Category: Alternative Football

Today challenging the National Football League would be a fool’s errand. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar money maker that could (and would) crush any competition. But in 1953 it was a 12-team league still looking to find its way, and J. Curtis Sanford thought he might have a way to take it on.

How?

Location, location, location.

Sanford was a major mover and shaker who was the originator of the Cotton Bowl as well as an investor in the Dallas Texans, the ill-fated club that played one NFL season in 1952. With Dallas no longer part of the league, pro football had no teams in the South or Southwest, and that gave Sanford an idea: why not form a small league located entirely in that region of the continent?

So on January 24, 1953, he unveiled plans for the six-team Southern Football League, which would have franchises in Atlanta, Birmingham, Dallas, Houston, Mexico City and New Orleans. The idea came 15 years after another Texas promoter, Bennie Strickland, proposed a similar league in many of the same locales.

“I don’t think the new league would have any trouble getting players,” Sanford told United Press International. “And I think the league will go over, with the proper promotion. We will have a strong promotion program here, you can bet. The Texans would’ve gone over last year with better promotion.

“Mexico City is a fine spot for professional football and will strengthen the league. Mexico City has the finest stadium in the world and just last month a (soccer) game there drew 122,000 paid admissions.”

But Sanford suggested climate and lifestyle would be the big draw for top-quality players.

“Money isn’t everything to a football player,” he said. “The players now take into consideration such things as weather conditions, living conditions and a lot of little things that go toward a happy, satisfied life.

“Here in the south we can offer the best of all these things and my talks with some professional football players bear this out. The response from those I’ve talked to has been terrifically enthusiastic, especially the idea of having Mexico City as a member of the circuit.”

(Editor’s note: Jim Crow laws were still in effect in the Deep South so African-American players would strongly disagree with the “happy, satisfied life” assessment. The 1952 Texans featured two Black players, Buddy Young and George Taliaferro, but Dallas was a segregated city along with the rest of the American southern cities considered for the league).

Sanford also said he had learned valuable lessons from the Texans debacle, and that knowledge would help make the SFL a success.

“Football is a big business and to succeed it has to be operated as such,” Sanford said. “The Dallas Texans’ brief fling in the pro league provided us with a lot of examples of things not to do. But there have been many other examples of unsound business practices involving even the long-established clubs.

“We hope to profit by these mistakes and minimize our chances of making any fatal errors.”

Another advantage for the SFL would be that it wouldn’t have to battle with the NFL for stadiums or fan support since it was going into mostly new markets.

“We would not be competing for attendance at the gate, for choice dates or use of the same stadiums, factors which struck heavy financial blows at everyone concerned,” Sanford said. “We’re going to do it right or not do it all.”

Sanford didn’t name any propspective team owners, but said he had been in touch with several interested parties and promised to line up heavy hitters for all the franchises. He even hoped to lure some former Texans to the new league.

“The Texans never released the players,” he told Associated Press. “Of course, we can’t make the players play for us, but I’ve talked to some of the players from last year’s team and their reaction to the Southern League, with its international flavor, is terrific.”

In February an exhibition game was played between the Politecnico All-Stars and American All-Stars in Mexico City, which was seen as something of a test run for a SFL team there.

It did not go well.

Although the home Politecnico team defeated the American contingent, 31-6, in front of 30,000 fans, many of the patrons spent the afternoon booing the players. They also threw trash on the field and – according to a UPI news report – set fires in the grandstands.

Whether that changed Sanford’s plans or not no one knows for sure, but nothing else was heard from the entreprenuer concerning the formation of the Southern Football League.

By the time the 1953 NFL season began the Texans assets had been turned over to the new Baltimore Colts franchise, and the NFL didn’t face head-to-head competition until 1960 when the American Football League hit the field.

Ironically, it was the new Dallas Texans of the AFL – as well as the Houston Oilers – that gave professional football a southern presence it has maintained ever since.

Since tackle football is, at its core, an American game, it stands to reason that any pro league would look to American players to fill its rosters. But two years before the World League of American Football did just that, a Texas businessman hoped to flip the script.

Carroll Huntress, a member of the Dallas City Council who had previously coached both college and professional football, announced the formation of the International League of American Football in November, 1989.

“We want to bring a little of American pro football to Europe.” Huntress told the Associated Press. “And we want this to be true nationals, not Americans who might be living in Italy. Our goal is to have no Americans and we think that is an attainable goal in seven to eight years.”

While the World League – set to begin play in 1991 – was designed to serve as a developmental league for the NFL, Huntress said that would not be the case with the ILAF.

The plan was to start with all-American coaching staffs to teach the game, and fill skill positions (two quarterbacks, two running backs, three wide receivers, two linebackers and three defensive backs) with 12 American players per team. Over time, as the European players advanced and tackle football became more common, the United States-based coaches and athletes would be phased out.

“We are not interested in television in the United States,” Huntress said. “Our seats are going to be sold here – not in America. We are negotiating for European TV rights and hope to have a league-wide package, but if we can’t get what we are seeking that way we would negotiate individually in each city. We hope to televise every game.”

The league targeted an April, 1990, start with franchises in Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki, Munich, London and Birmingham, England.

Huntress expected to average 15,000 fans per game and even predicted the circuit would turn a profit by its third year (theoretically a realistic goal considering American players would make no more than $500 per game and the European players less than that).

“Europeans are used to fast-moving games and penalty flags can slow down football,” Huntress said. “Our basic premise which we will tell the officials is like the old saying in basketball, ‘No harm, no foul.’”

By December the ILAF was signing players and front office personnel, and in January, 1990, London hired Jack Elway as head coach and Helsinki inked a deal with former New York Jets and New Jersey Generals coach Walt Michaels. Huntress had worked as a Jets assistant under Michaels for five seasons.

The organization seemed to be gaining momentum as its launch date approached, but then things started falling apart – and they fell apart quickly.

In February the teams in Rome and Milan dropped out because of stadium conflicts related to World Cup matches, and on March 1 the ILAF decided to cancel the 1990 season due to issues with work permits for American players. However, league spokesman Steve Gerrish said it would be ready to begin play in 1991.

Unfortunately, it breathed its last before it had a chance to do much breathing at all. On May 2, the International League of American Football folded after it was reported that American financial backers had withdrawn their support.

“This is absolutely shameful,” ILAF general manager Tor Westerberg told AP. “This will really damage the reputation of American businessmen and American sports in Europe.”

The WLAF filled the European tackle football void in London, Barcelona and Frankfurt in 1991, and by the time the league had rebooted as NFL Europe in 1995 it had an all-international lineup of franchises.

As for Huntress’ dream of a mostly European-stocked circuit, that currently exists with the 12-team European League of Football. The ELF mandates that no team can have more than four “A-Players” (American, Canadian, Japanese or Mexican) players on its roster, and a maximum of eight additional foreign athletes.

Remember that time I wrote about the World Football League that existed before the World Football League we all came to know (the latter which forced another World Football League to change its name to Universal Football League)?

Well, guess what?

I found one more.

Yep, aside from the WFL proposed by Louis P. Roberts, the WFL pitched by partners Tony Razzano and Louis S. Goldman and Gary Davidson’s WFL – the only one that actually played – a newspaper publisher in Oklahoma City named Don Pavel also wanted in on the crowded World Football League field.

Davidson’s league was incorporated on August 3, 1973 while Pavel claimed his group had filed paperwork on January 29, 1973.

“I was making feasibility studies then and planned to be ready for the 1975 season,” Pavel, publisher of the MidwestCity Monitor, said in an interview with the Courier-Journal of Louisville on February 5, 1974. “Then this Gary Davidson came along. He incorporated under the name World Football League in August of 1973. That meant I had to get off my you-know-what and be ready by 1974.

“The more Davidson gets that name in headlines, the better for me. Oh, we’ll probably have a lawsuit over that pretty soon now. But I have the papers to show I’d incorporated previous to him.”

The other WFLs all had similar plans – plans that included signing top-quality players to major market teams scattered across the United States and beyond. Pavel said he was eyeing franchises in five U.S. cities (located in Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, Texas and Kentucky) as well as Mexico City, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Caracas, Venezuela. The league would expand to two European locales in its second season.

The difference in Pavel’s WFL, however, would be that his franchises would sign “local” talent from nearby college teams. If a team was placed in Louisville, he said, then 85 percent of its roster would have to come from the conference the Cardinals played in (at the time, it was the Missouri Valley).

“We don’t have any long, drawn out plan,” Pavel said. “There’d be a tryout camp seven days, then you’ve got a team together.”

Pavel also spoke to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis on February 5, adding an important detail – his WFL had no desire to challenge the NFL for players.

“I don’t want to compete with the National Football League … I don’t think anyone can,” he said. “I want to get into an extended program of football like minor league baseball, so some of the 7,000 kids who don’t get to play when they graduate will go on with their careers.

“We’ll pay good salaries, but it won’t be in terms of $50,000 or $60,000 a year.”

Normally when I research leagues of old (planned or realized), most of them have a concept that looks workable, at least on paper. But this WFL gave me a major “seat-of-the-pants” vibe.

First, there’s the local conference requirement. Where would Mexico City, San Juan, Caracas and two European franchises get their players from?

And if anyone wants to throw a bunch of guys together and call them a team after a week, that tells me they probably haven’t thought this thing through.

“I got into this through my newspaper,” Pavel told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “One of my men said we weren’t getting enough news about football so we wrote the NCAA and they must’ve sent us 90 pounds of material.

“It was then I got the idea (in 1972) that these thousands of college football players never get to play in the NFL. Some of them get asked to try out, but 99 percent aren’t even looked at.”

Pavel was also convinced small crowds would translate to big profits.

“With an average crowd of 10,000, an owner can make a couple of hundred thousand a year,” he said.

Pavel was supposed to announce the franchises in March and hit the field in the summer of 1974, but as you might’ve guessed, that didn’t happen. The only World Football League we were blessed with that year was the wild, wonderful mess spawned by Davidson.

Of course if you want to look on the bright side, Pavel got his wish.

He didn’t want his WFL to compete with the NFL, and it never did.