The Oklahoma City Slickers were an expansion entry in the American Soccer League in the spring of 1982.   The ASL was a de facto 2nd Division league that traced its roots back to the early 1930′s.  By the time the Slickers entered the league in 1982, the ASL was on its last legs, doomed by over expansion, invisibility and constant franchise turnover.

Slickers Head Coach Brian Harvey put together a stellar expansion side, led by English NASL veterans Phil Parkes in goal and Jeff Bourne at forward.  Parkes played all 28 games, posting a 19-6-3 record.  Bourne finished third in the ASL in scoring with 20 goals and eight assists.

The Slickers carried a 13-match winning streak into the best-of-three ASL championship series against the Detroit Express in late September 1982.  The Slickers won the first match on the road at the Pontiac Silverdome and had the chance to ice the series at home, where the Slickers had a 15-game unbeaten streak.  But the Express scored two late goals to defeat the Slickers 2-0 at Taft Stadium and send the series back to Pontiac for a deciding Game Three.  The Express won the rubber match 4-1 before an announced crowd of 33,762 at the Silverdome on September 22, 1982.

By the 1983 season, the ASL had dwindled to just six franchises, with five southern clubs scattered from Dallas to Charlotte, plus Allentown, Pennsylvania.  The team was unable to retain Jeff Bourne who joined the ASL’s lone expansion club in Dallas.  Phil Parkes returned for part of the season, but the Slickers sold his contract to the Toronto Blizzard of the North American Soccer League in early July 1983.  Brian Harvey’s team could not recapture the magic of the first season and the Slickers dropped to a league-worst record of 8-17.

In late 1983, the American Soccer League finally threw in the towel after 51 years of operation.  The Slickers joined three other ASL clubs – the Carolina Lightnin’, the Dallas American and the Jacksonville Tea Men – to help form a successor organization, the United Soccer League.  The USL debuted in the spring of 1984 with nine franchises. The USL intended to operated year-round, playing both indoor and outdoor soccer, something the ASL had never attempted.  The league also made a firm commitment to Americanization, requiring that fourteen of the eighteen players on each roster be Americans.

 As part of the shift to the new league, the Slickers changed their name to the Oklahoma City Stampede for the 1984 season.  The Stampede bounced back in a big way from the disappointment of the 1983 season.  NASL veterans Thompson Usiyan and David Kemp provided a new scoring punch, finishing 2nd and 3rd in the league in total points.  Jamaican-born Delroy Allen handled the bulk of the goalkeeping duties.

The Stampede finished the 1984 USL season at 15-9, tied for the best record in the league.  The Houston Dynamos eliminated the Stampede in the semi-finals in a mild upset.

Following the 1984 season, seven of the nine USL franchises folded or withdrew from the league, including the Stampede.  The USL attempted to get a 1985 season off the ground with four teams, but gave up midway through the schedule.

The inspiring story of Kurt Warner, who rose from supermarket stock boy to Super Bowl Champion and MVP over the course of five years, is one of the great legacies of the original Arena Football League (1987-2008).  Warner, undrafted out of college and later released in training camp by the Green Bay Packers in 1994, famously signed on with the Arena League’s Iowa Barnstormers in 1995.  He led the Barnstormers to the Arena Bowl title games in 1996 and 1997, before finally earning his shot at the NFL with the St. Louis Rams.  By 1999, he was the NFL’s MVP and quarterback of a Super Bowl championship team in his first season as a starter.  Warner’s fame briefly made the Iowa Barnstormers an object of cult fascination, if not quite a household brand name.

So what became of the Barnstormers?

The Barnstormers started out as an Arena Football expansion franchise in the spring of 1995.  Jim Foster, founder of the Arena Football League in 1987, owned the club, which played in the 11,400-seat  Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, dubbed “The Barn”.  Head Coach John Gregory was a long-time Canadian Football League coach.  Gregory brought in CFL vet Willis Jacox to play the role of Iowa’s “Offensive Specialist” – most AFL players played “Ironman” football, meaning they played offense and defense.  The offensive specialist was akin to the DH in baseball, playing offense only and returning kicks.  Gregory also plucked Warner out of the Hy-Vee grocery store aisle prior to the Barnstormers’ first season in 1995.

The team was competitive in 1995, advancing as far as the playoff semi-finals.  Gregory earned AFL Coach-of-the-Year honors (he would repeat in 1996) and the team drew terrific cowbell-clanging crowds to The Barn.  In a 2012 celebration of Arena Football’s 25th Anniversary, the league ranked the 1990′s atmosphere at The Barn as the 2nd best in the sport’s history.

The Barnstormers glory years came in 1996 and 1997, when Warner and Jacox led the Barnstormers to back-to-back Arena Bowls.  In 1996, the Barnstomers hosted Arena Bowl X before a national cable TV audience but lost to the Tampa Bay Storm 42-38.  The following year, the Barnstormers fell to the Arizona Rattlers 55-33 in Arena Bowl XI in Phoenix, in what would prove to be Warner’s last AFL game.

Warner headed the Rams and Jacox retired after the 1997 season.  But Gregory and the Barnstormers uncovered more great players in WR-DB Carlos James, offensive specialist Mike Horacek and, especially, quarterback Aaron Garcia.  Garcia would go on the set every major career passing record in Arena Football over the course of the next decade plus.

On November 1st, 2000, after the conclusion of the Barnstormers’ sixth season in Des Moines and nine months after Warner’s historic Super Bowl performance, Jim Foster sold the team to New York Islanders owners Charles Wang and Sanjay Kumar.  The franchise relocated to Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum as the New York Dragons for the 2001 Arena Football League season.

The move to New York was in keeping with Arena Football’s growing ambition to become a “5th Major League”, as the league began favoring major markets over cities like Des Moines and Grand Rapids, Michigan.  In the course of a decade, Arena Football franchise valuations ballooned from $125,000 in 1990 to $7 million – the price paid by Wang & Kumar for the Barnstormers, and for another AFL franchise, the New England Sea Wolves, which also changed hands in the autumn of 2000.

Several top Barnstormers made the move from Iowa to New York, including Head Coach John Gregory and All-AFL quarterback Aaron Garcia.  In New York, the franchise also produced another future NFL star, as it had with Kurt Warner in Iowa.  In 2002, the Dragons signed WR-DB Mike Furrey, a refugee of World Wrestling Entertainment chief Vince McMahon’s defunct XFL.  Furrey became the favorite target of Garcia in 2002 and 2003.  Furrey left the Dragons partway through the 2003 season – he was leading the AFL in receptions at the time – to sign with the St. Louis Rams.  Furrey went on to play both wide receiver and defensive back in the NFL, leading the NFC in receptions in 1996 with 98 catches for 1,086 years as a member of the Detroit Lions.  In a bizarre coincidence, Furrey played college football at Northern Iowa University, just like Warner.

Back in Des Moines, a new Iowa Barnstormers expansion team was issued to play in AF2, a small market minor league spinoff of the AFL.  The new minor league Barnstormers were not able to re-capture the interest of area fans and this version of the Barnstormers folded after a single season in 2001.

The Dragons were never one of Arena Football’s top draws and the Nassau Coliseum was typically regarded as one of the league’s worst venues, much as it was in the National Hockey League.  Announced attendance averages peaked in 2005 at 11,922 per game.  By 2008, announced attendance dipped to 9,072, the second lowest figure in the 17-team league.

In July 2008, Wang sold the Dragons to Steve and Shanna Silva for an estimated $12 million.  This would prove to be the last time a franchise changed hands in the original Arena Football League.  By this time, the league was struggling under $14 million in accumulated debt.  A postseason attempt to sell a $100 million controlling stake in the league to leveraged buyout firm Platinum Equity and re-organize the league as a single-entity structure fell through in late 2008.  The league suspended the 2009 season in December 2008 and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in August 2009 after owners failed to come together on a way forward.

The Silvas were left with nothing for their unfortunately timed investment.  Another Arena Football investor who bought into the league late at the peak of the bubble – Dr. Robert Nucci who bought the Tampa Bay Storm for approximately $18 million in 2007 – later filed a lawsuit claiming that the late-era Arena Football League was little more than a debt-laden ponzi scheme that relied on constantly rising expansion fees to finance its existence.  The Silvas, for their part, got as far as announcing a new logo and color scheme for the Dragons in September 2008.  The new green-and-black color scheme would have been used for the 2009, but the league collapsed first:

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A group of former Arena Football League owners and officials called Arena Football One purchased the assets of the original Arena Football League out of bankruptcy for $6.1 million in December 2009.   It was a long way down from the proposed Platinum Equity purchase of the AFL just a year earlier, which valued the league at approximately $250 million.

A much more budget-conscious (and non-union) reinvention of the Arena Football League debuted in 2010, with many franchises returning under their old names and, in some cases, their old investors.   The New York Dragons and the Silvas were not among them.  But the Iowa Barnstormers were.   A third incarnation of the Iowa Barnstormers joined AF2 for the 2008 season as an expansion team playing in the new $99 million Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines.  The team retained the old logo of the original Kurt Warner-era Barnstormers and still practices in The Barn – venerable Veterans Memorial Auditorium.   When the Arena Football League went dark in 2009, AF2 kept playing.  In 2010, the new Barnstormers took a leap up to rejoin the new Arena Football League.

Kurt Warner retired from the NFL in January 2010.  He led two different franchises to Super Bowl appearances, starting in three and winning one.  As of 2011, he holds one of the top ten passer ratings in NFL history.

Mike Furrey played seven seasons in the NFL, ending in 2009.  He is now one of the growing number of former NFL players filing suit against the league over concussion-related health problems.

The Washington Stars were a professional soccer franchise based in Fairfax, Virginia that operated for three seasons between 1988 and 1990.  The Stars were a founding franchise in the American Soccer League, which debuted in the summer of 1988 with ten East Coast franchises stretching from Albany to Miami.

Three of the ASL’s founding clubs were clustered in the Baltimore-Washington metroplex.  The Washington Diplomats revived the brand name of the old North American Soccer League (NASL) club of the 1970′s and early 80′s and, like the original Dips in their glory years, played out of RFK Stadium in D.C. proper.  The Maryland Bays played 50 miles away in Catonsville, MD.  The Stars, originally dubbed Washington F.C. before a name change, hoped to play at George Mason University’s 5,000-seat stadium.  But the university declined and the Stars split time instead between Stalnaker Stadium at Fairfax (VA) High School and Fairfax’s nearby W.T. Woodson High School.

The Stars owner was John Koskinen, a corporate turnaround specialist and the Chairman of the Washington, D.C. Host Committee as the United States prepared to host the 1994 World Cup.  ASL clubs worked on much more modest budgets than their NASL predecessors.  Koskinen told The Washington Post that the Stars first-year budget was around $350,000 with $50,000 or so earmarked for player salaries.

Also unlike the NASL, the American Soccer League planned to feature American players.  The Stars had several very good ones, including the young U.S. National Team midfielder Bruce Murray and the former Duke Blue Devil John Kerr, Jr.  Kerr’s father, John Kerr, Sr. coached the Stars and was himself a veteran of the Washington Darts and Diplomats NASL teams of the 1970′s.  The Stars also brought in 31-year midfielder Sonny Askew who played for the old Dips from 1977-1980.  Askew would make the league’s postseason All-Star team in 1988.

On the field, the club’s brightest moments came during the 1989 campaign, when the Stars posted the best regular season record at 14-6.  The Stars lost to the eventual champion Ft. Lauderdale Strikers in the 1989 ASL playoffs.

Prior to the 1990 season, the twelve clubs of the ASL merged with the eleven-team Western Soccer League and re-branded itself as the American Professional Soccer League.  The teams would still stick to a regional schedule in 1990, with the champions of the ASL and WSL meeting for a national championship match.

After the 1990 season, fifteen franchises dropped out of the APSL, reducing membership from 23 clubs to just 8 in a matter of months.  The Stars were among the casualties.  John Koskinen finalized a long-planned merger with the APSL champion Maryland Bays in October 1990.  The Bays continued for one more year themselves with Koskinen as a part owner, before folding in January 1992.

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John Koskinen later served as President of the United States Soccer Foundation from 2004 to 2008.

Stars midfielder Bruce Murray earned 86 caps with the U.S. National Team between 1985 and 1993.   He started all three games for the United States and scored a goal in the 1990 World Cup.  Murray earned induction to the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2011.

Downloads:

Washington Stars sources

The San Antonio Gunslingers were a gritty, hard-nosed team in the short-lived United States Football League.  Although they posted losing records in both of their spring campaigns, they competed harder under adverse conditions than perhaps anyone had a right to expect.  Despite having the lowest payroll in the USFL, team owner Clinton Manges stopped paying it during the club’s second season in 1985.  To make ends meet, players began trading game tickets for food and finding local families to take them in.  Despite this, the team of mostly anonymous and unpaid journeymen won two of their final three games.  Then they took their battles from the gridiron to the court room.

Manges had a remarkable backstory - he was an Okie who dropped out of elementary school at the height of the Depression to pick cotton.  Later he worked as a watch repairman, service station attendant and bowling alley owner before amassing his fortune as a land baron and political power broker in the sprawling brush country of South Texas.  It might have been an inspirational rags to riches tale, but for the fact that Manges was also a convicted felon and a combative, inveterate tax dodger and check bouncer.  He arrived at the USFL’s doorstep, expansion application in hand, in the summer of 1983, while dozens of unpaid creditors chased him around the 100,000-acre ranch he referred to as “the Magic Kingdom” in fruitless attempts to serve papers.  The USFL let Manges in anyway, to its eternal chagrin.

The Gunslingers were the sixth and final expansion team admitted for the USFL’s second season in the spring of 1984.  A wave of deep-pocketed new owners vowed to take on the NFL for the best free agent and college draft talent available.  Pittsburgh Maulers owner Edward Debartolo Sr. inked University of Nebraska Heisman Trophy winner Mike Rozier to a $3.1 million dollar deal.  New Jersey Generals owner Donald Trump raided the NFL for veteran free agents, including 1980 MVP Brian Sipe.  Los Angeles Express owner J. William Oldenburg signed a slew of projected NFL 1st round draft picks, highlighted by an eye-popping $40 million deal for the future Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young.

Manges and his Gunslingers looked and acted nothing like those teams.  The team signed only one of its twenty-five college draft picks.  That man, rookie quarterback Rick Neuheisel of UCLA, was the team’s highest paid player at a modest $70,000 per year.  Neuheisel’s 34-year old backup Karl Douglas last played with British Columbia of the Canadian Football League…in 1976.  Defensive end Mike St. Clair,  a veteran of the Cincinnati Bengals 1982 Super Bowl team, was best known name on an opportunistic defense known as “The Bounty Hunters” that put up a plus-13 takeaway ratio in 1984.

The team did enter negotiations with Houston Oilers star running back Earl Campbell in February 1984.  Unlike the other big name NFL stars who jumped to the spring season USFL in 1984, Campbell was not a free agent.  Campbell wanted to challenge the exclusivity clause in NFL contracts and play year-round in both leagues.  Campbell, famed for his punishing running style, would last only two more seasons in the NFL.  Anyone familiar with Campbell’s post-career health problems should be thankful his 12-month plan never came to pass.

The Gunslingers debut came at home on February 27th, 1984 against the New Orleans Breakers on February 27th, 1984.  It was a homecoming of sorts for Breakers starting quarterback Johnnie Walton, who starred for the San Antonio Wings of the doomed World Football League in 1975.  The Breakers sent the announced crowd of 18,233 home disappointed, dealing the Gunslingers a 13-10 loss.  After the season, an unrelated creditor lawsuit against Manges revealed that the team systematically over-reported attendance to the public and the team’s internal numbers showed that only a little over 10,000 fans showed up for the opener.

At the second home game against Jim Kelly and the Houston Gamblers on March 5, 1984, Alamo Stadium plunged into darkness midway through the 3rd quarter.  The power outage postponed the game nearly an hour.  The Gunslingers lead the league in such misadventures, which has helped fuel their cult following to this day.  Witness:

• The unnamed Gunslinger scratched from a 1985 game after slamming his penis in a storage trunk
• After struggling for approval to play in and expand Alamo Stadium due to congestion and noise concerns, the Gunslingers held a promotion to determine which tailgating fan had the loudest car stereo
• The story – apparently apocryphal – of 72-year old team President/Manges stooge Bud Haun crawling out an office window to hide from irate players looking for paychecks
• According to the excellent USFL.info history site, a clueless Gunslingers staffer asked the league office for head sizes of all USFL players, under the mistaken belief that the home team was responsible for providing helmets to each visiting club

After an 0-4 start, the Gunslingers rebounded to win half of their remaining games and finish at 7-11, thanks largely to the stout defense.  The team claimed average attendance of 15,444 (inflated) against actual season ticket sales of just over 3,500.

Heading into their second campaign in 1985, the Gunslingers’ returning Defensive Coordinator Jim Bates took over head coaching duties from Gil Steinke who became General Manager.  The condition of the team’s business operations - already a league joke – deteriorated substantially.  Manges was always cash poor.  In a lengthy 1984 profile in Texas Monthly magazine, author Paul Burka characterized Manges’ late 1970′s liquidity problems and track record with creditors:

Manges’ problem was more one of philosophy than one of money. His financial statement at the time showed $67 million in assets ($24 million or the Duval County Ranch, $33 million for oil and gas properties like the Guerra lands, and $5 million for the Groos Bank were the main items) and only $27 million in liabilities ($19 million in loans and the rest in past-due bills). That left his net worth at $40 million. But cash flow was his problem. To pay his debts he would have had to sell land, and that was unthinkable. Land is power; one gets rich by accumulating assets, not by selling them.

Burka’s analysis shrewdly foreshadowed the situation that the USFL – and Gunslingers players and staff – found themselves in with Manges a year later in the spring of 1985.  Four of the team’s first five payrolls in 1985 were either late or a portion of the checks bounced.  Gunslingers President Bud Haun promised to cobble together one payroll through a combination of cash and his own personal checks.  Years later, players recalled Cannonball Run style derbies on pay day, as players raced to the bank, knowing only the first few checks would clear.  A Gunslingers plane sat on the tarmac following a game in Jacksonville – the team discovered that Manges hadn’t paid for a flight home.

After 12 games, with the 1985 Gunslingers record at 3-9, Head Coach Jim Bates resigned after Manges failed to make good on late paychecks that Bates had assured the players were forthcoming.  Gil Steinke had to return from the administrative office to finish out the last six games.

“I admire <Bates> for that,” starting cornerback Peter Raeford told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2004. “I remember my eyes welled up that day because not only was he a man of character, but he brought a lot of energy to the team.”

In early June 1985, Manges paid out two overdue payrolls, beating an arbitrator’s deadline by a few hours.  He paid every player except offensive lineman Lee Spivey, whom he stiffed because Spivey had the nerve to file suit for his back wages.  (Another disgruntled Gunslinger, Ken Gillen, was traded for complaining in the press about late paychecks).   Manges promptly missed the next two payrolls and stopped paying the team’s bills entirely in June 1985.  Gunslingers’ players were left with over $600,000 in unpaid salaries.  Exasperated USFL Commissioner Harry Usher formally revoked the franchise on July 23rd, 1985.

The players’ subsequent efforts to recover their pay dragged out in the courts into 1988.  The litigation outlasted the USFL itself, which folded in August 1986, and ultimately went unresolved when Manges declared bankruptcy in the late 1980′s.

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Coach Jim Bates went on to a long career in the NFL as a defensive assistant and coordinator, including a seven-game stint as interim Head Coach of the Miami Dolphins in 2004.  His most recent post was as Defensive Coordinator of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2009.

Rick Neuheisel played for the San Diego Chargers as a replacement player during the 1987 NFL strike.  He subsequently has held high profile college head coaching positions at Colorado, Washington and his alma mater, UCLA.

Clinton Manges lost his Magic Kingdom ranch in February 1991 when the U.S. Marshals arrived in Black Hawk helicopters to evict Manges from the foreclosed property.  By this point, Manges owed at least $89 million to his creditors.  He later went to prison on federal bribery and mail fraud charges in 1997.  Manges died at age 87 in September 2010.

“My father was a perfect example of how far being an ornery old bastard can take you,” his daughter MaLou Manges told the San Antonio Express-News upon his death.

Downloads:

 San Antonio Gunslingers sources

The Detroit Ignition played three seasons of indoor soccer at the 3,800-seat Compuware Arena in suburban Plymouth, Michigan between 2006 and 2009.  The Ignition originated as an expansion franchise in the wobbly Major Indoor Soccer League in April 2006 and finished their run in the winter of 2008-09 as champions of a silly “lifestyle brand” called the Xtreme Soccer League.

Detroit entrepeneur John Hantz owned the Ignition and his Hantz Group advertised itself as the club’s jersey sponsor.  Hantz owned an array of insurance and financial services companies.  His sports group subsidiary dabbled in auto racing in addition to indoor soccer.

The club’s best known player was Major League Soccer (MLS) veteran Jamar Beasley, who played with the Ignition during the first two seasons of the team in the MISL.  In 1998, Beasley became the first high school player ever to jump directly to MLS, signing with the New England Revolution at the age of 18.

Beasley won MISL MVP honors with the Ignition in the club’s inaugural season of 2006-07, helping the Ignition to a league best record of 18-12.  The Ignition hosted the Philadelphia Kixx in the MISL Championship Game on April 21st, 2007 in a nationally televised game on the Versus cable network.  The Kixx defeated the Ignition 13-8, disappointing a capacity crowd at Compuware Arena.

Following the Ignition’s second season in the winter of 2007-08, the Major Indoor Soccer League folded.  The move was more of a procedural matter than a declaration of insolvency.  The MISL’s nine franchises all desired to keep playing in one form or another, but the chronically unstable league had a number of stockholders from dormant franchises that it wanted to sweep out the door.  Folding the league was apparently the easiest way to do so.

After the MISL folded, the teams split off into three different offshoot leagues.  The Ignition wound up in the strangest of the bunch – the Xtreme Soccer League – along with the Chicago Storm, Milwaukee Wave, New Jersey Ironmen and Philadelphia Kixx.

The gimmick of the XSL was that it was not really a league at all.  It was a “new interactive sports lifestyle” and a “12-month experience built around skilled soccer professionals, entertainment and fan participation – both live and online.”

Sounds exhausting!  What all this embarassing mumbo jumbo added up to here on Earth was that the players had to play some (Xtreme!) beach soccer exhibitions in the summer time.

The Ignition won the first and only XSL title by virtue of having the best regular season record at 12-8. There were no playoffs for the four-team league.  Ignition goalkeeper Danny Waltman played all 20 games and earned league MVP honors.

The Ignition folded along with the Xtreme Soccer League in the summer of 2009.

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As of early 2012, most of the Detroit Ignition’s official website is still online at www.detroitignition.com.

After the Ignition folded, John Hantz turned his attention to urban agriculture and has proposed a $30 million investment over ten years to convert Detroit’s vast acreage of abandoned lots into cutting edge commercial farms.

I’ve been waiting to do an interview with long-time pro soccer executive Peter Wilt since I launched this blog in February 2011.  I met Peter at the Women’s Professional Soccer Cup in 2009, when he was the President and CEO of the Chicago Red Stars and I was the GM of the Boston Breakers.  He’s a terrific storyteller and has worked in a quite a few leagues that we write about here on Fun While It Lasted.  Frankly, I didn’t want to waste an interview with Peter early on when nobody was visiting the site.  I decided to celebrate the New Year (and much improved site traffic) by finally re-connecting with him.

Peter has run franchises in men’s, women’s and indoor soccer, highlighted by eight years as the founding President and General Manager of the Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer.  He has won a MLS Cup (1998) and was instrumental in the construction of Toyota Park, the soccer-specific home of the Fire, in Bridgeview, Illinois.  As the chief executive of five franchises, he has launched countless careers in the sports industry, which made him a perfect fit for our Breaking Into Professional Sports interview series.

Only I didn’t want to talk about soccer.  Peter began his own sports career in 1983 as a Public Relations assistant with the Milwaukee Admirals of the rough and tumble International Hockey League. Peter was kind enough to share his memories of the 1980′s Milwaukee Admirals, along with  what he looks for (and guards against) when hiring people into the sports business.

The following is an excerpt of our complete interview with Peter Wilt.  Click here to read the full piece.

FWiL:

Can you tell me how you landed your first job with the Admirals in 1983?

Wilt:

After I graduated, I couldn’t find a job.  For about eight months I was working on a book which was really a way to stall things and convince my mother to continue sending me money for rent.  It was a book about the history of trades in baseball.  Anyway, I then got a notice in the mail from the Assistant Dean of the journalism school at Marquette who was helping me try to find a job.

It was a notice for a general assignment reporter at the Kankakee, Illinois newspaper and I had zero interest in it.  But, serendipitously, on the back was a job notice for the Milwaukee Admirals of the International Hockey League hiring a PR assistant.  So I said to myself, I don’t want to go to Kankakee, but the Admirals job is exactly the type of job that I am looking for.

I called up several times and eventually got an interview with Phil Wittliff, the Admirals GM.  Phil was really curious about my usher’s job at the Milwaukee Brewers.   I’m sure he was disappointed when I quit the Brewers job a couple of months later and took away his opportunity to sneak into County Stadium.

It was a jack-of-all-trades position, which was exactly what I needed because I didn’t go to sports management school.  That barely existed as a concept when I was in school.  I had the strong desire to go into the business, but I didn’t have the formal training.  With the Admirals, which was a very small organization of seven employees at the time, I really got the opportunity to learn the business from the ground up.

FWiL:

When you got to the Admirals in the mid-80’s, where did you think they stood on the totem pole of Milwaukee sports at that time?

Wilt:

The only team below them was the Milwaukee Wave indoor soccer team that started in 1984.  In Milwaukee, you had the Packers, the Bucks, the Brewers, Marquette and the Badgers over in Madison that were all bigger deals.

Interesting thing about the Admirals – we were maybe the only pro team in history to have five beer sponsors.  This was back when Milwaukee was truly a brewery city.  We had Pabst, Budweiser, Schlitz, Miller and Old Style.  We only averaged about 3,500 a game at the MECCA Arena.  The Bucks were playing there at the same time and selling out just about every game at about 11,000 fans a game.  And we were selling more beer each night than the Bucks!

FWiL:

Who were some of the more memorable or outsized personalities who were involved in the IHL in that era?

Wilt:

The Admirals had a player named Barry Scully and we traded him.  I drove him to the airport.  Back then there was no security.  We were late for the plane and I was trying to get him to run, but he refused.  And he also refused to get onto a propeller plane.  He kept saying to me ‘this isn’t a propeller plane is it’?  And he finally got to the gate agent and demanded to know if they were trying to put him on a propeller plane.  And the agent looked at him with a straight face and said ‘No, it’s a turbo prop’.  And that calmed him down and he didn’t realize a turbo prop and a propeller plane were the same thing until it was basically too late.

Then there was Danny Lecours.  He was a five-foot nothin’ Frenchman who was a superstar at the IHL level.  He scored 75 goals one year in the IHL!  He could never get a call up to the NHL because of his size.  Great guy.  And his career basically ended because of the Blackhawks affiliation.  He had scored 57 goals for the Admirals the year before the Blackhawks came in, but they didn’t want him.

His wife Jan was from Milwaukee and had a good nursing job in the city, so he couldn’t really relocate to another city.  So he ended up getting a construction job building the Bradley Center, the new arena in Milwaukee.  The Bradley Center was built with money donated by Jane and Lloyd Pettit, the Admirals’ owners. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it was built as a hockey building.  They wanted an NHL expansion team, but once they saw the going price they lost interest.  Not that they didn’t have the money, but they just didn’t think it was a good investment and they kept the Admirals instead.

But Danny Lecours went from a star player on the Admirals to literally building the new arena for his team.

FWiL:

You mentioned that Mike Wojciechowski was your mentor at the Admirals.  What lessons did you take from Mike – or self taught lessons perhaps – that you have applied in your subsequent jobs in the sports industry?

In general, the lessons I learned from Wojo were about how it all revolves around sales.  He essentially told me to follow the money.

Later on in my career I was working with the Milwaukee Wave indoor soccer team.  I had an opportunity to move to the Cleveland Crunch of the Major Indoor Soccer League for a pure public relations position for considerably more money.  And I turned it down because it didn’t have a sales aspect to it.  I remembered that Wojo told me that to grow in sports, you need to be tied to the revenue stream.

The reason I left the Admirals in 1987 was that I had nowhere to move up in the organization.  The only logical job for me to take was Wojo’s and it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere.  And I was right.  That was 1987 and now it is 2011 and he is still there!

And, of course he taught me that sports was entertainment.  There was a year when we tried to have a mascot for every single game, beyond the Admirals normal mascot.  One or both of us would dress up almost every game.  If Disney On Ice or Sesame Street Live was coming we would get the costumes shipped in advance and borrow a couple.  For President’s day I dressed up as Abraham Lincoln and he dressed up as George Washington and we had him pop out of a birthday cake at center ice.  My dad was a Lincoln-o-phile and I think his proudest moment during my career was seeing my out on the ice dressed as Abe Lincoln refereeing the Pee Wee hockey game between periods.

Last question.  Later in your career, you’ve been in a position to provide a lot of first jobs into the sports industry.  What are some things you consistently look for in a job seeker trying to get their foot in the door and conversely what are a few red flags that a job seeker might put out that would cost them an opportunity to work for a Peter Wilt organization?

Wilt:

For better or worse, when I interview people I know within two minutes if I want to hire them.  The rest of it is a song and dance to justify their time with me.

The things I look for are personality, character, intelligence, desire.  To delve a little deeper, experience is important.  I really don’t care about are education.

As far as red flags, I don’t like Notre Dame grads and I don’t like attorneys.  I hate getting resumes from attorneys who are convinced that they are ready for a life altering experience and job and I’ll be fortunate to hire them.  You get a lot of those.  I’d rather have a hungry 22-year old than a fat and sassy 35-year old.

Click Here For The Full Interview

Last September, my wife and her sister entered a team in Pigskin Fantasies, the fantasy football league of which I have been a member for 10 years.  The $140 entry fee was a modest investment compared with the $700 million that Bob McNair forked over for the NFL’s most recent expansion team, the Houston Texans, in 2002.  Nevertheless, “Mayhem & Foolishness” shared a few of the basic trappings of a real professional football franchise: they drafted players, generated a modest revenue stream, established an online presence, and even created their own apparel - long sleeved t-shirts featuring the pirated likenesses of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

For the record, Mayhem & Foolishness posted a record of 2-12 in 2011 and an operating loss of about $100.  Now I know that my wife and my sister-in-law don’t think of fantasy football in terms of net profits.  If they did, they wouldn’t have stuck with Ryan Fitzgerald down the stretch this fall.  My wife is an entrepeneur, however.  She runs her own busy psychotherapy practice and she identifies herself, with good justification, as both a therapist and a small business owner.

But what if my wife got it into her head that she was fundamentally in the business of fantasy football ownership – i.e. a professional gambler?  At what point does an idea become an enterprise?  When a business goes bankrupt the precise condition and timing of its demise is recorded. But can a dream that fails to catch fire ever cease to exist?  If a friend insists that they are, despite all evidence to the contrary, a classic car mechanic or a bounty hunter or a professional magician, who am I to say otherwise?  Maybe business is just really slow.

Consider the long, strange journey of the Plymouth River Eels,  a proposed independent baseball team in Southeastern Massachusetts that insisted it was in business for upwards of four years but never truly was.  Founded in 2005, the River Eels did almost everything you’d expect a minor league baseball team to do.  Everything except play baseball games.  They conducted clinics and name-the-mascot contests for local school children.  They had a architectural renderings and hired a groundskeeper and even commissioned a team song.  At one time, the River Eels claimed over 1,500 season ticket reservations and signed 10-year sponsorship deals with local car dealerships and insurance agencies.  As late as 2010, one team official continued to promote merchandise for the River Eels on Twitter.

When it comes to the Plymouth River Eels, two things are certain.  The River Eels never played a game of baseball. And for (at least) three summers, the River Eels were Plymouth’s home town ball club.  Only one of these statements can be true, but neither of them is wrong.

Massachusetts State Representative Tom O’Brien announced the formation of Bay Colony Baseball and Athletics, LLC and the Plymouth River Eels baseball club in November 2005, flanked by business partners Mike Rothberg and Erik Christensen.  At the introductory press conference, the trio unveiled architectural drawings for a privately funded 5,500 seat ballpark with adjacent convention center and restaurant.  Total price tag: an estimated $34.5 million.  The River Eels expected to throw out their first pitch in May of 2007.

The Eels drew inspiration from the success of the nearby Brockton Rox of the independent Can-Am League.  During the summer of 2004, the three-year old Rox drew 204,000 fans to Campanelli Stadium, an $18 million ballpark and convention center complex built in 2002.  The Rox also ran the Campanelli Stadium concessions business, and grossed over $100,000 a night when Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Def Leppard came through town on summer ballpark tours.

But if the Rox offered a tempting model they also presented a problem: proximity.  Campanelli Stadium is only 35 miles from Plymouth and the Rox tapped into the bedroom communities along the Route 3 corridor to Plymouth for a significant portion of their fan base.  If Bay Colony Baseball and Athletics wanted a Can-Am League membership, it was going to have to buy the Rox’ permission.

Rox management was divided on the River Eels.  The team’s out of state owners and advisors were skeptical of the project and of opening the market to a potential competitor.  But Rox President Jim Lucas wanted to work with the River Eels on a deal: the Rox would help broker the acquisition of the Can-Am League’s struggling Elmira Pioneers franchise for somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000.  On top of that, the  the River Eels would pay a six-figure annual territorial rights fee to the Rox for several years.  Lucas and O’Brien negotiated until August 2006, when the Rox abruptly ousted Lucas.  Two months later The Brockton Enterprise reported that the former Rox President was under investigation by the Plymouth County District Attorney.  Lucas was indicted by a grand jury in 2007 for allegedly embezzling $50,000 from the ballclub.  The charges were later dismissed, but with Lucas gone, negotiations with the Rox and the Can-Am League ended for good.

In 2006, the River Eels reached agreement with former California Angels shortstop Gary DiSarcina to manage the ball club, but on the eve of that announcement the Boston Red Sox offered DiSarcina a managerial post in their farm system.  The River Eels let him go and it was just as well – the planned May 2007 debut came and went with no league membership, no groundbreaking and no deal to purchase the 28 acre parcel of land eyed for the ballpark.

“We haven’t heard from them in more than a year,” Plymouth Planning Director Lee Hartmann told The Patriot-Ledger newspaper in February 2008.

But the team continued to market itself in the community, hosting a used equipment drive and later a baseball clinic in January and February 2008.  The team inked a 10-year sponsorship deal with a local Chevy dealer to sponsor the dugouts tops at the ballpark.

In May 2008 activity ticked up once again as the River Eels signed a purchase and sale agreement to acquire the stadium land for $5.1 million.  By this time Bay Colony Baseball and Athletics was up against a deadline – the company needed to file a written plan for the property by June, or else lose favorable tax breaks approved by local voters in October 2007.  But the land deal blew up for unspecified reasons on the day of closing.  By this point, the looming economic crisis began to impact the project as well.  Stadium contractor Payton Construction, which also built Brockton’s Campanelli Stadium, filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors in September 2007, leaving the River Eels without a builder.

After the land deal collapsed in May 2008, the River Eels went silent again, as they had for much of 2007.  The last media article published on the team arrived in June 2009, in which River Eels Vice President Mike Rothberg insisted the project was still a matter of when, not if.  River Eels front man Tom O’Brien was notably absent from that article.

Today, the River Eel has become more of a Loch Ness monster – an acknowledged myth that periodically raises its head in view of a few onlookers.   O’Brien is now the Treasurer of Plymouth County.  He has not commented in the press about the River Eels since May 2008.  As late as March 2010, team co-founder Mike Rothberg posted an update on his Twitter account plugging a new and improved version of the River Eels website.  However, that website finally came down later in 2010, nearly five years after the launch of the team.

The idea of the River Eels seems to have finally met its end sometime in 2010 or 2011 .  On the other hand, the team remains only one tweet, one Facebook post, or one $25 box of business cards away from a return to its former condition.

Update! (1/17/12)

The River Eels live?! A member of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League writes in to say that a man with Plymouth River Eels business cards attended an organizational meeting for the start-up collegiate wooden bat league in December 2010 or January 2011.  But the new league debuted in the summer of 2011 and has since conducted another round of expansion for 2012 and a Plymouth River Eels entry has yet to surface.

Downloads:

Plymouth River Eels sources

 The Detroit Lightning were a one-year wonder in the Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL).  The television production team of Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear purchased the expansion franchise in the two-year old MISL.  Perenchio was a former talent agent, who had a background in sports promotions as well.  He had promoted the “Fight of the Century” heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in 1971 and the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis exhibition between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.  Lear launched some of the most popular and critically acclaimed situation comedies of the 1970′s, including All In The Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day At A Time and Sanford & Son.

Indoor soccer was an unfamiliar sport in 1979, in many ways more similar to hockey than soccer.  Compounding the challenge of introducing a new sport and an unfamiliar league, the Lightning also faced local competition in the form of the Detroit Express of the North American Soccer League (NASL).  The NASL was a traditional outdoor soccer league, but had experimented with the indoor exhibitions for several years.  After the NASL watched the upstart MISL draw large crowds at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Madison Square Garden and other major arenas during its debut season in the winter of 1978-79, the older league decided to launch an indoor season of its own in the winter of 1979-80.

The Lightning played at the downtown Cobo Arena.  The Express stayed out in suburban Pontiac, staging their indoor games in a tiny corner of the 80,000-seat Silverdome, where they played conventional soccer in the summertime.

Detroit travelled to Kansas for a single-game Divisional semi-final playoff against the Wichita Wings on March 11th, 1980.  The Wings eliminated the Lightning 6-5 and that would prove to be the franchise’s final game as the Lightning.

Perenchio and Lear sold the Lightning to Dr. David Schoenstadt in the spring of 1980 and he officially relocated the club to San Francisco on May 28th, 1980.

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After a single season of play as the San Francisco Fog, Schoenstadt relocated the team once again to Kansas City, Missouri for the 1981-82 season.  The Kansas City Comets proved one of the most popular draws in the MISL throughout the 1980′s.  The franchise that started out as the Detroit Lightning in 1979 finally went out of business in Kansas City in the spring of 1991.

Perenchio and Lear sold their film and television properties to Coca-Cola/Columbia Pictures for $485 million.  Perenchio later purchased and eventually sold Spanish-language television giant Univision, earning billionaire status.  In 2004 Perenchio ranked #186 on Forbes‘ list of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

Pat Ercoli played in the MISL until 1986.  He coached the Rochester Raging Rhinos of the United Soccer League from 1996 to 2003 and is today the President of the Rochester Rhinos organization.

Did you know that before NBA Hall-of Fame owner Dr. Jerry Buss won 10 NBA titles with his Los Angeles Lakers, he won a World Team Tennis championship as owner of the Los Angeles Strings?  New England Patriots patriarch Robert Kraft also made his first foray into sports ownership in World Team Tennis.  Boston Red Sox owner John Henry got his first taste as owner of the West Palm Beach Tropics in an over-the-hill league that promoted 40-something ex-Major League ballplayers.

Ya gotta start somewhere.  The three men listed above today own some of the most valuable sports properties in the world and collectively have won 15 world championships in their respective sports.  And they all started out investing in the forgotten teams and leagues profiled here on Fun While It Lasted.

Now let’s add another mogul to the mix – Little Caesar’s pizza founder Mike Ilitch.

Ilitch has at least one quality that separates him from Buss, Kraft and Henry.  He’s a jock.  Ilitch played minor league baseball for four summers from 1952 – 1955, starting out in the farm system of his hometown Detroit Tigers.  In 1959, at age 30, he founded Little Caesar’s and eventually amassed a personal fortune through franchising.

By the 1970′s Ilitch was sponsorsing top quality amateur softball teams in and around Detroit.  Columbus, Ohio-based sports promoter Bill Byrne announced plans for a professional slo-pitch league – the American Professional Slo-Pitch League (APSPL).  Ilitch took the last franchise in the league for the inaugural season of 1977 - a team that “started late and finished first” as he later put it in the team’s 1978 yearbook.  Ilitch signed top amateur players from Michigan and Florida and spiced up his lineup by signing Jim Northrup and Norm Cash, two popular veterans of the Detroit Tigers 1968 World Series championship team.

The Caesars played home games at Memorial Field in the suburb of East Detroit.  A large crowd – estimated at 9,000 by the Caesars – turned out for the team’s first APSPL game in June 1977.  Slo-pitch is an offense heavy game and the Caesars were the top sluggers in the league.  Ronnie Ford hit 88 home runs and drove in 196 in just 267 at bats. Pitching, meanwhile, was an afterthought.  Tony Mazza tossed more than half the innings the team played all season and posted 25 of the team’s 48 victories.  To a baseball fan, the numbers looked silly, but Detroit fans loved it.

The Caesars finished the 1977 season with a league-best 42-14 record and then swept the Baltimore Monuments four games to zero in the APSPL World Series.

The Caesars breezed through the APSPL again in 1978, putting up a 49-15 record.  Norm Cash and Jim Northrup turned out not to be major factors for the team – they were more or less occasional cameo players.  Nevertheless, the Caesars got a little publicity midway through the 1978 season when they offered to buy the contract of former Yankees All-Star Joe Pepitone from the APSPL’s New Jersey Statesmen for $30,000.  (The deal didn’t go through, apparently).  In the World Series, the Caesars swept again, defeating the Minnesota Norsemen in four straight.

The Caesars played one final season in 1979, but this time they got caught in the playoffs by the Milwaukee Schlitz.  The APSPL split apart into two rival leagues after the 1979 season and Mike Ilitch decided not to continue in either.  The Caesars were done after three summers of play.  A successor team, known as the Detroit Auto Kings, joined the offshoot North American Softball League for the 1980 season and played at the Caesars’ old home at Memorial Field in East Detroit.  The Auto Kings lasted one season before folding.

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Mike Ilitch bought the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings in 1982. He added the Detroit Drive of the Arena Football League in 1988, owning that popular club for six seasons until the summer of 1993.  In 1992, Ilitch added the Detroit Tigers to his sports empire.  At age 82, he continues to own both the Red Wings and the Tigers as of the writing in early 2012.

Caesar’s field manager & GM Gary Vitto continued on as a front office executive for Mike Ilitch’s teams.  Vitto served as General Manager of the Detroit Drive, presiding over three Arena Bowl championships in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s.  Vitto later joined the front office of the Tigers after Ilitch bought the Major League club in 1992.  Vitto passed away from cancer in December 2001.

Let’s start with the name.  The Montreal Manic – or Le Manic de Montreal for its Francophone supporters – was not named after a mental health disorder characterized by mood swings, unpredictability and frenzied activity.  That would be a sensible assumption – this was, after all, the franchise formerly known as the Philadelphia Fury.  But in fact the Montreal Manic soccer club took its name from something far stranger…the Manic-1 hyrdoelectric dam at the mouth of Quebec’s Manicouagan River.

The Manic formed in October/November 1983 when Molson Breweries – owners of the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens – bought into the struggling North American Soccer League for a reported price of just over $2 million dollars.  For their two million bucks, Molson got arguably the worst franchise in the league – the three-year old Philadelphia Fury.  The Fury were coming off a 10-22 last place finish in 1980 and their paltry average attendance of 4,465 was the worst in the league.  (The famed New York Cosmos, by comparison, averaged 42,754 in 1980).

Molson’s investment was a godsend for the shrinking NASL, which was entering into a painful correction after a period of reckless expansion in the late 1970′s.  The league peaked at 24 teams in 1980, but just one day before Molson officials announced the team’s arrival in Montreal, the NASL’s Houston, Rochester and Washington clubs folded.  The loss of the Washington Diplomats was particularly galling – the Dips had rich owners, a world superstar in Johan Cruyff of Holland, and had just hosted Soccer Bowl ’80 at RFK Stadium before nearly 50,000 fans.  Dips attendance rose by nearly 60% in 1980, but it wasn’t good enough for Sonny Werblin and his Madison Square Garden Corporation, who lost an estimated $5 million on the team over two seasons.  ABC was also unhappy with its puny TV ratings for the NASL and announced it would not broadcast any games in the final year of its contract in 1981 except for the Soccer Bowl championship.

The Manic retained Fury Head Coach Eddie Firmani, the winningest coach in league history despite 1980′s last place finish.  Firmani was the only coach to lead two different clubs to the Soccer Bowl title, winning with the Tampa Bay Rowdies (1975) and twice with the Cosmos (1977 and 1978).  Other Fury holdovers  included the American goalkeeper Bob Rigby (who would start all 32 games for Montreal in 1981), defenders Andy Lynch and Bob Vosmaer, and midfielder Fran O’Brien and Andy Parkinson.

The Manic added rookie scoring star Thompson Usiyan through the college draft and picked up English striker Gordon Hill who led the club with 16 goals and 12 assists in 1981.  The club would also acquire long-time NASL scoring star Alan Willey in a mid-season trade with the Minnesota Kicks.

The Manic debuted at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on April 18th, 1981.  A crowd of 27,060 watched Andy Parkinson score two goals to lead the Manic to a 2-1 victory over the Toronto Blizzard.  Enthusiasm for the team built throughout the summer.  38,667 turned out to see the NASL’s biggest draw – the Cosmos – on June 2nd.  A crowd of 40,000+ showed up for the Cosmos’ return visit in late July and the Manic drew a season-high of 50,755 to the regular season finale on August 18th.

The Manic eeked into the 1981 NASL playoffs with a 15-17 record and the crowds got even stronger.  46,682 came out to cheer the Manic in a 1st round match against the Los Angeles Aztecs on August 24th.  The Manic drew a club record 58,542 for the opening game of the quarterfinals against the Chicago Sting on September 2, 1981 and rewarded the hometown fans with a 3-2 victory.  But the Sting would win the next two games in Chicago to eliminate the Manic.  For the season, the club drew 379,263 fans for 16 home dates for an average of 23,703 per game, second only to the Cosmos in the 21-team league.

A 1981 profile in Sports Illustrated, which featured a comic scene of ex-pat Italian waiters fawning over a table of Manic players in a Montreal restaurant, captured the melting pot appeal of the Manic during the team’s early days.  Nevertheless, the Manic front office’s attitude towards non-French speaking fans was shockingly dismissive, particularly for a cosmopolitan city that hosted the Olympics just five years earlier:

“We haven’t spent a cent on the ethnics,” a team spokesman told SI.  “They can yap and yell that they know the sport from back in Italy or Romania, but we want to build something special for us Quebecois.”

From November 1981 to February 1982 the Manic played in the NASL’s wintertime indoor soccer league, making their home at the Montreal Forum.  The indoor game proved popular in Montreal as well, with peak attendance coming on January 29th, 1982 when 13,125 fans turned out at the Forum to watch the Manic defeat the Cosmos 11-6.

The Manic returned outdoors in April 1982 and embarked on what would be the best season of their short history.  Star English striker Gordon Hill was vocally unhappy with Canada’s tax system and demanded a trade during the indoor season.  The Manic accomodated him shortly into the outdoor campaign, trading him to the Chicago Sting for defender Frantz Mathieu, who would go onto to make the NASL All-Star Team for Montreal.  Alan Willey picked up the scoring slack, netting 15 goals.  Victor Nogueira took over the bulk of the goalkeeping duties from Bob Rigby.  The Manic finished 19-13, but fell to the Ft. Lauderdale Strikers in the first round of the playoffs.

1982 attendance dipped imperceptibly to an average of 21,438, second best to the Cosmos for the second straight year.

The turning point for the Manic franchise came in February 1983.  NASL President Howard Samuels championed the creation of an expansion team in Washington, D.C. for the 1983 season known as Team America.  The concept was that Team America would be a club version of the U.S. National Team, featuring all of the best young American players from around the NASL.  Playing as a club side in the NASL would help the U.S. team develop with a goal of qualifying for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.  Seizing on the idea, Samuels, Molson Chairman Morgan McCammon and the Canadian Soccer Association announced that the Manic would transform itself into Team Canada by the 1984 season, gradually trading away its foreign players and replacing them with top Canadians from around the NASL.

The concept went horribly awry for both teams.  Many of the NASL’s top Americans refused to leave their existing clubs to join an expansion team with uncertain prospects.  (The club ended up finishing last in the NASL in 1983 and folding.). Montreal was in a much tougher situation – a winning, established club with a passionate fan base being publicly instructed by the league’s President to dismantle itself.

Unsurprisingly, the Montreal fan base revolted.  Season ticket sales for the 1983 season dropped by more than 50% from 1982 levels.  Overall attendance collapsed to 9,910 per game, tenth out of the NASL twelve clubs in 1983, after two seasons of trailing only the New York Cosmos.  Win or lose, the Manic were a lame duck team and local fans saw no reason to support them.

The Manic earned a playoff berth on the final day of the 1983 season, despite a 12-18 record and a last place finish in the NASL’s Eastern Division.  The team then proceeded to shock the 22-8 New York Cosmos, sweeping a best-of-three series.  The Manic’s upset victory snapped a string of four consecutive Soccer Bowl appearances for the Cosmos.  The decisive Game Two at Olympic Stadium drew 20,726 to Olympic Stadium.  It was the less than the 1982 average, but nevertheless marked the largest crowd of the season in Montreal.  The Manic bowed in the semi-final round to the eventual champion Tulsa Roughnecks.

To the surprise of no one, Molson pulled the plug on the Manic during the first week of November 1983.  The brewery cited losses of $10 million over three seasons and admitted the Team Canada concept had been a disaster which obliterated the Manic fan base.

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Downloads:

Montreal Manic sources