Express Was on Fast Track : Instead of Ending Up in NFL, They Were Out of Business

It was a professional team.

It wasn’t supposed to end with grown men throwing appetizers at each other in a hotel room.

It wasn’t supposed to end with the quarterback telling the center: “Just snap the ball over my head and let’s see what happens.”

It wasn’t supposed to end with a 39-year-old truck driver going knuckles down at left tackle for $100 per game, sending a $40-million quarterback scrambling toward the sanctuary of the sideline.

It wasn’t supposed to end in backdrops so library-quiet the quarterback used to move the huddle back to keep defenses from picking up the sound of his heart beat.

It wasn’t supposed to end with death threats from creditors, or with daytime fireworks, or with checks that bounced higher than some Romanian gymnasts.

It wasn’t supposed to end.

The Los Angeles Express was going to survive its self-inflicted wounds and bolt the United States Football League for the NFL, probably in 1987.

“That was the premise,” Don Klosterman, the team’s general manager, said recently.

The Express was going to be so good after the USFL funeral, the NFL would absorb the team or face a public tribunal.

The Express would check in at the front desk with sights set on Super Bowl XXIII in Miami in January of 1989, when it would take on the San Francisco 49ers and perhaps defeat them on three or four touchdown passes from Steve Young to Jerry Rice.

That Rice?

That’s right.

Months before the 49ers took Rice with the 16th pick in the 1985 draft--receivers Al Toon and Eddie Brown were chosen before him--Klosterman invited Rice’s coaching staff from Mississippi Valley State to Manhattan Beach.

“I was working on him a year in advance,” Klosterman said. “I think we would have signed him before anyone else. He didn’t become hot until later on. We would have paid him a lot of money. He didn’t know he was going to be a first-round choice.”

Armed with the open checkbook of his owner, J. William Oldenburg, Klosterman set out in 1984 to build the greatest franchise in professional football.

The financial collapse of Oldenburg’s real estate empire stopped Klosterman in his tracks.

But what if the collapse hadn’t occurred?

During one two-month recruiting swoop in 1984, Klosterman signed 31 of the nation’s top college prospects. The Sporting News called it “arguably the finest haul of talent in one draft in pro football history.”

Seven years after Klosterman’s dream collapsed, pieces of his architecture can still be found scattered over the football landscape.

Seven years later, 12 former Express players entered 1992 training camps on NFL rosters.

The list stretches from A, Adickes, to Z, Zimmerman.

The Express club includes quarterback Steve Young (49ers); running back Kevin Mack (Cleveland Browns); kick returner Mel Gray (Detroit Lions); defensive end Lee Williams (Houston Oilers); offensive linemen Gary Zimmerman (Minnesota Vikings), Mark Adickes (Washington Redskins), Derek Kennard (New Orleans Saints) and Mike Ruether (Atlanta Falcons); defensive backs Dwight Drane (Buffalo Bills) and Wymon Henderson (Denver Broncos); linebacker David Howard (New England Patriots), and kicker Tony Zendejas (Rams).

Once, Klosterman ruled over all.

Can they play?

Young led the NFL in passing last season and threatens to become a star should Joe Montana ever pass on the torch.

Mack has made two Pro Bowls with the Browns and has rebounded from a 1989 drug problem.

Gray is the NFL’s most dangerous returner, on punts and kickoffs, making the Pro Bowl last season as a specialist.

Williams started in two Pro Bowls for the San Diego Chargers before going to the Oilers. He had 15 sacks in 1986.

Zimmerman, a left tackle, was voted to the second unit of the NFL’s team of the 1980s, not bad when you consider that his NFL career began in 1986.

Adickes started 48 games in his first four NFL seasons with Kansas City before joining the Redskins in 1989. Adickes has not totally recovered from a serious knee injury suffered with the Express.

Kennard was the only Cardinal lineman to start every down in 1988. He now plays for the Saints.

Ruether was Young’s center with the Express. He made NFL stops in Phoenix and Denver before landing with the Falcons.

Drane was a projected superstar until a neck injury with the Express set him back. Still, Drane started for the Bills in Super Bowl XXVI.

Henderson, the unlikeliest Express survivor, is a steady cornerback for the Broncos.

Howard was a solid starter in Minnesota for years before going to Dallas in 1989 as part of the Herschel Walker trade. He has since gone to the Patriots.

Zendejas set an NFL record last season with the Rams when he kicked 17 field goals without a miss.

“Look at those players,” Zendejas said of the list. “If we would have kept that team together, with good support from management, I think that team would have been a contender in the NFL for a long, long time.”

Remember, that was one draft.

“That would have been a core group that’s still here from 1984,” Young said. “Think of the additions we would have made in the last eight years.”

Other former Express players had significant NFL careers, such as quarterback Tom Ramsey, receiver Jojo Townsell and offensive linemen Chris Foote and Mike Durrette.

“If everything held together, and we kept getting players at the pace we were getting them, I could not imagine us not being Super Bowl contenders,” former Express coach John Hadl said.

Oldenburg took over the Express in December of 1983 and hired Klosterman. In early 1983, the Express had been born a modest franchise in a spring league with reasonable expectations.

But there was nothing modest about Oldenburg or his new general manager. With the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Colts and later, the Rams, Klosterman developed into one of the NFL’s most astute football executives.

His NFL career ended after the death of Ram owner Carroll Rosenbloom in 1979. Rosenbloom’s wife, Georgia, assumed control of the team and squeezed Klosterman out of the picture.

Klosterman took over the Express with a vengeance. Using Oldenburg’s money, Klosterman envisioned a powerhouse that could force its way into the NFL.

“Yes,” Klosterman said. “You have to look at the All-American League.”

Klosterman referred to the All American Football Conference, an NFL rival in the 1940s. The AAFC included two teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Cleveland Browns, that would join the NFL in 1950.

“If you could put together a good team, and it could stay together, you could merge in as an entity,” Klosterman said. “The NFL had to expand. (The Express) would have been the perfect expansion team.”

Klosterman stole Dick Daniels, a top personnel man, from the Redskins. He asked his old pal Hadl, the former star quarterback, to be his head coach. He hired legendary Sid Gillman to be a special assistant.

With minds and money, the Express combed the area for top talent.

“Listen,” Gillman said, “if you’ve got money, there’s nothing you can’t do. . . . We all had the advantage of having been in the NFL. The players are out there.”

The Express spent $12 million on talent in the first year alone.

Klosterman was criticized by NFL old-liners for driving up player salaries.

“I did not wantonly throw money around,” Klosterman said. “I’ve heard that in the past and it used to rile me a bit. They had to have something to say about us. Anybody who works for an owner knows the owner dictates what you can and can’t do. Bill openly wanted the best. He never complained about losing the money.”

Oldenburg told Klosterman to build him a replica of the 1978 Pittsburgh Steelers.

Adickes, an All-American tackle from Baylor, signed for $700,000 per year after a dinner-table conversation during which Oldenburg turned to Klosterman and said: “Give the kid anything he wants.”

Adickes scribbled $700,000 on a napkin, and the deal was done.

“My nickname was ‘Limo,’ ” Adickes recalled. “Because they drove me right out on the practice field in one. It was something right out of that sitcom on HBO, ‘First and 10.’ ”

Klosterman used the signings of rookie linemen Adickes, Zimmerman and Ruether as bait to lure his top draft pick, Young, the Heisman Trophy runner-up from Brigham Young.

Young was hooked in March of 1984 when he signed a $40-million deal with an annuity that would pay out for 43 years.

Kevin Nelson, the former UCLA back, who was paid a $1.150-million signing bonus.

Zimmerman and Ruether signed identical deals worth $5.9 million over four years.

“I’ll tell you what, they knew where the good players were,” said Zendejas, who received $100,000 to sign. “I’ve never been in a parking lot that had so many brand-new Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches. Never. It was a shock to me when I went to the Houston Oilers and went to the parking lot and saw a whole bunch of beat up cars and trucks.”

But the stream of cash from Oldenburg dried up in May of 1984, not long after newspaper stories about the owner’s impending business failure.

Oldenburg’s mistake?

He boasted in a national magazine article that when it came to business, Donald Trump couldn’t carry his socks. This was at a time when New York City seemed Trump’s private Monopoly board.

It turned out that Oldenburg’s company, Investment Mortgage International, had posted losses for four consecutive years before showing a profit in 1983.

Oldenburg would soon disappear into debt and the shadow of federal indictments for business fraud.

He took his best shots before leaving center stage.

What started as a disagreement between Oldenburg and Hadl in a Los Angeles airport hotel room nearly ended in a brawl.

“He threw some hors d’oeuvres at me,” Hadl said. “He missed me, then I hit him with another plate.”

The Express, with 31 rookies and an uncertain future, advanced to the Western Conference title game in 1984 as a moving van waited to carry off the team’s repossessed uniforms.

Oldenburg came out of hiding for the playoff game and cried in Hadl’s arms after the Express lost to George Allen’s Arizona Wranglers at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz.

“It’s too bad he had the problems he had,” Hadl said recently. “He would have been a great owner, because he would give you anything you wanted.”

Even if he didn’t have it.

Desperate to keep a team in its second-largest media market in 1985, USFL owners took over Express operations, each agreeing to pay $500,000 to keep the team afloat.

The owners did have stipulations.

The league agreed to pay the team’s enormous player payroll, but refused to provide such basic necessities as adhesive tape for the trainers, ice, light bulbs and stamps.

It was a prescription for disaster.

The Express was not even allowed to replace injured players during the 1985 season. The team dressed as few as 37 players for some games.

With the team’s demise imminent, agents encouraged their players to take it easy so they wouldn’t endanger their potential NFL careers.

To drum up some extra cash, Mack was allowed out of his contract before the 1985 season, and he signed with the Browns.

Eleven players required season-ending operations. Twelve others suffered significant injuries.

“It was like a general losing battle after battle and you had no supplies coming in,” Klosterman said.

Hadl reflects on the season as “a chaotic mess.”

At the depth of despair, with the Express reduced to four able-bodied linemen, the team recruited a tackle from the school of trucking.

“They paid him in cash,” Young said. “I guess he had played at some point. He suited up and he was really out of shape. We were rolling right on every play. It was like, ‘Get out of the way!’

“It’s really amazing someone didn’t get killed.”

With eight games left in the season, USFL Commissioner Harry Usher informed Klosterman, Hadl and the coaching staff that their contracts would not be renewed.

“The coaches were (angry),” Young said. “So Hadl comes to us and says: ‘They’re going to fire us, you guys make your own game plan.’ So we were fighting over who was going to get the runs and passes. We started drawing up stuff. It was hilarious.”

Young, a great scrambler, once told his center, Ruether, to purposely snap the ball over his head out of the shotgun formation.

“We’ve had a lot of success with this over-the-head thing,” Young told Ruether. “It’s time.”

The Express finished 3-15 in 1985. The USFL folded after winning a $3 settlement in its antitrust suit against the NFL.

Players still wonder how good the Express might have been.

“With the right leadership, I think we could have been great,” Adickes said. “However, that team was just a bunch of college kids. We all lived in this apartment complex near the beach. It was like living on Fantasy Island. We definitely needed direction. I don’t know how we would have matured. It’s hard to say. But the talent was there.”

There will always be memories.

“Every once in a while, I’ll run into somebody wearing an Express jacket,” Young said. “I was walking in L.A. this summer, and someone came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I miss the Express.’ ”

Postscript:

--Klosterman is now chairman of the board of NTN Communications, a two-way interactive television company.

After taking on the NFL and losing, he knew his chances of returning to the league were slim.

Said Klosterman: “I had 25 great years in pro football. I was associated with teams that were in the playoffs 22 out of 25 years. It’s a pretty good record to have. I would have like to have gone on. It’s difficult not to end on a high note. But it just didn’t work out that way.”

--Hadl is back at his alma mater, the University of Kansas, where he is in charge of fund raising. His eagerness to take the Express job derailed his dream of becoming a head coach in the NFL. He regrets not having stayed in Denver with the Broncos, where he coached quarterback John Elway.

“I would have been a head coach by now by default,” Hadl said. “If I would have stayed with (Denver Coach) Dan Reeves another two or three years, I would have been totally qualified.”

--Oldenburg was indicted on several federal counts of business fraud, but in 1991, after two hung juries, the government decided to drop all charges against him.

Oldenburg was convicted on one other count of deceiving federal regulators in 1989, but a judge overturned that conviction.

Oldenburg was last seen plotting another business comeback in Mercer Island, Wash.

“He’s one of a kind,” said Joe Russoniello, a former federal prosecutor who litigated the first case against Oldenburg.

“I wouldn’t want to describe what I mean by that.”

Expressway to the NFL

The 12 former Los Angeles Express players who are on 1992 NFL training camp rosters.

Player Pos NFL Team Mark Adickes OL Redskins Dwight Drane DB Bills Mel Gray KR Lions Wymon Henderson DB Broncos David Howard LB Patriots Kevin Mack RB Browns Derek Kennard OL Saints Mike Ruether OL Falcons Steve Young QB 49ers Lee Williams DE Oilers Tony Zendejas K Rams Gary Zimmerman OL Vikings