AFL launched 60 years ago by ambitious owners who changed football forever

See you next year.

That’s what the Baltimore Colts told offensive lineman Ron Mix during a bidding war for his services in 1960. On one side was the Colts, an established NFL powerhouse. On the other, the Los Angeles Chargers of the American Football League, which was ramping up for its first season.

The Colts offered Mix, the 10th pick in that year’s draft, a one-year nonguaranteed contract for $7,500, plus a $1,000 bonus. The Chargers offered two years for $12,000 and a $5,000 bonus.

“I told (the Colts), ‘If you give me one year, $10,000 and a $2,000 bonus, I’ll sign,’ ” Mix said. “They said, ‘That’s almost what we pay our starting quarterback (Johnny Unitas), and that would upset our whole pay scale. The AFL is going to fold in a year. We’ll see you next year.’ ”

The AFL didn’t fold and, by 1966, reached a merger agreement with the NFL. Mix, incidentally, played all 10 seasons in the AFL with the Chargers and wound up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame — inducted the same year (1979), oddly enough, as Unitas.

From its beginning 60 years ago — the AFL’s first training camps opened July 8, 1960 — to the first season of the merged leagues 50 years ago, the AFL succeeded where other NFL rivals had failed.

The Tribune-Review spoke with several former AFL players to look back at the league that changed football forever.

Fools rush in

They were dubbed “The Foolish Club,” eight men eager to establish professional football franchises. Several had been spurned by the NFL, so they decided to form their own league with the goal of eventually forcing a merger with the NFL.

Their big dreams were backed by bigger bucks, which they had no qualms about throwing around. The NFL was seen as cheap, and player-owner relations were, by many accounts, strained at best.

When 10-year AFL veteran Tom Flores became coach of the Oakland Raiders in 1979, one of his assistants was Earl Leggett, who had played for the Chicago Bears under the legendary George Halas. Flores recalled Leggett telling him how he and Halas nearly came to blows over a $500 raise.

Likewise, Mix said his experience with the Colts and owner Carroll Rosenbloom was typical of how the NFL did business.

“The AFL owners were much nicer and cordial to the players than the old NFL,” said Flores, 83, who played quarterback for the Raiders, Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs and later won two Super Bowls as the Raiders coach. “The old NFL was more (tough). We liked the (AFL) owners. The NFL players, they hated their owners.”

Added Chiefs Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell: “There were guys in the NFL who wanted to play in the AFL because of the ownership and the way the players were treated.”

Mostly, they were treated to big contracts. The AFL owners’ free-spending ways helped them stockpile talented players quickly.

Though the new league’s early teams might not have been on par with the NFL, by the mid-1960s, that changed.

“I think the general consensus was the 1963 (San Diego) Chargers were the first AFL team that could have beaten the NFL champions that year, which would have been the Bears,” said Todd Tobias, who maintains talesfromtheamericanfootballleague.com and wrote his master’s thesis on Chargers Hall of Fame coach Sid Gillman. “The Chargers had the great offense, and the Bears had a hell of a defense. People thought it would have been one for the ages.

“Then you look at the ’64 and ’65 Bills, and they had really strong teams, too.”

AFL owners kept throwing money at the nation’s top collegians. Mix estimated the AFL was signing about 80% of the best college players.

The coup de grace came in 1965, when the New York Jets outmaneuvered the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals for quarterback Joe Namath. Owner Sonny Werblin inked the Beaver Falls native to a three-year, $427,000 deal — a record at the time.

The NFL suddenly began to realize a bidding war was not in its best interest.

“You had (Chiefs owner) Lamar Hunt and a number of (owners) who had money, and they had a little more staying power,” said running back Mike Garrett, the 1965 Heisman Trophy winner who played four seasons for Kansas City in the AFL. “They didn’t mind getting into that (bidding) war.

“The NFL owners said, ‘The pie is huge, so why would we commit suicide … when there’s enough for all of us?’ ”

The AFL’s clubs might have wanted to beat each other on the field, but, Tobias said, there was a sense everyone associated with the league was united for a larger battle.

“Everybody was in this struggle together to ensure that their league survived,” he said. “Everybody had a greater sense of camaraderie. I believe that was a critical factor in the AFL.”

Untapped talent

After more than a decade of segregation, the NFL began bringing Black players back into the league in 1946. As Bell remembered it, however, NFL teams still had few Black players.

“The NFL at the time would not play Black quarterbacks,” he said. “They didn’t have Black middle linebackers, and they usually kept one or two Black players on offense and one or two on defense.”

Tobias, 47, said the few Black players the NFL had mostly were starters. There were few roster spots reserved for Black players who were backups.

The AFL changed that.

“The AFL could not afford to have any artificial numbers as far as Black players who could be on a team,” Mix, 82, said. “Unfortunately at that time, there seemed to be some understanding among NFL teams that you shouldn’t have ‘too many’ Black players.

“The AFL had a group of young, progressive owners … and GMs and coaches who had a social conscience, too. That led to Black players finally getting an opportunity to play football based on their ability.”

Tobias said teams such as the Chargers and Chiefs began to recruit historically Black colleges heavily. The Chiefs’ Super Bowl IV-winning lineup in 1970 featured 12 Black players among its 22 starters — twice as many as its NFL opponent, the Minnesota Vikings.

The Denver Broncos made Marlin Briscoe their starting quarterback in 1968, and the Bills followed with James Harris in 1969. The NFL, meanwhile, had no black quarterbacks between 1956 and ’72.

The Chiefs’ Willie Lanier is recognized as the first Black middle linebacker — the man who called the signals for the defense.

“The AFL was the greatest thing that could have happened to pro football players,” Mix said, “and the greatest thing to happen to Black football players.”

Added Bell, 80: “The NFL was saying that this new young guy (AFL co-founder Hunt) started a new league, and it’s not going to last. Where is he going to get the players? They started to sign a lot of Black players.”

Showtime

When he was bored in high school, Flores would scribble football plays in his notebook. He said he came up with plays never seen in the NFL. The more outlandish, the better.

“I used to imagine some of the wild things you could do with a football,” he said.

In the AFL, he got a chance to try some of them. Where NFL teams were content to march methodically down the field, AFL coaches gave offenses a chance to bust out.

Emphasizing a vertical passing game was equal parts tactical and theatrical. Drawing top college players as well as taking advantage of the largely untapped pool of Black players opened new possibilities.

“The offenses got really stagnant in the NFL,” Garrett, 76, said. “The AFL comes at you … the great teams like the Jets and Raiders and the Chiefs could run the ball, and they could throw it. And they threw it better than the NFL.”

Said Flores: “It was Sid Gillman’s idea. He was a wide-open type coach, and he brought a lot of that to the AFL. The West Coast offense, he actually started it, throwing to backs out of the backfield and stuff like that.”

And a lot of America could see it because the AFL had a television contract, a first-of-its-kind deal that split revenue evenly among the eight teams. The deal, signed in June 1960 with ABC, was for five years, and it brought this new brand of football to a wider audience.

Still, many were skeptical. They didn’t believe the AFL’s flash and finesse could match the brute force of the NFL.

When the Green Bay Packers won the first two AFL-NFL championship games — what later became the Super Bowl — it appeared the naysayers were vindicated.

“But all it proved was Green Bay was the best team in football,” Mix said. “When the Jets won Super Bowl III, they said it was the biggest upset in history. But it really wasn’t because the Jets were outstanding. The next year, Kansas City obliterated Minnesota, and that just proved the leagues were equal.”

Even before the Jets’ Super Bowl win — famously guaranteed by Namath — the merger had been finalized. The leagues would merge and hold a common draft beginning in 1970.

In the meantime, from 1967-69, teams from the rival leagues played exhibition games. Mix recalled the results of those games being pretty evenly split — the NFL led the series 42-29-1, according to remembertheafl.com — a sure sign the AFL had arrived.

When the leagues played their first season together 50 years ago, both sides had made adjustments. Flores said AFL teams became more physical, and NFL teams diversified their offenses.

Jeannette grad Dick Hoak played for the Pittsburgh Steelers from 1961 through the first season of the merger. The Steelers were one of three teams from the NFL that joined the 10 AFL teams to form the AFC, and if the NFL teams were superior to their new brethren, Hoak couldn’t see it.

“I didn’t really notice a difference when the merger happened,” Hoak said through a Steelers spokesperson.

In the first season of the merger, four former AFL teams posted winning records, with the Miami Dolphins’ mark of 10-4 being the best. The Cincinnati Bengals, who joined the AFL in 1968, won the AFC Central title.

Those Bengals were built via an expansion draft from among the other AFL teams, a testament to the league’s widespread talent.

The changes the AFL brought to the NFL were important. But, Flores said, the AFL didn’t change the NFL as much as it changed football as a whole.

The infusion of new teams expanded the NFL’s geographic footprint and helped to launch the league to its current popularity.

“We opened it up and made it a sport that hit every state in the union and not just the narrow NFL cities,” Garrett said. “(The AFL) had some cities that wanted to become big time, and that’s how they became big time. It gave other cities a chance to grow and enhanced them.”

Legacy

There are 33 players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who have ties to the AFL. Only one of those, Bills lineman Billy Shaw, spent his entire career in the AFL.

Even now, Tobias believes the AFL remains overlooked to a degree. While the AFL won its battle for legitimacy and, ultimately, a merger, many of those who made it possible, he said, haven’t received their due.

“When the leagues merged and the Hall of Fame voting started including AFL players, there were far more reps from NFL cities in the voting,” he said. “There was an extreme NFL bias. There are probably 20-25 (AFL) guys who are deserving who haven’t even been discussed.

“I think if nothing changes in terms of the voting process, they are absolutely going to be overlooked.”

The men who formed and played in the AFL took a great risk. Fail, and they might never have had another chance at pro football’s highest level.

But the AFL was a resounding success, and Flores said he believes the impact of its players should not be lost to history.

“I think the legacy of the AFL was we were warriors of the game that loved the game and played it for the love of the game more than the money,” he said. “We respected the game, and for that, we should have an addition of our own in the Hall of Fame.”