucrative investment for Hunt, Adams, and Ralph Wilson, file only three original owners in the so-called "Foolish Club" who are still in the game. Their teams (today Hunt has the Kansas City Chiefs, Adams the Tennessee Titans, and Wilson the Buffalo Bills) are now worth more than half a billion dollars apiece.

Wilson had originally wanted to own a team in Miami, but the University of Miami opposed a franchise there, so he turned his eyes to Buffalo. The city had been spurned by the NFL when it took in only three teams from the old All-American Conference in 1950. Its stadium, War Memorial Stadium, was barely adequate, but the city had a solid fan base.

In the fall of 1959, the NFL tried to lure Hunt and Adams out of the new league with promises of new franchises in Dallas and Houston. (If that off had been made earlier, the AFL would never have been born.) But Adams and Hunt now felt committed to the AFL and wouldn't back out.

By 1960, there were eight teams: Houston, the New York Titans, Buffalo, Boston, the Los Angeles Chargers, the Dallas Texans, Oakland, and Denver. The last one added was Boston, headed by local businessman Billy Sullivan. Like Harry Wismer, the broadcaster who owned the Titans in New York City, Sullivan was underfinanced, a condition that would plague him even after the merger with the NFL and eventually cause his family to lose the team.

Wismer lasted only three years before running out of money, and Sonny Werblin bought the Titans, changed their name to the Jets, and later signed Joe Namath, which helped the AFL become a big-time league. As told in the book, "The $400,000 Quarterback, or the League that Came in From the Cold," when Sullivan went to his first league meeting, he saw that Hunt had holes in the soles of

both of his shoes. The unassuming Hunt--who still flies coach on commercial airlines and wears blue bluets with slacks--saw flint Sullivan had noticed his shoes and said, "I do twice as well as Adlai." (Adlai Stevenson, who had lost to Dwight Eisenhower in the Presidential races in 1952 and 1956, had once been photographed with a hole in the sole of one of his shoes.)

Hunt may not have looked it, but he had a lot of money. His father, the legendary H.L. Hunt, had a fortune estimated at $600 million, which may not seem all that impressive in today's era of billionaires but made him one of the nation's richest men at the time.

It was the elder Hunt who came up with the best-remembered quote from the AFL era. After his son reportedly lost $1 million in his first season, H.L. was asked how long Lamar could keep doing that. According to various reports, he said Lamar would go broke in about 150 years if he kept it up. That quote signified that Lamar Hunt was in this AFL thing for the long haul.

And Hunt was no fool. After three years in Dallas, he decided it would be too difficult to keep going head to head with the Cowboys, who had entered the NFL in 1960. So he moved his franchise to Kansas City, where it continues to thrive today.

After one season, the Chargers moved to San Diego, but when the AFL merged with the NFL in 1970, the six other charter franchises still were in their original cities. Oakland eventually moved to Los Angeles and then back to Oakland, and the Houston team wound up in Tennessee, although it will be replaced by a Houston expansion franchise in 2002.

The AFL elected Joe Foss, a former Marine fighter pilot and a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who spent two terms as the governor of South Dakota, as its first commissioner. Foss was paid $40,000 a year, and he opened the league office in Dallas.

One of the main things he did was sue the NFL on antitrust grounds for, among other things, putting a team in Dallas after the AFL had placed one there and for interfering with the league's attempt to get TV contracts. The AFL's first contract with ABC averaged only $2,125,000 million a year for the entire league.

After a two-month trial in 1962 in Baltimore, a federal judge ruled against the AFL, but time was starting to favor the AFL. The longer it survived, the stronger it became. Not that there weren't some moments when the whole league appeared ready to collapse. For example, Bills owner Wilson loaned Oakland owner Wayne Valley $400,000 to keep his team afloat in the early years. Wilson got 25% of the Raiders, making him the sole owner of one team and the minority owner of another. Technically, that wasn't legal, but the key here was survival.

Bizarre things tended to happen on the field, too. In a 1961 Boston-Dallas matchup, Texans quarterback Cotton Davidson, attempting to tie the game, threw an incomplete pass in the endzone on the final play. The officials didn't notice that a fan had come out of the back of the endzone to knock the ball down. This isn't the stuff of lore, like Babe Ruth supposedly calling a home run. Film still exists of the play, although the fan has never been identified.

Despite all of this madness, the AFL finally turned the corner in 1964. That was the year NBC signed a five-year, $36 million deal with the upstart league to start televising its games hi 1965. The contract gave the AFL financial muscle, guaranteeing that it would be able to compete with the NFL.

And in 1965, Werblin gave Namath what was then an unheard of contract: $400,000. Ii was a steep price, but Namath brought star power to the league. It was the most important signing since Adams had inked Billy Cannon to a three-year, $100,000 deal in the league's first year.

Acquiring players wasn't a huge problem for the AFL, though. In 1960, the NFL consisted of only 12 teams, so many players who newer really got a shot in that league were offered new opportunities by the AFL, such as George Blanda with the Raiders and Len Dawson with the Chiefs.

In 1966, the AFL stepped up the pressure on the NFL when Foss resigned as commissioner and was replaced by Al Davis, who immediately started raiding the NFL for players. In an effort to end the escalating bidding wan Hunt and Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm opened peace talks.

A deal was announced on June 8 of 1966. It included a common draft, an AFL-NFL title game that became the Super Bowl, and a complete merger by 1970. The NFL pushed the merger through Congress by promising New Orleans a team to placate powerful Louisiana senator Russell Long. Four years later--after Super Bowl victories by the Jets and the Chiefs had proved the AFL had become legitimate--the AFL became part of the AFC, which also included three NFL teams (the Pittsburgh Steelers, Colts, and Cleveland Browns).

The AFL eventually would fade into history, but its influence hasn't been forgotten.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Century Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group