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The Birth of the Bengals

From the Paul Brown Story

Written by Paul Brown and Jack Clary

The idea of returning to professional football in Ohio had never been too far from my mind. My son Mike had made a survey of areas in the country which did not have a professional football team, and of them all, he showed me that Cincinnati was the most appealing. It had 10 million people within a 100-mile radius, it was among the highest per capita income areas in the nation and had equally high per family buying power and it was located within an area of proved football interest. I mentioned all of this to Bill during his visit, and his enthusiasm could barely be contained. Bill always was a person to get things moving, so when he got back to Ohio, he began telling John Sawyer about our conversation, and John, who had heard many nice things about me from Bill, had his interest aroused. Then Bill contacted Jim Rhodes, the governor of Ohio, and a friend, and he was equally enthusiastic. I had known Jim since my coaching days at Ohio State, when he had been working for the city of Columbus, and he came out to visit me to see if I really was serious about starting a new team in Cincinnati.

When I assured him that I was serious enough to invest a sizable amount of my own money, he began setting up a seriess of meeting that really started the franchise on its way. It wasn’t to long before I was commuting often between California and Cincinnati in 1966, meeting prospective members of our ownership group and working on the details that attach themselves to such a massive venture. When I wasn’t in Ohio, I was being awakened nearly every morning in La Jolla by Bill Hackett’s phone calls giving me the latest news.

I also kept Pete Rozelle informed about or progress, and he encouraged me fully because the surveys he has commissioned for the league agreed completely with ours about the suitability of Cincinnati as a franchise. By this point it was pretty much determined that I would get back into pro football in Cincinnati or not at all because other prospected cities, such as Phoenix or Settle, did not have suitable stadiums, and the universities in those cities were not inclined to allow theirs to be used by pro teams. As our group took shape and it appeared that Cincinnati could get a franchise, I was very excited about the prospect of resuming my career at a time when the sport was about to enter its greatest years.

My family was as deeply involved in all this as I was since everyone had been hurt by the affair in Cleveland, I felt everyone should have a say about whether I returned to football. When we were on the brink of getting our ownership together and securing the franchise, Kathy and I brought our sons and their families to La Jolla to discuss out family future. I laid out everything that was involved; so that all of us could decide whether it would be best to go back into football or to invest ourselves fully in the broadcasting enterprises.

We’ll sleep on it tonight and decide tomorrow morning after breakfast, I said I want all of you to be part of this. The next morning we sat in our living room overlooking the Pacific Ocean and I said, well what should we do? Oh, Katy replied, we know what we’ll do. We’ll go back into football. From the beginning our group’s intention was a join the National Football League, and my friends within the NFL worked on my behalf to convince the owners that Cincinnati was a worthy city. At one point Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers stood up at a meeting that was considering New Orleans, Seattle and some other larger cities and said to the owners, “Why are you fellows thinking twice? Cincinnati is a tremendous city and it would be a fine addition to our league.”

In 1965 the NFL had admitted Atlanta and the AFL had added Miami, but in June of the following year the two leagues agreed to merge, and each decided it would add one more franchise. The NFL chose New Orleans because it added another block to the tier of southern cities the league was building and because it had Tulane Stadium, with its 82000 seats, as well as an area that was rabidly interested in football. Commissioner Rozelle visited Cincinnati to tell me the news, but at the same time he brought along the members of the AFL expansion committee, who said they were willing to admit Cincinnati as the tenth franchise in their league.

I wanted to consider the offer because we had sold our program on being able to bring NFL football to the area. I thoroughly studied the merger agreement and saw that it had a specific performance clause regarding games between teams from both leagues, which meant that when the merger was finally implemented, everyone would be under the umbrella of the National Football League and everyone would be competing against one another. That was a good enough for us, and in May 1967 we agreed to join the AFL, though the official announcement was not made until July and the final papers were not signed until September. That “specific performance” clause became a critical issue a couple of years later, when the merger of the two leagues was being made final, and strong sentiment developed against realigning the teams and playing an interleague schedule. I successfully helped orchestrate a drive that overcame that opposition and brought about the promised realignment of both leagues.

Our group paid nearly $9 million for the Cincinnati franchise, but the price was actually closer to $14 million because we received no television revenues until 1970. Our ownership was comprised primarily of sportsmen, however, deliberately chosen to include men who not only represented some of Cincinnati’s oldest families but did not view professional football as a quick-hit profit scheme and could also withstand the limited income for our first two seasons. John Sawyer, whose father, Charles, had been secretary of commerce during Harry Truman’s presidency, was elected club president, I was head coach and general manager and my son Mike was legal counsel and assistant general manager.

Under the terms of our agreement, there was to be no majority stockholder. Therefore, I was given a voting trust because by NFL rule one person must be responsible for the club to the commissioner. In the event of my death, this control passes from me to my son Mike. This arrangement has proved beneficial to all of us because it was the only way I would return to professional football, and our owners needed me to get the franchise. Also, since I was the third largest investor, they knew I would do nothing to jeopardize the team’s financial success. The original investments have been repaid.

All this sounds so simple now, but no one can ever fully appreciate the tremendous job done by Governor Jim Rhodes, Gene Ruehlmann, the mayor of Cincinnati, and Francis Dale, publisher of the Enquirer, in helping clear away all the obstacles. As governor, Jim pushed for us at every level and gave our venture a spirit of public acceptance, while Dale and Ruehlmann were moving forces within Cincinnati in getting the construction of a new stadium agreed upon.

That stadium was a key factor in our getting the franchise because the NFL’s construction mandates that every team must have a facility with a seating capacity of at least 50,000 people, and it was specifically stipulated that our franchise would be awarded only if a new stadium were ready by 1970. When we began priming Cincinnati as a potential franchise, we went to Bill DeWitt, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds and tried to convince him to become a co-tenant in a new stadium. The Reds owned Crosley Field, which was totally unsuitable for football, because the terrace in the right field could not compatibly be used as a playing surface, and its seating capacity fell far short of the NFL’s minimum figures.

DeWitt balked at the idea of moving to a new stadium in the center of the city, however, because he thought the risks might be too unreasonable. As a result, pressure from the public and the media, particularly from Frank Dale’s Enquirer, because almost unbearable, and Bill suddenly found himself cast in the role of the bad guy who was preventing the city from acquiring an NFL team. Finally, we put together a group, which included many from our football ownership, including John Sawyer, Louis Nippert, Jim and Bill Williams, Dutch Knowlton and Barry and Pat Buse, that purchased the Reds from DeWitt, thus solidifying both professional sports franchises in the city.

Once the city saw it would have two tenants for the stadium-and once the league saw we would have a suitable stadium in which to play-barriers began to disappear. The agreement to build was flashed a few months before the NFL granted our franchise, and construction was begun soon after we were officially accepted. Riverfront Stadium stands today as a symbol of the city’s health and a boon to the preservation of its downtown business, shopping and entertainment areas.

While Riverfront Stadium was being built, we had secured, through Jim Rhode’s help, the University of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, the only suitable stadium facility in the area. It had a seating capacity of slightly more than 31,000, and while it was far from being the perfect stadium for a professional team, it was fine for our temporary needs. Unlike New Orleans, we did not have to fill a vast arena, and our early crowds were college football fans, whose enthusiasm and spirit were the perfect adjuncts to our fight and determination. The two seasons we spent at Nippert were fun, happy years because we didn’t have much of a chance to win, but we fought hard and played hard ultimately established the core of fans who have supported us ever since.

I’m even sure that Nippert’s limited dressing facilities helped us on more than one occasion. For the first couple of games, we occupied one that was so hot and muggy it simply drained the strength from our players. We subsequently moved up to the university’s field house and put the visitors in the steamy dressing room. I think a couple of teams were actually beaten because their players had just wilted in that room even before the game started, while my young, eager beavers were full of energy.

Nothing could dim my enthusiasm at returning to professional football. I felt twenty-one years old again and like a new father, because I was coming home to Ohio. I had no worries about the franchise’s being successful because professional football was riding tremendous popularity boom, and everyone knew me in Cincinnati from my days with the Browns.

I had no delusions, however, about immediate championships, and I had steeled myself to handle in good spirit the adversity I knew would come from starting a new team. I knew what I was faced with, as did the public, and they accepted it, so it really wasn’t too difficult to handle. Others had difficulty appreciating that, however, I remember my friend Tommy Davis, the coach at Western Reserve, wondering why I wanted to jeopardize my coaching record.

“The truth is,” I told him, “records bore me. I’ve never once considered what my final won-loss totals might look like because I have always lived for the present and the future, not for the past. Besides, I had five years to think about my record and found it meant nothing when I wasn’t doing the thing I loved most”.

One NFL coach even commented: “Paul will find the game is far more complicated than when he left it. He could be eligible for Social Security before he fields a team that wins half of its games”.

I never believed that, though, because I knew I had kept up with the game during my exile. I said from the start that we would be competitive within five years-and it took only three to reach the play-offs. While some wondered why a fifty-nine-year-old man wanted to come back into a profession that took a toll of younger men. I never worried a bit about my age. I was a healthy, and I had the energy, experience and enthusiasm to help me circumvent problems that might have been too much for other men.

I couldn’t wait to begin, even though there were a thousand and one details for us to resolve before we ever fielded our team in 1968. Katy and I moved from La Jolla to Cincinnati almost immediately, and I set up our first offices on the eighteenth floor of the Carew Tower, where, for a couple of months, all we had were an old desk and chair, plus one telephone-a much more rudimentary beginning in the so-called golden age of pro football than when the Browns had started in 1945. It didn’t bother me at all, though sometimes, when I was driving to work in the morning amid the belching fumes and the smoke from trucks and factories, I thought of La Jolla and said to myself, “Brown, what in the world did you get yourself into?”

The first person we hired for our front office was our business manager, John Murdough who had held the same position with the Cincinnati Reds. Later, in the fall of 1967, we hired Al Heim, the executive sports editor of the Enquirer, as our public relations director. Both men are still with our organization, and so are Marv Pollens, our trainer, and Tom Gray, our equipment man, who joined us shortly after the team was formed. Marv was an assistant trainer at Miami University, and Tom had worked as a hobby for the Cleveland Browns for more than a decade, assisting Morrie Kono. Tom was the only person I hired then with any connection whatsoever with the Browns because I wanted no repercussions. Even then, when he applied for the job, I made sure he was still just a football fan who went to Cleveland on Sunday afternoons to enjoy himself, not a bona fide employee. We also hired George Bird, who had been the Browns’ first entertainment director, to fill the same role with us. George was in poor health at the time, but the job gave him a tremendous lift, and when he retired, his daughter, Shirley, a music teacher in the Cincinnati school system, succeeded him. George died early in 1979, ending some forty years of matching football and music to make first-class entertainment programs.

We had to find a name for our new team, so I formed a committee of three, including myself, John Sawyer and Dave Gamble, another of our owners, to make the selection. Both men had graduated from Princeton, the mascot of which is the tiger, so I said, “Why not tigers”. “Sounds all right with us,” they said, “but it is kind of common, so why not make it a Bengal tiger or Bengals?”

That was perfect because it was a name that could be animated and also one that picked up a thread of tradition that went back as nearly thirty years to when the city had had a professional football team named the Cincinnati Bengals. We had received many suggestions for “Buckeyes,” but I didn’t want anyone confusing us with Ohio State’s team, and besides, our following would be spread throughout four states instead of just one, and I didn’t want to limit us.

I was also involved in designing our uniforms, as I had done at Cleveland. My one key principle was “nothing too flashy” because nothing is worse than a bad team with a crazy-looking uniform. The old Denver Broncos’ vertical-striped stockings had made them a laughingstock in the early sixties, and I was determined to avoid anything that might bring ridicule while we struggled to become respectable. I know that many people have said I patterned the Bengals’ uniform and colors after the Browns, but that is not so. In addition to our helmets’ being different, our orange, black and white colors are representative of our symbol, the Bengal tiger, while the Browns’ colors are orange, brown and white.

Team uniforms and nicknames were only two of the details that swarmed about me then. I attended dozens of civic and fraternal luncheons, oversaw the hiring of all our personnel, helped set up our radio network, scouted college and pro games and generally involved myself in every facet of our teams’ operation. We had so much to do and so little time to do it all in, and it seemed about all I ever did was get up in the morning, go downtown to work, come home in the evening and go to sleep. The time slipped by so fast I don’t know what happened to it.

Yet our organization gradually took shape, and things did come together, even if sometimes by happenstance, as in the case of our finding Wilmington College for out training camp. Mike and I were returning from Cleveland one day when I saw the sign for Wilmington, and I recalled I hadn’t been back there since my junior year at Miami, when we had played a baseball game against Wilmington’s team. Several schools, including Miami, had invited us to use their facilities for our training camp, but I said to Mike, “I’d like to take a look at Wilmington. As I remember, it was a tiny school, like Hiram College, where we could have peace and quiet for concentration.”

In fact, the school had changed very little since then, except for a new gymnasium-field house I spotted, overlooking three football practice fields. I wanted to see more, but the building was locked, and we were just about ready to leave when the custodian, a woman, showed up and became so caught up in our conversation about the place that she unlocked the doors and gave us a conducted tour. She didn’t know who we were or why we were there, but she was so pleased she couldn’t do enough to help us.

The building had everything we needed, so we called the school’s head, Brooke Morgan, and asked him about using his school for our training camp. He didn’t know what to make of us, so I said, “I’d like you to call Dr. Paul Sharp [who had been president of Hiram College], and he’ll tell you how we administrated our program.” Apparently, Paul couldn’t say enough nice things about us, and within a short time Mr. Morgan invited us back to consummate the deal. We have trained at Wilmington ever since, and the size of the town and the school, its relaxed summer atmosphere, and its convenience for our fans have been perfect for us.

While all this was happening, our football operation was also well under way. Even before our front office and franchise had been solidified, I hired Al LoCasale, who had worked for the San Diego Chargers’ personnel department, as our director of personnel, and my son Pete became his assistant. I put together our coaching staff from men I knew about or had seen work. The first to be hired was Tom Bass, whom I had watched when he worked with the Chargers. The next was Bill Johnson, of the 49’ers. I had seen him when Pete and I were up in San Francisco while Katy was confined to a hospital there. We had had time on our hands between visiting hours and gone out and watched the 49’er practice. Bill’s work as an offensive line coach, particularly his ability to teach and to command the attention of his players, had impressed me very much. He seemed like a man’s man to me, and his people worked at their job with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. I next hired Rick Forzano, who had just finished his second year as backfield coach of the St Louis Cardinals and whom I had known since his days as a young coach at Kent State University. Bill Walsh became our receivers’ coach when his semipro team, the San Jose Apaches, which he had coached and manage, went bankrupt. Jack Donaldson, who had worked for Weeb Ewbank in New York, became our defensive line coach.

In the beginning all of us worked in the basement of our townhouse in Glendale, a Cincinnati suburb, as we put our offense and defense together. Our system was basically the same as I had at Cleveland, though I welcomed the input of every coach, most of whom had come from different backgrounds and whose suggestions were often incisive. I stayed with the same numbering and play-calling systems I had used at Cleveland, though we altered the cadence from rhythmic to nonrhythmic. The biggest changes were on defense, which had become more complex and sophisticated with alignment switches and different defensive secondary coverage.

The most difficult problem was having to plan strategy without ever having coached any of the players. When we put in our quick flip end run, somebody said “How do we know we’ve got a halfback fast enough to run this?” When we diagrammed a power play up the middle, someone else asked, “This won’t be any good unless we have someone strong enough make it work.” Another problem was being sure everyone understood the terminology. We basically used mine because I have to operate that way, but if one of the other coaches used something that sounded a little better or made more sense, we built it into our system. I cannot say enough for the contributions each of those coaches made during that time, and I have always been grateful for what they did to help us build our new team so successfully in such a relative short period of time.

Of course, not too many people expected such a swift success, particularly considering the paucity of quality players we received from the expansion draft and our nearly total reliance on the rookies we selected in the regular player draft. I had hoped the AFL owners would see the soundness of my long held beliefs about allowing a new team to become reasonably competitive from the stat, and even Pete Rozelle tried to help me by bringing me before the American League owners so I could make an appeal for an allocation draft at least as good as given the Miami Dolphins two years before. After I had made my little pitch, carefully laying out my ideas and documenting the case with proved references from past expansion teams, Al Davis of Oakland stood up and said, “ Oh, that’s already been decided. What’s the next order of business?”

What they had decided was to give us the bare minimum because they knew they faced a merger with the stronger NFL teams in just two seasons, and they did not want to sacrifice any of their quality players just to help the new guys. Only eight AFL teams participated in our allocation draft, Miami being exempt, and each team was allowed to freeze 29 players before we could choose one. Then they froze two more, we got two more choices; on the last round, each team froze one more player, and we got our last, and we got our last pick; and then each of the eight teams “gave” us another player. In contrast, Miami had been able to choose after each AFL team had frozen only its first twenty-five players, and New Orleans and Atlanta had gotten to choose from a player pool that came from fourteen teams, so both the depth and the number of players were much larger for them.

The AFL players allocation draft held in Jacksonville, Florida, was also mismanaged and poorly run. We were given the names of the eligible players only days before, and I had an inkling of what we were up against when I saw the list arriving on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes—anything that was at hand. We were supposed to have been provided with vital statistics, including injuries, and all pertinent information about every player, but they were often missing, and some names were even wrong. The list included every cripple, bad actor, retiree or inept player in the AFL. Several of the players had already told their teams they were going to retire, and more than a dozen of forty players we eventually picked never even showed up for training camp the following summer. We selected Cookie Gilchrist from Denver, for example, and two weeks later the Broncos hired him to sell tickets and do promotional work. Only seventeen players from that group made our first team, and some, such as Ernie Wright, Sherrill Headrick, Frank Buncom, Bobby, Hunt Andy Rice and Fletcher Smith, showed some of the quality we had hoped to extract from the draft. Headrick had a tremendous spirit and gave us everything he had, but prior injuries had sapped his talent, and he lasted only one season. Buncom died in his sleep the night before a game in 1969, and I often wished I had had Bobby Hunt in his earlier days, when he had first entered professional football with Kansas City.

The teams that didn’t want to do us any favors really wound up helping us though, because they forced us to build a team as it should be built—through the college draft, the life’s blood of our business. “We were able to raise our own” and discard the others at the earliest opportunity.

At least, we were permitted to be participants in that draft, with a formula that allowed us two first round picks, three in the second, third and fourth rounds and two from the fifth through the seventeenth, with the exception of the sixth round, in which we had the pick of every AFL team except Miami. Fourteen of the first fifteen players we picked made our team, and in all nineteen from that draft were on our roster in 1968. With such an infusion of youth and quality, it was little wonder we made the playoffs in our third season.

Our first choice in the draft was Bob Johnson, an all-American center from Tennessee, whom I had personally scouted and who eventually played eleven years for us, through the 1978 season. A few people were surprised when we made a center our top pick, but I had thought, “Well, where do we begin?” and the answer was obvious: Since the ball must go from the ground to the quarterback anything else can happen in a game, we might as well start with a center. There was more to it than that, though. From meeting him and talking to his coaches, I also knew Bob was a tremendous person, and he had been a team captain at every level of competition. He was even captain of the College All-Star team that year, and before our first season. I appointed him our offensive captain, a rarity for a rookie. He held the job until his final game as a Bengal, and I never once regretted the choice. The draft brought us other fine players as well. Essex Johnson, a sixth-round draft pick in 1968, played eight seasons with the Bengals and became the all-time rushing leader. He had been underrated, however, because we were an expansion team, so he never got the full credit due a player of his ability and accomplishments. Somewhat in the mold of Bobby Mitchell, Essex had unusual balance and acceleration, looked than his 200 pounds and ran the 40 in 4.4 seconds. I’ve always had a great feeling for Essex because he was so quiet and gave us everything he had.

We landed Paul Robinson in the third round, after I had seen him play against Ohio State as a wingback, and that he was in football at all was a stroke of good luck. Paul had gone out for football his senior year at Arizona State only after he had exhausted his track eligibility, and I immediately like his rawhide, slender build and excellent speed. Robbie was a tremendous competitor --- he had to be, to win the rushing title with a first year expansion team. We gave him the ball most of the time, and he never complained, and I know he was disappointed that he never that kind of season again. He became a marked man after that rookie year, however, and we had to spread out our running load, because we had neither the strength nor the experience to be successful with just one back carrying the brunt of the offense. Of our choices that year, Jess Phillips from Michigan State, in the fourth, was certainly the most interesting; Jess was serving time in the penitentiary for passing bad checks. We felt, however, that he was basically a good person who had succumbed to some youthful temptation we he had seen some of his former teammate’s comeback to school with plenty of bonus money, flashy clothes and big cars after a year of professional football. My son Mike talked to the prison officials and then his lawyer and we were told that if Jess, who was an exemplary prisoner, got a job with us and thus had an opportunity for rehabilitation, he would be released from prison. I had also talked with his coach, Duffy Daugherty, who had told me Jess was a fine boy and a fine football player – good enough to make All Big Ten team as safety in 1967 – so we felt we were on safe ground.

Six days after reporting to Wilmington. Jess was in the starting lineup against Denver and stayed there throughout the rest of his rookie year; then we switched him safety to offense in 1969, and he became our leading rusher for the next two seasons. Off the field, he took a job in a Cincinnati Bank and became a valued employee. Jess stayed with us for several seasons, and was always and exemplary citizen.

Other players from that draft who started for us in our first season included our defensive ends, Bill Staley and Harry Gunner; two of our three guards, Dave Middendorf and Howard Fest; Al Beauchamp at linebacker; Tom Smiley our starting fullback for half a season until he was called into the service; Bob Trumpy, our tight end; Dale Livingston, who did our punting and place kicking; Dewey Warren, our starting quarterback for half our games that first year.

We also paid first and second-round draft picks for John Stofa, another quarterback, from Miami. It was a steep price to pay because we knew his limitations but he had no military commitments, and he was the only experience quarterback available from the AFL. Finding a quarterback was our single biggest problem that first season, and we probably got as much from Stofa and Warren as we had any right to expect. Warren was released the following season, when Greg Cook and Sam Wyche joined our team.

By the time the draft was over we had a lot of players, but the biggest problem was how to marshal them all. I watch the New Orleans Saints being put together in 1967, when they practiced at Point Loma, near San Diego, and saw scores of players come and go within a month’s time. Often players arrive by plane in the morning, scrimmage in the afternoon and be gone by nightfall. I watched everything the Saints did, looking for the right way and the wrong way, and decided I saw no purpose in bringing so many players into camp or putting them through so much scrimmage work.

The Saints chose to build a veteran team, hoping to be successful immediately, partly because they had a 82,000 seat stadium to fill each week, and as a result, they sacrificed the long range success of their team. I knew the moment we got our allocation draft that we had to go with our college draft choices and that we had to spend the bulk of our time working with the players who would be part of our future. The main thing we learned from watching New Orleans was how “not” to do it. Tom Fears was a good coach, but with all the negative factors he was faced with, it was little wonder this team went for years before becoming competitive.

Even with my stanch beliefs in manageable training camp rosters however, it was impossible not to avoid looking at more than 100 players as we opened camp early in July. Within 10 days we had pared 50 players from the squad without even holding a scrimmage, because I was determined not to sacrifice my principles about how our team should be formed. Some players arrived in camp already expecting the worst. I’ll never forget Ernie Wright telling one of the writers after he had been in camp a few days, “when I came from San Diego, I didn’t know whether I would last ten minutes. I knew Jim Brown real well and wasn’t at all sure whether I could get along with Paul Brown. But everything I heard was completely wrong because he treats us squarely.”

I knew many players who join an expansion team think that since no one expects much of the team from a won-lost standpoint, they won’t have to give much of themselves, but we worked at the outset to short circuit those attitudes. At our first training camp lecture, I told our players, “We may be an expansion team, but we will not be a French Foreign Legion.” At the same time I wanted every player to feel that he had an equal chance to make the team and that he was more than just a numbered jersey.

I had every player stand up at the first meeting and introduce himself, give his school and whatever team he may have played on in the pros. I didn’t want any of them who left us to say, “Holy Smoke, it was such a cold, impersonal place they didn’t even know my name, and I never had a chance to know anyone.” I wanted that first camp—as I did every camp I ran—to be a pleasant experience. I told them they were not in a life-or-death situation, that a dropped pass wasn’t tantamount to expulsion and that one mistake didn’t mean a plane ticket home.

I tried to emphasize excellence in everything we did and not hurry or rush anyone or anything. The overall mental outlook of that group was wholesome because each of them had been challenged to prove he could make an expansion team, resulting in a very competitive situation. Applying the same standards and beliefs I had used in Cleveland, we built very slowly, but always very carefully. We wanted the players to become familiar with and accept our philosophy of football, and as far as we were concerned, what they had done before didn’t matter.

At one point we had to cut down the amount of material in our playbooks. “We’re not coaching the Cleveland Browns with only two or three rookies trying to make the roster,” I told our coaches. “This is a team of rookies, and we’ve got to slow down and give them a little bit at a time.”

I don’t think I ever felt discouraged during those two months. We knew exactly where we stood, and we just wanted to see how well we could do under very difficult conditions. I don’t think I changed any of my basic outlooks, though it may seem so because I had to be so tolerant of younger, more inexperienced or less talented players than I coached at Cleveland. I’m sure my happiness at being back in coaching was reflected in my day’s work and in my relationships with everyone who came to our camp. I also know that I appreciated my situation more having been away, so I held nothing back in my second opportunity to build a team.

We had some problems—the severe heat, for one. The temperatures were in the high nineties day after day that summer. We also faced the threat of a players’ strike, but my guys were fighting for their lives, and all the strike talk seemed to fall on deaf ears. The other American Football League teams didn’t help much either, with their so called buddy system, in which teams helped each other by not claiming players on injured reserve so the original team could keep them on it’s roster. In 1968, the AFL owners had agreed to abide by the NFL’s no-recall procedure on injured waivers, and we claimed Ken Stabler from Oakland and Al Denson, a swift wide receiver from Denver, that way, only to be told by Milt Woodard, then the AFL president, that our claims were invalid because the teams really hadn’t decided to go along with the rule after all. That was wrong because the waiver procedure is supposed to help the teams that need players, but there were actually threats of reprisal against those who wouldn’t honor this “buddy” agreement. Eventually a stop was put to it, but I wore a black hat on the subject of this for a while.

During training camp we worked at our normal two plays-per-day pace, and decided that in the preseason games we would stay with our usual procedure on rookies, which was to put them into the game gradually and not destroy what-ever cohesiveness we had established. I was totally realistic because we really didn’t have much of a chance against established teams, particularly against a team like the Kansas City Chiefs, who were our first preseason opponent at Nippert Stadium.

The Chiefs took the opening kickoff and drove for a touchdown, but after Warren McVea made a good return of the ensuing kickoff, he fumbled and lost the ball, and the Chiefs kept it for the rest of the quarter and scored another touchdown. It was the first time in my career that any of my teams had not run at least one offensive play in a quarter. We did have a nice moment, though, when Solomon Brannan, a defensive back, scooped up a fumble and ran for our first touchdown in the second quarter, to close the Chief’s lead to 14-7. We didn’t even make a first down until the third quarter, but when we did, everyone in the stadium stood and cheered, and not derisively. Those people really meant it because they were behind us all the way.

We eventually lost the game 38-14, and I know I surprised everyone afterward when I said, “We did better than I expected because we worked on specific things, and I am pleased that we showed a semblance of becoming a team.” In our second game against Denver, we battled so tenaciously that the Broncos elected to take a safety in the final five seconds, rather than risk a possible blocked punt, and though we lost 15-13, we had progressed a bit further. We led Buffalo at the half the next game but lost 10-6; then won our final two preseason games, 19-3 against the Pittsburgh Steelers and 13-9 over the New York Jets. We played the Steelers in Morgantown, West Virginia, and traveled by bus because the transportation was easier. On the way home, everyone was singing, and it reminded me of my days in Massillon, coming home after a victory. That win over Pittsburgh was one of the few by an AFL team over an NFL team in the preseason, and our victory over the Jets—who that season won Super Bowl III—came in the face of a desperate passing flurry by Joe Namath, which was turned aside time and again by our young defensive backs, Fletcher Smith, Charley King and Jim Williams.

Those final two victories were big moments—I still have the game ball from the Pittsburgh game—because we proved that this untried group of young me had a chance to be successful, and it helped them believe in themselves. The next step was to apply all that we learned and endured to our first season of play, and though we were no threat for the championship of 1968, I never doubted for a moment that we would ultimately become contenders. There were fence sitters around the nation who weren’t so sure and said perhaps I had made a mistake by coming back to the game.

For the next 8 seasons, I was very happy to accept that challenge.