NFL labor talks: Understanding the negotiations
MONDAY, 07 MARCH 2011 14:19
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/nfl-labor-talks-understanding-the-negotiations
As the representatives from the National Football League ownership group and the National Football League Players Association continue to try and bridge their differences and sign a new collective bargaining agreement (and yes Green Bay Packers players have collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin despite the best efforts of the state's governor to bust public employee unions as Governor Scott Walker told the fake David Koch), it might be useful to review 60 years of television money and players association activity and how closely linked television and the players really are.
NFL owners were planning to use some $ 4 billion in 2011 television rights fees to underwrite a lockout. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (FOX), General Election (now Comcast)'s NBC, Summer Redstone's CBS, the Walt Disney Company's ESPN and DirecTV cozied up to the NFL owners because the owners' product is still a consistently watched fare in an increasing fragmented audience industry — TV.
Television is the “tiger blood” of the NFL. CBS, NBC and ABC were the “Goddesses” that brought the NFL to the masses during an explosive growth spurt between 1960 and 1970. Each one of the NFL owners was a “bi-winner.”
NFL owners and NFL players have been battling over issues since 1956. Today, NFL players get huge salaries but have short careers and unlike their counterparts in Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, a NFL players contract is not guaranteed. If a player gets fired, he keeps bonus money but he is terminated with just some severance pay. NFL players need four years to get a pension and five years of medical benefits following a career. The lack of will to fight the owners and just take money now has left some former players financially destitute and in some case contemplating suicide from injuries suffered on the field from Pop Warner through junior high school, high school, college and pro football.
As television contracts got bigger and bigger, so did players salaries but NFLPA negotiators never looked at the future.
“Money Now.”
In 1950, the three most popular sports in the United States were baseball, boxing and horse racing. National Football league owners were running mom and pop store operations that operated from July to December. Television, as the noted writer Frank Deford explained on a long forgotten TV show that featured this writer and Al Michaels (along with the "Scud Stud" Arthur Kent) on Histories Mysteries, an all inconclusive look at sports history in about 88 minutes on the History Channel in 2000, changed the sports world. By 1965, football was the most popular sport in the United States. The owners had more money than they ever could imagine but the owners still treated players like they did in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
The NFL owners and players had a contentious relationship for decades. The NFLPA formed in 1956 with help from Creighton Miller, the first General Manager of the Cleveland Browns. Unhappy players in Cleveland and Green Bay assembled a network of "player reps" on each team. The players included Don Shula (Colts), Frank Gifford (Giants), and Norm Van Brocklin (Rams) to represent their teams. The Chicago Bears did not have a players representative. The players first meeting was held in New York in the fall of 1956, after the owners ignored the players' attempts to discuss their requests. The players asked for minimum salaries of $5,000 per season, injury pay, uniform per diems, and for teams to supply their own equipment.
Nothing happened but the players got a big break in 1957 when, the first lawsuit involving professional football and antitrust was filed, Radovich v. NFL, which significantly altered player rights within the league. The case involved a player/coach, George Radovich, who sued the league because the NFL effectively prevented him from attaining employment in the NFL or affiliated leagues, such as the Pacific Coast League, which was in existence at the time. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the NFL was exempted from the antitrust laws, and was appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the decision of the trial court, holding professional football subject to the antitrust laws.
The Supreme Court of the United States decision changed life for NFL owners. The players could now sue the league on antitrust grounds which they threatened to do. The owners and players settled with the players receiving minimum salaries of $5,000, $50 payment for preseason games, medical coverage for injuries, and a pension.
But the players didn't get what they agreed to and spend the 1958 season chasing the owners to live up to the agreement. The deal was finally signed in 1959.
In 2011, as a fallback, the players will decertify their association and then sue the league on antitrust grounds if an agreement isn't reached soon. Nothing much has changed since 1957.
The truth was that football was a part time vocation and not a real job for either the owners of the players in the 1950s.
When the season ended in the 1950s, so did football as a main vocation. New York fans may have wildly cheered the New York Giants defensive lineman Andy Robustelli on six Sundays a season, but on the Monday after the final game, it was back to work in the civilian world.
"Each player the day that the season was over, you were free and you looked for a job. You wouldn't see each other until next year. I think, and with all respect to the modern ballplayer, I hope the modern ballplayer appreciates, not only the opportunity, but...football is a stepping stone it's not the end of life," said Robustelli , who became a successful businessman in Connecticut once his Giant days were through, in the 1990s.
Robustelli's generation of players didn't put up much of a fight with the owners for pensions and future health benefits. In fact, lots of generations of NFL players never put up much of a fight for pension and health benefits and according to one players agent, there was a reason for that.
"Their constituency is active players and when the crunch comes, no one with status is representing the retired players. So it relies on the good will of the current players, which has been subsumed to selfishness," said the agent. "Football players are the worst labor unit--short playing careers, spectre of injury, coaches kids, born-again Christians, all salary paid from September to January so each game check more impactful, (Joe) Montana and Howie Long and other stars crossed picket line last time (in 1987), no ability to sustain a strike."
The NFLPA has always been weak and the owners knew that. The two leagues may have merged, but the player associations did not, as the players on the 16 NFL teams were NFLPA members and the players on the 10 AFL teams were American Football League Players Association members. This caused a major problem in subsequent negotiations as the NFLPA would come to a tentative agreement with the owners on certain collective bargaining issues (such as minimum salaries, retirement age) then the owners would bargain with the AFLPA, who accepted lower terms, which wasn't good for NFLPA members.
There was a brief lockout and a 20-day strike in 1970 that ended just before the 1970 All Star game and which did not result in the cancellation of regular or post-season games, the NFL and NFLPA signed a four-year contract, the first collective bargaining agreement in the history of the NFL, which raised player salary minimums to $12,500 for rookies and $13,000 for veterans, added dental insurance, improved the pension, gave players the right to have agents, gave players representation on the Retirement Board, and provided for impartial arbitration of injury grievances.
(Retired players from that era are still battling the NFL over injury grievances)
In 1974, the previous CBA was coming to an end. Players were demanding the elimination of the Rozelle Rule and the option clause which kept a player tied to his team in perpetuity unless another team was willing to give up number one draft picks or players to sign a free agent among other things. On July 1, the players went on strike, and were prepared to sit out until a new bargaining agreement was hammered out. The sit-out led to the cancellation of the New York Jets game at New Haven, the first game ever canceled due to a labor impasse. However, by the early part of August, about a quarter of the NFLPA crossed the picket lines, breaking down union solidarity. On August 11, Garvey sent his players back to work after a federal mediator suggested a 14-day cooling off period, instead pursuing the issue through the Mackey case. The 42-day strike ended that day with nothing gained.
On September 21, 1982, NFL players went on strike. It was the longest strike in professional sports in the U.S. at the time and lasted until November 17. The owners responded by locking the players out at the commencement of the strike. During the strike, only 126 of the 224 scheduled regular-season games were played, forcing the league to change the format of post-season play to include 16 teams instead of the usual 10 teams. The players held two "All-Star" games to raise some funding for players without a paycheck. The players got more money but two goals were not met, a form of free agency and more pension money.
NFL owners won the 1987 battle with the players but the two sides ended up in Judge David Doty's courtroom in 1993 after the association decertified. They came up with a deal because of pressure from Judge Doty. Eighteen years later, Judge Doty is still involved with the two sides. Apparently Judge Doty disagrees with the owners pocketing network, cable and satellite TV money in 2011 whether the league is locked out or not. There is a question of what happens with that $4 billion. Eventually Judge Doty will decide what to do.
Television and the NFL have had a long history. TV has helped and hurt the league. Today, it is all good but 62 years ago, it was a different story.
The Los Angeles Rams showed all 12 of the team's home and away games on local television in 1949 and saw a sharp decrease in attendance from 1948. In 1950, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell urged teams to blackout home games in an effort to keep the people in the stands for home games instead of in front of the television.
Some teams had TV contracts. The Dumont TV Network paid $75,000 to nationally televise the Los Angeles Rams-Cleveland Browns championship game on December 23, 1951. By 1953, the NFL was in the courtroom defending its blackout policy. Judge Allan K. Grim of the U. S. District Court in Philadelphia upheld the league's blackout policy and did not violate anti-trust laws.
The 1957 NFL Championship Game was blacked out in the host city, Detroit, despite being a sellout. The blackout policy was challenged again in 1962 when the Giants hosted Green Bay in the NFL Championship at Yankee Stadium Judge Edward Weinfeld of the U. S. District Court upheld the NFL position and denied an injunction, which would have forced CBS to televise the game in the New York City area.
“That was a big test case for us,” said Mara of the 1953 courtroom proceedings. “I think the big value of TV was the promotion that it should what a great event this was; what a great game this was. It made people want to come to the ball park, or go up to Stratford, Connecticut to see it on TV.”
New York Giant fans who could not get tickets to the sold out Yankee Stadium would travel to Fairfield County, Connecticut and either rent hotel rooms or go to bars and/or restaurants to watch blacked out home games on WTIC, Channel 3 out of Hartford. Blacked out games meant money six, seven or eight times a year to Connecticut businesses.
The blackout policy would remain in effect until 1973, when Congress passed experimental legislation (only valid until 1976) requiring any NFL game that was declared a sellout 72 hours prior to kickoff be made available for local TV.
Television would play a role in the Bidwill family's move of their Cardinals franchise in 1960. The NFL also permitted the Cardinals to relocate to St. Louis for the 1960 season, in an effort to eliminate the market-cannibalization taking place between the Cardinals and the Bears in Chicago, the second largest television market at the time. The Chicago CBS station, which was televising NFL games, needed a solution to the Bears-Cardinals two-market setup. Since the teams never played on television head to head unless they played one another, and the league was blacking out home games, CBS never showed games in Chicago.
On March 13, 1960 the Cardinals moved to St. Louis after receiving $500,000 for "improvements" at Soldier Field, some of the funding coming from CBS. In effect, the Cardinals were not just "allowed" to move to St. Louis, but rather were paid to do so by the Bears, the NFL, and CBS.
The American Football League formed in 1959. It was an eight-team league, which borrowed a business model from the stillborn Continental Baseball League, which was a brainchild of Branch Rickey. The CBL planned to pool TV revenue and divide the money among the league's 12-teams. Rickey's league was working under the assumption that it had an antitrust exemption like the American League and National League in baseball. Lamar Hunt's league must have felt the same way. The AFL had decided on November 23, 1959 to approve a cooperative television plan whereby the league office negotiates the television contract and which proceeds from which were equally divided among member clubs.
By June 9, 1960, the AFL had a TV deal with the American Broadcasting Company. It was a five-year contract with the eight teams sharing $1,785,000 in 1960 and graduated increases of the life of the agreement.
The NFL wanted the same type of network deal but the league had to live with the Sherman Antitrust Act hanging over the league's business practices. That changed on September 30, 1961 with President John F. Kennedy's signature on a bill that allowed the 14-team league to become one entity for television contract negotiation purposes.
In 1960, the New York Giants received $340,000 for their deal, but the Green Bay Packers received $105,000. Rozelle saw the changing playing field and knew the big market teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles could get enormous contracts as television grew leaving behind smaller markets such as Pittsburgh and Green Bay.
"My brother Jack (Giants), George Halas (Bears) and Daniel Reeves (Rams), we were the three teams that were most affected," said Giants owner Wellington Mara. "Now, Art Modell (Browns), he had has own deal made already and he surrendered that to go into it.
"He (Modell) was really the one who gave something away. We didn't know what we were giving up. That is what did it. They made the decision. Without that, why we wouldn't have the league we have today."
Rozelle was a genius. He was lucky that the times were favorable but he had to work at getting a diverse group of owners to think league instead of individual fiefdom and he did.
"I think he explained to everybody very cogently what was at stake and he knew it wasn't going to be much of a league with lopsided revenue" Rozelle is a guiding force in the formation of the modern NFL. "We used to laugh a little bit, but we used to say Pete was so smooth and so polished and he had a great sense of public relations, but we always thought in running a league meeting, the softest part about him were his teeth," said Mara with a laugh.
"He knew when to twist an arm, and when to massage an ego and he made great use of that knowledge. He stepped in and from the very first minute, from the very first meeting he ran, he was a leader. He took things over and organized us."
CBS would win rights to NFL games in 1962 with a $4.65 million bid, NC would gain the 1963 AFL Championship Game for $926,000 despite the fact that ABC was the AFL regular season TV right’s holder. CBS would keep the NFL for the 1964 and 1965 seasons as well as the NFL Championship Game by paying $14.1 million per season and $3.6 million for two championship games. Meanwhile NBC guaranteed the future of the AFL by signing a five-year, $36 million contract beginning in 1965.
CBS extended its relationship with Pete Rozelle and the NFL in 1965 through 1967 with a $39.6 million for the 1966 and 1967 regular seasons with an option for 1968. CBS bought the 1966 and 1967 NFL Championship Games for $2 million per game. After the June 8, 1966 merger, the rights to the first four AFL-NFL Championship Games, 1967-70 was sold to both CBS and NBC for $9.5 million. In 1969, CBS passed on Rozelle’s idea of Monday Night Football, ABC acquired the rights to 13 games annually between 1970-72. Monday Night Football would change the NFL as much as the June 8, 1966 merger between the AFL and NFL.
The players of the 1960s kept pushing to get the owners to give them more benefits. They always seem to lose except salaries increased as TV contracts increased.
Television is willing to pay sports teams lavishly because TV executives think 18-49 year old males and 25-54 year old males will tune in and support advertisers’ products. The NFL makes TV networks. Monday Night Football made ABC a legitimate network in 1970. NFL ratings were down significantly in 1999, and 2000 yet CBS was happy with its decision to return to the NFL after one time owner Lawrence Tisch passed on extending the network's NFC deal with the league in 1993.
Tisch's failure to extend NFL football on CBS caused a massive turnover in the TV industry. CBS lost local affiliates in Detroit and Milwaukee as stations defected to FOX to continue having NFL games and FOX became a network sports powerhouse, eventually securing the rights to Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League.
While CBS claimed to have broken even on its football expenditure in 1998, insiders knew that other areas of the company were cut back because of football. The company announced massive layoffs in 1998 and closed studios around the United States.
After the NFL was lost in 1993, CBS still had its billion dollar, seven-year deal to cover the NCAA Tournament in basketball, golf's Masters and college football. Cutbacks at CBS were nothing new. Tisch scaled back the news operations in the 1980s to pay for football and baseball. In fact, Tisch really started the pay escalation for TV rights by paying the enormous sum of $1.06 billion over four years for MLB television rights from 1990-93. CBS ended up losing millions on the deal, especially with poor Saturday Game of the Week ratings.
Without the NFL and John Madden, Rupert Murdoch's United States media empire may not be as imposing as it is today.
Before the NFL and Madden, Murdoch's FOX network, which is technically not a network but a syndication unit, was a weak collection of UHF stations with the exception of a few cities like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. Before the NFL and Madden, FOX had a few shows that drew some attention, the It's Gary Shandling's Show, the Tracy Ullman Show and Married With Children. Out of the Ullman show came The Simpsons, Shandling's show originally ran on Showtime and then went to FOX. Ullman's show was canceled in 1990. FOX could not establish a late night talk show, the Joan Rivers experiment was a disaster and a 1993 Chevy Chase late night show as a bomb. Not much worked for Murdoch.
Neither Al Bundy nor Bart Simpson, as popular as the characters would become, could bolster FOX. Murdoch's team was buying TV stations and became the biggest owner of over-the-air stations in the United States but by 1993, it was still the fourth network in a three horse race for ratings behind CBS, NBC and ABC.
The NFL and Madden changed all of that. Actually, it was Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys that put Murdoch on the map as Jones and Murdoch negotiated the TV deal that would change everything. The NFL had been prospering from TV rights fees since the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act which allowed the league commissioner, who is also the league's chief negotiator and lobbyist in all things NFL, to bundle the 14 member franchises into one entity in order to negotiate a TV deal. Three decades later, the NFL was a 30 franchise entity with four separate and distinct elements. CBS had the National Football Conference contests and paid slightly more money for the NFC than NBC did for American Football Conference games because the NFC had more major markets. ABC had Monday Night Football and ESPN and Turner Sports split a Sunday night package.
The NFL was being paid $3.6 million over a four year period between 1990 and 1993.
Murdoch's fourth place network was desperate for a game changer and the NFL provided him with an opening. The NFL and Jones were knocked over by Murdoch's bid for the NFC games. Murdoch was willing to fork over $1.58 billion over four years to get the NFC package along with the Super Bowl. Murdoch had a syndication arm but no news division, no sports division, none of the apparatus that CBS, ABC and NBC had. Murdoch knew that the NFL deals with an old philosophy, cash on the barrel head gets serious consideration and because he blew CBS out of the water with his bid, the NFL and Jones knew they would be getting a new partner with a patchwork of big city VHF and small area UHF stations and both sides would have to make it work.
In December 1993, The NFL took the money. In retrospect, it was the right decision but at the time it looked like just a money grab.
In early 1994, Murdoch started to prepare for the 1994 season by quickly established a sports department by giving Madden an enormous contact and hiring his sidekick Pat Summerall. Murdoch also took Madden's CBS support team and made John feel right at home. Madden would become the face of FOX sports and with the NFL in tow, Murdoch was able to steal VHF stations in Detroit and Milwaukee away from CBS. Murdoch had one of TV's crown jewels, the NFL, and FOX would now be in a position to become a serious player in American TV.
It can be suggested that the success of the NFL and Madden on FOX led to Murdoch to start the FOX News Channel. The over-the-air network, still technically a syndication arm, started producing hits like the X-Files along with Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, In Living Color to go along with The Simpsons and Married With Children. Murdoch didn't have blockbuster ratings but the network was doing okay business and he already had a satellite news network in Europe, Murdoch turned to creating a United States cable TV news channel.
There are no what if questions. The NFL and Madden changed the fortunes of both Murdoch and Lawrence Tisch's CBS. In 1993, CBS completed the TV hat trick; it won daytime, prime time and late night ratings. David Letterman had just moved over to the network and things were looking good. But Tisch's CBS did not invest in cable TV, lost the NFL and Madden, football's top star both on and off the field, lost affiliates and would start a downward spiral. Murdoch's FOX Sports added the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball soon after the NFL deal. Eventually Murdoch would gain NASCAR and the Bowl Championship Series. On the cable TV side, Murdoch sort of has a national sports network, but that is not where Murdoch really has a sports foothold. Murdoch's regional sports cable networks are still strong despite being challenged by upstarts in the past few years. FOX either owns or has agreements with 23 regionals and there are college sports networks as well. There is also a partnership with The Big Ten Network
Madden's signing with FOX after CBS lost the NFL rights in 1993 cannot be dismissed. John Madden was a major part of the FOX promotion, so much so that at an NFL owners meeting at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, John ended up by the master of ceremonies for the night's owners party after Murdoch departed. Madden left FOX after the February 2002 Super Bowl and joined ABC Monday Night Football's crew. John was no longer that valuable to Murdoch. Rupert built a viable network; he had built a strong regional sports cable network. He had his news channel and was finally an American citizen because non American citizens could not own TV networks. Murdoch, the Australian, should not have owned FOX but American President Bill Clinton's Federal Communication Commission in 1995 allowed Murdoch to run FOX because it was "in the best interest of the public."
NFL owners never knew what they had in the 1950s. Today billions flow into the owners pockets. The fight between the owners and players is all about money. It is “Money Now” for the players and the owners.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Showing posts with label Green Bay Packers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green Bay Packers. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Super Bowl XLV: Vince Lombardi wanted no part of the Super Bowl
WEDNESDAY, 02 FEBRUARY 2011 13:38
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/super-bowl-xlv-vince-lombardi-wanted-no-part-of-the-super-bowl
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Vince Lombardi has staged a comeback in the past year. The Broadway show, "Lombardi", is doing well and his old team, Green Bay, is playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday, an event, ironically enough that Lombardi didn't like. The Lombardi coached Green Bay Packers played in what is now known as Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II. Officially Lombardi's two teams played in the American Football League-National Football league World Championship Game.
Lombardi thought the NFL title game was the be-all, end-all NFL event.
Lombardi's teams won the 1967 and 1968 contests but Lombardi didn't get to touch the Vince Lombardi Trophy given to the Super Bowl winner. The Super Bowl became the Super Bowl in 1969 and the championship trophy was named for Lombardi following his death in 1970.
In the decades following his Lombardi's passing, the Super Bowl became a uniquely American quasi-celebration/holiday. The Fourth of July is America's Birthday Party but the Super Bowl is American's excuse for a party. Supermarkets have Super sales for countless Super parties, but it wasn't always like this.
Back in 1967, it was just called the "World Championship Game, AFL vs. NFL." The game was held in the 94,000 seat Los Angeles Coliseum. The ticket prices were $12, $10 and $6. There were 33,000 empty seats. It was the last time a Super Bowl or the World Championship Game was not a sellout.
There were no parties, no weeklong football orgies. In fact, it wasn't until January 1973 when Super Bowl parties took on a different life. The Commissioner's Party was held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.
The first game was played on January 15, 1967 just 26 days after the final approval of the merger between the National Football League and the American Football League. CBS and NBC televised it using the same television feed but with different announcers. The networks charged $42,000 for a 30 second commercial. The two leagues had to put together a game in a hurry.
The two networks paid $9.5 million to televise the game.
The leagues couldn't even agree on which ball to use, so they compromised. When Green Bay was on offense, they used the Wilson "Duke" football. When Kansas City had the ball, they used the AFL sanctioned Spalding J5-V.
Today there is still that one feed, but the game is internationally televised. Cities bid for Super Bowls years in advance. Networks put up big money for regular season games so they could get the Super Bowl once every three years.
It's no longer NFL vs. AFL, NFL advertisers vs. AFL advertisers. CBS vs. NBC. In 1967, the American Football League and the Kansas City Chiefs were considered to be part of a "Mickey Mouse league" by Lombardi and the NFL. Lombardi was among those thinkers (a group which includes Wayne Gretzky. The hockey star used the same term in 1983 in a criticism of the New Jersey Devils) who felt that "Mickey Mouse" was a putdown.
Mickey Mouse launched the Disney empire and the trademark is worth billions globally. Lombardi was partially right using a Mickey Mouse reference back in the infancy of the Super Bowl. There is some irony in that the Walt Disney Company's ABC- TV division had the rights to broadcast the Super Bowl along with FOX and CBS under one of the past NFL-network television agreements.
Adding injury to insult, Lombardi and his Packers practiced in Southern California before the 1967 championship game not far from Disneyland because the NFL felt that was the best way to sell tickets to the contest The AFL was the Mickey Mouse league and not worthy of being on the same field as the NFL..
"He got a lot of pressure put on him by the other owners of the National Football League. That was a bitter relationship with the AFL and NFL," recalled Jerry Kramer, one of Lombardi's Packers offensive linemen. "I'm not sure there still aren't still some rivalries in that situation.
"Lombardi got calls from virtually everyone in the NFL saying we were representing the NFL and the pride of the NFL and we couldn't be beaten."
Lombardi even had to deal with William Paley's CBS Television Network and NFL partner.
"I was talking to Frank Gifford years ago and he mentioned that he announced that first Super Bowl," Kramer continued. "Gifford said he was fairly cool, fairly calm and relaxed and he went over to put his arm on Vince's shoulder and Lombardi was shaking like a leaf.
"Gifford said that really made me nervous."
Gifford, of course, was the CBS announcer who played under Lombardi when Lombardi was the New York Giants offensive coach (in 2011 parlance, an offensive coordinator) in the 1950s and represented the NFL.
Neither CBS nor NBC bothered to keep a video of the game.
Green Bay won the matchup and Lombardi was able to exhale. But Lombardi was right in this sense. The NFL was the favored league of the sports media in those days with Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated leading the charge against the AFL. Green Bay won the first two championships and the football media dismissed the American Football League and players like Joe Namath and teams like the New York Jets, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders.
The flaw in the thinking was this. The AFL was signing players out of the same college pool as the NFL and the AFL coaches like Weeb Ewbank, Sid Gillman and Al Davis came out of the NFL. The AFL has had the same TV money available to them as the NFL thanks to David Sarnoff's anger at losing the NFL contract deal to his CBS rival William Paley. Sarnoff's NBC was the AFL's bank and the Sonny Werblin used some of Sarnoff's money to sign Namath.
The name Super Bowl came by accident and it came from Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, the man who founded the AFL because he could not get an NFL team in Dallas.
"It was one of the spur of the moment things," said Hunt. "No one ever said what are we going to call it? It was one of those things that just came out of the mouth. It was not too inspired."
Hunt was home one day watching his children play with a ball when he first uttered the words.
"They each had a Super Ball that my wife had given to them and they were always talking about them and I just used the expression Super Bowl and it was an accidental thing and it seems to have caught on."
But NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle didn't like the name nor did NFL owners. Still, the game had no name and no one had suggested anything else. In fact, there was no Super Bowl Committee. It was Rozelle's idea to call the contest, The AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
"Everybody said, that's a corny name," Hunt recalled. "But the members of the committee started using that name and one thing lead to another. After the second game, it was formally adopted."
But Hunt did talk to Rozelle, and Hunt the visionary who founded the AFL was very persuasive and Rozelle listened.
"Lamar talked to me after the first couple of games and told me his daughter had a funny ball, a toy. She'd bounce it. It was a super ball," remembered Pete Rozelle in September 1990. "He said why don't we call it the Super Bowl?
"Well to me, you know when I was in high school (in the 1940s), super was a big word. You know this was super, that was super. I thought that sounds a little corny, but then finally, I decided this was worth a shot and it course it has a totally different connotation when used on the game today. We decided to do it then, so we started calling it that and it really caught on."
Rozelle did not recall any formal discussion on the name. It just became the Super Bowl by 1969 despite the fact that he didn't really like the name.
As far as the Wham-O Super Ball? It's shelve life was considerably less than the Super Bowl. It was a toy made Zectron. Chemical Engineer Norma Stingley found that when formed at 50,000 pounds of pressure, Zectron becomes uncontrollably bouncy. Wham-O began producing a ball made of Zectron in 1967, the same year that Super Bowl I was played between the Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers. After only a few years, the "double-top secret" formula for Zectron was copied by Wham-O's competitors and the Super Ball floundered. The Super Ball was out of production by 1976.
Today the Super Bowl means millions of dollars for the airline industry, the hotel industry, the rent-a-car industry, the restaurant industry in the host city and the TV industry. The league uses the promise of awarding a game to a city if that town builds a new stadium. The Super Bowl is one of the few events that brings out of town money to a sporting event.
On January 12, 1969 the Jets- Baltimore Colts match up in Miami sold out just minutes before kickoff. The Jets victory that day might have been crushing for old line NFL owners, but even Rozelle in the NFL Publication, The Super Bowl, Celebrating a Quarter of a Century of America's Greatest Game, admitted the Jets upset that day mushroomed interest in football.
The Jets-Colts game was the turning point in the popularity of the Super Bowl. The National Football League and the most of the football media thought the old league would just be better all the time.
The New York Jets were the free spending rebels from the rebel league. New York quarterback Joe Namath had a large contract, wore long hair and played in white shoes. The Colts quarterbacks, Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas both had crew cuts. Namath was known as Broadway Joe, a nickname given to him by former Colt and Jet offensive lineman Sherman Plunkett. Unitas was known as Johnny U and wore black high top shoes.
Namath had a public perception of being a playboy who enjoyed New York life to its fullest and was a braggart. Unitas had little to say.
While Ewbank was studying films of the Colts and analyzing why the Chiefs and Raiders lost, Namath was talking and was ahead of his time as a trash talk pioneer. Except Namath only said two things and was probably only echoing what his coaching staff and teammates were thinking.
Namath said there were four quarterbacks in the AFL who were better than Morrall, the Colts starter and then said, "We are going to win this game. I guarantee it."
Ewbank had to convince his Jets to keep quiet and play football and not say a thing about beating Baltimore. He was in one way seeking NFL respect but in another way laughing to Super Bowl. Weeb knew his Jets could win and the AFL was a quality league.
"They weren't giving the AFL anything," he said years later. "I thought there were two great teams in Super Bowl I and II. They were fine ball clubs. I don't think there has ever been much better material than they had at Kansas City. They had great athletes and the Raiders were a good football team.
"In both games, they let themselves get upset. In the first game, they had an interception in the third quarter and the Chiefs weren't any good in the ballgame after that after Green Bay scored. Then the Raider game, they had a dropped punt and a recovery and then they weren't in the game anymore.
"When we went into out game, we said no matter what happened, we weren't going to let it upset us. Whether it be an official call, an interception, a fumble or what. Why we weren't going to let that upset us. We were going to stick to the game plan."
But one thing Ewbank didn't count on was Namath sounding more like Muhammad Ali than the average football player.
Ewbank brought the Jets to Fort Lauderdale to work out prior to the game. The Jets stayed at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel where Namath was given the same room that Vince Lombardi used the year before. The Jets trained at the New York Yankees Fort Lauderdale spring training complex and he was given Mickey Mantle's locker. Twists of fate?
Maybe, but Namath broke the athlete's code. He guaranteed a win. Ewbank was not amused.
"We had gone down there as 17 points underdogs which I liked," he recalled. "I told the guys don't pay any attention to what I say because I want to try to make it 21 if I can. Don't you guys do anything to stir them up. Well, I could have shot Joe when he said that."
But Namath and the Jets were confident and really believed they were better than the Colts.
"That's true and I understood Coach Ewbank," said Namath. "The next day I saw Coach Ewbank and he said my goodness these guys (the Colts) are overconfident and I have been working on that and here you are giving them fuel to get fired up for the game.
"I simply said, Coach if they need clippings to fire them up, then they are in trouble. That was that. He made me aware that he was very upset that I had said what I did and I felt badly about it after that. Fortunately we won."
The Jets did go out and won 16-7. The AFL had arrived nearly 10 years after Hunt and Bud Adams decided to go ahead with their plan.
The Jets apparently didn't think too highly of the Tiffany Trophy the organization received for winning the game. The team left it behind in Miami's Orange Bowl in a backroom and returned to New York.
"The important thing was we won," said Namath.
Namath, Ewbank and the rest of the Jets permanently etched the term Super Bowl into the American mindset. Namath, the quarterback, became a TV host, sex symbol, rebel, hero and salesman.
"I don't know how much money the Super Bowls means," Hunt admitted. "I wasn't smart enough to copyright the name. That was a fatal mistake. No, I'm kidding.
"If we thought about copyrighting it, I am sure somebody would have taken the name. It is copyrighted now. But it's all from a child's toy ball."
Even Rozelle years later would admit the "Super" name probably played a major role in the event's success.
What would have happened to the NFL without its June 1966 merger with the AFL? Tex Schramm, the longtime Dallas Cowboys President and a chief architect of the merger along with Hunt, thought pro football would have been in shambles. There would have been no Broadway Joe guarantees, no Steelers, no 49ers or Cowboys, no Lombardi to talk about.
"I think football was on its way to self destruction with the two leagues," said Schramm. "Both sides were spending themselves into bankruptcy and there were only four or five clubs that could remain really competitive.
"Teams were drafting players not on the basis on whether or not they could play but whether they could be signed. Whenever that happens then your sport is in trouble and that's the way we were headed then."
At that time there were 15 NFL teams and nine AFL clubs. Instead of two
entities in a financial battle, the merger brought an end to the 1960s
version of soaring player cuts and solidified an industry that was gaining more and more popularity annually.
"The merger started the most successful growth period in the National
Football League. Because of the rivalry that had been built up with the American Football League, we were able to create the Super Bowl," Schramm explained. "The Super Bowl kind of put the icing on the cake and the interest in the National Football League kept rolling until it was the most popular spectator sport in the United States."
The ghost of Lombardi will be on display during Sunday's big game between Green Bay and Pittsburgh. The Lombardi Trophy will be shown off around 10:15 Eastern Time on Sunday night. Lombardi will be back for a day but in a sense, he has never left. There is the turnpike stop near the Meadowlands, the play on Broadway, the old adages and of course, the Lombardi Trophy. All of which is a bit odd considering that Vince Lombardi really didn't want to be at the Super Bowl.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
WEDNESDAY, 02 FEBRUARY 2011 13:38
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/super-bowl-xlv-vince-lombardi-wanted-no-part-of-the-super-bowl
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
Vince Lombardi has staged a comeback in the past year. The Broadway show, "Lombardi", is doing well and his old team, Green Bay, is playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday, an event, ironically enough that Lombardi didn't like. The Lombardi coached Green Bay Packers played in what is now known as Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II. Officially Lombardi's two teams played in the American Football League-National Football league World Championship Game.
Lombardi thought the NFL title game was the be-all, end-all NFL event.
Lombardi's teams won the 1967 and 1968 contests but Lombardi didn't get to touch the Vince Lombardi Trophy given to the Super Bowl winner. The Super Bowl became the Super Bowl in 1969 and the championship trophy was named for Lombardi following his death in 1970.
In the decades following his Lombardi's passing, the Super Bowl became a uniquely American quasi-celebration/holiday. The Fourth of July is America's Birthday Party but the Super Bowl is American's excuse for a party. Supermarkets have Super sales for countless Super parties, but it wasn't always like this.
Back in 1967, it was just called the "World Championship Game, AFL vs. NFL." The game was held in the 94,000 seat Los Angeles Coliseum. The ticket prices were $12, $10 and $6. There were 33,000 empty seats. It was the last time a Super Bowl or the World Championship Game was not a sellout.
There were no parties, no weeklong football orgies. In fact, it wasn't until January 1973 when Super Bowl parties took on a different life. The Commissioner's Party was held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.
The first game was played on January 15, 1967 just 26 days after the final approval of the merger between the National Football League and the American Football League. CBS and NBC televised it using the same television feed but with different announcers. The networks charged $42,000 for a 30 second commercial. The two leagues had to put together a game in a hurry.
The two networks paid $9.5 million to televise the game.
The leagues couldn't even agree on which ball to use, so they compromised. When Green Bay was on offense, they used the Wilson "Duke" football. When Kansas City had the ball, they used the AFL sanctioned Spalding J5-V.
Today there is still that one feed, but the game is internationally televised. Cities bid for Super Bowls years in advance. Networks put up big money for regular season games so they could get the Super Bowl once every three years.
It's no longer NFL vs. AFL, NFL advertisers vs. AFL advertisers. CBS vs. NBC. In 1967, the American Football League and the Kansas City Chiefs were considered to be part of a "Mickey Mouse league" by Lombardi and the NFL. Lombardi was among those thinkers (a group which includes Wayne Gretzky. The hockey star used the same term in 1983 in a criticism of the New Jersey Devils) who felt that "Mickey Mouse" was a putdown.
Mickey Mouse launched the Disney empire and the trademark is worth billions globally. Lombardi was partially right using a Mickey Mouse reference back in the infancy of the Super Bowl. There is some irony in that the Walt Disney Company's ABC- TV division had the rights to broadcast the Super Bowl along with FOX and CBS under one of the past NFL-network television agreements.
Adding injury to insult, Lombardi and his Packers practiced in Southern California before the 1967 championship game not far from Disneyland because the NFL felt that was the best way to sell tickets to the contest The AFL was the Mickey Mouse league and not worthy of being on the same field as the NFL..
"He got a lot of pressure put on him by the other owners of the National Football League. That was a bitter relationship with the AFL and NFL," recalled Jerry Kramer, one of Lombardi's Packers offensive linemen. "I'm not sure there still aren't still some rivalries in that situation.
"Lombardi got calls from virtually everyone in the NFL saying we were representing the NFL and the pride of the NFL and we couldn't be beaten."
Lombardi even had to deal with William Paley's CBS Television Network and NFL partner.
"I was talking to Frank Gifford years ago and he mentioned that he announced that first Super Bowl," Kramer continued. "Gifford said he was fairly cool, fairly calm and relaxed and he went over to put his arm on Vince's shoulder and Lombardi was shaking like a leaf.
"Gifford said that really made me nervous."
Gifford, of course, was the CBS announcer who played under Lombardi when Lombardi was the New York Giants offensive coach (in 2011 parlance, an offensive coordinator) in the 1950s and represented the NFL.
Neither CBS nor NBC bothered to keep a video of the game.
Green Bay won the matchup and Lombardi was able to exhale. But Lombardi was right in this sense. The NFL was the favored league of the sports media in those days with Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated leading the charge against the AFL. Green Bay won the first two championships and the football media dismissed the American Football League and players like Joe Namath and teams like the New York Jets, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders.
The flaw in the thinking was this. The AFL was signing players out of the same college pool as the NFL and the AFL coaches like Weeb Ewbank, Sid Gillman and Al Davis came out of the NFL. The AFL has had the same TV money available to them as the NFL thanks to David Sarnoff's anger at losing the NFL contract deal to his CBS rival William Paley. Sarnoff's NBC was the AFL's bank and the Sonny Werblin used some of Sarnoff's money to sign Namath.
The name Super Bowl came by accident and it came from Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, the man who founded the AFL because he could not get an NFL team in Dallas.
"It was one of the spur of the moment things," said Hunt. "No one ever said what are we going to call it? It was one of those things that just came out of the mouth. It was not too inspired."
Hunt was home one day watching his children play with a ball when he first uttered the words.
"They each had a Super Ball that my wife had given to them and they were always talking about them and I just used the expression Super Bowl and it was an accidental thing and it seems to have caught on."
But NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle didn't like the name nor did NFL owners. Still, the game had no name and no one had suggested anything else. In fact, there was no Super Bowl Committee. It was Rozelle's idea to call the contest, The AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
"Everybody said, that's a corny name," Hunt recalled. "But the members of the committee started using that name and one thing lead to another. After the second game, it was formally adopted."
But Hunt did talk to Rozelle, and Hunt the visionary who founded the AFL was very persuasive and Rozelle listened.
"Lamar talked to me after the first couple of games and told me his daughter had a funny ball, a toy. She'd bounce it. It was a super ball," remembered Pete Rozelle in September 1990. "He said why don't we call it the Super Bowl?
"Well to me, you know when I was in high school (in the 1940s), super was a big word. You know this was super, that was super. I thought that sounds a little corny, but then finally, I decided this was worth a shot and it course it has a totally different connotation when used on the game today. We decided to do it then, so we started calling it that and it really caught on."
Rozelle did not recall any formal discussion on the name. It just became the Super Bowl by 1969 despite the fact that he didn't really like the name.
As far as the Wham-O Super Ball? It's shelve life was considerably less than the Super Bowl. It was a toy made Zectron. Chemical Engineer Norma Stingley found that when formed at 50,000 pounds of pressure, Zectron becomes uncontrollably bouncy. Wham-O began producing a ball made of Zectron in 1967, the same year that Super Bowl I was played between the Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers. After only a few years, the "double-top secret" formula for Zectron was copied by Wham-O's competitors and the Super Ball floundered. The Super Ball was out of production by 1976.
Today the Super Bowl means millions of dollars for the airline industry, the hotel industry, the rent-a-car industry, the restaurant industry in the host city and the TV industry. The league uses the promise of awarding a game to a city if that town builds a new stadium. The Super Bowl is one of the few events that brings out of town money to a sporting event.
On January 12, 1969 the Jets- Baltimore Colts match up in Miami sold out just minutes before kickoff. The Jets victory that day might have been crushing for old line NFL owners, but even Rozelle in the NFL Publication, The Super Bowl, Celebrating a Quarter of a Century of America's Greatest Game, admitted the Jets upset that day mushroomed interest in football.
The Jets-Colts game was the turning point in the popularity of the Super Bowl. The National Football League and the most of the football media thought the old league would just be better all the time.
The New York Jets were the free spending rebels from the rebel league. New York quarterback Joe Namath had a large contract, wore long hair and played in white shoes. The Colts quarterbacks, Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas both had crew cuts. Namath was known as Broadway Joe, a nickname given to him by former Colt and Jet offensive lineman Sherman Plunkett. Unitas was known as Johnny U and wore black high top shoes.
Namath had a public perception of being a playboy who enjoyed New York life to its fullest and was a braggart. Unitas had little to say.
While Ewbank was studying films of the Colts and analyzing why the Chiefs and Raiders lost, Namath was talking and was ahead of his time as a trash talk pioneer. Except Namath only said two things and was probably only echoing what his coaching staff and teammates were thinking.
Namath said there were four quarterbacks in the AFL who were better than Morrall, the Colts starter and then said, "We are going to win this game. I guarantee it."
Ewbank had to convince his Jets to keep quiet and play football and not say a thing about beating Baltimore. He was in one way seeking NFL respect but in another way laughing to Super Bowl. Weeb knew his Jets could win and the AFL was a quality league.
"They weren't giving the AFL anything," he said years later. "I thought there were two great teams in Super Bowl I and II. They were fine ball clubs. I don't think there has ever been much better material than they had at Kansas City. They had great athletes and the Raiders were a good football team.
"In both games, they let themselves get upset. In the first game, they had an interception in the third quarter and the Chiefs weren't any good in the ballgame after that after Green Bay scored. Then the Raider game, they had a dropped punt and a recovery and then they weren't in the game anymore.
"When we went into out game, we said no matter what happened, we weren't going to let it upset us. Whether it be an official call, an interception, a fumble or what. Why we weren't going to let that upset us. We were going to stick to the game plan."
But one thing Ewbank didn't count on was Namath sounding more like Muhammad Ali than the average football player.
Ewbank brought the Jets to Fort Lauderdale to work out prior to the game. The Jets stayed at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel where Namath was given the same room that Vince Lombardi used the year before. The Jets trained at the New York Yankees Fort Lauderdale spring training complex and he was given Mickey Mantle's locker. Twists of fate?
Maybe, but Namath broke the athlete's code. He guaranteed a win. Ewbank was not amused.
"We had gone down there as 17 points underdogs which I liked," he recalled. "I told the guys don't pay any attention to what I say because I want to try to make it 21 if I can. Don't you guys do anything to stir them up. Well, I could have shot Joe when he said that."
But Namath and the Jets were confident and really believed they were better than the Colts.
"That's true and I understood Coach Ewbank," said Namath. "The next day I saw Coach Ewbank and he said my goodness these guys (the Colts) are overconfident and I have been working on that and here you are giving them fuel to get fired up for the game.
"I simply said, Coach if they need clippings to fire them up, then they are in trouble. That was that. He made me aware that he was very upset that I had said what I did and I felt badly about it after that. Fortunately we won."
The Jets did go out and won 16-7. The AFL had arrived nearly 10 years after Hunt and Bud Adams decided to go ahead with their plan.
The Jets apparently didn't think too highly of the Tiffany Trophy the organization received for winning the game. The team left it behind in Miami's Orange Bowl in a backroom and returned to New York.
"The important thing was we won," said Namath.
Namath, Ewbank and the rest of the Jets permanently etched the term Super Bowl into the American mindset. Namath, the quarterback, became a TV host, sex symbol, rebel, hero and salesman.
"I don't know how much money the Super Bowls means," Hunt admitted. "I wasn't smart enough to copyright the name. That was a fatal mistake. No, I'm kidding.
"If we thought about copyrighting it, I am sure somebody would have taken the name. It is copyrighted now. But it's all from a child's toy ball."
Even Rozelle years later would admit the "Super" name probably played a major role in the event's success.
What would have happened to the NFL without its June 1966 merger with the AFL? Tex Schramm, the longtime Dallas Cowboys President and a chief architect of the merger along with Hunt, thought pro football would have been in shambles. There would have been no Broadway Joe guarantees, no Steelers, no 49ers or Cowboys, no Lombardi to talk about.
"I think football was on its way to self destruction with the two leagues," said Schramm. "Both sides were spending themselves into bankruptcy and there were only four or five clubs that could remain really competitive.
"Teams were drafting players not on the basis on whether or not they could play but whether they could be signed. Whenever that happens then your sport is in trouble and that's the way we were headed then."
At that time there were 15 NFL teams and nine AFL clubs. Instead of two
entities in a financial battle, the merger brought an end to the 1960s
version of soaring player cuts and solidified an industry that was gaining more and more popularity annually.
"The merger started the most successful growth period in the National
Football League. Because of the rivalry that had been built up with the American Football League, we were able to create the Super Bowl," Schramm explained. "The Super Bowl kind of put the icing on the cake and the interest in the National Football League kept rolling until it was the most popular spectator sport in the United States."
The ghost of Lombardi will be on display during Sunday's big game between Green Bay and Pittsburgh. The Lombardi Trophy will be shown off around 10:15 Eastern Time on Sunday night. Lombardi will be back for a day but in a sense, he has never left. There is the turnpike stop near the Meadowlands, the play on Broadway, the old adages and of course, the Lombardi Trophy. All of which is a bit odd considering that Vince Lombardi really didn't want to be at the Super Bowl.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, January 21, 2011
Bears and Packers: Bitter Rivals? Not Really
By Evan Weiner
January 21, 2011
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/bears-and-packers-bitter-rivals-not-really
(New York, N. Y.) -- Those bitter old rivals, the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers, who take to the football field in Chicago on Sunday, really aren't the bitter old rivals after all. You see the football teams in Chicago and Green Bay are really old business partners who needed each other's financial support to survive in the very early days of the National Football League in the 1920s and were still dependent on each other as late as the 1950s.
In 1919, Earl (Curly) Lambeau and George Calhoun organized a football team in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lambeau and Calhoun may not have realized what they were doing at the time, but Green Bay's football team was named after the team's benefactor and Lambeau's employer, the Indian Packing Company, Green Bay was not paid of any league and played whoever was available.
The Indian Packing Company gave Lambeau $500 for equipment and allowed the team to use the company field for practices. Lambeau's team might have been the first "pro" football club to depend on corporate backing for naming rights even if it was just $500. Interestingly enough, the Chicago Bears franchise has a similar history.
There was a momentum to organize football into some entity after World War I. In 1920, The American Professional Football Conference came about because of three reasons. Rising salaries was becoming a problem; players were jumping from one team to another following the highest offers and the use of college players still enrolled in schools. The "owners" of the day sound an awful lot like the owners of 2010 complaining about giving players too much of the revenues generated by football games.
On August 20, 1920, the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians and Dayton Triangles agreed to join a league that would follow the same rules. Four weeks later, there was another meeting in Canton with Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Dayton from Ohio, the Hammond Pros and the Muncie Flyers from Indiana, the Rochester Jeffersons of New York and the Decatur Staleys, Racine Cardinals and Rock Island Independents in attendance.
The group changed the name of the circuit to the American Professional Football Association, charged a $100 a franchise membership fee and named Jim Thorpe President of the APFA. None of the teams ever paid the $100. There was no league schedule as teams could play whatever opponent they could book and four other teams joined the league, the Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandlers and the Detroit Heralds.
The APFA's first game was on September 26 when Rock Island defeated the St. Paul Ideals 48-0 before 800 fans at home. By season's end, the Chicago Tigers and Detroit had folded.
In 1921, the APFA had 22 teams including the first year Green Bay Packers. A. E. Staley turned the Decatur Staleys over to George Halas who moved the team to Cubs Park. Staley gave George Halas $5,000 to retain the Staley name for another season. The Staleys who finished 9-1-1 were named champions. Staley was a big producer of corn based products and was another corporate sponsor, a much bigger benefactor than the Indian Packing Company.
In 1922, Green Bay withdrew from the league after admitting the Packers used college players the year before. Curly Lambeau rescued the team by putting up $50 to buy the franchise and promised to obey APFA rules. Lambeau went broke keeping the Packers going but local businesses arranged a $2,500 loan to keep the team playing. By year's end, a public non-profit cooperation was set up to operate the team and that arrangement is still in place eight decades later.
On June 24, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League and the Chicago Staleys became the Chicago Bears.
Halas was already wielded an enormous amount of power in the newly named NFL. As the NFL came into existence, the owners adopted a constitution that required an owner's vote to approve a franchise move. That night, Halas moved the Bears to Chicago without a vote.
The Bears and Packers became bitter rivals in the 1920s yet allies in many ways. Lambeau and Halas needed one another and the NFL needed them.
"Halas came up the hard way, sort of like we did, we were a town team that had to struggle through a number of financial crisis in our early history and he had somewhat the same. His wife had a laundry and they did the uniforms.
"When he started out, he did press releases in long hand and delivered them to the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times, a think it may have been a case of a common experience, a common bond and also there was a strong, intense rivalry between the two teams in part because of the two guys who coached them, Halas and Curly Lambeau who coached the Packers. Lambeau was equally intense, I can assure you," said Lee Remmel, a long time Green Bay Press Gazette sportswriter and Packer Public Relations Director.
"In 1956 when (Green Bay) had a citywide referendum to funding the building of the stadium that is now Lambeau Field, (Halas) came up personally and spoke on behalf of the referendum, the yes vote obviously.
"He was one of the key figures in getting the equal sharing of television revenue when the league went to television. That is a big factor in our survival in the NFL. Without it, obviously we would not."
Green Bay Packers officials knew Halas would do anything to win on the field, but he was extremely important in helping to maintain the franchise in northern Wisconsin. But Green Bay also helped assure the finances of the Bears as well.
"We did make a loan to Halas one time to meet his payroll in his early days," Remmel said. "In fact, when he did his book Halas by Halas in 1979, he asked me if I could find an affidavit or an IOU and I tracked it down at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It was an IOU that the Packers had loaned Halas something like $1,500 in 1930."
Neither Halas nor Lambeau seemed to be a stickler for rules. The 1925 season would be a turning point for the league as Harold (Red) Grange signed a contract with George Halas and the Bears following his All-American season at the University of Illinois. Halas admitted to signing Grange early, before his college eligibility was up.
On Thanksgiving Day, Grange made his debut as the Bears hosted the Chicago Cardinals at Wrigley Field before a crowd of 36,000. At the beginning of December, the Bears went on an eight game, 12-day barnstorming tour in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit and back to Chicago.
The Bears-Giants game at New York's Polo Grounds drew 73,000 people and gave the struggling first year New York Giants franchise a much needed financial lift. The Bears went out west and attracted a crowd of 75,000 in Los Angeles. Because of Grange's drawing power, the NFL faced its first competition from a league called the American Football League in 1926.
Grange made $100,000 and his manager/agent's C.C. Pyle, often referred to as "Cash and Carry Pyle," also made $100,000. Grange played 18 games in three months. More importantly for the NFL, the Galloping Ghost brought the pro league much needed publicity.
Pyle told Halas that Grange wanted a five-figured contract and one-third ownership in the Bears for 1926 season. Halas refused. Pyle leased Yankee Stadium in New York and then petitioned the NFL for a franchise. The NFL refused. Giant owner Tim Mara felt threatened with Pyle's request and the NFL backed up Mara.
Pyle then started the AFL, which included a New York Yankees team led by Grange, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, Newark and a road team representing Los Angeles. The ninth team Rock Island jumped over from the NFL. Grange's presence could not save the AFL and the NFL came up with a new star, the Duluth Eskimos Ernie Nevers who played in 29 games throughout the country to earn his $15,000 paycheck.
Halas got legislation through that prevented people like Red Grange from joining a team in mid season. Teams could not sign a player whose college class had not graduated. Halas then put a stop to a common practice. In the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, there is an exhibit that goes back to those days when it was very common for a player to suit up for a college team on Saturday and a pro team on Sunday. The Grange signing clearly violated NFL rules, but the signing of Red Grange, and the subsequent national barnstorming tour of the Bears may have saved the NFL in the 1920's.
"We have some headgear from the 1920s and 1930s. The headgear not only went over the head and behind the head, but over the face too," said John Bankert, who was the Executive Director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the 1990s. "A lot of people say it was facial protection, but I don't believe that though. Many of those guys played in college on Saturday and under an assumed name on Sunday.
"George Trafton, however, who played for Notre Dame as a center also played some pro football in those early days. He had part of his index finger missing. So when he would reach down on the ball, a guy across the line who says, "Hey, didn't I see you yesterday? Trafton would say, "If you saw me then you must have played too!"
Green Bay was the last of the small towns in the NFL after Portsmouth, Ohio’s team moved to Detroit in 1934. Green Bay and Chicago's histories date back to a place that no longer exists. The NFL of 1922 included the Chicago Cardinals, a franchise that now plays in Glendale, Arizona and the Dayton Triangles, a team that moved to Brooklyn in 1930 and ended up in Indianapolis after various attempts at success in Brooklyn, Boston, New York, Miami (All American Football Conference), Baltimore, New York, Dallas, Baltimore and finally Indianapolis. All the other teams have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
The oldest rivals in the NFL clearly are dependent on one another and football in Chicago and Green Bay would not be the same if Green Bay disappeared from the NFL. Lambeau saved Halas and Halas returned the favor in the 1950s.
Bitter rivals? Maybe not.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble's xplana.com and amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
By Evan Weiner
January 21, 2011
http://www.examiner.com/business-of-sports-in-national/bears-and-packers-bitter-rivals-not-really
(New York, N. Y.) -- Those bitter old rivals, the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers, who take to the football field in Chicago on Sunday, really aren't the bitter old rivals after all. You see the football teams in Chicago and Green Bay are really old business partners who needed each other's financial support to survive in the very early days of the National Football League in the 1920s and were still dependent on each other as late as the 1950s.
In 1919, Earl (Curly) Lambeau and George Calhoun organized a football team in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lambeau and Calhoun may not have realized what they were doing at the time, but Green Bay's football team was named after the team's benefactor and Lambeau's employer, the Indian Packing Company, Green Bay was not paid of any league and played whoever was available.
The Indian Packing Company gave Lambeau $500 for equipment and allowed the team to use the company field for practices. Lambeau's team might have been the first "pro" football club to depend on corporate backing for naming rights even if it was just $500. Interestingly enough, the Chicago Bears franchise has a similar history.
There was a momentum to organize football into some entity after World War I. In 1920, The American Professional Football Conference came about because of three reasons. Rising salaries was becoming a problem; players were jumping from one team to another following the highest offers and the use of college players still enrolled in schools. The "owners" of the day sound an awful lot like the owners of 2010 complaining about giving players too much of the revenues generated by football games.
On August 20, 1920, the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians and Dayton Triangles agreed to join a league that would follow the same rules. Four weeks later, there was another meeting in Canton with Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Dayton from Ohio, the Hammond Pros and the Muncie Flyers from Indiana, the Rochester Jeffersons of New York and the Decatur Staleys, Racine Cardinals and Rock Island Independents in attendance.
The group changed the name of the circuit to the American Professional Football Association, charged a $100 a franchise membership fee and named Jim Thorpe President of the APFA. None of the teams ever paid the $100. There was no league schedule as teams could play whatever opponent they could book and four other teams joined the league, the Buffalo All-Americans, Chicago Tigers, Columbus Panhandlers and the Detroit Heralds.
The APFA's first game was on September 26 when Rock Island defeated the St. Paul Ideals 48-0 before 800 fans at home. By season's end, the Chicago Tigers and Detroit had folded.
In 1921, the APFA had 22 teams including the first year Green Bay Packers. A. E. Staley turned the Decatur Staleys over to George Halas who moved the team to Cubs Park. Staley gave George Halas $5,000 to retain the Staley name for another season. The Staleys who finished 9-1-1 were named champions. Staley was a big producer of corn based products and was another corporate sponsor, a much bigger benefactor than the Indian Packing Company.
In 1922, Green Bay withdrew from the league after admitting the Packers used college players the year before. Curly Lambeau rescued the team by putting up $50 to buy the franchise and promised to obey APFA rules. Lambeau went broke keeping the Packers going but local businesses arranged a $2,500 loan to keep the team playing. By year's end, a public non-profit cooperation was set up to operate the team and that arrangement is still in place eight decades later.
On June 24, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League and the Chicago Staleys became the Chicago Bears.
Halas was already wielded an enormous amount of power in the newly named NFL. As the NFL came into existence, the owners adopted a constitution that required an owner's vote to approve a franchise move. That night, Halas moved the Bears to Chicago without a vote.
The Bears and Packers became bitter rivals in the 1920s yet allies in many ways. Lambeau and Halas needed one another and the NFL needed them.
"Halas came up the hard way, sort of like we did, we were a town team that had to struggle through a number of financial crisis in our early history and he had somewhat the same. His wife had a laundry and they did the uniforms.
"When he started out, he did press releases in long hand and delivered them to the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times, a think it may have been a case of a common experience, a common bond and also there was a strong, intense rivalry between the two teams in part because of the two guys who coached them, Halas and Curly Lambeau who coached the Packers. Lambeau was equally intense, I can assure you," said Lee Remmel, a long time Green Bay Press Gazette sportswriter and Packer Public Relations Director.
"In 1956 when (Green Bay) had a citywide referendum to funding the building of the stadium that is now Lambeau Field, (Halas) came up personally and spoke on behalf of the referendum, the yes vote obviously.
"He was one of the key figures in getting the equal sharing of television revenue when the league went to television. That is a big factor in our survival in the NFL. Without it, obviously we would not."
Green Bay Packers officials knew Halas would do anything to win on the field, but he was extremely important in helping to maintain the franchise in northern Wisconsin. But Green Bay also helped assure the finances of the Bears as well.
"We did make a loan to Halas one time to meet his payroll in his early days," Remmel said. "In fact, when he did his book Halas by Halas in 1979, he asked me if I could find an affidavit or an IOU and I tracked it down at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It was an IOU that the Packers had loaned Halas something like $1,500 in 1930."
Neither Halas nor Lambeau seemed to be a stickler for rules. The 1925 season would be a turning point for the league as Harold (Red) Grange signed a contract with George Halas and the Bears following his All-American season at the University of Illinois. Halas admitted to signing Grange early, before his college eligibility was up.
On Thanksgiving Day, Grange made his debut as the Bears hosted the Chicago Cardinals at Wrigley Field before a crowd of 36,000. At the beginning of December, the Bears went on an eight game, 12-day barnstorming tour in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit and back to Chicago.
The Bears-Giants game at New York's Polo Grounds drew 73,000 people and gave the struggling first year New York Giants franchise a much needed financial lift. The Bears went out west and attracted a crowd of 75,000 in Los Angeles. Because of Grange's drawing power, the NFL faced its first competition from a league called the American Football League in 1926.
Grange made $100,000 and his manager/agent's C.C. Pyle, often referred to as "Cash and Carry Pyle," also made $100,000. Grange played 18 games in three months. More importantly for the NFL, the Galloping Ghost brought the pro league much needed publicity.
Pyle told Halas that Grange wanted a five-figured contract and one-third ownership in the Bears for 1926 season. Halas refused. Pyle leased Yankee Stadium in New York and then petitioned the NFL for a franchise. The NFL refused. Giant owner Tim Mara felt threatened with Pyle's request and the NFL backed up Mara.
Pyle then started the AFL, which included a New York Yankees team led by Grange, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, Newark and a road team representing Los Angeles. The ninth team Rock Island jumped over from the NFL. Grange's presence could not save the AFL and the NFL came up with a new star, the Duluth Eskimos Ernie Nevers who played in 29 games throughout the country to earn his $15,000 paycheck.
Halas got legislation through that prevented people like Red Grange from joining a team in mid season. Teams could not sign a player whose college class had not graduated. Halas then put a stop to a common practice. In the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, there is an exhibit that goes back to those days when it was very common for a player to suit up for a college team on Saturday and a pro team on Sunday. The Grange signing clearly violated NFL rules, but the signing of Red Grange, and the subsequent national barnstorming tour of the Bears may have saved the NFL in the 1920's.
"We have some headgear from the 1920s and 1930s. The headgear not only went over the head and behind the head, but over the face too," said John Bankert, who was the Executive Director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the 1990s. "A lot of people say it was facial protection, but I don't believe that though. Many of those guys played in college on Saturday and under an assumed name on Sunday.
"George Trafton, however, who played for Notre Dame as a center also played some pro football in those early days. He had part of his index finger missing. So when he would reach down on the ball, a guy across the line who says, "Hey, didn't I see you yesterday? Trafton would say, "If you saw me then you must have played too!"
Green Bay was the last of the small towns in the NFL after Portsmouth, Ohio’s team moved to Detroit in 1934. Green Bay and Chicago's histories date back to a place that no longer exists. The NFL of 1922 included the Chicago Cardinals, a franchise that now plays in Glendale, Arizona and the Dayton Triangles, a team that moved to Brooklyn in 1930 and ended up in Indianapolis after various attempts at success in Brooklyn, Boston, New York, Miami (All American Football Conference), Baltimore, New York, Dallas, Baltimore and finally Indianapolis. All the other teams have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
The oldest rivals in the NFL clearly are dependent on one another and football in Chicago and Green Bay would not be the same if Green Bay disappeared from the NFL. Lambeau saved Halas and Halas returned the favor in the 1950s.
Bitter rivals? Maybe not.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble's xplana.com and amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Friday, July 30, 2010
There was a time when the Canadian Football League was a serious threat to the NFL
There was a time when the Canadian Football League was a serious threat to the NFL
FRIDAY, 30 JULY 2010 08:42
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/there-was-a-time-when-the-canadian-football-league-was-a-serious-threat-to-the-nfl
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
The New York Giants and Jets are opening up training camp in the next few days and all eyes will be on SUNY Cortland for Jets fans and SUNY Albany for Giants fans as the teams prepare for the 2010 season. But once upon a time, the National Football League and the Giants were considered a real alternative to the Canadian Football League.
The CFL paid better salaries.
In 1953, the NFL would set an attendance record and by 1954 most of the NFL teams had local TV contracts. No matter, the NFL was a step above semi-pro football and another league had set its sights on a war with the NFL.
The Canadian Football League.
The CFL signed the 1952 Heisman Trophy Winner Billy Vessels, along with Eddie LeBaron and Gene Brito. In 1955, LeBaron, Brito, Norb Heckler, Alex Webster and Tom Dublinski left the CFL for NFL teams after representatives from the two competing leagues failed to work out a no raiding treaty.
The CFL gave up on competing with the NFL by 1956, but Frank Tripucka who was the Saskatchewan Roughriders quarterback said people should not have dismissed the CFL as just another league somewhere north of the United States border. Tripucka was with the Dallas Texans franchise that played in Akron and practiced in Hershey, Pa.
"A lot of people think, even in those days, that the National Football League was the almighty league but it really wasn't," said Tripucka.
The National Football League in those days was haphazard.
"I'd come home here (to New Jersey, after the CFL season had ended) and I'd watch the Giants play at the Polo Grounds and you could walk up to the ticket window and buy yourself a ticket to anywhere in the place that you wanted. I am talking about 1952, 53, 55. The time the Giants turned it around was the time they moved from the Polo Grounds to the Yankee Stadium in 1956.
"They had the playoff game for the National Football championship against that Baltimore which was that Dallas franchise. I was their property, but I decided, I came home and I was going to call it quits.
"I was totally disenchanted with football, so I came back here to Bloomfield, New Jersey to call it quits and I get a call from Saskatchewan and the fellow says what would it take you to come up here and play? I'm making a big $12,000 at that time, so I hurrily say $25,000 and he says you got it. That was the year they opened up the Canadian League to eight Americans, prior to that they only had three Americans on each team.
"The instructions they had given us was that if you were coming to Canada, don't tell anybody. Because they were going to put an injunction against you, so what most of the players did was say they were going to retire and then they went to Canada and started practicing.
"By that time the Canadian courts wouldn't send you back so you could play the season. If the National Football League wanted to sue you, they would sue you after the season was finished. Most of them didn't bother you, so that's how we got away with it."
Tripuka recited the names of Kenny Carpenter, Mac Speedie, Neill Armstrong, Bud Grant, Frankie Albert, John Henry Johnson who jumped from the NFL to the CFL.
"These were the all the type of people who went up there, so you can see the National Football League in those days wasn't that almighty so to speak. We all went up there and it was great because we played 14 games, you got up there in July and you were home in November. Whereas in the National Football League you were in January when you got home and you were making double the money.
Tripucka started with the Chicago Cardinals and ended up in Dallas in his brief NFL career, but he knew one thing about the National Football League. Bert Bell might have been the Commissioner but George Halas was running the league in the early 1950s.
"He was the founder and he pretty much ran that league," said Tripucka of Halas' influence thirty years after the NFL got its start in a Canton auto dealership. "Many a time we used to kid on the field on sideline that a referee would reach into his pocket and first look over on the sideline to George Halas. If Halas didn't give him any sign, he'd throw the flag. If Halas shook his head no, he wouldn't throw the flag."
When the CFL stopped competing, the owners had another problem. In 1956, an early form of the National Football League Players Association formed and started pushing for a minimum salary of $5,000 and pension benefits.
Canadians playing in the CFL were working a fulltime job and playing football. The Americans were commanding big salaries and Tripucka said in many ways, the CFL of the 1950s resembled the NFL in the 1920s.
"We didn't have too," he said, "The funny thing about is this is why the native Canadians liked the Americans because they felt this was going to raise their salaries up. Because these poor kids were playing for $50 just like our semi-pros down here.
"You talk to some of these old-timers from the National Football League, when the league first started they were getting $100 a game, $50 a game. Well it was the same thing up in Canada. Of course when they brought the Americans in and raised those salaries then the Canadian kids started to get more money.
Tom Landry actually started his career with the New York Yankees of the AAFC in 1949 and moved to the NFL in 1950 when the Yankees folded with the AAFC. Landry and four others joined the New York Giants. Landry would stay there until 1955, and then coach the defense through 1959.
Landry actually was planning to get out of football because it was not a professional that paid much money and going into private business around the Dallas area at the end of the decade.
"Well I think the 1950s was an interesting era," said Landry. "In that nobody made any money. I signed for $6,000 when I started and a $500 bonus. We didn't make any money but I think we had a good time playing the game.
"We weren't concerned about the other guy who made more money than we did. We weren't worried about those things. We just went out to play football. I think that's what the guys really feel good about the fifties."
Despite becoming more and more popular in the 1950s, the NFL was a part time operation. Stan Jones was an offensive lineman with George Halas' Chicago Bears and would report to training camp in July and finish his season in December and look for another job. In fact, Halas wasn't even around in the off-season.
"We weren't a full time operation. A lot of people don't realize that. The football teams closed up after the last game of the year and packed everything away and George Halas wasn't a fulltime football man himself.
"He had a sporting goods business and all the other caches would go on their life's work," said Jones, a pro football Hall of Famer. "And everybody would get together next July and back to football. In the off-season, you couldn't find the Chicago Bears other than the ticket office which was in the Halas and May Sporting Goods Company. There wasn't anything at Wrigley Field because that was the Cub home ballpark. There wasn't any place where you could say this is where the Chicago Bears are."
Life at the Chicago Bears training camp in the 1950s wasn't too much different from the other 11 teams. None of the players were paid during the eight weeks of preparation. In fact, the players didn't even have their own equipment except for shoes.
"They used the old gym at St. Joseph's College and they got out all duffel bags out and dumped everything on the floor and you went down and found a pair of shoulder pads that fit. A pair of hip pads that fit. And if nobody else claimed them, they were yours," said Jones.
"Of course you had to bring your own shoes. What happened, a lot of guys would get cut and when they were about to leave, one of the older players would say I'll give you three dollars for your shoes. Then he would sell the shoes at $10 and make a hell of a profit. We had a bunch of older players who were trading shoes. They pick them up cheat from guys who got cut, they needed the money to go home and the guy coming in needed a new pair of shoes, the old guys gave them a deal."
But shoes weren't the only things available on the player's black market. Fans were a major commodity at the central Indiana school as there was no air conditioning.
"A guy would come in and she I'm dying in here," Jones continued. "I'd say, we will sell you a fan. You couldn't buy them at Montgomery Ward's because they would be sold out in a real hot summer.
So you'd have these fans. Guys would get cut and you'd say, hey I like your fan, I'll give you five dollars for it. The next guy coming in, you'd sell it for $10.
"You never got your first paycheck until after I made the team in September unless you got cut and then they would give you money to go home with. On the other hand, they took care of all your expenses and things like that. But if you wanted to go out and get a beer, it was on your own money."
While Jones was responsible for his shoes in Chicago, Steelers players didn't have that problem.
"I used to go to camp, actually since the time I was five years old, we did issue equipment. We didn't just throw it out for them," said Dan Rooney, the son of Steelers owner Art Rooney. "We used to get in some battles with them about different things. I will tell you a great aside, when the union, their first demand was a second pair of football shoes. As you know today when you go into the locker room they have 30. But there was the demand back in 1958.
"Jack Butler, who was a great player for us and had gone to the Pro Bowl and probably should be in the Hall of Fame, he wore the same shoes for three years because they were his luck shoes and he had taped them on. We said, hey you can't be doing that. We did give them one pair each year. We said use the new shoes. He thought they were good luck the shoes that he had. He wore them literarily out."
When the season ended in the 1950s, so did football as a main vocation. New York fans may have wildly cheered the New York Giants defensive lineman Andy Robustelli on six Sundays a season, but on the Monday after the final game, it was back to work in the civilian world. Robustelli was a great player for the Los Angeles Rams between 1951 and 1955, playing in the Pro Bowl twice. But Robustelli's fortune was to be made at his Connecticut businesses not on the playing field of the Los Angeles Coliseum and he requested a trade to the New York Giants because he simply couldn't afford to live in Los Angeles, spent eight weeks without being paid for training camp and then play a 12 week season 3,000 miles away. Without the trade, Robustelli would have retired.
"Each player the day that the season was over, you were free and you looked for a job. You wouldn't see each other until next year. I think, and with all respect to the modern ballplayer, I hope the modern ballplayer appreciates, not only the opportunity, but...football is a stepping stone it's not the end of life," said Robustelli who became a successful businessman in Connecticut once his Giant days were through.
It was a different time, a different life for players who literally played for nothing and had few, if any benefits. There were no great business minds in the NFL of those days, the names that are saluted now, Halas, Rooney, Tim Mara, Bert Bell were actually second rate thinkers that had no vision for their product. It seems absurd to think that Saskatchewan could outbid NFL teams for talent but in the 1950s, the Green Bay Packers held fund raisers throughout Wisconsin and literally passed the hat so the team could operate season to season and in some cities, owners could not even give away NFL tickets. Today there are multi-billion dollar TV contracts, stadiums that cost more than a billion dollars in East Rutherford, N.J., and Arlington, Tx., thanks to two bills passed by Congress in the 1960s and signed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson -- the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 and the 1966 AFL-NFL merger -- which made the league the cash cow it is today.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
LAST UPDATED ( FRIDAY, 30 JULY 2010 08:42 )
FRIDAY, 30 JULY 2010 08:42
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/there-was-a-time-when-the-canadian-football-league-was-a-serious-threat-to-the-nfl
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
The New York Giants and Jets are opening up training camp in the next few days and all eyes will be on SUNY Cortland for Jets fans and SUNY Albany for Giants fans as the teams prepare for the 2010 season. But once upon a time, the National Football League and the Giants were considered a real alternative to the Canadian Football League.
The CFL paid better salaries.
In 1953, the NFL would set an attendance record and by 1954 most of the NFL teams had local TV contracts. No matter, the NFL was a step above semi-pro football and another league had set its sights on a war with the NFL.
The Canadian Football League.
The CFL signed the 1952 Heisman Trophy Winner Billy Vessels, along with Eddie LeBaron and Gene Brito. In 1955, LeBaron, Brito, Norb Heckler, Alex Webster and Tom Dublinski left the CFL for NFL teams after representatives from the two competing leagues failed to work out a no raiding treaty.
The CFL gave up on competing with the NFL by 1956, but Frank Tripucka who was the Saskatchewan Roughriders quarterback said people should not have dismissed the CFL as just another league somewhere north of the United States border. Tripucka was with the Dallas Texans franchise that played in Akron and practiced in Hershey, Pa.
"A lot of people think, even in those days, that the National Football League was the almighty league but it really wasn't," said Tripucka.
The National Football League in those days was haphazard.
"I'd come home here (to New Jersey, after the CFL season had ended) and I'd watch the Giants play at the Polo Grounds and you could walk up to the ticket window and buy yourself a ticket to anywhere in the place that you wanted. I am talking about 1952, 53, 55. The time the Giants turned it around was the time they moved from the Polo Grounds to the Yankee Stadium in 1956.
"They had the playoff game for the National Football championship against that Baltimore which was that Dallas franchise. I was their property, but I decided, I came home and I was going to call it quits.
"I was totally disenchanted with football, so I came back here to Bloomfield, New Jersey to call it quits and I get a call from Saskatchewan and the fellow says what would it take you to come up here and play? I'm making a big $12,000 at that time, so I hurrily say $25,000 and he says you got it. That was the year they opened up the Canadian League to eight Americans, prior to that they only had three Americans on each team.
"The instructions they had given us was that if you were coming to Canada, don't tell anybody. Because they were going to put an injunction against you, so what most of the players did was say they were going to retire and then they went to Canada and started practicing.
"By that time the Canadian courts wouldn't send you back so you could play the season. If the National Football League wanted to sue you, they would sue you after the season was finished. Most of them didn't bother you, so that's how we got away with it."
Tripuka recited the names of Kenny Carpenter, Mac Speedie, Neill Armstrong, Bud Grant, Frankie Albert, John Henry Johnson who jumped from the NFL to the CFL.
"These were the all the type of people who went up there, so you can see the National Football League in those days wasn't that almighty so to speak. We all went up there and it was great because we played 14 games, you got up there in July and you were home in November. Whereas in the National Football League you were in January when you got home and you were making double the money.
Tripucka started with the Chicago Cardinals and ended up in Dallas in his brief NFL career, but he knew one thing about the National Football League. Bert Bell might have been the Commissioner but George Halas was running the league in the early 1950s.
"He was the founder and he pretty much ran that league," said Tripucka of Halas' influence thirty years after the NFL got its start in a Canton auto dealership. "Many a time we used to kid on the field on sideline that a referee would reach into his pocket and first look over on the sideline to George Halas. If Halas didn't give him any sign, he'd throw the flag. If Halas shook his head no, he wouldn't throw the flag."
When the CFL stopped competing, the owners had another problem. In 1956, an early form of the National Football League Players Association formed and started pushing for a minimum salary of $5,000 and pension benefits.
Canadians playing in the CFL were working a fulltime job and playing football. The Americans were commanding big salaries and Tripucka said in many ways, the CFL of the 1950s resembled the NFL in the 1920s.
"We didn't have too," he said, "The funny thing about is this is why the native Canadians liked the Americans because they felt this was going to raise their salaries up. Because these poor kids were playing for $50 just like our semi-pros down here.
"You talk to some of these old-timers from the National Football League, when the league first started they were getting $100 a game, $50 a game. Well it was the same thing up in Canada. Of course when they brought the Americans in and raised those salaries then the Canadian kids started to get more money.
Tom Landry actually started his career with the New York Yankees of the AAFC in 1949 and moved to the NFL in 1950 when the Yankees folded with the AAFC. Landry and four others joined the New York Giants. Landry would stay there until 1955, and then coach the defense through 1959.
Landry actually was planning to get out of football because it was not a professional that paid much money and going into private business around the Dallas area at the end of the decade.
"Well I think the 1950s was an interesting era," said Landry. "In that nobody made any money. I signed for $6,000 when I started and a $500 bonus. We didn't make any money but I think we had a good time playing the game.
"We weren't concerned about the other guy who made more money than we did. We weren't worried about those things. We just went out to play football. I think that's what the guys really feel good about the fifties."
Despite becoming more and more popular in the 1950s, the NFL was a part time operation. Stan Jones was an offensive lineman with George Halas' Chicago Bears and would report to training camp in July and finish his season in December and look for another job. In fact, Halas wasn't even around in the off-season.
"We weren't a full time operation. A lot of people don't realize that. The football teams closed up after the last game of the year and packed everything away and George Halas wasn't a fulltime football man himself.
"He had a sporting goods business and all the other caches would go on their life's work," said Jones, a pro football Hall of Famer. "And everybody would get together next July and back to football. In the off-season, you couldn't find the Chicago Bears other than the ticket office which was in the Halas and May Sporting Goods Company. There wasn't anything at Wrigley Field because that was the Cub home ballpark. There wasn't any place where you could say this is where the Chicago Bears are."
Life at the Chicago Bears training camp in the 1950s wasn't too much different from the other 11 teams. None of the players were paid during the eight weeks of preparation. In fact, the players didn't even have their own equipment except for shoes.
"They used the old gym at St. Joseph's College and they got out all duffel bags out and dumped everything on the floor and you went down and found a pair of shoulder pads that fit. A pair of hip pads that fit. And if nobody else claimed them, they were yours," said Jones.
"Of course you had to bring your own shoes. What happened, a lot of guys would get cut and when they were about to leave, one of the older players would say I'll give you three dollars for your shoes. Then he would sell the shoes at $10 and make a hell of a profit. We had a bunch of older players who were trading shoes. They pick them up cheat from guys who got cut, they needed the money to go home and the guy coming in needed a new pair of shoes, the old guys gave them a deal."
But shoes weren't the only things available on the player's black market. Fans were a major commodity at the central Indiana school as there was no air conditioning.
"A guy would come in and she I'm dying in here," Jones continued. "I'd say, we will sell you a fan. You couldn't buy them at Montgomery Ward's because they would be sold out in a real hot summer.
So you'd have these fans. Guys would get cut and you'd say, hey I like your fan, I'll give you five dollars for it. The next guy coming in, you'd sell it for $10.
"You never got your first paycheck until after I made the team in September unless you got cut and then they would give you money to go home with. On the other hand, they took care of all your expenses and things like that. But if you wanted to go out and get a beer, it was on your own money."
While Jones was responsible for his shoes in Chicago, Steelers players didn't have that problem.
"I used to go to camp, actually since the time I was five years old, we did issue equipment. We didn't just throw it out for them," said Dan Rooney, the son of Steelers owner Art Rooney. "We used to get in some battles with them about different things. I will tell you a great aside, when the union, their first demand was a second pair of football shoes. As you know today when you go into the locker room they have 30. But there was the demand back in 1958.
"Jack Butler, who was a great player for us and had gone to the Pro Bowl and probably should be in the Hall of Fame, he wore the same shoes for three years because they were his luck shoes and he had taped them on. We said, hey you can't be doing that. We did give them one pair each year. We said use the new shoes. He thought they were good luck the shoes that he had. He wore them literarily out."
When the season ended in the 1950s, so did football as a main vocation. New York fans may have wildly cheered the New York Giants defensive lineman Andy Robustelli on six Sundays a season, but on the Monday after the final game, it was back to work in the civilian world. Robustelli was a great player for the Los Angeles Rams between 1951 and 1955, playing in the Pro Bowl twice. But Robustelli's fortune was to be made at his Connecticut businesses not on the playing field of the Los Angeles Coliseum and he requested a trade to the New York Giants because he simply couldn't afford to live in Los Angeles, spent eight weeks without being paid for training camp and then play a 12 week season 3,000 miles away. Without the trade, Robustelli would have retired.
"Each player the day that the season was over, you were free and you looked for a job. You wouldn't see each other until next year. I think, and with all respect to the modern ballplayer, I hope the modern ballplayer appreciates, not only the opportunity, but...football is a stepping stone it's not the end of life," said Robustelli who became a successful businessman in Connecticut once his Giant days were through.
It was a different time, a different life for players who literally played for nothing and had few, if any benefits. There were no great business minds in the NFL of those days, the names that are saluted now, Halas, Rooney, Tim Mara, Bert Bell were actually second rate thinkers that had no vision for their product. It seems absurd to think that Saskatchewan could outbid NFL teams for talent but in the 1950s, the Green Bay Packers held fund raisers throughout Wisconsin and literally passed the hat so the team could operate season to season and in some cities, owners could not even give away NFL tickets. Today there are multi-billion dollar TV contracts, stadiums that cost more than a billion dollars in East Rutherford, N.J., and Arlington, Tx., thanks to two bills passed by Congress in the 1960s and signed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson -- the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 and the 1966 AFL-NFL merger -- which made the league the cash cow it is today.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
LAST UPDATED ( FRIDAY, 30 JULY 2010 08:42 )
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