Alive And Well

Football Digest, Dec, 2000 by Vito Stellino

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.