The Battle For Dallas

It was the most unique situation in the history of American professional sports: two start-up football teams going head-to-head in the same city at the same time.

In the history of pro football, basketball and hockey and major league baseball it’s never happened before or since. The Dallas Texans and Cowboys were teams born in the same football nursery, some six months apart. They had different fathers who shared many of the same characteristics – sons of oil millionaires with quirky personalities who loved sports and liked to stay in the background.

The Texans and Cowboys competed for the hearts and minds of football fans in Dallas for three years. They shared a playground known as the Cotton Bowl and hustled about the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex trying to sell tickets and attraction attention with special promotions and half-time extravaganzas that featured everything from Roy Rogers to bathing beauties. The Texans were a football success, a championship team in that time, while the Cowboys struggled to win games at the start. Neither team was able to establish a solid financial foothold as the head-to-head competition split the ticket buying public in half.

Eventually something had to give and in the early days of 1963, Lamar Hunt decided to move his franchise out of his hometown. It was a painful moment for Hunt, but the move to Kansas City where the Texans became the Chiefs strengthened the American Football League. Three years later, the AFL and NFL reached a merger agreement that created what would become the strongest professional sports business in history.

Unhappily, the Texans left Big D for KC. Big parts of the roster at the time were natives of Texas, players like E.J. Holub, Jerry Mays, Jerry Cornelison, Jon Gilliam, Sherrill Headrick and Abner Haynes. They left behind a Cowboys franchise that would ultimately become called “America’s Team.”

When the Chiefs wear the throwback helmets of the ‘62 Texans against the Cowboys on Sunday at Arrowhead Stadium, there will be fans that will not understand why a team from Kansas City has the lone star state outlined on their helmets. It’s a forgotten part of pro football history.

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Almost immediately after Lamar Hunt announced the formation of the American Football League, the established NFL answered back, promising an expansion that would include a team in Dallas. It would take some five months before Clint Murchison, Jr. and Bedford Wynne were awarded an expansion franchise at the same NFL meeting where owners elected a new commissioner, a young fellow from California named Pete Rozelle. Murchison actually owned more than 90 percent of the ballclub. That’s him to the left with QB Eddie LeBaron.

There’s no question the established league was trying to nip in the bud this new league, so they would retain control over the pro game. They didn’t count on Hunt being unwilling to walk away from the men who signed up with him for the founding ride of the AFL. Murchison offered him a majority interest in the team; in fact at one point, he offered to sell him all of the 95 percent that Murchison owned of the franchise. Hunt refused the offer, not willing to abandon the partners he’d picked up in formation of the new league.

In six months, Dallas went from no pro football beyond NFL exhibition games, to having a pair of teams in two different leagues. And, there was only one place to play: the Cotton Bowl.

That first year there was one problem for the NFL franchise that started its life as the Rangers, but then changed their name to the Cowboys: Hunt had beaten them to the Cotton Bowl. He had negotiated a contract with the State Fair of Texas that operated the stadium just after the AFL was even announced. That deal guaranteed him seven games at the Bowl, with the right to choose the dates.

When the Cowboys became reality, they wanted to know what dates were available at the Cotton Bowl. But the AFL had not yet created a schedule, as they were still trying to fill the eighth spot in their initial lineup of teams. So Hunt dragged his feet on submitting his dates. If that caused the new guys some problems, so be it. Eventually, he picked his favored dates, all Sunday afternoons in some of the prime fall weekends. The Cowboys got what was left and had to play several games on Friday and Saturday nights.

The two owners came from similar backgrounds. Both of their fathers had made fortunes in oil, and they were trying to establish their own histories. Both had been benchwarmers playing college football, Hunt at SMU and Murchison at MIT. Murchison was 37, while Hunt was 27 when he formed the AFL in 1959.

And while their organizations would go head-to-head in competition for players, fans and the ticket-buying public, Hunt and Murchison always got a long. One time Murchison showed u p at a Texans booster luncheon wearing one of the club’s red blazers. Another time Hunt showed up at Murchison’s birthday party and came out of the extra large birthday cake.

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She was a physical education teacher at Highland Park High School in Dallas.

Growing up in Louisiana, she had been quite an athlete. In fact, she won the parish/county girls team track championship all by herself. In those days, girls competed in the shot put, baseball throw, sprints, broad jump, high jump and horseshoe pitching.

She also loved football, and become part of the athletic department during his undergrad days at LSU.

So when she heard there was a pro football team coming to Dallas, Jayne Murchison wanted to get involved. She joined the Spur Club, a volunteer organization that was selling tickets and trying to generate attention for the Texans. In just a few months, she sold 137 season tickets, earning the honor of a red blazer that was given to every member who sold 100 tickets or more.

When she called on some people in Dallas, they were confused which team she was working for, given the fact that Clint Murchison was the primary owner of the Cowboys. So when she talked about Texans season tickets, more than a few prospective buyers were scratching their heads.

Many, many years later, the confusion still brought a smile to Lamar Hunt’s face.

“Yes there was some confusion,” Hunt said several years ago, a twinkle in his eyes. “She was a very good salesperson.”

Clint Murchison did not think the situation was funny. In fact, he asked his staff to comb the phone books in the Dallas area for a Rosemary Hunt. At the time, Lamar’s first wife was named Rosemary. Legend has it that one possibility was found in the Dallas suburbs, but the Cowboys decided not to get involved in having her become part of their organization.

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Jimmy Harris is not a name that leaps from the pages of Texans history. He’s not a name that burned his mark in the annals of the Cowboys.

But Harris played for both teams – Texans in ‘60 and Cowboys in ‘61 – and was the subject of a court fight for his services. It was one of the early skirmishes between the teams that shared a city.

There were many players that both teams wanted for their start-up season. The most famous was Doak Walker, who had retired five years earlier from the NFL’s Detroit Lions. Walker was a Texas legend and in 1960 he was just 33 years old. Both teams asked him to return to the playing field, and short of that they wanted him to get involved as a coach. Walker was running an oil company in Texas at the time and declined the opportunities.

SMU QB Don Meredith was sought by both clubs. Although he does not have this designation in history, Meredith was the first player drafted by the Texans. The ‘60 AFL Draft was built on taking players by position. In the ‘60 NFL Draft, the Chicago Bears drafted Meredith in the third round. But Halas had no intention of signing the quarterback; he drafted him to control his rights so he would end up with the expansion team in Dallas. Ultimately, his rights were traded to the Dallas franchise for a third-round selection in the ‘61 NFL Draft. Meredith signed a personal services contract with Murchison that took him off the market and made him part of the Cowboys.

There was more competition for players with a lone-star pedigree, like LB E.J. Holub out of Texas Tech who signed with the Texans, while the Cowboys signed DT Bob Lilly from TCU.

And then there was Harris. He had been the quarterback for Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma Sooners, a team that went 31-0 during Harris’ time there (1954-56) and won two national championships. He was selected in the 1957 NFL Draft by the Philadelphia Eagles and played as a defensive back. The next year he played for the Los Angeles Rams and then in ‘59, unhappy with the salary he was offered, Harris went back to Norman and served as a volunteer coach for Wilkinson while he finished work on his college degree in geology.

In April 1960, the Texans announced the signing of Harris to a contract that would pay him $13,000. The Rams immediately reacted, telling Harris that he was still under their control because of the option clause in his contract, in a deal that would pay him $8,000.

“We didn’t think there would be any complaint about signing Harris,” Hunt told the Dallas Morning News in June 1960. “(Elroy) Hirsch (Rams GM) told him he didn’t particularly care one way or another whether he played with us, but the NFL was pushing the matter.”

Ultimately, it all ended up in court. First, the Cowboys traded a fifth-round ‘61 draft choice to the Rams for Harris. Then they filed suit in U.S. District Court asking for a temporary injunction that would keep Harris from playing for anybody else but the Cowboys.

Hunt and the Texans claimed harassment. There were other players in the same situation, including a linebacker named Hugh Pitts who had retired from playing with the Rams, but had the option year on his contract sitting there. Pitts signed with the Houston Oilers, but the Cowboys took no action in that case.

“This is not harassment,” said Cowboys GM Tex Schramm at the time. “We feel Harris is a fine football player and a valuable piece of property and that he belongs to the NFL.”

Judge W.L. Thornton of the 44th District court ruled in favor of the Cowboys, granting the injunction. A hearing on Harris’ appeal to the Court of Civil Appeals was put on hold for 60 days. Eventually, the Court of Appeals overturned the injunction and Harris was able to play for the Texans at the end of October.

But the case went back to court and in July of 1961, it was ruled that if he wanted to play football he had to play for the Cowboys. Harris actually left the Texans training camp and reported to the Cowboys camp, where he played that season and never again in either league.

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There were hard feelings all around in the football battle for Dallas. Tex! The Man Who Built the Dallas Cowboys is a 1988 biography of Schramm written by Bob St. John, a long-time Dallas newspaper columnist. In the book, the late Cowboys GM is quoted as saying this about Lamar Hunt:

“I obviously have emotional reasons to cloud my perspective. But I see Lamar Hunt as one of the most selfish, commercial people I’ve ever met in sports. He has been able to sell people on a façade that he creates for himself of being Mr. Nice Guy, just a good ol’ boy with money … that’s a bunch of bull. He was scheming all along to start his own league and when he saw a chance to get out of Dallas for a better financial deal, he cut and ran.”

That’s Schramm in the middle of the picture at left, with Art Modell, Pete Rozelle, Milt Woodard and Hunt. Schramm was sometimes very crass in his dealings with his peers in the NFL and there was no bus needed to carry his friends in the football business. There was no doubt that Hunt and his Texans GM Jack Steadman rubbed him the wrong way. Many years later, he would tell a young Cowboys assistant coach named John Mackovic not to take the head coaching job of the Chiefs. “You can’t trust those people,” is what Schramm told Mackovic, who did not listen and after four seasons as head coach, he was fired after making the playoffs.

And there were plenty of hurt feelings from those three years of head-to-head competition that Schramm carried to his grave.

“The Texans attendance figures were misleading, because t hey gave away a lot of tickets,” Schramm said. “We didn’t. The only giveaway we had was that we’d let an adult who bought an end zone ticket bring in five kids free. We had a basic difference in philosophy. We knew we had the product and all we had to do was eventually be successful on the field. ”

After the 1962 season, Hunt and Steadman sat down for a meeting with Murchison and Schramm.

In the 1970 book Dallas Cowboys Pro or Con? by Dallas sportswriter Sam Blair, Hunt talked about that meeting:

“There was no conceivable way for both the Texans and Cowboys to continue to operate in Dallas and be successful. Jack Steadman and I initiated the meeting with Clint and Tex Schramm. The theme was, ‘Look, we’ve both lost money for three years. Let’s one of us leave town.’ We came to the conclusion that the Cow boys were not really interested in leaving. We looked elsewhere.”

Not surprisingly, Schramm had different memories of that meeting:

“At first Hunt proposed to play us in a loser leave town game, but we refused. We had nothing to gain by such a game and besides we weren’t going anywhere. Then the job going around town a year or so later was that the two teams should play and the loser had to stay in town. He (Hunt) said ‘If we move what will you do? How do you feel about it?’ There was never any discussion or thought about the Cowboys leaving. Once again Clint offered Lamar a partnership in the Cowboys. But Lamar didn’t want that. He wanted to go to Kansas City.”

Hunt also had a looming tax problem, as did Murchison. Both me were writing off their football teams’ financial losses as a tax deduction. But IRS rules said that after five years those teams would become hobbies, not businesses and they would have to pay tax on all the future and previous write-offs

“We had just won the championship and I felt if we were going to move that was the time,” Hunt told Blair. “I didn’t think we would do a lot better if we stayed another year and we might not do n early as well on the field.”

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The Texans and Cowboys shared the Cotton Bowl in Dallas for three seasons. At the time, the Texans were the best product on the field, going 26-17 and winning the ‘62 AFL Championship Game against the Oilers. The Cowboys were 9-28-3 during those three seasons. Team attendance figures show the Cowboys at 452,946 fans, with the Texans drawing 449,909.

Len Dawson was a late comer to the Battle for Dallas, arriving before the 1962 season. He remembers the teams shared the city, but seldom mingled with each other.

“You didn’t see the Cowboys at places where we went, and they didn’t see us at their places,” Dawson said. “Maybe in the off-season, there was a banquet or luncheon or something where there would be guys from both teams.

“But there wasn’t any fraternization.”

It was tough for some of the Texas natives to leave for Kansas City. Cornelison retired for a year. Mays seemed to be talking retirement before every season with the Chiefs because he was needed at the family construction business in Dallas. A guy like Holub adapted. He bought a farm near Liberty and trucked in some of his horses from Lubbock.

While the first years were a struggle in Kansas City, it all fell together in 1966 and it was the Chiefs that played in the first NFL-AFL Championship Game, which became known as the Super Bowl. Sadly, the same Packers team that beat the Chiefs in Super Bowl I beat the Cowboys for the NFL Championship that season in the game that would become known as the Ice Bowl.

That was the Cowboys seventh season of play and it was their first winning season and first championship. The Chiefs would return to the Super Bowl for a victory in the fourth game before the Cowboys made their first appearance after the 1970 season in Super Bowl V

“Lamar’s team had an emotional following,” Schramm said before he died. “Feelings like that linger. We even had a sportswriter named Sam Blair who wore a red Dallas Texan sport coat to our games long after the team had left town.

“We just had to live with those who favored the Texans until we started winning. When we reached the .500 mark in 1965, those things started taking care of themselves. We had become a very exciting team and had captured the imagination of the fans in Dallas.”

The same thing happened in Kansas City with the Texans Chiefs.