In the ‘80s, NFL’s Order Is Restored

My late, lovely friend, Hamilton Beauregard Prieulx Maule--Tex to the rest of the world--must be in sportswriters’ heaven today.

Tex was a fascinating guy. He had a voice like thunder over the mountains and had lived a life most of us dreamed about. He was a seaman on a merchantman plying the sea lanes of the world, an “understander”--the strong man who held up the acrobatic pyramids in center ring--in a traveling circus and, finally, a writer and team official in the NFL.

Tex thought he invented the modern game of pro football--or that George Halas invented it and Tex made it public.

It was Tex, writing for Sports Illustrated, who dubbed the 1958 playoff game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants the “Greatest Game Ever Played.” It wasn’t, but try telling that to Tex. Tex did not suffer contradiction gracefully.

Tex had one small quirk when it came to football: He hated the American Football League and its spinoff, the AFC, or American Football Conference.

Tex thought they had a nerve, muscling in on a real man’s league. Tex and his colleagues spent a lifetime building up the National Football League as the only game of any consequence.

Tex had been a PR guy for the Rams, a columnist in Texas, and, finally, resident football expert and chronicler for Sports Illustrated. He took proprietary interest in the game as a resident landlord. It was his life.

Tex considered the merger of the two leagues a marriage made in hell. He was like a rich guy whose daughter wants to marry the gardener. He felt the rival league was socially, morally, legally and athletically inferior to his league, and the only consolation to this abomination was that the good guys would now get to thrash the upstarts annually in front of God and the whole world in a spectacle--which Tex also opposed--called the Super Bowl.

In Tex’s mind, football was bounded on the north by the Green Bay Packers, on the south by the Dallas Cowboys, on the East by the New York Giants, and on the West by the L.A. Rams. In between were the Washington Redskins, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Bears, the NFL generally. Everything else was Bridgeport.

Tex was sure that the Super Bowl would have to be re-formatted. It would have to pit two NFL teams, since the public would be cloyed with annual drubbings of the despised newcomer league by the seasoned practitioners of the old. Tex looked with undisguised contempt on the high-scoring AFL games, lips curling at the 60-20, 45-28 scores coming over the evening wire.

“Nobody knocks down a pass in that league,” he sneered. “Nobody makes a tackle. They think defense is just a word in treaties. The way they play, they should put up a net.”

No one who was there can forget Tex Maule at Super Bowl I. He told everyone who would listen that it wasn’t going to be a game, it was going to be a public execution. They might have to stop it.

A few of us looked up Tex at the half of that Super I. The score was Green Bay 14, Kansas City 10, hardly the germ of a rout. Tex was unworried--at least, publicly. “Wait,” he advised confidently.

Well. Tex was vindicated. Thanks to a few one-handed catches, a few fortuitous interceptions, the final score was Green Bay 35, Kansas City 10.

“See!” sneered Tex.

Super Bowl II was more of same: Green Bay 33, Oakland 14.

And, then, the wheels came off. The day after Super Bowl III, Tex walked around town as if someone had just hit him with a sash weight. He looked as if Paris had just fallen. Joe Namath and the hated New York Jets had humiliated the mighty Baltimore Colts and NFL, 16-7.

The next year was even worse. The Kansas City Chiefs-- the Kansas City Chiefs! --manhandled the Minnesota Vikings, 23-7.

The ‘70s were an excess of catastrophes for Tex and the NFC, nine losses for the decade.

But, by then, Tex had a saver. You see, in the merger of the leagues, the junior league had absorbed the franchises of Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. When Baltimore beat Dallas, Tex was able to rationalize it. Just a little family fight.

When Pittsburgh emerged as the team of the ‘70s, Tex could still take consolation in the contention that they were really an Establishment team that had been lent out. The Miami Dolphins, he had more trouble explaining.

Tex is gone now. A heart attack claimed him. It’s too bad he couldn’t be abroad in the Super Bowl press boxes of today. Because, you know who has been winning Super Bowls of the ‘80s? Not only NFC teams, not only Establishment teams but Super Establishment teams.

You don’t get any more Establishment than the New York Giants and Chicago Bears. The San Francisco 49ers definitely belong to Tex’s old-boy network. The Washington Redskins were there long before all these la-dee-dah Denver Broncos and Cincinnati Whatchacallums and Miami Whozits.

What’s more, these Establishment types are thrashing the ruffian newcomers within an inch of their lives, making them pay for their effrontery, as Tex would have wished.

Chicago Bears 46, New England Whodats 10. Tex would have chortled.

New York Giants 39, Denver 20. Tex would have wondered only how this funny little team from this funny little league ran up 20 points on a real honest-to-God NFL team, a grandfather team like the Giants.

Order has been restored, Tex.

Tex would have been mollified to know, too, that in the playoffs this year of Our Lord, of the eight teams left, six are really old-line first families of football, Tex’s kind of people.

The NFC presents the 49ers, Minnesota Vikings, Chicago Bears and Redskins. And the other conference offers the Indianapolis (nee Baltimore) Colts and Cleveland Browns.

The only only bona fide interlopers in the tournament are the Denver Broncos and Houston Oilers. And one of them is going to cancel the other out.

Tex could finally be getting his idea of a Super Bowl. One with real royalty in it. If he were here, Tex would be getting a Super Bowl where he couldn’t be wrong. Tex would like that. Anyway, it’s about time we returned to some standards.