The WFL: Drunk practice, bounced checks and the biggest disaster in professional sports ·

13 May 2024, 00:00

George Haynes figured this was his last, best shot.

A lanky cornerback out of Tulsa, Haynes spent the 1974 preseason with the New England Patriots, but when the team cut him in late August, he joined the Detroit Wheels, a founding franchise in the new World Football League. Haynes loved football, and deep down, he still believed he could play at the highest level. This was his chance to prove it.

When Haynes arrived in Detroit, a Wheels official picked him up at a downtown hotel and drove him to the team’s practice field out in the suburbs. Haynes doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this: a shoddy football field used by a prep school’s varsity squad. Shocked, Haynes stepped out of the car. The team official popped the trunk. “OK, see if you can find a helmet and shoulder pads that fit.”

Haynes wanted to cry: What have I gotten myself into?

It could have been the official slogan for the World Football League.

When the WFL launched with 12 teams in July 1974, Gary Davidson, the league’s founder, predicted it would span the globe, with franchises in Honolulu, Madrid, Mexico City, Toronto and Tokyo. A charming, fast-talking lawyer, Davidson had previously shaken the sports world with the American Basketball Association (ABA) and the World Hockey Association (WHA), leagues that pilfered big names with rich contracts. Davidson fostered the same ambitions for football.

Five months later, two teams had folded, three others had relocated and Davidson was out of the league. The owner of one team borrowed $27,000 from his head coach, then fired him the next day. The owner of another team was under federal indictment. In total, the World Football League lost $20 million in 1974 and another $10 million in 1975 before mercifully folding midway through the season.

Chris Hemmeter, the one-time commissioner of the league, called it “the biggest disaster in professional sports history.”

There was the time the coach of the Jacksonville Sharks — a former judge — climbed on a bar after a win, dropped his pants and revealed a silver shark on his underwear. Or the time the Philadelphia Bell needed eight flights, a broken-down bus and some old-fashioned hitchhiking to get home from Portland, Ore. Or the time players refused to dress in Philadelphia because of dead rats. Or the time sheriff’s deputies lingered to repossess the jerseys, helmets, shoulder pads and shoes of the league’s championship team while the team’s owner shrugged to reporters: “So what? The IRS and everybody else has liens against us, so what’s the big deal about losing our uniforms?”

And yet there was something beautiful about the WFL’s struggles. Stripped of every incentive to play pro football — money, fame, first-class travel — the little-knowns and has-beens of the league stumbled into a revelation about the meaning of sports that sticks with many of them almost 50 years later. “Had the most fun of my life,” Mike McBath, a former defensive lineman with the Buffalo Bills, told the Courier-Post that year. “Didn’t make any money, but the season proved something for me — there are still people in this world who would play the game only for the love of it. That might sound like bleep, but it was true.

“For the first time in my life, football was fun.”

There were also the parties. You can’t forget about the parties.

Miami Dolphins stars (from left to right) Paul Warfield, Jim Kiick and Larry Csonka all signed with the WFL’s Toronto Northman, who relocated to Memphis and became the Southmen before ever playing a game. (Erin Combs / Getty Images)

The train thundered through the Southeast countryside. Inside the club car, John Ricca and his teammates drained beer, banged on the piano and belted “Soul Man” and “Silhouettes on the Shade” until they passed out on the floor. For Ricca, a defensive tackle fresh out of Duke, it was heaven.

The Jets had drafted him in the 12th round that year, but when the D.C.-based WFL team reached out, he jumped. His father, Jim, played six years in the NFL in the 50s, four of those in Washington. Ricca always wanted to play pro football too, but he never thought he’d be good enough. Now he had a chance to do so in D.C., his hometown. It was an easy decision.

Only problem: the franchise was a disaster.

An ocean researcher and shipbuilder named Joseph Wheeler owned the team, first nicknamed the Washington Capitals, then the Washington Ambassadors. When his would-be NFL competitor wouldn’t let Wheeler play in RFK Stadium, he tried to pivot to Navy’s stadium in Annapolis, Maryland. Once that fell apart, he moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and changed the name again, this time to the Virginia Ambassadors.

“I feel that we now have a home at this time,” Wheeler said at a news conference announcing the relocation.

One month later, Wheeler sold to a group of investors who relocated the franchise to Orlando and renamed the team the Florida Blazers.

Because of the last-minute nature of the sale, Ricca and his teammates went to training camp in Harrisonburg, Virginia, 800 miles from Orlando. It was an inauspicious start. Many players didn’t show up on time (or at all) because the team hadn’t distributed airline tickets or directions. The dorm that doubled as team headquarters lost power. Gary Collins, a three-time All-Pro receiver with the Browns who hadn’t played in two years, broke his collarbone.

In training camp, Ricca impressed with his size, competitiveness and temper. An admitted hothead, Ricca complained during one practice that offensive lineman Benny Holthaus was holding. The next play Holthaus took, in Ricca’s mind, a cheap shot. So Ricca’s fist collided with Holthaus’ nose.

“Well,” coach Jack Pardee smirked to a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel, “he’s got plenty of spunk.”

At the end of training camp, Ricca and his teammates did not fly back to Orlando. Instead, they loaded their cars, pets and families onto a train for a 17-hour trip, a decision the Blazers pitched as classy. “It cost us twice as much to go this way than by plane,” assistant general manager Ed Cain boasted to a reporter on the trip from the Tampa Bay Times. “We wanted to start our franchise on the right foot.”

John Ricca and his buddies carried on in the club bar until 4 a.m., living their best lives.

“All I know is when it was time to get off the train about 10 guys were passed out under tables and the piano,” Ricca said. “It was a hell of a trip.”

Mike McBath had started for the Buffalo Bills. He had a master’s degree in economics and a doctorate in finance and management. Since retiring from the NFL after the 1973 season, he had done well as a salesman. He had no reason to play football again. His mother told him it was time to move on. Except one thing gnawed at him: He wanted desperately to live in Florida.

So when the Blazers reached out, McBath, a hulking defensive lineman with a booming voice, saw an opportunity. Not only would he live among palm trees and beaches, he figured football would give him a platform to meet business people in the community.

Then, on his first night in Orlando, McBath pulled up in front of the motel the Blazers had arranged as temporary housing.

“You had every type of lowlife degenerate there,” he said. “Everything was there.”

McBath and the Blazers practiced on a former little league field at an abandoned air force base. The Blazers didn’t have tackling dummies, and coach Pardee had to buy light bulbs, soap and toilet paper for the locker room. On the first day of practice, one player realized something else was missing.

“Hey,” the player yelled, “somebody get the footballs!”

The Blazers started the year 4-1, but before the sixth game, the team’s managing general partner, Rommie Loudd, a former UCLA linebacker and Patriots front-office executive, revealed that the Blazers might move to Atlanta — immediately. Loudd had spent the past two years trying to bring an NFL team to Orlando, but when that failed, he had turned to the WFL. Now he blamed a lack of support from public officials for the Blazers’ spiraling finances. Players didn’t know what to make of the drama, so they just kept playing.

Then the checks stopped.

George Haynes was eating his pregame meal at the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel in Manhattan when the news broke: The Detroit Wheels had filed for bankruptcy.

The Wheels had 32 owners, including Marvin Gaye, but no money. During training camp, one owner had suggested housing players in tents. More recently, the WFL had set a deadline for the team to find new ownership or the league would step in and run the organization. The Wheels no longer filmed games because they couldn’t pay the film processor. The equipment manager didn’t have enough tape, towels or even shoelaces. Banks in Detroit refused to extend the Wheels credit, but the team’s director, Erwin Ziegelman, didn’t blame them.

“If I was a bank,” he told the Free-Press, “I wouldn’t have loaned money to us either.”

Oh, and the Wheels lost their first nine games.

In less than a month, Haynes had gone from the fringe of the NFL to this. “You lived on hope,” he said, but when the team filed for bankruptcy in late September, hope was tested.

The Wheels were $1.4 million in debt. They owed $1,300 for pizza, $835 for dry cleaning and $3,823 to hotels. They had sent a floral wreath to the funeral of Lions coach Don McCafferty but had never actually paid for it.

Haynes and his teammates decided to play that night against the New York Stars. Dust devils swirled on patches of dirt at New York’s Downing Stadium. Members of the color guard sipped Carling Black Label on the field. About 4,000 people showed up. The Wheels lost 37-7. Their quarterback threw five interceptions. Two players wound up in the hospital. Coach Dan Boisture summed up the dysfunction to reporters: “We are defunct or something.”

After the game, the players on the winning team learned news of their own: The New York Stars had been sold and were relocating to Charlotte.

Three days after the game in New York, Haynes and the Wheels boarded a last-minute midnight flight out of Detroit, never to return. The telephone line in their office was disconnected, their practice equipment repossessed. “We just can’t operate in Detroit,” the team’s general manager, Sonny Grandelius, said. “We can’t even get aspirin or tape for the players. Nobody will give us credit.” So like bandits on the run, the Wheels fled the city — and their creditors — under the cover of darkness. The Wheels planned to play the rest of their games on the road, collecting gate money and traveling from one city to the next like a circus act.

One week later the team folded. George Haynes was out of a job.

World Football League teams

Team name	Years active	Record
Birmingham Americans	1974	15-5
Birmingham Vulcans	1975	9-3
Charlotte Hornets	1975	6-5
Chicago Fire	1974	7-13
Chicago Winds	1975	1-4
Detroit Wheels	1974	1-13
Florida Blazers	1974	14-6
The Hawaiians	1974-75	13-18
Houston Texans/Shreveport Steamer	1974	7-12-1
Jacksonville Express	1975	6-5
Jacksonville Sharks	1974	4-10
Memphis Southmen	1974-75	24-7
New York Stars/Charlotte Stars/Charlotte Hornets	1974	10-10
The Philadelphia Bell	1974-75	13-18
Portland Storm	1974	7-12-1
Portland Thunder	1975	4-7
San Antonio Wings	1975	7-6
Shreveport Steamer	1975	5-7
Southern California Sun	1974-75	20-12

Mike McBath, the former Bills lineman with the booming voice, looked at his buddy, linebacker Billy Hobbs from Texas. What they were about to do was impossibly stupid, and had McBath been in the right frame of mind, he would have realized it too. But by that point in the night, McBath had consumed enough alcohol that the idea he and Hobbs had originated seemed ingenious.

Now they just had to execute.

This night, like many nights, McBath and his Florida Blazers teammates were at Rosie O’Grady’s, one of the most popular bars in Orlando, where sawdust covered the floor, a Dixieland band blasted tunes and singing bartenders served flaming hurricanes in souvenir glasses.

“We had a lot of drinks and a good time,” McBath said. “That was our motto.”

On the second floor, McBath and Hobbs stared over the balcony at the packed crowd. One teammate said McBath was a “wild man,” but Billy Hobbs was a “wild, wild, wild man.” This was to be their crowning act as a tandem.

The pair jumped over the railing, their huge bodies falling through the air like pro wrestlers, until their chests smashed a table, flattening it on impact. Mission complete, they stood up, brushed themselves off and stumbled away in search of another beer. These were the moments of camaraderie that kept McBath and his teammates going after their pay stopped.

That, and gallows humor.

“I had a unique contract,” McBath joked. “No cut and, after a few weeks, no pay — not many guys have been able to achieve that in their negotiations.” Another time, when the Blazers had gone a month without pay, McBath received his $6 per diem and held it up in mock excitement: “Our paychecks!”

The whole league was in shambles. In the span of just a few weeks in the fall of 1974, the struggling Houston Texans relocated to Shreveport, Louisiana; the New York Stars moved to Charlotte; and the Detroit Wheels and Jacksonville Sharks folded (that doesn’t include the Toronto Northmen, who became the Memphis Southmen before the season). The IRS announced it would auction off the repossessed uniforms of the Portland Storm to cover the team’s tax debt. The owner of the Chicago Fire, Tom Origer, canceled his team’s final game and called it “meaningless,” even though a playoff spot was on the line. The Fire had lost nine straight; Origer had lost $800,000. “We don’t deserve to be in the playoffs,” he said. The WFL reshuffled the playoff format several times because no one knew how many teams would remain when the season ended.

The Blazers had it as bad as any of them.

Each week, management met with players and insisted new investors were on the way. And each week, nothing changed. Ricca had one check refused at the grocery store. Other players had their phones cut off. A woman parodied a fight song for the team in the Orlando Sentinel:

Fight on Blazers, right on Blazers,

We’re so proud of you.

Fight on Blazers, fight on Blazers,

Here’s an IOU.

Right on Blazers, fight on Blazers,

Though your rent is due.

“Before every practice, we’d meet and vote whether to play,” Billy Hobbs later told the Orlando Sentinel. “Guys would be yelling and crying and carrying on. Those meetings were hilarious. In my five years in the NFL, I remember only four team meetings; with the Blazers, we often had two a day.”

The drama extended to the highest levels. Loudd, the team’s managing general partner, sued the team’s major stockholder, David Williams, for $7 million in damages. Loudd claimed Williams had intentionally led the organization into economic disaster. Williams turned around and sued Loudd for $10 million, claiming Loudd could not account for the nearly $1 million Williams had invested.

Still the Blazers won. Pardee made his case to his team: “By leaving, what do we gain? By staying, we’ve got a chance to accomplish something.” To win a championship still meant something for Mike McBath, John Ricca and many others, even if they might never see a dollar for it.

But in late October 1974, the Blazers nearly mutinied.

Instead of the usual charter flight, the Blazers had to fly commercial to their game in Birmingham, Ala., complete with a four-hour layover in Atlanta. Naturally, Ricca and his teammates found the bar. Drinks flowed. And flowed. And flowed.

Ricca loved his time in Orlando, and he loved his teammates, but he was tired of the lies. At one point, he and two other young players had stormed out of a meeting, insisting they were done. They made it only as far as the parking lot. “We were just pissed,” Ricca said. “But we weren’t going anywhere.” They couldn’t quit on their teammates.

In the airport, Ricca and the Blazers started to complain. They hadn’t been paid in two months, and they were fed up.

They were also hammered.

Walter Rock, a veteran NFL defensive lineman, quit and flew home. Other players questioned if they should sit out the next day’s game. Pardee sensed serious trouble.

The team arrived in Birmingham at 9 p.m., but Pardee decided to bus the Blazers to the stadium anyway. He worried if players sat around the hotel bar, there would be no one left in the morning. Practice that night was short and brutal. “There were more guys drunk than not drunk,” Ricca says.

The next night the Blazers lost to the Birmingham Americans for the second time. Pardee was not happy with his team’s performance, but that was secondary to what had been achieved.

Other than Walter Rock, everyone stayed together.

George Haynes was in paradise. Or Birmingham. But in the fall of 1974, Birmingham, Ala., felt pretty much like paradise to Haynes.

After the Wheels folded, the league held a draft of the team’s players, and Haynes went in the second round to the Birmingham Americans, one of the jewels in the WFL’s crumbing crown. Birmingham had won its first 10 games and averaged more than 50,000 fans in that stretch.

Against the Florida Blazers in late October, Haynes took over for the Americans’ injured starting corner and played an “exceptional game,” according to the Birmingham Post-Herald. “It’s nice to be back on a winning team,” Haynes told the paper.

There was one problem: The Americans hadn’t been paid in several weeks either.

Soon after Haynes joined, the Americans were booted from their office in a motel. They still hadn’t paid a sporting goods store for their equipment. The IRS claimed the team owed $237,000, not to mention what the Americans owed the state, county and city. Attendance had cratered from 50,000 fans in September to 25,000 in October to less than 15,000 in November.

Birmingham’s owner, Bill Putnam, the former president of the Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Flames, hoped to find someone, anyone, with money. “Right now I will take the first thing that is offered,” he told reporters.

Still, the Americans earned a bye in the first round of the playoffs and beat The Hawaiians from Honolulu in the semifinals, setting up a showdown in the World Bowl against another team in the thick of chaos:

The Florida Blazers.

The Blazers beat the Philadelphia Bell in the quarterfinals. At halftime, a potential new owner handed a giant $1.5 million check to Blazers’ officials as a down payment on the franchise, a rare moment of financial bliss. But the check bounced, and the U.S. Attorney launched an investigation to determine if interstate fraud had been committed.

In the semifinals Blazers played the Memphis Southmen, a heavy favorite. The Blazers fell behind 15-0 at halftime before rallying. With seven seconds left and the Blazers clinging to an 18-15 lead, defensive end Louis Ross blocked a 40-yard field and broke down in happiness.

The Blazers hadn’t been paid in 14 weeks. It hardly mattered: They were going to the first — and only — World Bowl.

Four days before the World Bowl, George Haynes and his teammates walked off the practice field. They hadn’t seen a paycheck in more than a month, and they refused to practice. If nothing changed, they threatened to boycott the championship game.

Haynes had it as bad as anyone. Not only had he not been paid in five weeks with the Americans, he also hadn’t been paid in his final several weeks with the Wheels. Haynes and his teammates met after their walkout. Should they play? Should they not? The arguments became so heated and passionate, some players nearly fought.

“It got kind of ugly there,” Haynes said.

In the end, Haynes and the rest of the Americans voted to play, knowing the money might never come. The World Bowl was back on.

On the opening drive of the game, Blazers running back Tommy Reamon, for some reason one of three players named league MVP, fumbled as he was about to score a touchdown. Blazers players thought he had scored, leading linebacker Hobbs to say: “The officiating is the worst part of the WFL. The officials are even worse than not getting paid.”

Once again, the Blazers fell behind 22-0, but they hadn’t come all that way without pay just to roll over. They scored three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, including two in less than two minutes. Rod Foster, a defensive back from Harvard, broke a half dozen tackles on a 76-yard punt return to cut Birmingham’s lead to 22-21.

Four minutes remained. The Blazers needed a stop.

As the Americans chewed the clock, Ricca, the Blazers’ hot-headed defensive lineman, was pissed. The Blazers had burned their timeouts. The game was slipping away. Ricca took out his frustration on a strange target — Birmingham running back Charlie Harraway, a former NFL player with Cleveland and Washington whom Ricca idolized growing up. But Ricca was seeing red, and he admittedly cheap-shotted Harraway.

“He got up and said, ‘F— you,'” Ricca said. “And I said, ‘F— you.’ Next thing we know we were wailing away and the benches cleared.”

Ricca was ejected. He walked across the field to the Blazers’ bench, where Pardee stopped him.

“What are you doing?” the coach said.

Ricca explained the officials had tossed him.

“Well, they didn’t tell me,” Pardee said. “Get back in there.”

Ricca ran back on the field. The officials blew their whistles and escorted Ricca off the field, “like a convict,” he said. As he walked to the locker room, Birmingham fans tossed beer bottles at him, and Ricca, in a moment of inspiration, flipped off the crowd. “My mother, my grandmother — everybody saw it,” he said.

(Courtesy of Mike McBath)

The Blazers never did get the ball back — until the game ended.

Even though the Blazers lost, J.R. Pardee, Jack’s 16-year-old son, scooped the ball and ran off the field. Birmingham offensive lineman Paul Costa, a 6-foot-6 giant, gave chase. Pardee flipped the ball over Costa’s head to Blazers defensive back Billy Hayes, who now drew Costa’s full attention. Hayes ran up the tunnel. Both teams pursued him. A fight broke out. Hobbs, the wild man from Texas, beat up a Birmingham fan who had climbed the fence, then had to be restrained from climbing the fence himself to take on more fans.

Paul Costa did catch Billy Hayes, a fact confirmed by McBath. McBath had played with Costa in Buffalo, and he knew Costa was “probably the nicest, nastiest guy you’ve ever met. In other words, he would rip your head off if there was a flight.” McBath saw a bloody Hayes after the melee and walked up to him.

“You picked the wrong guy, brother,” he said.

Once the fighting stopped, the champagne flowed. A bunch of fans slipped into the locker room, followed by Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies. One deputy stared at the trophy while he waited to repossess Birmingham’s uniforms, helmets and shoes.

Given that, George Haynes doesn’t know how the Americans paid for championship rings, but he still has his almost 50 years later.

John Ricca did not get a ring, nor did he officially get his recognition as an all-WFL player. The Durham Sun said the achievement “wasn’t announced by the league because players who made it were promised bonuses.” But Ricca took away lessons about personal pride and team chemistry, experiences he drew on for decades afterward.

“Now that it’s all said and done,” Ricca said, “I wouldn’t trade a thing about it.”

In the losing locker room after the World Bowl, Mike McBath saw his chance. He had loved his return to football, and if this was the end of his career, he wanted a keepsake. So he grabbed a few of the league’s blue-and-gold footballs. “In my own way,” he says, laughing, “I figure I got my pension plan.” A successful businessmen who later owned an Arena Football League team in Orlando, McBath still displays the footballs and Blazers memorabilia in his house, a reminder of his crazy, chaotic and wonderful year in the WFL.

“No money could buy this once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.

(Photo illustration: Sam Richardson / The Athletic)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57km9tcW1lbXxzfJFrZmpoX2eCcMPOq6OdZZakvLWuwKWjZqSVlrS2sYyhoKysn6fGcA%3D%3D

The WFL: Drunk practice, bounced checks and the biggest disaster in professional sports

Share!