Throwback Thursday: Al Davis Leads The AFL's Guerrilla War Against The NFL

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

On April 8, 1966, a 36-year-old Brooklynite was chosen to conduct an all-out war on the National Football League, and the next three months would shape professional football as we still know it. Al Davis had already risen from an assistant coach in San Diego to the head coach and general manager of the Oakland Raiders; he was, wrote Sports Illustrated's Edwin "Bud" Shrake, a "fast talker and slick dealer." In tapping Davis to replace Joe Foss as the commissioner of the American Football League, the owners of that league appeared to be going straight at their rivals' throats.

Already, with the bidding wars for rookies soaring, a merger between the leagues was being discussed. On April 6, according to Michael MacCambridge's book America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, AFL founder and Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt met with the Dallas Cowboys' Tex Schramm in the parking lot at Dallas's Love Field. A truce appeared to be in the offing. But the choice of Davis threatened to scuttle those peace talks. "The prospect," Shrake wrote in SI, "is for warfare that will be destructive for both leagues."

Hunt told Davis nothing about the merger talks. But even then, the ever-shrewd Davis was working toward the same result, albeit in a more bludgeoning fashion. In May, the Giants signed Bills kicker Pete Gogolak, thereby shattering the unwritten agreement between the leagues that they would compete for rookies, but not for veterans. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, still hoping that the NFL could win the battle, approved the signing. Davis was in the office of Bills owner Ralph Wilson when the news about Gogolak went public.

He grinned at Wilson and said, "We just got our merger."

What Davis knew was that the AFL could retaliate by signing the NFL's players, thereby forcing the elder league's hand. He still had no idea of Hunt's secret negotiations with Schramm, though, which meant that even as Schramm was reassuring his AFL counterpart that the merger was still moving forward, Davis had no reason not to take the more combative route. He devised a plan to offer contracts to 10 NFL players for the coming season; he also decided there would be one team he would "hold hostage," thereby sending the message that either the NFL come to the table for merger talks, or "leave us alone." (That team was the Rams, in large part because of the popularity of Rams' owner Dan Reeves.)

The NFL owners, panicked by the prospect of an all-out war, met amongst themselves, and then told Rozelle they wanted to go ahead with a merger. Rozelle, knowing either he went along with the plan or likely would lose his job, was furious. According to MacCambridge, he went into the bathroom, splashed water on his face, came back out, and said, "If that's what they want, let's go do it."

This is how things progressed for the next several weeks, through May of 1966: Schramm and Hunt negotiating behind the scenes, and an entirely unaware Davis conducting public warfare with the NFL at the same time. The guerilla wins if he doesn't lose, were among the cryptic statements Davis delivered to his staff. On May 23, Davis struck hard: The Raiders signed Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel, delivering a bonus check of $100,000 and a four-year contract for $75,000 per year. The Rams countered by saying they had signed Gabriel to a new contract. Meanwhile, Schramm and Rozelle were working out the details of a proposed merger agreement.

Down in Houston, 49ers quarterback John Brodie met with Houston Oilers general manager Don Klosterman. This was another cog in Davis's plan: The Oilers offered Brodie a $500,000, three-year contract. Eventually, that number grew to $250,000 a year. Brodie called the 49ers, who had offered him $38,000. Word got up to Schramm, who tried frantically to reach Hunt, who was off attending the Indianapolis 500. "Look," Schramm said, "I can't hold these people together. They're going to get mad and they're going to do something, and if that happens, the merger is gone."

Davis was angry now. He knew he'd been cut out of the loop about the merger talks. Hunt called Klosterman and told him to scuttle the deal with Brodie. Klosterman called Davis, and Davis said, "Fuck it. Sign him anyway."

The way Davis saw it, he was only strengthening the AFL's bargaining position. And in a way, he was right. The merger talks moved forward. On June 8, a press release was issued. The new league would be comprised of 26 teams in 25 cities. The commissioner of the new league would be Pete Rozelle, which meant Davis was out of a job. Davis declined to attend the press conference announcing the merger. Davis resigned as AFL commissioner on July 25, 1966. He hadn't even lasted three months, but they remain three of the most crucial and contentious months in professional football history.

It was not the first time Davis would stand at the center of a controversy. The seeds of Davis's dislike of Rozelle had been sown in the wake of the merger, and in the 1980s, Davis and Rozelle would clash in court over Davis's desire to move the Raiders to Los Angeles. But for as much as Davis may have felt used throughout the merger process, the bottom line is that the two-pronged approach—Hunt playing the good cop behind the scenes, and Davis fighting a public battle—worked.

"If Davis's machinations behind the scenes…didn't help the spirit of the negotiations, they certainly hastened the endgame," MacCambridge wrote. "The two sides had been talking for years, but the prospect of seeing the likes of Gabriel, Brodie and the Bears' Mike Ditka in AFL uniforms brought a grave urgency to the negotiations that the older league's owners had never felt before."