Kemper's Reviews > Ten-Gallon War: The NFL's Cowboys, the AFL's Texans, and the Feud for Dallas's Pro Football Future

In 1952 the National Football League started an expansion franchise called the Dallas Texans, but the team was a miserable failure and played only one year there. They were eventually sold and moved to Baltimore where they became the Colts. Only the Colts would later leave Baltimore for Indianapolis, and the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, then Cleveland got an expansion team again named the Browns. In 1960 Lamar Hunt started another team in Dallas and again called them the Texans, but they eventually had to leave town for Kansas City and became the Chiefs. However, there is again a NFL team called the Texans only they play in Houston because they got an expansion team after their Oilers moved to Nashville and became the Tennessee Titans.

Got all that?

OK, let me try to simplify it.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Lamar Hunt who was the son of an uber-wealthy oil tycoon. Hunt was a sports nut who dreamed of owning his own professional football team, but at that time the NFL had no interest in expansion. With the league giving him the cold shoulder, Hunt came up with the idea of starting his own. After rounding up some other rich folks to help him out, Hunt’s vision of the American Football League became a reality with his own Dallas Texans among its teams.

However, the NFL panicked at the idea that a rival league might drive up salaries and attract their fans so they tried to put Hunt out of business by starting another team in Dallas. After recruiting another Texas oil millionaire named Clint Murchison to pay the bills, the Cowboys were born and the war to win the hearts and minds of football fans of Dallas was on.

The two teams fought in courts and the media but oddly enough never on the football field. The Texans managed to win more games in those early years and Hunt was a tireless promoter who worked every angle he could think of to attract fans, but the Cowboys had the backing of the established league as well as the Dallas business community. After winning an AFL championship but playing in a mostly empty stadium, Hunt cut a deal to take his team to Kansas City. He lost the battle but won the war since the league he formed went on to merge with the NFL and become the version of pro football that has gone on to dominate the American sports landscape.

As a Kansas City area resident and Chiefs fan (And do not take that as an invitation to mention that last play-off collapse against the Colts. I’m still not speaking about it.) I was pretty familiar with most of this story, and I’d watched a fun documentary series about the old AFL vs. NFL war called Full Color Football that had tons of interesting history and anecdotes about how the two leagues fought over players and territory. I was hoping that this book would provide more juicy tidbits about the fight to become Dallas’s team, but I’d heard most of this already.

While it gives a decent overview of the situation and the key figures involved, the book spends far more time providing blow by blow recaps of action in individual games the Texans and Cowboys played rather than detailing the war between them off the field. Several lawsuits are mentioned, but few details are provided. Plus, while some effort is made to show how some players and fans hated the other team, there’s no real heat between Hunt and Murchison. In fact, the two men liked each other and would often engage in pranks like Hunt jumping out of a birthday cake at a party to surprise his rival. In the end this feels less like a war than a civilized battle for market share that eventually found both teams thriving.

Another thing that had me scratching my head is that a lot of focus is put on Abner Haynes, a terrific running back for the Texans who was an early AFL superstar. We get a lot of material about what he thought about the situation as well as many accounts of spectacular plays he made on the field. Then he suddenly vanishes from the book, only to get the casual revelation in one sentence that the Chiefs cut him after the 1964 season. It’s really odd that so much time was spent on him as a player, but then have almost nothing about his leaving or what he did after that.

If you don’t know much about the AFL/NFL or Texans/Cowboys feud and are interested in it, then this is an entertaining book, but if you already know the basic story and are looking for something more in depth, it won’t tell you much you didn’t already know.

Although maybe Stephen King should give it a read.