What if the N.Y. Jets were bought by Zygi Wilf instead of Woody Johnson?
MONDAY, 17 JANUARY 2011 23:03
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/what-if-the-ny-jets-were-bought-by-zygi-wilf-instead-of-woody-johnson
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
A little more than a decade ago, two New Jersey businessmen decided that they wanted to own a National Football League team. The estate of Leon Hess was selling the New York Jets and both Robert Wood Johnson IV and Zygi Wilf wanted the team. In 2000, Johnson beat out Wilf's group and bought the franchise from the Hess estate. There is no way of knowing what would have happened to the franchise had Wilf outbid Johnson for the team.
Wilf did end up with a National Football League franchise in 2006 when he led a group that bought the Minnesota Vikings.
Both Johnson and Wilf are still playing for a championship in the winter of 2011 although the titles they seek are totally different. Johnson's Jets will be in Pittsburgh on Sunday in the American Football Conference title game. Wilf is in a totally different arena but the stakes are probably much higher.
Wilf and his lobbyists are blanketing the state houses in St. Paul, Minnesota in a bid to get money to build a new stadium somewhere in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area,
Johnson's Jets play in a new stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey complete with all the bells and whistles that make a venue a state-of-the-art facility. He has personal seat licenses, large concourses to sell food and Jets merchandise, and access to large in-stadium revenue streams. But Johnson's facility did not happen overnight.
Johnson wanted a stadium on the west side of Manhattan at a rail yards site between 30th and 34th Streets and 11th and 12th Avenues next to the Hudson River. He might have also been able to get land for a new stadium in the Jets old home borough of Queens. The west side stadium would have also served as the centerpiece of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in New York and New Jersey. The stadium plan died when New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and New York Assembly Speaker Shelton Silver refused to support the plan in 2005. The International Olympic Committee soon afterwards eliminated the New York bid and gave London, England the 2012 Games.
Eventually Johnson along with the New York Giants ownership, the National Football League and New Jersey officials signed an agreement to build a new stadium next to Giants Stadium. The NFL loaned Johnson, and the Giants Mara and Tisch families hundreds of millions of dollars and New Jersey kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure along with tax breaks such as reduced property tax payments to provide stadium funding.
Johnson and the Mara/Tisch family put up some of the money for the structure that is estimated to have cost $1.5 billion.
Wilf is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars from Minnesota to help finance the stadium. He will not get NFL help, at least not right now, as the NFL's stadium finance fund is tapped out. The NFL is also not actively seeking to help owners looking for funding for a stadium until there is a new collective bargaining agreement. The NFL wants the players to put up money for a new stadium in Santa Clara, California that would be home to the San Francisco 49ers.
In somewhat of a muddled message, the NFL's senior Vice President of Public Relations, Greg Aiello, wrote on ESPN's website that the lack of a new collective bargaining agreement with the players is hurting Los Angeles chances of getting league financial support for a new stadium. Aiello said there are other cities also looking for money but did not name them. The other cities are Santa Clara and Minneapolis.
Minneapolis has been one of the epicenters of the sports financial earthquake that started in 1950 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee elected officials decided that the only way they could attract a Major League Baseball team to town was by building a stadium with public money and then giving virtually all of the revenue generated in the building to an owner.
The strategy worked as Lou Perini moved his Boston Braves to Milwaukee in March 1953.
Minneapolis elected officials pursued the same course of action. They allocated $8.5 million to build a stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington that opened for the minor league Minneapolis Millers in 1956. The Millers team was the New York Giants top farm club and the stadium caught Giants owner Horace Stoneham's eye when he decided that playing in Manhattan's Polo Grounds was no longer a viable financial option for him.
Stoneham kicked the tires in Minneapolis but took what was a better offer in his mind from San Francisco in the summer of 1957. In 1958, Minneapolis elected officials took out a $9 million bond to expand the 21,000-seat Bloomington seat to 41,000 seats.
The nine million dollar gamble paid off as the Bloomington stadium was big enough for Calvin Griffith who moved his Washington Senators baseball team to the Twin-Cities market after the 1960 season and the National Football League. The Minnesota Twins franchise started play in April 1961. The NFL persuaded the owners of the Minnesota American Football League franchise to drop out of the new league and join the NFL in 1961.
The NFL's Chicago Cardinals had played two "home" games in Bloomington in 1959. The Minnesota AFL franchise was replaced by Oakland, California. The Oakland team played in San Francisco in 1960 and 1961.
In 1965, public money was set aside for the construction of an indoor arena in Bloomington. The gamble again paid off for politicians when the National Hockey League in 1966 decided to double in size from six to 12 teams and added a team in Bloomington.
On the other side of the Mississippi, public money built the St. Paul Civic Center that became a competitor to the Bloomington building. Minnesota was totally immersed in sports spending by the early 1970s.
There is more than a half-century of public support for sports facilities in Minnesota and Wilf is hoping to be the latest owner to grab public dollars for a private business — the Minnesota Vikings.
Ironically, it was the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger that doomed the Bloomington park. One of the NFL's proposals before Congress as they lobbied Washington to approve the merger was ran in the face of antitrust laws was to move teams. The league planned to have 24 teams in 24 different cities. There was some discussion that would have moved Sonny Werblin's New York Jets (with Joe Namath) to Los Angeles. Daniel Reeves' Los Angeles Rams would have gone to San Diego. Barron Hilton's San Diego Chargers was headed to New Orleans and the Oakland Raiders franchise would have ended up in either Portland, Oregon or Seattle. But Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Cellar and his colleagues weren't in favor of the idea and it was dropped.
Werblin's Jets paid the Mara Giants $10 million to share the territory and the Raiders ownership gave San Francisco ownership $8 million to share the Bay Area territory. New Orleans was given a team in exchange for yes votes from Louisiana Senator Russell Long and Congressman Hale Boggs. The NFL owners pocketed expansion money from New Orleans and Cincinnati. The league did get one perk from Congress. They established that they could move any franchise if stadium capacity was fewer than 50,000 seats.
The Bloomington stadium had less than 50,000 seats.
In the 1970s, Vikings owners began clamoring for a new stadium and explored a move to Los Angeles. (Wilf could be offered a stadium deal in Los Angeles if things in St. Paul don't work out)
State legislators cobbled a deal to build a multi-purpose domed stadium for the Twins, Vikings and the University of Minnesota. The $80 million to fund the building came from a variety of taxes.
With a new stadium and two arenas built on the public dime, Minnesota seemed to have all of the sports facilities need in the 1980s. But that wasn't the case. The National Basketball Association was expanding and two Minneapolis businessmen, Harvey Ratner and Marvin Wolfenson, decided to go after an NBA franchise. In April 1987, the NBA junked its two team expansion in favor of a four-franchise expansion and took $32.5 million from "Harv and Marv" in exchange for a Minneapolis franchise. The two decided not to ask for public funding for an arena and that proved to be a massive mistake.
By 1994, "Harv and Marv" were broke. They sold the franchise to a group led by Boxing promoter Bob Arum and the franchise was headed to New Orleans. The NBA blocked the sale and found a local buyer. The Minnesota legislature allowed the city of Minneapolis to purchase the building. The NBA was still in the Twin-Cities, which is more than could be said about the NHL.
Minnesota might have been hockey country but various Minnesota North Stars ownerships struggled financially. The last North Stars owner Norman Green, a Canadian who had a sexual harassment suit hanging over him, moved the team to Dallas in 1993.
In 1997, the NHL was completing a nine-team expansion. St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman decided to go after one of the final expansion franchises and put together a more than $100 million proposal for funding to build an arena for an NHL team. The new arena was built on the site of the old St. Paul Civic Center. The NHL returned to the Twin-Cities in 2000.
The Twins ownership didn't like the Metrodome very much and almost sold the team to North Carolina interests led by Don Beaver. The team would have played in Greensboro, N.C. had voters approved a referendum to raise a restaurant tax to fund a stadium.
One of the reasons Greensboro needed a stadium? Young people would be energized to stay in the area and look for jobs in the Triad area of North Carolina because there was a baseball team there.
The Twins ownership began very serious discussions with state legislators in 2005 for a new Minneapolis stadium. Eventually a deal was worked out with the legislators on a funding mechanism, which called for the state to invest $392 million in a $522 million facility. There would a be sales tax hike in Hennepin County but Hennepin County residents would have to approve the hike in a referendum. The vote never occurred as politicians pulled an end around and claimed there was no time to hold a referendum.
The Republican governor Tim Pawlenty signed the funding bill into law and Minneapolis got a new baseball stadium.
Pawlenty, who seems to be running for the Republican nomination for President as one of those let's cut government spending to the bone didn't exactly act like a cheapskate when it came to sports spending.
Not only did he approve the $392 million Twins stadium deal in 2006, but two days prior to the Twins deal, Pawlenty put his signature on a deal to build a new football stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Nearly half of the $288.5 million cost for the facility came from the state. Students at the school, whether they liked football or not had to pay part of the cost for the stadium in their student fees
Pawlenty put at least a half of a billion dollars to build stadiums and that is without debt service.
Pawlenty did not run for re-election in 2010. The fiscal conservative left Minnesota with more than a six billion dollar deficit. He was in favor of a new Vikings stadium but did not want to spend public money. Pawlenty is now running around and doing the TV carnival barker route pushing a book and arguing against raising the federal debt ceiling.
Pawlenty's old Vikings problem is now the Democrat Mark Dayton and the GOP state houses' problem. Wilf's lease at the Metrodome ends after 2011 so there is pressure to get a new stadium-funding package done.
What Wilf wants is the same toy that Johnson has. A new stadium with overflowing revenue streams. Sometime after the Super Bowl, the Minnesota legislature will tackle the Vikings problem. Wilf wants an open-air stadium but if the state wants to put a roof on the building that's fine too. Wilf isn't going to pay for a roof but would come up with about one-third the cost of an open-air stadium.
The Jets-Giants building allegedly cost $1.6 billion. Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys home, Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas is also well over a billion dollars. An outdoor Minneapolis stadium is estimated to cost $700 million.
Wilf is next on line in St. Paul for a new stadium. Had he won the big game in 2000, he might have been sharing the Meadowlands with the Mara and Tisch family. But he came in second to Woody Johnson. Johnson's Jets are playing to get into the Super Bowl but Wilf's Vikings are playing for a bigger prize.
A new stadium.
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 Woody Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Woody Johnson. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
New York Giants get first home Meadowlands game, so what?
New York Giants Get First Home Meadowlands game, So What?
http://www.examiner.com/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m3d16-New-York-Giants-get-first-home-Meadowlands-game-so-what
By Evan Weiner
March 16, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- The owner of the East Rutherford, New Jersey-based New York Jets is unhappy that his team will not host the first “regular” season National Football League game at the new Meadowlands Stadium. Robert Wood Johnson IV, better known as Woody, unloaded on the way the National Football League handled the coin toss which decided the team that would get the first game honor without any representatives from Johnson’s Jets or the stadium’s other tenant and half owner, the Mara-Tisch families’ owned New York Giants. The Mara-Tisch Giants “won” the toss and got the first regular season game on Sunday, September 12th while Johnson’s Jets get the first Monday night game at the place on the following day.
Both teams are scheduled to play pre-season games in the new building including one against each other. The Mara-Tisch Giants practice outside the facility. The stadium opens April 10th with a college lacrosse tournament, there is a three day music festival at the end of April, the first “football” game will be a match between Mexico and Ecuador on May 7, Bon Jovi is performing for three nights there in May followed by the Eagles, not the ones from Philadelphia, in June and U2 is in for a July concert. NFL pre-season games come four months into the stadium’s existence.
The stadium, built for football, is featuring other events which should help pay some of the bills at the place. The stadium is also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Johnson put up half the cash for the new place and the surrounding real estate which will be turned into a New York-area football hall of fame and other businesses, the Mara-Tisch families put up the other 50 percent with the state of New Jersey kicking in hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure and East Rutherford gets only a slice of what should be a multimillion check for property taxes through a mechanism called “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” or PILOT.
Johnson released a statement which condemned the league and probably the one-time Jets employee, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“An NFL coin toss has a few fundamental elements that are missing here, most notably the presence of the teams involved,” said Johnson. “That's how it's always done in the League, whether it’s determining the order of the draft or deciding who’s going to kick off the game. When the issue of which team would be hosting the first regular season game could not be resolved on the merits, I suggested a coin toss as the fairest way to resolve this issue. The League rejected that idea. Then, I was told on Friday that a coin toss had taken place at the League office and that the Jets had lost. We rejected a process in which neither team was present. The League departed from our time-honored tradition and declined the opportunity to set the matter straight with a transparent process. “
And with that Mara-Tisch get to “open” the stadium and Johnson gets what New York Rangers forward Sean Avery might call “sloppy seconds”
Perhaps the National Football League was the wrong party to hold the coin flip. The truth of the matter is that the coin flip should have been held in the Trenton office of the Governor of the State of New Jersey, and Governor Chris Christie should have conducted the flip. Governor Christie was not in office in 2005 when the Mara/Tisch-Johnson stadium/real estate deal was signed and when New Jersey committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the project and signed off on giving East Rutherford a slice of the property tax assessment on the land. New Jersey is a partner in the stadium venture and should have been included in the process.
There will be all sorts of conspiracy theories about even whether there was a coin flip but the Maras have seemingly gotten their way virtually every time in the New York area since the one time bookie and bootlegger Tim Mara invested $500 to get an NFL franchise in 1925 for Manhattan. Mara’s Giants franchise was a financial disaster throughout the 1925 season and the team was saved from financial ruin by George Halas quite by accident. The Chicago Bears owner Halas signed Red Grange right after Grange’s college football season with Illinois was done and immediately went on tour with the “Galloping Ghost.”
One of the stops was the Polo Grounds in Manhattan with the Giants hosting the Bears and New Yorkers came to see not the Giants, but the legendary Grange. That game paid the bills and established Mara’s team, at least for the 1926 season. But the Grange game also caused Mara some problems.
Grange and his agent C. C. (Cash and Carry) Pyle applied to get an NFL franchise for Yankee Stadium for the 1926 season based on the Polo Grounds game. The NFL, protecting Mara’s franchise, said no. Grange and Pyle started the first American Football League in 1926. The league folded after just one season but the NFL took Grange and the Yankees franchise in 1927 to replace the Brooklyn Lions. Grange was injured in 1927 and his team folded after the 1928 season.
The New York territory has been in the Mara family since 1925 and as Bill Parcells said in 1991 when he quit as Giants coach, “it is the flagship franchise of the league.” Parcells spoke an awful lot of truth with that statement although there is little evidence that the Mara family was all that influential in the league and that whatever influence the Mara family may have had stemmed from being in the biggest city in America and their ability to withstand challenges from other owners trying to make it in New York in football.
The Mara family outlasted the Staten Island Stapletons (1929-32), the Newark Tornadoes (1930), the Brooklyn Dodgers (1930-43), and the Brooklyn Tigers (1944). In 1945, Dan Topping’s Dodgers merged forces with the Boston Yanks. Topping owned Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees owner was part owner of the Yanks-Dodgers combination. Topping decided to move his portion of the Tigers from Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field to Yankee Stadium, but Tim Mara refused to allow Topping to invade his territory as the Polo Grounds as across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. Topping took holdings out of the NFL and joined the rival All American Football Conference in 1946 playing as the Brooklyn Dodgers and eventually as the second New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. That team folded when the National Football League absorbed three AAFC teams, Baltimore, Cleveland and San Francisco in 1950.
That was not the last time Mara had to face competition from another Yankee Stadium-based team. The Boston Yanks moved to New York and the Polo Grounds in 1949 and the owners, the singer Kate Smith and her agent Ted Collins renamed the team the New York Bulldogs. In 1950, Collins and Smith moved across the river to Yankee Stadium and called the team the New York Yankees. That NFL franchise folded after 1951 and ended up in Dallas.
The Mara family would not have any New York City rivals between 1952 and 1959. In 1960, the fourth American Football League put a team in the Polo Grounds, Mara moved to Topping’s Yankee Stadium in 1956 from the Polo Grounds. Harry Wismer’s New York Titans franchise was a financial shipwreck but the AFL was able to get new owners for the team in 1963 with a group led by David (Sonny) Werblin.
Sonny Werblin gave the Mara family a lot of trouble. Werblin was well connected in show business and worked for a company that provided programming for David Sarnoff’s National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff’s NBC lost the bid to gain control over NFL television rights in 1964 to William Paley’s Columbia Broadcasting System. Sarnoff decided to get even through Werblin and discussed how NBC would fund the AFL giving the league a multimillion dollar, multiyear TV deal.
NBC landed the AFL beginning with the 1965 season which gave AFL owners more money to compete for players after their college careers were done. That raised salaries and old line NFL owners and AFL owners needed to solve their money problem. Ironically it was Mara’s Giants that poured fuel on the AFL-NFL rivalry by signing Buffalo kicker Pete Gogolak. It was the first time the NFL went after an AFL star and the AFL’s new commissioner, Al Davis, took notice and as a league, the AFL went after the NFL’s two of the top quarterbacks, Roman Gabriel and John Brodie.
Werblin understood football was entertainment, something old line NFL owners like Mara’s son Jack and Wellington did not. Werblin used some of NBC’s money and a new home field, Shea Stadium, to land players like Joe Namath. Werblin, who believed in the star system, had his star, Namath and his new home field, Shea Stadium and his Jets became a credible rival to the Mara family’s Giants.
The two leagues, the NFL and AFL, merged on June 8, 1966. Apparently neither the NFL nor the Maras wanted a second New York team and one of the merger plans on the table was to move Werblin’s Jets out of New York so that the Maras would continue to have an NFL monopoly in New York. The league also wanted to maintain the San Francisco 49ers one team market in the Bay Area. Werblin’s Jets would have been relocated to Los Angeles, LA Rams owner Daniel Reeves would have taken his team south to San Diego, Barron Hilton would have moved his Chargers from San Diego to fill a hole in New Orleans, the two leagues needed support from Louisiana Senator Russell Long and House member Hale Boggs to pass the merger through Congress, and the Oakland Raiders would exit the Bay Area and end up in the Pacific Northwest in either Seattle or Portland.
That plan died in a House of Representatives merger hearings when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle assured Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Cellar, who has a very large place in NFL history despite never having played, coached or being an owner in the NFL, that all 24 teams, 15 NFL teams and nine AFL teams would not be relocated. Werblin and his partners, including Leon Hess, would pay Wellington and Jack Mara $10 million for invading the Giants New York territory and the Raiders ownership provide eight million dollars to the 49ers ownership to share the Bay Area marketplace.
Neither Werblin nor the Raiders ownership wanted a merger.
Wellington Mara became enough of an NFL visionary by 1971 that he accepted New Jersey’s new stadium offer which was presented to him by, of all people, Werblin who left the Jets partnership in 1968. Werblin headed up the New Jersey Sports Authority. Mara’s Giants moved into Giants Stadium in 1976 and played the venue’s first NFL regular season game on October 10th of that year losing to Dallas. Werblin’s former team, the Jets, moved into the Meadowlands in 1984. In 2005, Wellington Mara and Woody Johnson agreed to fund a new Meadowlands Stadium.
The Mara-Tisch guys beat Johnson this time around but the Giants and Jets franchises have been linked for decades and at the end of the day, Woody will get over not hosting the first NFL game in the new place, there is too much money at stake for him to continue having a fit and besides, the Mara-Tisch-Johnson troika will be bidding for a huge prize, the 2014 Super Bowl and NFL policy lately has been to reward owners who get municipal funding or build their own stadiums with a Super Bowl.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
http://www.examiner.com/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m3d16-New-York-Giants-get-first-home-Meadowlands-game-so-what
By Evan Weiner
March 16, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) -- The owner of the East Rutherford, New Jersey-based New York Jets is unhappy that his team will not host the first “regular” season National Football League game at the new Meadowlands Stadium. Robert Wood Johnson IV, better known as Woody, unloaded on the way the National Football League handled the coin toss which decided the team that would get the first game honor without any representatives from Johnson’s Jets or the stadium’s other tenant and half owner, the Mara-Tisch families’ owned New York Giants. The Mara-Tisch Giants “won” the toss and got the first regular season game on Sunday, September 12th while Johnson’s Jets get the first Monday night game at the place on the following day.
Both teams are scheduled to play pre-season games in the new building including one against each other. The Mara-Tisch Giants practice outside the facility. The stadium opens April 10th with a college lacrosse tournament, there is a three day music festival at the end of April, the first “football” game will be a match between Mexico and Ecuador on May 7, Bon Jovi is performing for three nights there in May followed by the Eagles, not the ones from Philadelphia, in June and U2 is in for a July concert. NFL pre-season games come four months into the stadium’s existence.
The stadium, built for football, is featuring other events which should help pay some of the bills at the place. The stadium is also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Johnson put up half the cash for the new place and the surrounding real estate which will be turned into a New York-area football hall of fame and other businesses, the Mara-Tisch families put up the other 50 percent with the state of New Jersey kicking in hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure and East Rutherford gets only a slice of what should be a multimillion check for property taxes through a mechanism called “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” or PILOT.
Johnson released a statement which condemned the league and probably the one-time Jets employee, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“An NFL coin toss has a few fundamental elements that are missing here, most notably the presence of the teams involved,” said Johnson. “That's how it's always done in the League, whether it’s determining the order of the draft or deciding who’s going to kick off the game. When the issue of which team would be hosting the first regular season game could not be resolved on the merits, I suggested a coin toss as the fairest way to resolve this issue. The League rejected that idea. Then, I was told on Friday that a coin toss had taken place at the League office and that the Jets had lost. We rejected a process in which neither team was present. The League departed from our time-honored tradition and declined the opportunity to set the matter straight with a transparent process. “
And with that Mara-Tisch get to “open” the stadium and Johnson gets what New York Rangers forward Sean Avery might call “sloppy seconds”
Perhaps the National Football League was the wrong party to hold the coin flip. The truth of the matter is that the coin flip should have been held in the Trenton office of the Governor of the State of New Jersey, and Governor Chris Christie should have conducted the flip. Governor Christie was not in office in 2005 when the Mara/Tisch-Johnson stadium/real estate deal was signed and when New Jersey committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the project and signed off on giving East Rutherford a slice of the property tax assessment on the land. New Jersey is a partner in the stadium venture and should have been included in the process.
There will be all sorts of conspiracy theories about even whether there was a coin flip but the Maras have seemingly gotten their way virtually every time in the New York area since the one time bookie and bootlegger Tim Mara invested $500 to get an NFL franchise in 1925 for Manhattan. Mara’s Giants franchise was a financial disaster throughout the 1925 season and the team was saved from financial ruin by George Halas quite by accident. The Chicago Bears owner Halas signed Red Grange right after Grange’s college football season with Illinois was done and immediately went on tour with the “Galloping Ghost.”
One of the stops was the Polo Grounds in Manhattan with the Giants hosting the Bears and New Yorkers came to see not the Giants, but the legendary Grange. That game paid the bills and established Mara’s team, at least for the 1926 season. But the Grange game also caused Mara some problems.
Grange and his agent C. C. (Cash and Carry) Pyle applied to get an NFL franchise for Yankee Stadium for the 1926 season based on the Polo Grounds game. The NFL, protecting Mara’s franchise, said no. Grange and Pyle started the first American Football League in 1926. The league folded after just one season but the NFL took Grange and the Yankees franchise in 1927 to replace the Brooklyn Lions. Grange was injured in 1927 and his team folded after the 1928 season.
The New York territory has been in the Mara family since 1925 and as Bill Parcells said in 1991 when he quit as Giants coach, “it is the flagship franchise of the league.” Parcells spoke an awful lot of truth with that statement although there is little evidence that the Mara family was all that influential in the league and that whatever influence the Mara family may have had stemmed from being in the biggest city in America and their ability to withstand challenges from other owners trying to make it in New York in football.
The Mara family outlasted the Staten Island Stapletons (1929-32), the Newark Tornadoes (1930), the Brooklyn Dodgers (1930-43), and the Brooklyn Tigers (1944). In 1945, Dan Topping’s Dodgers merged forces with the Boston Yanks. Topping owned Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees owner was part owner of the Yanks-Dodgers combination. Topping decided to move his portion of the Tigers from Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field to Yankee Stadium, but Tim Mara refused to allow Topping to invade his territory as the Polo Grounds as across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. Topping took holdings out of the NFL and joined the rival All American Football Conference in 1946 playing as the Brooklyn Dodgers and eventually as the second New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. That team folded when the National Football League absorbed three AAFC teams, Baltimore, Cleveland and San Francisco in 1950.
That was not the last time Mara had to face competition from another Yankee Stadium-based team. The Boston Yanks moved to New York and the Polo Grounds in 1949 and the owners, the singer Kate Smith and her agent Ted Collins renamed the team the New York Bulldogs. In 1950, Collins and Smith moved across the river to Yankee Stadium and called the team the New York Yankees. That NFL franchise folded after 1951 and ended up in Dallas.
The Mara family would not have any New York City rivals between 1952 and 1959. In 1960, the fourth American Football League put a team in the Polo Grounds, Mara moved to Topping’s Yankee Stadium in 1956 from the Polo Grounds. Harry Wismer’s New York Titans franchise was a financial shipwreck but the AFL was able to get new owners for the team in 1963 with a group led by David (Sonny) Werblin.
Sonny Werblin gave the Mara family a lot of trouble. Werblin was well connected in show business and worked for a company that provided programming for David Sarnoff’s National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff’s NBC lost the bid to gain control over NFL television rights in 1964 to William Paley’s Columbia Broadcasting System. Sarnoff decided to get even through Werblin and discussed how NBC would fund the AFL giving the league a multimillion dollar, multiyear TV deal.
NBC landed the AFL beginning with the 1965 season which gave AFL owners more money to compete for players after their college careers were done. That raised salaries and old line NFL owners and AFL owners needed to solve their money problem. Ironically it was Mara’s Giants that poured fuel on the AFL-NFL rivalry by signing Buffalo kicker Pete Gogolak. It was the first time the NFL went after an AFL star and the AFL’s new commissioner, Al Davis, took notice and as a league, the AFL went after the NFL’s two of the top quarterbacks, Roman Gabriel and John Brodie.
Werblin understood football was entertainment, something old line NFL owners like Mara’s son Jack and Wellington did not. Werblin used some of NBC’s money and a new home field, Shea Stadium, to land players like Joe Namath. Werblin, who believed in the star system, had his star, Namath and his new home field, Shea Stadium and his Jets became a credible rival to the Mara family’s Giants.
The two leagues, the NFL and AFL, merged on June 8, 1966. Apparently neither the NFL nor the Maras wanted a second New York team and one of the merger plans on the table was to move Werblin’s Jets out of New York so that the Maras would continue to have an NFL monopoly in New York. The league also wanted to maintain the San Francisco 49ers one team market in the Bay Area. Werblin’s Jets would have been relocated to Los Angeles, LA Rams owner Daniel Reeves would have taken his team south to San Diego, Barron Hilton would have moved his Chargers from San Diego to fill a hole in New Orleans, the two leagues needed support from Louisiana Senator Russell Long and House member Hale Boggs to pass the merger through Congress, and the Oakland Raiders would exit the Bay Area and end up in the Pacific Northwest in either Seattle or Portland.
That plan died in a House of Representatives merger hearings when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle assured Brooklyn Congressman Emanuel Cellar, who has a very large place in NFL history despite never having played, coached or being an owner in the NFL, that all 24 teams, 15 NFL teams and nine AFL teams would not be relocated. Werblin and his partners, including Leon Hess, would pay Wellington and Jack Mara $10 million for invading the Giants New York territory and the Raiders ownership provide eight million dollars to the 49ers ownership to share the Bay Area marketplace.
Neither Werblin nor the Raiders ownership wanted a merger.
Wellington Mara became enough of an NFL visionary by 1971 that he accepted New Jersey’s new stadium offer which was presented to him by, of all people, Werblin who left the Jets partnership in 1968. Werblin headed up the New Jersey Sports Authority. Mara’s Giants moved into Giants Stadium in 1976 and played the venue’s first NFL regular season game on October 10th of that year losing to Dallas. Werblin’s former team, the Jets, moved into the Meadowlands in 1984. In 2005, Wellington Mara and Woody Johnson agreed to fund a new Meadowlands Stadium.
The Mara-Tisch guys beat Johnson this time around but the Giants and Jets franchises have been linked for decades and at the end of the day, Woody will get over not hosting the first NFL game in the new place, there is too much money at stake for him to continue having a fit and besides, the Mara-Tisch-Johnson troika will be bidding for a huge prize, the 2014 Super Bowl and NFL policy lately has been to reward owners who get municipal funding or build their own stadiums with a Super Bowl.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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