Month: May 2021

The CFL: taped and in color

Fifty years ago today, I was most likely doing one of three things: pretending I was Wendell Hudson while shooting at the basketball goal tacked onto an oak tree in the middle of my backyard; pretending I was Don Maynard running an improvised pass pattern while reeling in a Joe Namath aerial; or pretending I was a puppet master while playing with my Adventure Team G.I. Joe (with life-like air and beard).

All three were noble pursuits for a 10-year old, especially on a Saturday in the early summer. But the day was also quite significant in my journey as a sports fan. Why? Because on May 29, 1971, American newspapers announced that the Canadian Football League would begin televising some of its games on U.S. stations.

Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @scottscribe60

According to Associated Press:

The Canadian Football League, which has lured some big-name college players north, may take away some of college football’s television audience this fall.

The International Broadcasting Company, an independent network with headquarters (in Hayward, California), announced last week that CFL games will be telecast next season, mostly on Saturday afternoons, to at least 15 major markets.

Robert M. Green, president of the network, said the U.S. television rights were purchased for about $500,000.

The CFL’s commissioner, Jake Gaurdaur, (sic) was here for Thursday’s announcement and called the television money “minimal at present.”

But, he said, the U.S. television exposure will help CFL teams sign more good American players.

“If an American player is seen on television here, he’ll establish his name for the time when he finishes his playing days,” Gaurdaur (sic) said.

Despite misspelling Gaudaur’s name, the story brought good tidings. At the time I thought the only “TV football” that existed was the kind offered by the NFL and NCAA, but here was a whole new league (to me) that started play in the summer.

And while I’d love to tell you specifics of the first CFL game I ever watched, I can’t – I only know that whenever a game was on, I made every effort to watch.

Recalling memories from half a century ago can be tough – and sometimes you later learn that a few of them are false. I never remember a CFL game being broadcast on a Saturday afternoon, and I’m quite certain they never went head-to-head with college football on ABC – at least not in the Birmingham TV market. But I want to say the games I saw as a kid were on the CBS affiliate, always on a taped delayed basis, always at night, and edited to fit into maybe a two-hour window.

I watched the Hamilton Tiger-Cats play and became a fan of the team based on their hyphenated nickname and black and gold color scheme.

There was a game involving the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in which the announcers talked about how big and pesky the mosquitoes were. Weird that bit of info stuck with me, but it has.

And I recall Alex Karras doing color commentary and thinking, “Hey … he used to play for the Detroit Lions.”

All random stuff, I know, and mere snapshots to the bigger picture, which was that of a gridiron style that I fell in love with. Three downs to make 10 yards was downright exotic in my book, and those end zones (25 yards deep at the time) meant a QB could throw long on first-and-goal situation.

Further research shows that the 1972 American TV slate was aborted in August of that year because the syndicated network didn’t think the CFL games could compete with the NFL, which was already well into its exhibition season.

But in 1973 another American syndicate – this one led by baseball Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner – reached a 21-week deal with the CFL that resulted in midweek TV games.

By 1974, however, the league’s appearance on U.S. stations was reduced to 30-minute highlight packages that were lost in the shuffle of “traditional” football. I might’ve whined more were it not for the fact the World Football League began play that year, so my summer football passion had shifted to the Birmingham Americans.

But Jack Gotta – who led the Ottawa Rough Riders to the Grey Cup in 1973 – was the head coach of the Ams, and starting quarterback Georgia Mira had spent his previous two seasons with the Montreal Alouettes. So, in a way, the CFL lived on in my new favorite ballclub.

All these years later I’m still passionate about the Canadian Football League, hoping it comes back healthy and looking forward to watching as many games as I can on ESPN+. And when news breaks about the TV schedule this time, I won’t be outside pretending to be Wendell Hudson or Don Maynard or playing with G.I. Joes.

At least not as far as you know …

This is … the XBL

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking, talking and writing about alternative football leagues. I’ve written about them in book form, short form – I’ve even gone so far as to suggest what kind of alt grid league I’d form myself, down to the team nicknames (I still think Birmingham Battalion is a winner, whether competing in the Summer Football League Would you support the SFL? or a U.S.-based group playing by CFL rules The American League of Canadian Football).

What I haven’t done, however, is jump on the alternative basketball bandwagon.

Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @scottscribe60

Maybe it’s because between the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League and EuroLeague (when I’m feeling continental) I’m pretty well satisfied when it comes to pro hoops. And if I have an itch for roundball during the offseason, there’s the NBA Summer league to provide a scratch.

But just for my own amusement (and yours, if you’re easily amused), I’ve decided to conjure the XBL – an extreme, innovative brand of basketball modeled after its football counterpart, the XFL. It’s not that I need another professional basketball organization to exist, it’s just that I feel the need to write about the possible existence of another professional basketball organization.

Like the XFL, the XBL will target major league near-misses and will not pretend to be a rival of the NBA. But since the big league already has a farm system in the G League, it needs to strive to be more than just developmental in nature. This means attempting to pluck athletes currently playing overseas, including former NBA guys who might no longer have the skills required to make an Association roster, but who have some name recognition. Truthfully, between the NBA, G League and EuroLeague, (as well as the fledgling Professional Collegiate League and Overtime Elite), the top players are already taken. Instead of up-and-comers, the XBL will include a lot of down-and-wenters. The pay should be decent, though. The average XFL salary ($55,000 per season) was three percent of the average annual NFL salary, so using that math XBL players will pull down $246,000.

So, when will the league’s season begin?

The two previous incarnations of the XFL started the week after the Super Bowl, filling a late winter/spring gridiron void. Finding down time in basketball is more problematic.

The NBA season, including the playoffs, runs from mid-October to early June. The WNBA starts in May and ends around the time the NBA starts back. Translation: there ain’t no offseason in North American pro hoops.

But since the XBL is a men’s league, we’ll go ahead and start it in mid-June. The regular season will consist of 34 games, so it’ll wrap up in mid-September.

As for franchises, you want the major media markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago) to lure TV networks, but you might want to throw in some non-NBA towns as well. So for our inaugural XBL season we’ll go with eight flagship cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Louisville, New York, San Diego and San Francisco.

Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville and New York will play in the Eastern Division while Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco make up the Western Division.

The scheduling format is structured so that a team faces each foe in its division six times and teams in the other division four times apiece.

The playoffs are quite simple: East winner meets West winner in a best-of-3 championship series.

And now for my favorite part … rule innovations.

As far as timing, we’ll stick with four, 12-minute quarters. After that, though, things get weird:

* The 3-point line is 21 feet from the basket.

An American soccer century

Raise a glass, tip your hat, or – if you’re feeling extra festive – juggle a ball, because today is the 100th anniversary of major league soccer in the United States.

Don’t believe me?

Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @scottscribe60

Well, then, perhaps you’ll believe the secretary of the United States Soccer Association, James E. Scholefield, who wrote this in the May 20, 1921, edition of the Evening Herald newspaper in Fall River, Massachusetts:

Though from a playing sense the soccer season is closed, the next few days is expected to make history in the development of the game in this country. Tonight the big Professional League “The American Soccer League” meets at Hotel Astor in New York. It is expected that permanent officials will be elected and the constitution and by-laws adopted. All the clubs are enthusiastic and each have put up guarantees unheard of in the history of soccer football in this country. There is naturally much disappointment in many cities who have not been able to obtain coveted franchises, and in a few years it is certain that professional soccer will be the fall and winter sport of the country.

Obviously when I write “major league soccer” I’m not referring to Major League Soccer (it’s still a relative baby, born in 1996). Nor am I claiming the ASL was the introduction of professional soccer to America, because it wasn’t. There were already stateside footballers getting paid to play, and in 1907 the St. Louis Soccer League became the first fully professional circuit in the United States. But the original ASL was the country’s initial attempt to make the Beautiful Game a major national sport, although its roots and branches were very much regional.

Culled from the National Association Football League and Southern New England Soccer League, the original franchises were New York Soccer Club; Todd Shipyard (Brooklyn); Celtics (Jersey City); Philadelphia Field Club; Bethlehem Steel Company (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania); Harrison (New Jersey) Soccer Club; Fall River (Massachusetts) United; and J and P Coats (Pawtucket, Rhode Island).

At the time the ASL was hailed as the vehicle to begin soccer’s rise as the second major sport in the United States, joining baseball.

Al Spink, who founded The Sporting News, wrote:

At last soccer football is to take its place as the winter game to be played from fall to spring, and in the same way as baseball is played from spring to fall. There is a (great) deal of capital behind the newest soccer enterprise. The president of the league is W. Luther Lewis, a brother of H. Edgar Lewis, vice-president of the Bethlehem Steel Company. Thomas W. Cahill, the guiding spirit of the league, has been called the father of American soccer. He conceived and founded the present national body, which has grown to such proportions it embraces some 25 affiliated state associations fostering the booting sport.

It was, indeed, a big deal. With owners flashing plenty of money around and willing to spend it, rosters were augmented by the arrival of many European stars.

The Boston Globe trumpeted one of the first big signings:

British soccer stars have already begun to arrive here to get a chance in the new league. (Willie) Porter, the crack Hearts Forward of the Scottish League, landed yesterday and was promptly captured by Philadelphia.

But soccer’s relationship to America has always been a rocky one, and it wasn’t long before things went sideways. While international players elevated the game here, their influx all but shut out native-born footballers.

In a 1927 column, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Westbrook Pegler addressed the issue:

There are only two native Americans in this league, Davey Brown, of the New York Giants, the leading goal scorer of the league, and Tommy Florrie, of the Providence team. The rest of the athletes are English, Irish and Scotch, Welsh, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians and Jews from Austria. The British Isles are the greatest soccer country in the world, but although crowds of 100,000 have been checked in at the turnstiles for big games in England, the president of the American Soccer League claims that his teams pay highersalaries than any of the European teams. That is why the European club owners are always so leery of agents representing the American teams.

This financial tug-of-war created a major rift between the USFA and soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, but then the ASL also began quarreling with the USFA over participation in the National Challenge Cup, which required extensive travel and took place during the league’s regular season. The ongoing ASL vs. USFA crisis became known as the “Soccer War,” leaving both sides much worse for wear. Ultimately there was infighting among league owners themselves, franchises came and went, and when the USFA put financial backing behind a new league in 1928 (the Eastern Professional Soccer League) the ASL’s days as soccer’s grand United States showcase were numbered. The Great Depression – which began in August, 1929 – made sure of that.

By the time it went out of business in 1933, the American Soccer League had burned through 47 different teams but never expanded beyond the Northeast. One hundred years after the ASL’s introduction, American professional soccer still hasn’t become “the fall and winter sport of the country,” which I’m certain would be disappointing to Mr. Scholefield. It is, however, still alive and kicking. And as someone who owns $125 worth of Chattanooga FC, this makes me happy.