Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 158

tiff 'M J10Srm4 i 77 Wheels dash past the cheerleaders to start their first home game before 10,631 at Rynearson Stadium in Ypsilanti. They lost this one and their first 11, and suddenly the owners were alone in the stands. ing irregularity that even the office betting pools are having trouble keeping track. The Memphis Southmen were born as the Toronto Northmen, but the Canadian parliament legislated them out of the country for fear they would overshadow the Canadian Football League. The Florida Blazers began in Baltimore and visited Annapolis, Washington.

and Norfolk before ending up in Orlando (they tried to get to Atlanta from there, but were thwarted.) The Houston Texans started life in New York and then flirted with Boston and Portland before running off" a few plays in the Lone Star State: it has just been announced they are moving In Philadelphia, the Bell has been through two owners but so far has not had to call a moving company. WFL commissioner Gary Davidson would have done well, in fact, to have designated some van line as the "official movers of the WFL." just as he selected Spauld-ing to provide the footballs. One can imagine a dozen of the big trucks, with the WFL's blue and gold insignia painted on their sides, highballing it around the nation with a full load of uniformed players and coaches, and assorted gridiron equipment like chalk-line spreaders and kicking tees, stuffed into the back. When two such vans happened to arrive at the same crossroads at the same time, they would set up some folding chairs, measure out a hundred yards of pasture, sell tickets and have a game. Perhaps that is an accurate vision of the future of the league.

That Manhattan-polluted wind is blowing into Downing Stadium through the open end, where it kicks up dust devils on the natural field's bare spots and then hits the fans on their faces, chests and legs, like stray pages of yesterday's newspaper. In this meeting of the Detroit Wheels and the New York Stars, about to get underway in the bush-league desolation of Downing Stadium, it is possible to glimpse the American Sports Dream a multi-million-dollar contract for every player, a championship season for every fan turned to nightmare. Right here, on this field, at this time, the nation's acceptance of pro football reached the limit of its tensile strength, and It was a subtle moment, missed by most, coming as it did on the same day, September 24, that the Yankees, only a half-game out of first place in the American League's Eastern Division, were battling the third-place Red Sox across the river, and Al Kaline was in Baltimore collecting his three thousandth hit and his ticket to the Hall of Fame. Was there no limit to America's love of football? Could the country ever drink its fill of the heady liquor of professional football? Those who attended this Wheels-Stars game could answer those questions. Yes.

there was a limit. We could quench our thirst for pro football, and probably already had. In identically-cramped locker rooms down a dark concrete tun nel beneath the Downing Stadium stands, the Wheels and Stars are suiting up. A few hours earlier, during their pre-game steak dinner at the plush Barbizon Plaza Hotel across from Central Park in Manhattan, the Wheels players and coaches got the word from back home the antithesis of a pep talk that the football club's attorneys just petitioned them into bankruptcy. The Wheels took it in stride.

Coached by Cx-high-school and small college strategists, too poor to buy top players, or top equipment, or to build a stadium of their own. the team had become accustomed to adversity. The Wheels had been practicing in borrowed facilities at St. Mary's Prep School on Orchard Lake in West Bloomfield, and playing home games in Eastern Michigan University's Rynearson Stadium before miniscule crowds. There had been, payless paydays and canceled practices because there was no cash to get the uniforms out of the laundry.

More than once, players were denied pre-game meals. Equipment manager Rip Collins had run out of towels, shoelaces, adhesive tape, shoes, jerseys and nearly everything else needed to field a team. Once there, the Wheels had won only one game in II starts (the Florida Blazers broke their losing streak). The league already had taken over operation of the Wheels from its 32 owners just to keep the schedule together. So no one was surprised in that Barbizon Plaza Hotel dining room when they heard that the bankruptcy petition filed an hour or so earlier before Judge Harry G.

Hackett in U.S. District Court in Detroit listed the club's liabilities at a shade more than $1.4 million. No one was surprised, and no one not club president Louis Lee, nor Coach Dan Boisture, nor general manager Sonny Grande-lius, nor player representative Jon Henderson, a wide receiver who had played with the Minnesota Continued on Page 8 7.