Springtime Is for Lovers, Not Football

Well, it’s that time of year again. Frost is on the pumpkin, days are getting shorter, leaves are turning red. The chill of winter is in the air.

It must be. There’s a football game at the Coliseum Sunday. An opening game. Season kickoff.

But the calendar says--what? Feb. 24?

Even for California’s uniclimate, this is ridiculous. Man and boy, I’ve been going to football-season openers for more years than I care to tell you about. The Yale Bowl, Trinity Field, the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium. Raccoon coat, hip-flask weather, tuba-frozen-to-the-lips weather. That’s what football is all about. I never went to one at the end of February.

Pro football has never abided by the rules. Even in the early days, it was a kind of traveling medicine show in which they took the reigning college sensation--Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, the Four Horsemen--surrounded them with 10 (or seven) guys from the roundhouse and sold tickets.

They were gypsies, innovators. They took the archaic, flying-wedge college game and opened it up to give it some of the Perils of Pauline Saturday matinee suspense and thrills. They took the game away from Bronko Nagurski and gave it to Sammy Baugh. You could throw the ball anytime, anywhere, and as often as you wanted.

But most of all, they played their game when the colleges didn’t. This included Sundays--and Decembers.

They said you couldn’t play that late in the year because the ground was frozen, and so was the air. So, the pros put on rubber-soled shoes, bought some handwarmers and played their championship games clear up to Christmas.

But no one ever thought of July before. Until the USFL came along. These guys will not only play anytime but anywhere. One team has gone clear from Boston to New Orleans to Portland in a 12-month period. They go through more towns than a road company doing “The Count of Monte-Cristo.” No one knows for sure where the Chicago Blitz is.

The Los Angeles Express knows where it is. It’s just not sure who it is. Many years ago, John Lardner, describing the sale of the St. Louis Browns, wrote: “Many people were surprised the St. Louis Browns could be sold because they didn’t think the St. Louis Browns were owned.”

Well, the L.A. Express really isn’t owned. It’s kind of a public trust or the embarrassing ward of a prominent family--the kind they would lock up in the attic of the family castle in the old days, or tie to the bed, or pack off to India with the stipulation that he never tell anybody his real name.

The Express was originally owned by two guys from Colorado who made their poke in cable television. As soon as they realized putting on football in summer was like putting on chamber music in Perth Amboy, they put the club in the window with a tag on it. It said: “Make offer.”

In lots of leagues, you can’t tell the players without a number. In the USFL, you can’t keep track of the owners without a number.

J. William Oldenburg was a lot more interesting than anybody who worked for him. Most guys who have a billion dollars are at great pains to conceal that fact from the working population. Bill Oldenburg was not shy at all about his billion. Particularly, since he didn’t have it.

Pretty soon, he didn’t have the Express, either. So, the club went looking for any other at-large billionaires, preferably real ones, who thought owning a football team was like owning a coal mine with cheerleaders. They finally offered the club around to anybody who had an unexpired American Express card, but these guys had briefer career spans than World War I machine-gunners.

The one thing that used to distinguish the old pro football was continuity of ownership. George Halas owned the Chicago Bears from inception till his death. So it was with George Preston Marshall and the Washington Redskins. Art Rooney is the only owner the Pittsburgh Steelers have ever had, and the Mara family is in the third generation of ownership of the New York Giants.

The Express has had more owners than a 1949 DeSoto. To paraphrase the old saying: “Success has many owners, failure is an orphan.” The league found the Express on its doorstep with a note pinned to it. The league sighed and took it in. Not to have Los Angeles and New York in your league is not to have a league.

It is the hope of every new league to be swallowed up, in whole or in part, by the existing league. It happened to the entire AFL. It happened to key franchises in the old All-America Football Conference--Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore.

It did not happen to any entrants in the old World Football League. And it is not likely to happen to any in the USFL. What is more likely is that the old league will cannibalize players, not franchises. As the French say, in another context, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk free?”

Still, summer football is a nice novelty. Like six-day bicycle races, bunion derbies, hula hoops, it has its moment. The USFL is the only league in which the owners are more interesting than the athletes, and the boys of summer in this sport wear three-piece suits, carry briefcases and tell people that they’re billionaires and know Wayne Newton personally.