A Big Mess In Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History
By David Fleming
St. Martin's Press; 320 pages; hardcover, $29.00; E-Book, $14.99; available today, Tuesday, October 14th
David Fleming is a senior writer at ESPN, and in his three-decade long career, of which he was formerly with Sports Illustrated, building a reputation as one of the industry's most prolific, versatile, imaginative, and imaginative longform writers. He has earned numerous national awards, and is the author of Breaker Boys: The NFL's Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship; Noah's Rainbow: A Father's Emotional Journey from the Death of his Son to the Birth of his Daughter; and Who'd Your Founding Father?: One Man's Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True declaration of Independence.
Before the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans, there was the Dallas Texans, whose unique, largely unknown story Fleming chronicles in his new book, A Big Mess In Texas.
The Dallas Texans played only one season, in 1952, and it encapsulates every larger-than-life Texas football folktale. This zany season included rattlesnakes on the practice field, fist fights on the team plane, bounced checks, paternity suits, house bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, stadium fields covered with circus elephant dung, one-legged trainers, humiliating defeats and miraculous win, as well as a future Hall of Fame Coach stealing a taxi cab.
Surprisingly, there is a link to the Big Apple, as a wealthy Dallas businessman, Giles Miller, bought the failing New York Yankees football team and moved them to Dallas. His father, Clarence Ransom (C.R.) Miller, owner of Texas Textile Mills, Inc., had a deep skepticism when his son informed him that he was going to pour a substantial amount of the family fortune into the still-fledgling National Football League.
The most football-obsessed state in America was about to have a team to call their own. While everything possible could go wrong, there were some fun moments, such as when the Texans upset George Halas' Chicago Bears on Thanksgiving Day. They celebrated with a bender that was true to form.
Miller stood out in many ways, starting with the fact that he was the youngest NFL owner and president in history, and was quite open about how he didn't know much about the NFL or how to run a team. The one thing he did now how to do was promote his new team, starting with having players dressed in full Western outfits when traveling to road games. This meant cowboy boots, ten-gallon hats, and bedazzled suits.
It didn't take long for the media to compare him to baseball's intrepid owner, Bill Veeck, of the Chicago White Sox, among other teams. Another innovation Miller came up with was halftime entertainment, including ceremonial dancers from nearby Oklahoma tribes, as well as Kilgore College's well-known drum majorettes.
In this excerpt, Fleming writes of the era of the NFL that the Dallas Texans were a part of: While it would one day grow into a glossy, multibillion-dollar corporation and America's national pastime, in 1952, when Giles Miller dreams up the idea of making Dallas the NFL's first franchise in the South, the National Football League was almost unrecognizable (often, in a good way) from the overly produced, perfectly polished product of today. At the time, "pro football was the haunt of brawlers, boozers, and big-time gamblers," wrote one historian. In the 1950s the NFL was still very much a ragtag organization perpetually on the verge of financial collapse, pushing a chaotic, bloody, uber-violent, but strangely captivating game still considered by many, including C.R., to be a less respectable form of entertainment than burlesque.
"Mr. C.R. was just apoplectic about the whole thing, about the very thought of his son blowing all that money on something as lowly as the NFL," said one family member.
After all, baseball was still king in America, followed by college football, boxing, and horse racing. "In national popularity polls, pro football ranked just above synchronized swimming," wrote Hall of Famer Art Donovan, one of the game's greatest characters, who chronicled the era in his 1987 memoir, Fatso. "When I played football there were wild teams, stocked with wild guys, playing during wild times."
This long-forgotten version of the NFL had everything - except profits. Before Giles Miller spontaneously threw his Stetson in the ring, forty-three other true believers with money to burn had also tried to make a go of it in the NFL.
Thirty-one had gone broke.
After playing for what he described as "a couple of the worst dog-ass teams ever assembled" stocked with "over-sized coalminers and west Texas psychopaths," Donovan sought out family friend and New York State Athletic Commission chairman Jim Farley, the future postmaster general of the United States, did not mince words.
"Get the hell out of the NFL," he told Donovan.
There's no future in it, he said...
In 1952 the NFL was still essentially a Ponzi scheme made up of a handful of fortunate owners constantly searching for easy marks, er, investors, to pay off the massive debts accrued by the long trail of failed franchises that had come before them. In fact, the only reason an NFL franchise was even available for possible relocation to Dallas was that after seven lackluster seasons of failing to garner attention in the media capital of the world, the owners of the New York Yanks had finally thrown in the towel and were about to unload the franchise back to the NFL for pennies on the dollar. The Sporting News concluded that in seven years the only thing the Yanks managed to accomplish was "an unusual ability to blow away a bankroll." So while the going rate for an NFL franchise appeared to be just $100,000, Giles had to sheepishly explain to his already irate father the deal would actually be contingent on the Millers also assuming $200,000 of what the Yanks still owed on their lease at Yankee Stadium. Which sounded truly ridiculous until Giles explained the original payoff number had been $400,000."
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