If you like hypocritical hand-wringing, you should love this week's pre-game shows on the various networks that broadcast National Football League games.
(Note: The editorial board of We Want Marangi insisted on avoidance of the word "cover" in the sentence above, since that verb carries implications of digging up new information not made readily available by the league and its teams, as opposed to the combination of myth-making and mispronounced gibberish served up by these programs.)
Unless you enjoy watching former players, coaches and alleged journalists attempting to out-sensitive each other on a topic about which none of them had any interest in commenting until left with absolutely no other choice, you might want to join WWM in giving them a miss.
This should not be taken to suggest that attacking women or children is acceptable in any context, particularly when the attackers are among the world's most physically powerful humans. Or that the problem -- and when almost 90 of your star performers have been accused of some form of domestic violence over a 14-year period, there is no other way to describe it -- should be rationalized or excused, as Roger Goodell, the rest of the NFL front office and the Baltimore Ravens tried to do over the spring and summer.
It's just that I have no interest in hearing what Emmitt Smith, Mike Ditka or Peter King -- all of whom are beholden to the great and powerful NFL for their continued gainful employment -- think about it.
At the same time, talking -- or writing about -- anything involving the present NFL at this moment in time without mentioning the actions of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Ray Washington, Greg Hardy and Jonathan Dwyer feels pretty disingenuous, too.
So, as a public service, WWM travels back to a simpler time for professional football, a journey made possible by YouTube's laissez-faire attitude toward copyright law.
Buffalo hosts San Diego this week in the latest renewal of a rivalry that was one of the old American Football League's most significant. The Chargers played in five of the AFL's first six championship games, while the Bills made it to three straight from 1964 to '66, smothering San Diego twice.
In 2009, Showtime aired a five-part documentary on the upstart league to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the AFL's founding. Like many, I completely missed "Full Color Football: The History of the American Football League" at the time, in no small part because it was on Showtime.
The second episode (which you can watch by clicking here), "Times They Are A Changin'," focuses on the years 1963 to '65, a span when both the Bills and Chargers won the only championships of any sort in either franchise's history to date.
Coached by Sid Gillman, the Chargers helped create the image of the AFL as a wide-open, deep-passing league, with the Chargers continuing to win while cycling through Jack Kemp, Tobin Rote and John Hadl at quarterback.
The Bills, under Lou Saban, stuck to a more traditional approach, emphasizing defense and power running, particularly as demonstrated by Cookie Gilchrist. Kemp's acquisition, thanks to a rare miscalculation by Gillman, balanced Buffalo's offense and provided the Bills with their first clear on-field leader. As the documentary explains, Kemp's burgeoning political skills led directly to Buffalo's 1964 championship by helping keep Gilchrist on the team after the 250-pound fullback staged a one-man strike during a loss to the then-Boston Patriots.
A few other highlights from the episode:
--- The most extensive footage of Gilchrist in action I have seen in one place. The AFL was not as exhaustively filmed as its rival league, which had NFL Films documenting every game from 1964 on. The grudge between Gilchrist and Ralph Wilson, which both men took to their graves, probably did not help, either.
While Gilchrist was a mercurial enough presence that the Bills traded him to Denver after the 1964 title game, he was as destructive an offensive force as the team has ever possessed. While defenders have gotten much bigger since the mid-1960s, its hard to imagine them having much luck against him, either.
As an added bonus, the segment on Gilchrist includes one of my favorite football stories ever, told by the late Buffalo News sports editor and columnist Larry Felser, which ends with one of the great gentlemen I have had the pleasure to know using the word "motherfuckers."
--- Video evidence that Bill Belichick may, in fact, be a human being and not simply the practice-taping, MILF-hunting, media-snubbing cyborg we have all assumed him to be for the last few decades. Get him talking about Gillman's offensive brilliance, and the guy actually smiles.
--- A closing segment on the 1965 AFL All-Star game, the only instance of players in a major American sport boycotting an event, due to racial discrimination experienced by black athletes in New Orleans.
So, as Larry would say, do yourself a favor and check it out. Unless you really need to know what the likes of Chris Berman have to say about the NFL's present-day disgrace.
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