Post by TheShadow on Jul 14, 2009 18:07:34 GMT -5
www.usatoday.com
By Jarrett Bell, USA TODAY
The American Football League began play in 1960 with eight franchises, all of them alive and well today.
The fledgling AFL not only offered professional football fans an alternative to the NFL, but ultimately proved to be the only pro football league to successfully go toe-to-toe with the more established league.
After half a dozen contentious years of competing for fans and players, the leagues finally called a truce. Each saw their teams win two Super Bowls before they ultimately joined forces before the 1970 season.
This summer, USA TODAY will take a look back at the AFL, which would have played its 50th season this year, and its contributions to the pro game, examining each of the league's 10 franchises — all current members of the AFC — and the impacts, stories and footprints that they stamped into football lore.
*****
Maybe now, 50 years after the American Football League was conceived as an NFL alternative amid the growing popularity of pro football, Al Davis will set the record straight.
So, Al, who hatched that devious plot to add star power to the fledgling league?
Davis, the illustrious Oakland Raiders owner, was also the new AFL commissioner in 1966 when the league's war with the established NFL was at its peak. In one of the more cunning examples of the chicanery employed by the rival league to woo incoming players, the AFL surreptitiously called for a bogus meeting of the so-called "babysitters" utilized by the older league — while labeling it an NFL event — to coincide with the NFL draft.
The babysitters, unaware they were targets of the subterfuge, were commonly enlisted by NFL teams to try to persuade prospects not to sign with the AFL.
"I don't know who these people were devising these things," Davis recently contended.
Some background: For three years, beginning in 1964, the NFL instituted what was officially labeled "Operation Hand-Holding." According to America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, the idea was conceived by Los Angeles Rams owner Dan Reeves. The Rams planned to enlist operatives to establish relationships with college prospects before the draft, like a fraternity rush line, then sequester them in locales hidden from AFL officials who also planned to bid for their services. When NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle learned of the strategy, he quickly decided to implement it league-wide.
Rams publicist Bert Rose was drafted to run the program, which was set up in less than a month with about 80 babysitters — typically businessmen with ties to NFL power brokers — who took on their appointed tasks more for prestige than money. On one operation, 27 players were stashed in a hotel in Detroit, away from AFL eyes.
A common babysitter perk was a "gold card," which allowed them to hop on any United Airlines flight, with the cost billed to the NFL.
The phony babysitter meeting concocted by the AFL was to be held in the Pacific Northwest.
"We got the names and addresses of all the babysitters," Davis remembers. "We sent them all a memorandum that on the day of the draft, you are to meet in Portland, Oregon, at 5 o'clock, at a certain motel."
The plot was foiled, thanks to Gil Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys' personnel chief.
"Gil caught on to it and stopped a good part of it," Davis says. "But a lot of them were at the airports, getting ready to go to Portland."
Brandt says one of two players from Oregon who eventually became Hall of Famers — cornerback Mel Renfro (whom the Raiders and their chief scout, Ron Wolf, lost to the Cowboys) or linebacker Dave Wilcox (who played his entire career with the NFL's San Francisco 49ers) — tipped him off.
Still, the effort to hoodwink the babysitters with such a calculated plot was classic. "I couldn't think of something like that," Davis maintains. "I'll put it on Ron."
Brandt suggests otherwise. "Al was pretty good," Brandt says. "He was really our only competition."
Doing whatever it took
Memories of the war between the leagues are still stirring with Davis, 79, who recalls names and other details from nearly a half-century ago as if he were plucking them from an encyclopedia.
Take the case of Memphis tackle Harry Schuh, whom the Raiders "stole" from the Rams. Oakland selected Schuh in the first round of the AFL draft; the Rams apparently were considering him for a high pick, too. Rams babysitter Harp Pool caught on that Schuh was stashed in a Las Vegas hotel.
"We had to pull an escapade," Davis says now. "We had to get him out of the hotel."
Asked where he wanted to go from there, Schuh harbored an exotic vision: Hawaii.
With Pool watching, Davis walked through the front of the hotel and retrieved keys for Schuh's room. But Davis was a decoy. Raiders assistants were simultaneously sneaking Schuh out of the back of the hotel, then to the airport for a week in Hawaii.
Brandt, hired by president/general manager Tex Schramm as the first employee of the expansion Cowboys (they began play in 1960 alongside the AFL's Dallas Texans, who moved and became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963), chuckles when recalling the buzz over Pool's telegram to Babysitter Central that read: "Boo hoo, I lost my Schuh."
That sentiment epitomizes the landscape during the 1960s rivalry, which featured a Wild West flavor as each league had its own commissioner, and there were essentially no rules. This gave college players choices that hardly existed before and haven't since.
In 1960, for example, Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of LSU signed with both leagues — after originally agreeing to join the Cowboys on a personal services contract. (Dallas landed Cowboys stars Don Meredith and Don Perkins with such contractual arrangements).
But Rozelle nixed Cannon's deal with the Cowboys, who were still in a start-up mode and yet to be formally approved as a franchise. Dallas also didn't participate in the 1960 college draft — which, incidentally, was held in secret as the NFL tried to conceal the priority placed on players for fear it would help the AFL.
Cannon, a running back, then signed with the Rams, who took him No. 1 overall in the NFL draft, and the AFL's Houston Oilers. Ultimately, the case went to court, and Cannon was allowed to choose where to play. He chose Houston and helped the Oilers win the first two AFL titles.
"If Rozelle had left me alone," Schramm said in his biography, Tex! The Man Who Built the Dallas Cowboys, "the NFL and the Cowboys would have ended up with Billy Cannon."
Dallas was also involved in the granddaddy case of babysitting lore.
The night before Thanksgiving in 1965, the Cowboys' babysitters, Buddy Young and a stockbroker named Wallace Reed, went to the Prairie View A&M campus and picked up coveted receiver Otis Taylor and a marginal lineman, Seth Cartwright. The players were "invited" to spend Thanksgiving weekend in Dallas and, as Brandt recalls, were stashed at the Holiday Inn off North Central Expressway in suburban Richardson.
The Chiefs worried when calls to Taylor's dorm room went unanswered. Finally, Chiefs general manager Don Klosterman called Taylor's mother and told her that he suspected her son had been kidnapped.
Chiefs operative Lloyd Wells — who was close to Taylor's family and had known the receiver since junior high — tracked down the players' whereabouts. The Cowboys' babysitters, though, wouldn't let Wells through the hotel lobby.
Brandt remembers that Reed, stationed outside the room, fell asleep.
"Too many cocktails," Brandt says.
That allowed Wells to whisper to Taylor from the parking lot. In addition to reminding his target of their kinship in pursuing women and the chance that he might lose his job if he didn't land Taylor, Wells passed along a promise from Klosterman: A red Thunderbird, which Taylor desired, was waiting in the parking lot at the Chiefs' headquarters.
Taylor — and Cartwright — climbed out the window. They flew to Kansas City, but not before Wells took them to Fort Worth for a flight after becoming suspicious of two men waiting at the terminal at Love Field in Dallas.
The red T-Bird was indeed waiting. Taylor drove it back to Texas after signing his contract with the Chiefs.
The same weekend of the Taylor adventure, Davis was in Jacksonville, sealing a deal to land Florida State receiver Fred Biletnikoff. The Raiders drafted Biletnikoff in the second round; the Detroit Lions took him in the third round of the NFL draft.
Immediately following the end of the Gator Bowl, pitting Florida State against Oklahoma, Davis rushed onto the field, contract in hand.
It was reminiscent of the scene in 1962 when Davis, as receivers coach for the San Diego Chargers, signed Arkansas star Lance Alworth under a goal post after the Sugar Bowl. Alworth, a second-round AFL pick, was drafted in the first round by the 49ers, eighth overall.
Now Davis had similarly beaten the NFL on another future Hall of Fame receiver.
"I signed Biletnikoff on national TV, with a lawyer from Florida State, because his mother and the Detroit Lions were on the sideline screaming, 'Don't sign it, Fred! Don't sign it!' " Davis says now. "They had the police there and everything. We got 'em held back in the middle of the field.
"It was just like getting married. 'Do you know, under your own volition, that you are signing this contract?'
"Fred says, 'Yes.'
"He didn't know a damn thing," Davis continues. "He just wanted that money. In those days, $5,000 to $10,000 was magic."
Looking back, there are what-if cases galore. The Chiefs lured future Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell from his home-state Minnesota Vikings but lost out on a would-be Hall-of-Fame running back in their backyard: Gale Sayers of the Kansas Jayhawks.
Joe Namath might be the face of the AFL's coming of age as the New York Jets' quarterback who "guaranteed" a shocking upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. But he was also a first-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Buffalo Bills' 1964 draft class? Carl Eller and Paul Warfield were members, and both wound up in the Hall of Fame … but never played a down for the Bills.
Imagine Ron Mix, the Hall of Fame tackle, joining the defending NFL champion Colts. Mix did. He was Baltimore's first-round pick in 1960, when he was also selected in the first round of the AFL draft by the Boston Patriots.
Fresh off the Southern California campus, the All-American wanted to join a star-studded Colts offense that included Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore.
When the Patriots called, Mix informed them that if he had to play with a team in the East, it would be the Colts. The "counteroffer," though, reflected the tendency of AFL teams to work together in luring talent. Boston's representative asked Mix if he would consider the AFL if he could play for the Chargers instead.
Then came the Colts' offer: A one-year deal with a $1,000 bonus and $7,500 salary.
The Chargers offered a guaranteed two-year, $17,000 contract that included a $5,000 bonus. Mix then asked the Colts for a one-year, $12,000 deal.
Mix recalls what Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom told him in rejecting the counteroffer.
"He told me that I was asking for 'Johnny Unitas money,' and that high a contract would disrupt the team's salary structure," says Mix, now a San Diego-based attorney.
Mix also remembers Rosenbloom expressing the sentiment that was widespread that year in the AFL's inaugural season: The new league wouldn't last.
When he began to play pro football, Mix points out, there were no agents and no combine.
"I wanted to play in the NFL, but I wanted to be treated somewhat fairly," Mix says.
He wound up as one of 20 players who played in all 10 seasons of the AFL's existence.
Coming together
As badly as they wanted their competition to fold, Rosenbloom and many others within NFL circles sorely miscalculated the AFL's chances for survival. Schramm has claimed that, by 1966, NFL teams signed about 75% of college players drafted by both leagues, but such an advantage did not end the war.
In addition to securing key big-name players, the AFL put a dent in the established league because of myriad factors. The league expanded the sport to new markets that clamored for pro football. The AFL provided a flood of opportunity for African-American players, whose numbers in the NFL trickled. When the AFL began play, one NFL team, the Washington Redskins, still had never fielded an African-American player.
Then there was the appeal of the AFL's wide-open brand of play, exemplified by Sid Gillman's aggressive passing attack in San Diego.
One other factor fueled the war that ultimately forced the merger of the AFL and NFL: TV money.
The AFL signed a five-year, $36 million contract with NBC in 1964. It was worth almost five times the previous TV deal from ABC, and it allowed AFL teams — many of whom were struggling financially — to fund their war chests.
Reflective of the symbiotic partnership between the network and the league, NBC advanced five AFL teams $250,000 each to help pay bonuses for 1965 draft picks.
This intensified the war. Although the NFL's TV contract with CBS that began in 1964 was worth $28.2 million for two years — triple the value of the previous package — the NFL divided it among 14 teams.
"Remember, we only had eight teams," Davis says. (The Miami Dolphins began play in 1966, the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968.)
In 1965, the AFL's package was worth $900,000 annually per team; the NFL's equated to a shade more than $1 million annually per team.
While talk of a merger persisted and owners from both leagues worried about the impact of spiraling salaries, the leagues operated on a dictum that, despite the intensity of battles over players coming from college, they wouldn't sign the other league's veterans.
This was shaky antitrust ground during a period when the NFL was attempting to land an antitrust exemption from Congress.
"You could call it a gentleman's agreement," Davis recalls. "I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but that's what it was."
The "agreement" was shattered in 1966 when the New York Giants signed the AFL's star kicker, Pete Gogolak, from the Bills. The three-year, $96,000 deal was largest ever for a kicker at the time.
Davis used that signing to declare full-scale war. "The NFL will never know what hit them," Davis told his AFL staffers.
Reflecting back, he says, "That opened the excuse for me to hold one team hostage by taking several of their players, and then players from around the NFL, and signing them — some contracts that we still have in the archives."
The AFL moved quickly to sign NFL stars Mike Ditka, John Brodie and Roman Gabriel — signings that were eventually nullified when the leagues agreed to merge.
While the war intensified, Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and Schramm were engaged in a series of secret meetings that led to the agreement announced in June 1966. Under conditions of the merger, the leagues would hold the first common draft in 1967 and at the end of the 1966 season play the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, which at Hunt's suggestion was later called the Super Bowl. In 1970, the leagues officially fused under the NFL umbrella that exists today.
Was the Gogolak signing the pivotal factor in striking the merger?
"I think so," Davis says. "But Lamar (who died in 2006) thinks that going to these meetings with Tex Schramm was pivotal, too. They ironed out all the details, but there's no question that the NFL felt threatened by all these players that were willing to leave."
One way or another, the war was headed for a cease-fire.
"I always felt that Pete was good," Davis says of Rozelle, "but he didn't want confrontation. The gorilla wins if he doesn't lose. We were the gorillas in those days. We had just gotten the TV contracts, and it was tough for them to stomach."
Willie Lanier remembers when the leagues reached their merger agreement as if it were yesterday. Lanier was heading into his senior year at Morgan State, eyeing a pro football career that would ultimately land him in the Hall of Fame as a middle linebacker.
Lanier wishes they had waited a year to strike a deal — or that there had been a filibuster on Capitol Hill as the agreement worked its way through congressional approval.
"The merger bill was tied to a tax bill as a rider," Lanier says. "I was just hoping that there would be a long enough delay that it wouldn't happen that year."
Lanier, now a businessman in Richmond, Va., found a term paper at his parents' home a couple of years ago that he produced as a college senior. The title: "The Monopolistic Aspects of Pro Football."
When the leagues merged, Lanier, who starred for the Chiefs from 1967-77, lost the chance to negotiate with AFL and NFL teams because there was just one draft.
"Timing," Lanier says with a chuckle, "is everything."
By Jarrett Bell, USA TODAY
The American Football League began play in 1960 with eight franchises, all of them alive and well today.
The fledgling AFL not only offered professional football fans an alternative to the NFL, but ultimately proved to be the only pro football league to successfully go toe-to-toe with the more established league.
After half a dozen contentious years of competing for fans and players, the leagues finally called a truce. Each saw their teams win two Super Bowls before they ultimately joined forces before the 1970 season.
This summer, USA TODAY will take a look back at the AFL, which would have played its 50th season this year, and its contributions to the pro game, examining each of the league's 10 franchises — all current members of the AFC — and the impacts, stories and footprints that they stamped into football lore.
*****
Maybe now, 50 years after the American Football League was conceived as an NFL alternative amid the growing popularity of pro football, Al Davis will set the record straight.
So, Al, who hatched that devious plot to add star power to the fledgling league?
Davis, the illustrious Oakland Raiders owner, was also the new AFL commissioner in 1966 when the league's war with the established NFL was at its peak. In one of the more cunning examples of the chicanery employed by the rival league to woo incoming players, the AFL surreptitiously called for a bogus meeting of the so-called "babysitters" utilized by the older league — while labeling it an NFL event — to coincide with the NFL draft.
The babysitters, unaware they were targets of the subterfuge, were commonly enlisted by NFL teams to try to persuade prospects not to sign with the AFL.
"I don't know who these people were devising these things," Davis recently contended.
Some background: For three years, beginning in 1964, the NFL instituted what was officially labeled "Operation Hand-Holding." According to America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, the idea was conceived by Los Angeles Rams owner Dan Reeves. The Rams planned to enlist operatives to establish relationships with college prospects before the draft, like a fraternity rush line, then sequester them in locales hidden from AFL officials who also planned to bid for their services. When NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle learned of the strategy, he quickly decided to implement it league-wide.
Rams publicist Bert Rose was drafted to run the program, which was set up in less than a month with about 80 babysitters — typically businessmen with ties to NFL power brokers — who took on their appointed tasks more for prestige than money. On one operation, 27 players were stashed in a hotel in Detroit, away from AFL eyes.
A common babysitter perk was a "gold card," which allowed them to hop on any United Airlines flight, with the cost billed to the NFL.
The phony babysitter meeting concocted by the AFL was to be held in the Pacific Northwest.
"We got the names and addresses of all the babysitters," Davis remembers. "We sent them all a memorandum that on the day of the draft, you are to meet in Portland, Oregon, at 5 o'clock, at a certain motel."
The plot was foiled, thanks to Gil Brandt, the Dallas Cowboys' personnel chief.
"Gil caught on to it and stopped a good part of it," Davis says. "But a lot of them were at the airports, getting ready to go to Portland."
Brandt says one of two players from Oregon who eventually became Hall of Famers — cornerback Mel Renfro (whom the Raiders and their chief scout, Ron Wolf, lost to the Cowboys) or linebacker Dave Wilcox (who played his entire career with the NFL's San Francisco 49ers) — tipped him off.
Still, the effort to hoodwink the babysitters with such a calculated plot was classic. "I couldn't think of something like that," Davis maintains. "I'll put it on Ron."
Brandt suggests otherwise. "Al was pretty good," Brandt says. "He was really our only competition."
Doing whatever it took
Memories of the war between the leagues are still stirring with Davis, 79, who recalls names and other details from nearly a half-century ago as if he were plucking them from an encyclopedia.
Take the case of Memphis tackle Harry Schuh, whom the Raiders "stole" from the Rams. Oakland selected Schuh in the first round of the AFL draft; the Rams apparently were considering him for a high pick, too. Rams babysitter Harp Pool caught on that Schuh was stashed in a Las Vegas hotel.
"We had to pull an escapade," Davis says now. "We had to get him out of the hotel."
Asked where he wanted to go from there, Schuh harbored an exotic vision: Hawaii.
With Pool watching, Davis walked through the front of the hotel and retrieved keys for Schuh's room. But Davis was a decoy. Raiders assistants were simultaneously sneaking Schuh out of the back of the hotel, then to the airport for a week in Hawaii.
Brandt, hired by president/general manager Tex Schramm as the first employee of the expansion Cowboys (they began play in 1960 alongside the AFL's Dallas Texans, who moved and became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963), chuckles when recalling the buzz over Pool's telegram to Babysitter Central that read: "Boo hoo, I lost my Schuh."
That sentiment epitomizes the landscape during the 1960s rivalry, which featured a Wild West flavor as each league had its own commissioner, and there were essentially no rules. This gave college players choices that hardly existed before and haven't since.
In 1960, for example, Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of LSU signed with both leagues — after originally agreeing to join the Cowboys on a personal services contract. (Dallas landed Cowboys stars Don Meredith and Don Perkins with such contractual arrangements).
But Rozelle nixed Cannon's deal with the Cowboys, who were still in a start-up mode and yet to be formally approved as a franchise. Dallas also didn't participate in the 1960 college draft — which, incidentally, was held in secret as the NFL tried to conceal the priority placed on players for fear it would help the AFL.
Cannon, a running back, then signed with the Rams, who took him No. 1 overall in the NFL draft, and the AFL's Houston Oilers. Ultimately, the case went to court, and Cannon was allowed to choose where to play. He chose Houston and helped the Oilers win the first two AFL titles.
"If Rozelle had left me alone," Schramm said in his biography, Tex! The Man Who Built the Dallas Cowboys, "the NFL and the Cowboys would have ended up with Billy Cannon."
Dallas was also involved in the granddaddy case of babysitting lore.
The night before Thanksgiving in 1965, the Cowboys' babysitters, Buddy Young and a stockbroker named Wallace Reed, went to the Prairie View A&M campus and picked up coveted receiver Otis Taylor and a marginal lineman, Seth Cartwright. The players were "invited" to spend Thanksgiving weekend in Dallas and, as Brandt recalls, were stashed at the Holiday Inn off North Central Expressway in suburban Richardson.
The Chiefs worried when calls to Taylor's dorm room went unanswered. Finally, Chiefs general manager Don Klosterman called Taylor's mother and told her that he suspected her son had been kidnapped.
Chiefs operative Lloyd Wells — who was close to Taylor's family and had known the receiver since junior high — tracked down the players' whereabouts. The Cowboys' babysitters, though, wouldn't let Wells through the hotel lobby.
Brandt remembers that Reed, stationed outside the room, fell asleep.
"Too many cocktails," Brandt says.
That allowed Wells to whisper to Taylor from the parking lot. In addition to reminding his target of their kinship in pursuing women and the chance that he might lose his job if he didn't land Taylor, Wells passed along a promise from Klosterman: A red Thunderbird, which Taylor desired, was waiting in the parking lot at the Chiefs' headquarters.
Taylor — and Cartwright — climbed out the window. They flew to Kansas City, but not before Wells took them to Fort Worth for a flight after becoming suspicious of two men waiting at the terminal at Love Field in Dallas.
The red T-Bird was indeed waiting. Taylor drove it back to Texas after signing his contract with the Chiefs.
The same weekend of the Taylor adventure, Davis was in Jacksonville, sealing a deal to land Florida State receiver Fred Biletnikoff. The Raiders drafted Biletnikoff in the second round; the Detroit Lions took him in the third round of the NFL draft.
Immediately following the end of the Gator Bowl, pitting Florida State against Oklahoma, Davis rushed onto the field, contract in hand.
It was reminiscent of the scene in 1962 when Davis, as receivers coach for the San Diego Chargers, signed Arkansas star Lance Alworth under a goal post after the Sugar Bowl. Alworth, a second-round AFL pick, was drafted in the first round by the 49ers, eighth overall.
Now Davis had similarly beaten the NFL on another future Hall of Fame receiver.
"I signed Biletnikoff on national TV, with a lawyer from Florida State, because his mother and the Detroit Lions were on the sideline screaming, 'Don't sign it, Fred! Don't sign it!' " Davis says now. "They had the police there and everything. We got 'em held back in the middle of the field.
"It was just like getting married. 'Do you know, under your own volition, that you are signing this contract?'
"Fred says, 'Yes.'
"He didn't know a damn thing," Davis continues. "He just wanted that money. In those days, $5,000 to $10,000 was magic."
Looking back, there are what-if cases galore. The Chiefs lured future Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell from his home-state Minnesota Vikings but lost out on a would-be Hall-of-Fame running back in their backyard: Gale Sayers of the Kansas Jayhawks.
Joe Namath might be the face of the AFL's coming of age as the New York Jets' quarterback who "guaranteed" a shocking upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. But he was also a first-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Buffalo Bills' 1964 draft class? Carl Eller and Paul Warfield were members, and both wound up in the Hall of Fame … but never played a down for the Bills.
Imagine Ron Mix, the Hall of Fame tackle, joining the defending NFL champion Colts. Mix did. He was Baltimore's first-round pick in 1960, when he was also selected in the first round of the AFL draft by the Boston Patriots.
Fresh off the Southern California campus, the All-American wanted to join a star-studded Colts offense that included Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore.
When the Patriots called, Mix informed them that if he had to play with a team in the East, it would be the Colts. The "counteroffer," though, reflected the tendency of AFL teams to work together in luring talent. Boston's representative asked Mix if he would consider the AFL if he could play for the Chargers instead.
Then came the Colts' offer: A one-year deal with a $1,000 bonus and $7,500 salary.
The Chargers offered a guaranteed two-year, $17,000 contract that included a $5,000 bonus. Mix then asked the Colts for a one-year, $12,000 deal.
Mix recalls what Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom told him in rejecting the counteroffer.
"He told me that I was asking for 'Johnny Unitas money,' and that high a contract would disrupt the team's salary structure," says Mix, now a San Diego-based attorney.
Mix also remembers Rosenbloom expressing the sentiment that was widespread that year in the AFL's inaugural season: The new league wouldn't last.
When he began to play pro football, Mix points out, there were no agents and no combine.
"I wanted to play in the NFL, but I wanted to be treated somewhat fairly," Mix says.
He wound up as one of 20 players who played in all 10 seasons of the AFL's existence.
Coming together
As badly as they wanted their competition to fold, Rosenbloom and many others within NFL circles sorely miscalculated the AFL's chances for survival. Schramm has claimed that, by 1966, NFL teams signed about 75% of college players drafted by both leagues, but such an advantage did not end the war.
In addition to securing key big-name players, the AFL put a dent in the established league because of myriad factors. The league expanded the sport to new markets that clamored for pro football. The AFL provided a flood of opportunity for African-American players, whose numbers in the NFL trickled. When the AFL began play, one NFL team, the Washington Redskins, still had never fielded an African-American player.
Then there was the appeal of the AFL's wide-open brand of play, exemplified by Sid Gillman's aggressive passing attack in San Diego.
One other factor fueled the war that ultimately forced the merger of the AFL and NFL: TV money.
The AFL signed a five-year, $36 million contract with NBC in 1964. It was worth almost five times the previous TV deal from ABC, and it allowed AFL teams — many of whom were struggling financially — to fund their war chests.
Reflective of the symbiotic partnership between the network and the league, NBC advanced five AFL teams $250,000 each to help pay bonuses for 1965 draft picks.
This intensified the war. Although the NFL's TV contract with CBS that began in 1964 was worth $28.2 million for two years — triple the value of the previous package — the NFL divided it among 14 teams.
"Remember, we only had eight teams," Davis says. (The Miami Dolphins began play in 1966, the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968.)
In 1965, the AFL's package was worth $900,000 annually per team; the NFL's equated to a shade more than $1 million annually per team.
While talk of a merger persisted and owners from both leagues worried about the impact of spiraling salaries, the leagues operated on a dictum that, despite the intensity of battles over players coming from college, they wouldn't sign the other league's veterans.
This was shaky antitrust ground during a period when the NFL was attempting to land an antitrust exemption from Congress.
"You could call it a gentleman's agreement," Davis recalls. "I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but that's what it was."
The "agreement" was shattered in 1966 when the New York Giants signed the AFL's star kicker, Pete Gogolak, from the Bills. The three-year, $96,000 deal was largest ever for a kicker at the time.
Davis used that signing to declare full-scale war. "The NFL will never know what hit them," Davis told his AFL staffers.
Reflecting back, he says, "That opened the excuse for me to hold one team hostage by taking several of their players, and then players from around the NFL, and signing them — some contracts that we still have in the archives."
The AFL moved quickly to sign NFL stars Mike Ditka, John Brodie and Roman Gabriel — signings that were eventually nullified when the leagues agreed to merge.
While the war intensified, Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and Schramm were engaged in a series of secret meetings that led to the agreement announced in June 1966. Under conditions of the merger, the leagues would hold the first common draft in 1967 and at the end of the 1966 season play the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, which at Hunt's suggestion was later called the Super Bowl. In 1970, the leagues officially fused under the NFL umbrella that exists today.
Was the Gogolak signing the pivotal factor in striking the merger?
"I think so," Davis says. "But Lamar (who died in 2006) thinks that going to these meetings with Tex Schramm was pivotal, too. They ironed out all the details, but there's no question that the NFL felt threatened by all these players that were willing to leave."
One way or another, the war was headed for a cease-fire.
"I always felt that Pete was good," Davis says of Rozelle, "but he didn't want confrontation. The gorilla wins if he doesn't lose. We were the gorillas in those days. We had just gotten the TV contracts, and it was tough for them to stomach."
Willie Lanier remembers when the leagues reached their merger agreement as if it were yesterday. Lanier was heading into his senior year at Morgan State, eyeing a pro football career that would ultimately land him in the Hall of Fame as a middle linebacker.
Lanier wishes they had waited a year to strike a deal — or that there had been a filibuster on Capitol Hill as the agreement worked its way through congressional approval.
"The merger bill was tied to a tax bill as a rider," Lanier says. "I was just hoping that there would be a long enough delay that it wouldn't happen that year."
Lanier, now a businessman in Richmond, Va., found a term paper at his parents' home a couple of years ago that he produced as a college senior. The title: "The Monopolistic Aspects of Pro Football."
When the leagues merged, Lanier, who starred for the Chiefs from 1967-77, lost the chance to negotiate with AFL and NFL teams because there was just one draft.
"Timing," Lanier says with a chuckle, "is everything."