Real Big Game gave AFL honor

[TheShadow]

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By Bud Kennedy
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

The real Big Game in Houston wasn't a Super Bowl.

Only 15,000 fans came. Instead of weeks of hype, pro football's superstars played on five days' notice, and the crowd half-filled a rented high school stadium.

Yet without that game nearly 40 years ago, Houston might not be hosting a Super Bowl this weekend. Because there might be no Super Bowl.

In January 1965, Houston welcomed 21 African-American players and an all-star game that abruptly moved from segregated New Orleans. The players voted to boycott that city after they were ignored by taxi drivers, shunned in restaurants and turned away from nightclubs on Bourbon Street.

Seven days after stars such as San Diego Chargers tackle Ernie Ladd and Buffalo Bills running back Cookie Gilchrist were insulted in the Big Easy, they played in Houston in a makeshift version of the American Football League All-Star Game.

That saved more than an all-star game. It saved the 5-year-old league's reputation with African-American star players -- two years before the older National Football League finally agreed to an "ultimate game" called the Super Bowl.

"That was the turning point," said former Denver Broncos defensive back Austin "Goose" Gonsoulin, a white All-Star who grew up in segregated schools in Port Arthur. "That was when players began looking at the AFL with more respect."

Gilchrist said the successful boycott "transformed football, and with it the whole country."

Nine months after the federal Civil Rights Act ended legal discrimination, days before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would lead voting rights protests in Alabama, the 21 players took a stand of their own, voting 13-8 to leave New Orleans.

AFL Commissioner Joe Foss was quoted telling the Houston Chronicle that the bigotry and insults were "more than they could be expected to take."

Players said they hailed taxis for 45 minutes before one stopped at the airport. Ladd couldn't get a cab at the hotel. Chargers tackle Earl Faison was refused service at the Playboy Club, he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune for a 1995 retrospective.

Buffalo Bills receiver Ernie Warlick said he was told not to hang his coat alongside those of white customers.

Gonsoulin, now retired and living in Silsbee, vividly remembered one incident. He went to breakfast at the team hotel, the Roosevelt, with Oakland Raiders safety Clem Daniels, a fellow Texan from McKinney. Daniels is African-American.

They put their overcoats on the rack and sat at a table. The woman waiting on them want over to the coat rack and knocked Daniels' onto the floor.

"Y'all can't eat in here," she said.

"Clem, don't pay attention to her," Gonsoulin said. He hung the coat back in place. She knocked it off again.

Daniels picked it up and kept it at the table.

"Man, I can't believe this," he said.

Ladd was already insulted at the way he and Faison had been treated the Saturday night before. When they started hearing more stories, they talked with New York Jets tackle Sherman Plunkett of the East All-Stars and decided to call a meeting.

While the white players climbed aboard the bus that Sunday to the first practice, the African-American players were meeting with apologetic game promoter Dave Dixon and a local NAACP official. Then the players voted to leave.

The African-American players from Northern cities "didn't want to put up with it," Gilchrist said by phone this week from his home in the Philadelphia area.

"Some of the players from the South did. They were born there, so they knew the 'boundaries.' They thought everything would be OK. But what happened to us was not OK."

Gilchrist, the son of a Beaumont native, has written an unpublished screenplay about the game and also writes about it on his Web site, www.cookiegilchrist.com.

Foss was quoted as saying that the AFL had been assured that New Orleans was "ready" to accept a game between "racially mixed teams."

"Evidently, it isn't," he said.

Gonsoulin said the white players knew about the problems. Some, including Bills quarterback and future Republican candidate Jack Kemp, were already agreeing not to play if the AFL went ahead with the game.

First, the game was canceled. Then, with a $75,000 CBS-TV contract in limbo, Foss sought somewhere else to play the game.

At 8:30 that Monday morning, Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams booked Jeppesen Stadium, now the home of the University of Houston Cougars. The players were recalled -- some had gone home to New York -- and the Oilers began selling blank tickets off an old roll left over from the high school season.

Instead of playing in the Sugar Bowl before a predicted crowd of 60,000, the AFL All-Stars wound up performing in sunny, 45-degree weather for a half-empty stadium.

Gonsoulin couldn't remember the score. The West stars won, 38-14. The Chronicle called it the "floating All-Star Game."

Only one African-American player was quoted reflecting on a week that would go down in football history.

Kansas City Chiefs tackle Buck Buchanan was asked whether the players were treated well in Houston.

"Man," he was quoted in the Chronicle, "this is the best city in the league."

His team won. But there were no losers that day.