The Oakland Oaks were charter members of the American Basketball Association (ABA) and were introduced, along with the rest of the new league, on February 2, 1967. The franchise’s initial investors were league co-founder Dennis Murphy, along with Los Angeles-based insurance executive S. Kenneth Davidson. The latter pulled in entertainer Pat Boone, an avid basketball fan.
The Carolina Chargers were a ramshackle minor league football team that played out of Charlotte, North Carolina for three summers between 1979 and 1981. Quarterbacked by former North Carolina A&T star Ellsworth Turner in all three seasons, the Chargers appeared in two American Football Association title games in 1979 and 1980. After the Chargers folded in 1981, the team was replaced by the Carolina Storm who featured many of the same players and won the last two championships of the AFA in 1982 and 1983.
The Baltimore Elite Giants got their start in Nashville, before moving to Columbus, Ohio for one year, then to Washington, D.C. They moved down the road in Baltimore in 1938 and played there until 1950, before spending their final season back in Tennessee.
The Salt Lake Golden Eagles hockey team was a popular mainstay on the Utah pro sports scene for a quarter century. That Eagles endured despite the shocking and untimely deaths of two team owners, the collapse of two hockey leagues of which they were members, and several 11th hour rescues from financial calamity.
Omaha, Nebraska has hosted the top farm club of the Kansas City Royals since the Major League club’s inception in 1969. Initially known as the Omaha Royals, the Class AAA club won four league championships of the American Association, including back-to-back titles in their first two seasons in 1969 and 1970. The Royals survived the closure of the American Association, joining the Pacific Coast League in 1998. From 1999 until 2001, the team was briefly known as the “Golden Spikes” before returning to the Royals nickname. In 2011, the club re-branded as the Omaha Storm Chasers while simultaneously moving into the new $36M Werner Park.
SUPER SOCCER LEAGUE Announced: January 5, 1978 Vanished: Summer 1978 Founders: Dennis Murphy, Jerry Saperstein, Richard Ragone, Norm Sutherland, Fredric Wise & Dr. Elliott Gorin Background Periodically, some persuasive entrepreneur claims to have developed the sport of the future. And from the 1960’s to the 1990’s that man was
This short-lived indoor football team played a single season at Cross Insurance Arena in downtown Portland during the summer of 2018. The Mammoths leading receiver was the delightfully-named Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.
The San Diego Clippers were born when the Buffalo Braves headed west in the summer of 1978. Almost as soon as they got there, the team was angling to move up the 5 to L.A., which they ultimately did in 1984.
The Memphis Mad Dogs were a short-lived chapter in the Canadian Football League’s expansion misadventure into the United States between 1993 and 1995. The Mad Dogs arrived at the Liberty Bowl just in time for the final season of the CFL’s three-year American experiment in the fall of 1995. The ‘Dogs featured an outstanding defense and CFL legend Damon Allen at quarterback but never quite put it all together and finished their only season at 9-9. The team did make a star out of unheralded community college wide receiver Joe Horn, who leapt from the Mad Dogs to a 12-year career in the NFL and four Pro Bowl nods. The team folded after the 1995 season.
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