Category: History and More

The first weekend of Premiere Lacrosse League action is in the books, with four games played over two days in Albany, New York.

In case you’re wondering, the New York Atlas started things off with a 10-8 victory over the Carolina Chaos on Friday, followed by the California Redwoods outscoring the Denver Outlaws in the nightcap, 15-12.

On Saturday, the two-time defending PLL champion Utah Archers edged the Maryland Whipsnakes, 8-7, in a rematch of last year’s title game, and the Boston Cannons closed out weekend competition by defeating the Atlas, 16-12.

My fascination with field lacrosse goes back several years, but it often seemed like I was following a game that was destined to remain in a fixed niche. Now, however, it truly seems like it’s found solid footing with the PLL.

The circuit is in its seventh season, having grown from a touring series featuring clubs without city attachments to one that remains a traveling show but now reps markets. The next phase of its evolution will likely see it move to a traditional home and away schedule for each of its teams.

Some of the best lacrosse players in the world have a home in the PLL, and it has become one of my favorite sports to watch. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve thrown my emotional support behind the Chaos – mainly because I love Charlotte).

Yet, as successful as this venture has become, an early attempt at pro lacrosse in North America proved to be a spectacular failure.

The American Lacrosse League was founded in 1988 and if this is the first you’ve heard of it, you aren’t alone. Blink and you missed it.

The brainchild of two former All-American lacrosse players-turned businessmen, Terry Wallace and Bruce Meierdiercks, the ALL had an April 24, 1988, start. The season lineup featured the Baltimore Tribe, Boston Militia, Denver Rifles, Long Island Sachems, New Jersey Arrows and Syracuse Spirit.

Teams had 23-player rosters, including 14 with two-year, $10,000 contracts and nine playing for $4,000 over one season.

And like today’s PLL, the rosters were loaded. In fact, lineups included several future United States Lacrosse Hall of Fame inductees culled from elite college programs such as Syracuse, Johns Hopkins and UMass.

The Baltimore Sun reported in its April 24, 1988, edition that 80 percent of the league’s 138 players were All-Americans in college.

Tribe player Brooks Sweet – a future Hall of Famer – predicted that every clash would be a battle of elites.

“Every game is going to be like Johns Hopkins against Johns Hopkins,” Sweet, an attackman, said. “I was skeptical at first, but when I saw the caliber of players in the league, I was impressed.”

Rules were designed to make for a fast-paced, offensive game. Teams were limited to three longsticks (typically used by defenders and a midfielder) – five were allowed in the college game at the time. There was also a 25-second clearing clock, “on-the-fly” substitutions, and if an offensive player was fouled a flag was thrown but the penalty not assessed until the play’s completion.

Days before the opener, Arrows general manager John Pappas expressed both “hope and uncertainty” when talking to a reporter from Newsday. He pointed to a team jersey and said, “Could be a collector’s item someday. The question is, will it be hanging in the hall of fame or someone’s closet?”

Unfortunately, it was the latter.

Just over a month after opening day, the league was dead –   having played just 13 games.

The Denver franchise went belly up on May 18 and the rest of the league followed suit on May 28. Like many sports upstarts, it fell victim to lack of money – and lack of attendance.

“We got to know players we had read about and were able to play with them,” Arrows player Tom Grimaldi told the Montclair Times for a June 9, 1988, article. “Everyone was in the same boat. It’s disappointing that the league did not last.”

Added teammate John Shaw, “The level of competition was the best I’ve ever seen.”

The next outdoor pro league to come along was Major League Lacrosse, which began play in 2001 and lasted until 2020. That year it merged with PLL, which is now the gold standard for the play-for-pay game.

Thirty-seven years after the ill-fated ALL, professional field lacrosse is finally in a good place. The Women’s Lacrosse League debuted this year with four teams (the Boston Guard, California Palms, Maryland Charm and New York Charging), and attendance and TV audiences continue to rise.

Of course, it has a long way to go to catch up with the National Lacrosse League, a box lacrosse circuit whose roots go back to 1986. The NLL trails only the NBA and NHL in attendance among pro indoor sports worldwide.

But that’s a story for another time …

In 1992, A League of Their Own provided a funny – and loving – tribute to women’s professional baseball. The movie chronicled the exploits of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (1943-54), which featured 10 teams and more than 600 players during its 12-year run. While fictionalized, the comedy captured the spirit of a circuit that had been forgotten by many but deserved respect.

The AAGPBL’s final game was played on September 5, 1954, when the Kalamazoo Lassies defeated the Fort Wayne Daisies, 8-5, to win the championship series three games to two.

In 1994, women’s baseball returned in the form of the Colorado Silver Bullets, a traveling team that took on amateur and semi-pro men’s clubs in exhibition games over four seasons. Made up primarily of softball players who decided to give hardball a try, the club showed that female baseballers were more than just a gimmick.

The swan song of the Silver Bullets came on August 14, 1997, when they defeated the State Farm Machine, 5-3, to cap off a 23-22 campaign.

And more history will be made in May, 2026, but it’ll be a new beginning instead of an untimely end. Women’s play-for-pay baseball is set to return, owing a debt to its past but forging a modern path.

The formation of the Women’s Pro Baseball League was announced last October by co-founders Justine Siegal and Keith Stein. The plan is to begin with six franchises in 2026, located primarily in the northeastern United States, and go from there.

Registration for players closed on May 7, and two-time USA Baseball Sportswoman of the Year Alex Hugo will be overseeing July and August tryouts.

More than 500 players have already registered.

“The WPBL’s summer tryouts mark an important and exciting milestone in women’s sports,” Hugo said. “Female baseball players around-the-world have been waiting for this moment for over 70 years and I am honored to be leading the tryouts for the league.”

The WPBL’s inaugural season will consist of approximately 40 games, followed by playoffs.

Siegal became the first female coach of a pro men’s baseball team when she worked for the Brockton Rox of the Canadian American Association of Professional Baseball in 2009. She’s also the founder and executive director of Baseball for All, the largest girls’ baseball organization in the United States. 

“I am so excited that there will finally be a professional women’s baseball league – it is a dream come true for all the girls and women who play America’s Pastime,” Siegal said. “The Women’s Pro Baseball League is here for all the girls and women who dream of a place to showcase their talents and play the game they love. We have been waiting over 70 years for a professional baseball league we can call our own. Our time is now.”

Muse Sport was named an advisory partner to the WPBL in April, and founding partner Assia Grazioli-Venier has been appointed chair of the league. Grazioli-Venier was the first woman board member in the 120-year history of Juventus Football Club, helping launch Juventus Women and associated properties.

Members of the WPBL Advisory Board are Donna Cohen, lawyer and member of the World Baseball Softball Confederation’s Diversity and Inclusivity Commission; Emmy-winning documentarian Rhonda Eiffe; espnW co-founder Laura Gentile; communications strategist Kate Childs Graham; Leslie Heaphy, chair of the Society of American Baseball Research’s Women in Baseball Committee; former Arizona Diamondbacks executive Nona Lee; Dr. Digit Murphy, a longtime coach and former president of the Toronto Six pro hockey team; Ayani Sato, Team Japan pitcher, six-time World Cup champion and one of women’s baseball’s all-time great hurlers; and Dr. Kat Williams, professor emeritus of women’s sports history at Marshall University.

Yet, while the WPBL is looking to the future, it hasn’t forgotten its history.

Maybelle Blair, former player in the AAGPBL, is Honorary Chair of the WPBL Advisory Board. Her biography, All the Way: The Life of Baseball Trailblazer Maybelle Blair was released in March.

The addition of baseball seems like a natural fit for women’s professional sports. Basketball and soccer are well-established, and hockey recently joined the ranks with the Professional Women’s Hockey League in 2023.

The WPBL has a chance to give women’s pro ball its own “Big Four.”

“We are fortunate to live in a period of extraordinary growth and transformation in women’s sports,” Grazioli-Venier said. “I believe the WPBL is poised to join the ranks of other great women’s leagues like the WNBA, NWSL, and PWHL.”

How fun would it have been if – last weekend – the Buffalo Bills and Washington Commanders had squared off in the NFL’s third place game?

For the players and coaches, I doubt it would’ve been fun at all.

The teams would be just a week removed from their gut-wrenching conference championship game losses, and forced to serve as a warm-up act for the Super Bowl. Moreover, they’d be reminded they fell short of their ultimate goal.

I’m not sure even fans would have much of an appetite for a “bronze medal” game these days.

However, for 10 consecutive years the NFL did, in fact, host such a game. Known as the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl (and unofficially as the Runner-Up Bowl and, more popularly, the Playoff Bowl), it was contested at the Orange Bowl in Miami each year following the 1960-1969 seasons. Named after the league’s late commissioner, the matchup raised money for the players’ pension fund.

In 1960, the NFL consisted of six teams in the Eastern Conference and seven teams in the Western Conference. The division winners (10-2 Philadelphia in the East and 8-4 Green Bay in the West) earned spots in the NFL Championship Game, but league officials decided another game – played two weeks after the title tilt – would be a good showcase for pro football’s senior circuit.

So, it was decided that the competing teams would be the runners-up from each conference. In 1960, that meant the Cleveland Browns from the East and Detroit Lions repping the West.

Players on the winning teams would pocket $600 while those on the losing side got $400 each.

As a fundraiser for player pensions, the game served a noble purpose. The question, though, was how much incentive players would have to go full throttle in what was basically a glorified exhibition game.

Detroit coach George Wilson thought it was insulting to suggest his guys would give anything short of maximum effort.

“What a foolish approach to such an interview,” Wilson told The Daily Times of Salisbury, Maryland, for a January 5, 1960, story. “Sure, my guys will be putting all out as will the Browns. No, there isn’t much money involved for the players. However, remember every one of them is striving for better contracts next year.

“Other sports writers have asked me such questions. I’m getting tired of hearing such talk.”

Cleveland coach Paul Brown was all- business, even putting his team through full-pads scrimmages to prepare.

“We’re here to get ready for a ballgame,” Brown said.

The game was quite competitive, with Detroit winning, 17-16, in front of 34,891 fans.

Detroit was back in the Playoff Bowl the next season, defeating Philadelphia, 38-10, a week after Green Bay’s 37-0 rout of the New York Giants in the NFL Championship. This time only 25,621 patrons showed up for the third-place game.

Detroit earned the Playoff Bowl “threepeat” to close out the 1962 campaign, edging the Pittsburgh Steelers, 17-10, seven days after the Packers defended their crown with a 16-7 victory over the Giants.

Before the third-place game NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle said a crowd of 35,000 was necessary to keep the game in Miami, and 36,284 paid the price of admission to seal the deal.

At some point, however, a coach or player was bound to deviate from the party line when it came to the battle of also-rans, and that coach was none other than Vince Lombardi.

His Packers played in the consolation game at the close of the 1963 and 1964 seasons.

As you can imagine, the legend-in-the-making who had led his club to two consecutive NFL crowns wasn’t a fan.

Green Bay beat Cleveland 40-23 in the fourth Playoff Bowl, but lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 24-17, in the fifth installment.

Following Lombardi’s death in 1970, it was revealed what he really thought about the game.

“There is no room for second place here,” he said. “There’s only one place here and that’s first place. I’ve finished second twice in my time here and I don’t ever want to finish second again.

“There’s a second-place bowl game and it’s a hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink football players. That’s all second place is – hinky dink.”

Cowboys coach Tim Landry – after his team earned a spot opposite Green Bay in the 1967 championship game – allegedly said to a friend, “Lord, I don’t know what makes me happier, playing Green Bay for the championship or not having to go to Miami for the Playoff Bowl.”

The “hinky-dink” game last 10 consecutive years, often with impressive attendance. Four of the five games had crowds in excess of 50,000, with the largest coming in the January 9, 1966, contest when the Baltimore Colts dismantled the Dallas Cowboys, 35-3. There were 65,569 in the stands that day.

And TV ratings were always excellent. Super Bowl III and the 1969 Rose Bowl and Orange Bowl were the only games to draw more TV viewers than that season’s Playoff Bowl (Dallas beat Minnesota, 17-13).

Still, the third-place game had outlived its usefulness.

“It was sort of a fluff game,” Cleveland quarterback Frank Ryan told the New York Times in 2011. “That ridiculous game shows how ridiculous the league was in those days.”

Once the NFL went to four divisions of four teams each in 1967, an extra round of playoffs was added. More importantly, a year earlier the NFL announced a merger with the American Football League that would go into effect in 1970.

That would create a 26-team league with eight of them making the playoffs.

With so many meaningful postseason games, it was time to do away with the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl.

The final clash saw the Los Angeles Rams blank the Cowboys, 31-0, and this is how Associated Press led its game story:

“Pro football’s most famous stepchild is dead. Roman Gabriel gave the 10-year-old NFL Playoff Bowl a four-bomb salute and the Cowboys stood around as pallbearers.

“If there was any reason for the National Football League’s backdoor classic it was the $1.25 million funneled into the players’ pension fund during the 1960s. But, after a decade as a haven for championship playoff losers, the misnamed event is no more.”

PLAYOFF BOWL RESULTS

Detroit Lions 17, Cleveland Browns 16 (1-7-61)
Detroit Lions 38, Philadelphia 10 (1-6-62)
Detroit Lions 17, Pittsburgh Steelers 10 (1-6-63)
Green Bay Packers 40, Cleveland Browns 23 (1-5-64)
St. Louis Cardinals 24, Green Bay Packers 17 (1-3-65)
Baltimore Colts 35, Dallas Cowboys 3 (1-9-66)
Baltimore Colts 20, Philadelphia Eagles 14 (1-8-67)
Los Angeles Rams 30, Cleveland Browns 6 (1-7-68)
Dallas Cowboys 17, Minnesota Vikings 13 (1-5-69)
Los Angeles Rams 31, Dallas Cowboys 0 (1-3-70)