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 Jacksonville Express was a franchise that existed for part of one season in the World Football League during the summer and autumn of 1975. The WFL was an under-funded effort to challenge the NFL head-to-head in the fall, along the lines of the AFL-NFL rivalry of the 1960’s. Jacksonville was one of the league’s original cities in 1974, but the Jacksonville Sharks club went kaput midway through the season. The WFL took another crack at Jacksonville in 1975 with the formation of the Express. But this time the entire league folded halfway through the regular season on October 22nd. The Express had a 6-5 record when their season was cut short.
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.
For a remarkable three-year period between 2004 and 2006 this amateur women’s soccer club that played in a 1,500-seat community college field in the Trenton suburbs managed to sign up a jaw-dropping roster of top players from all over the world. The Wildcats ran roughshod over the USL’s W-League during these years with only one North American women’s club – the Vancouver Whitecaps – able to stay on the field with them.
The Fort Worth Cavalry were a failed Arena Football League franchise now residing in our One-Year Wonders file. After one star-crossed season in Fort Worth, the team crossed the border into Mexico just in time for that country’s late 1994 financial meltdown and vanished without a trace.
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 history of the Ottawa Rough Riders Canadian football team stretches back to 1876 with the formation of an amateur rugby side known as the Ottawa Football Club. The team folded in 1996 after 120 years.
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