Review: A Big Mess in Texas (2025)

By David Fleming

The sports book business seems specialized enough on its own, but there could be a subclass that could describe a particular type of literary effort. 

Let's call it, "Defunct Teams and Leagues."

While many sports books concentrate on success stories, and deservedly so, some cover the spots on the sports landscape where almost everything went wrong. It's particularly true for start-ups teams and leagues which is a reading exercise in "What were they thinking?" Such books have a serious side, naturally, since we're talking about events that affected people's lives. But they have the extra benefit of often bringing laughs to the table. 

That all brings us to "A Big Mess in Texas," by David Fleming. 

Hardly anyone remembers when the National Football League wasn't on particularly solid financial ground. It started in 1920, and ran through teams like tissues for several years. You'd think that the NFL would have been poised for success by 1950, when the league merged with its major rival, the All-American Football Conference. But even so, only a few teams were earning a profit, and most were hanging on. Pro football still took a back seat to the college game in terms of interest, and revenues weren't keeping up with expenses - and wouldn't until television entered the, um, picture.  

In 1951, a football team called the New York Yankees (no relation) was struggling in a major way in the NFL. It had lost a huge amount of money by the standards of the day, and competing with the New York Giants had become a bad idea. It was time for the franchise to go elsewhere. Anywhere. 

And Dallas was pretty much anywhere at the time. Texas certainly loved football, but mostly in the form of high school and college football. The pros hadn't even tried to put a team there yet. But Giles Miller, the son of a wealthy Dallas businessman who never saw a long-shot financial chance he couldn't bet on, decided to take a chance on it. He was so confident, in fact, that he agreed to be responsible for the Yankees' leftover debt from 1951 - which got the franchise off to a flying standstill. 

Everyone tried hard, but there were too many obstacles. Fleming does some of his best work in describing the racial situation in Dallas, which was not pretty at the time. The new Dallas Texans had three African-American players on the roster, and Miller had plans of having integrated seating in the Cotton Bowl for games. But the powers that be wouldn't let the races sit near each other, generating substantial anger among both whites - who wanted no part of integration - and blacks - who wanted no part of sitting in the worst seats while sections of the stadium went unused. It's not exactly a formula for success. Dallas wasn't quite ready for the NFL, although the Texans probably knocked down a few walls that helped pave the way for the arrival of the Dallas Cowboys in 1960.

(Just to confuse things a little more, 1960 also was the year that the American Football League was formed, and a team in Texas debuted as ... the Dallas Texans. That team couldn't compete with the Cowboys and eventually moved to Kansas City.) 

The original Texans started slowly and then got worse. Attendance was never good and quickly faded to virtually nothing. Before the season, ownership essentially gave up and handed the franchise back to the league, which had it finish the season by playing road games and paid its bills. The Texans finished 1-11, with the win coming over a Chicago team that didn't even bother to play its starters until late in the game. Coach George Halas of the Bears was a little too overconfident about that one. Eventually, NFL commissioner Bert Bell convinced Carroll Rosenbloom to take over the team and move it to Baltimore, where it thrived for quite a while.

But there's still a bit of a legacy here, as the Texans had more talent on the field than off it. Gino Marchetti found a home in Baltimore and became a legend. Art Donovan not only had Hall of Fame talent, joining Marchetti in Canton, but he also was a world-class party animal. Quite a few of the laughs in this book are provided by Donovan, and deservedly so. Running back Buddy Young, an African-American, was simply beloved by teammates and fans wherever he went. George Taliaferro is recognized as one of the Black pioneers of the sport, and went on to a life that earned him a statue by the stadium at Indiana University. There are several other connections to the Texans involving football standouts (on and off the field) that are pointed out here, thanks to some fine research. Therefore, it's easy to keep an interest in the material here, particularly if you enjoy reading about football history. 

Admittedly, not everyone qualifies for that last classification. Some gray hair might be needed to appreciate what happened in some cases. Even so, "A Big Mess in Texas" nicely paints a picture of the last NFL team go go under financially. It doesn't take very long to go through it, and there are plenty of interesting moments to push the reader along. Fleming did good work here.

Four stars

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Review: Brady vs. Belichick (2025)

By Gary Myers

A long, long time ago ... the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came across the Atlantic in search of fame and fortune. What's more, they succeeded by any standard. Most music fans enjoyed both bands, while some of them picked a side if asked who they preferred. 

Naturally, there was a way for outsiders to cash in on the argument. The odd magazine popped up on the newsstand entitled "Beatles vs. Rolling Stones." That sounds like there was a big competition between them, which would be an overstatement, even if such publications were an excuse for young fans to cut photographs out and paste them on scrapbooks 

Such magazines came to mind when I saw the title of a football book, "Brady vs. Belichick," and the discussion is still light-hearted but a bit more serious than the musical version 60 years ago. In 20 seasons, the New England Patriots won six NFL championships, played in nine Super Bowls and 13 AFC championship games, and won 17 division titles. That's the greatest run in league history, and there were two major common denominators in that stretch: Quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick. (Owner Bob Kraft also was involved, naturally, but had less direct involvement in the fate of the team on the field.)

But which one deserves the lion's share of the credit for the dynasty? That's the task veteran football writer Gary Myers takes on with this book, which is a rather thankless job. After all, both Brady and Belichick are at worst in the discussion as the greatest person to work at their respective occupations.

To review the situation, Myers essentially writes something of an informal history of the dynasty, jumping through specific episodes of the Patriots' past. With two decades to cover, there's plenty of material available to review.

On the good side, it's been five years since Brady fled to Tampa Bay and ended the relationship with the Patriots. (Tom spent three years with the Bucs before retiring, winning one more Super Bowl along the way.) That means some football people are more open about expressing opinions. Myers talked to some former players, opponents, coaches, etc. in his research. That means there are some good stories and opinions that come out now that are "safe" to discuss. 

Belichick comes off with single-minded devotion toward making the team better each and every day he was the coach. He didn't exactly spare his feelings along the way, often criticizing everyone from Brady all the way to the last man on the roster. It doesn't sound like anyone was too anxious to come to work, even if they liked the end result. It's easy to think of a comment made about Scotty Bowman, who coached the dynastic Montreal Canadiens teams of the 1970s. It was said that the players hated Bowman on 364 days of the year, and liked him after they won the Stanley Cup. 

Brady, meanwhile, was smart enough to realize that he needed to be one of the boys in the locker room no matter how wealthy and famous he became. Brady probably left millions of dollars on the table in his contracts in an attempt to try to have a better team around him. He also won over the offensive lineman by showing respect for their efforts and never thinking he wasn't "one of the boys" at heart. 

Myers winds his way through tales of the dynasty in a leisurely way, jumping around a bit in the process. Perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that the premise expressed in the title is unanswerable. Basketball coach John Wooden once summed up his thoughts on such as things by saying, "No coach can win without talent, but some coaches can't win with it." In other words, it takes coaches and players working together in order to have a chance at something special. The answer to the "Brady or Belichick" question - who was more responsible - depends more on your orientation than anything else, and we know that from page one. I would guess this won't change many minds, either way.  

The Patriots' great run hasn't exactly been underreported over the years, and you can be excused for being a little wary of the subject at the point and not needed to know more. But fans of those teams probably have an insatiable appetite for information and stories about the era, and they'll enjoy the insights offered in  "Brady vs. Belichick"  

Three stars

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Review: Balls of Confusion (2024)

By Bob Kuska

Sometimes you can learn something about a book by looking at the footnotes. 

Exhibit A would be the book, "Balls of Confusion," by Bob Kuska. There are references to interviews that he did in 2008. That was a mere 16 years before the book was actually published. 

With that sort of dedication, it's a credit to the author that he stuck with it so long and figured out a way to get it published ... all right, the first part published. The book covers the first half of the "relationship" between the established National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association. It looks at the years from 1965 to 1970.  The second part - which should examine the time period from 1970 to 1976 - is said to be coming at some point. There's little doubt that this two-part package is going to be the definite word on the subject of the relationship between the two leagues. 

The discussion starts with one of the basic principles about professional sports leagues. If a national organization has a little success and doesn't expand into new cities, chances are quite good that a rival league will be born. In baseball, for example, the National League had a closely knit group of eight teams as members, and other cities wanted in. Thus, the American League was born. The National Football League had quite a few rivals come and go once it was past its formative years in the 1920s. 

Such was the case for professional basketball. Once it settled down in the post-war period, the National Basketball Association carried the flag for pro hoops nationwide. But by the mid-1960s, there still were only nine teams stretched out across the country. Inevitably, someone would try to fill that vacuum, and the American Basketball Association was born to try to fill that gap in 1967.

The ABA's management and owners hoped that the teams involved would follow a certain path. They would slowly build to the point where a viable group was established, and then it would merge with the more established league. The American Football League followed that gameplan in the 1960s, and succeeded with a merger with the NFL. The catch was that a new league was bound to have a few hiccups along the way, and teams would have to change cities and some good-sized amounts of money would be lost in the process. Two leagues are good for players' salaries of course, due to bidding wars, but not so good for owners' bottom lines. Oh, and the lawyers would find plenty of excuses to pad their totals of billable hours. 

As the book outlines in great detail, that's essentially what happened - particularly during the 1965-1970 time span covered by this book. The NBA expanded a few times in this era, eventually reaching 17 teams for the start of the 1970-71 season, in an effort to remain solvent. In 1970, the NBA and ABA had worked out many of the details of a potential merger, and the end of the basketball wars seemed inevitable. Spoiler alert: It didn't happen right away. 

Kuska collected information from all sorts of sources. He came up with some documents, including extensive numbers of the minutes of the ABA's league meetings. That's rather valuable in a book like this. He also refers to plenty of newspaper stories written at the time as well as interviews with the people involved. There are some good personal nuggets thrown in along the way,  The author uncovers some information here along the way that should be new and interesting to those who followed that era. He also has a little fun in the writing to keep us involved. 

This book had to be written by someone with a love for the sport and that era. It was a long time ago - more than 50 years - and that's going to be ancient history to many. Admittedly such a story will have legal and technical complications along the way; I'm one of the few people who might consider this beach reading. This checks in at almost 500 pages, and it's only part one.  

No, "Balls of Confusion" isn't going to be a best-seller. But in terms of getting an historical record of a pivotal era in basketball out there, this succeeds quite nicely. If you hit the sweet spot of interest, a read is quite rewarding.

Four stars

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