Going Long: The Wild Ten-Year Saga of the Renegade American Football League in the Words of Those Who Lived

Before it merged with the NFL in 1970, the American Football League helped usher into the limelight such cultural monuments as Joe Namath, O. J. Simpson and the Super Bowl. This meandering oral history of the AFL's 10-year existence, featuring interspliced interviews with 170 players, owners, coaches, secretaries and media personalities, is as inchoately supportive as a roaring stadium. Dallas Morning News sports editor Miller (Down to the Wire) styles the saga as a grudge match between scrappy AFL upstarts and NFL bullies, but, as in many sports stories, athletic rivalries obscure the workings of monopoly capital. The league started when the NFL dragged its feet in extending franchises to wealthy men in small-market cities; and it ended when the two leagues merged to halt the inter-league bidding wars that were driving up players' salaries. This tale of competition fostered and then strangled is fleshed out in interviews that offer a close-up look at the business side, delving into the details of franchise negotiations, television contracts and the jockeying for draft picks. But this material is, of course, buried under a pile-up of football anecdotes and play-by-play reminiscences of games 40 years past (one account of a single brutal tackle is told over three pages, from seven different perspectives). Miller inserts some sketchy historical exposition, but too often he leaves the narrative thread to the interviews, where it gets fragmented between intercutting shaggy-dog stories told by half a dozen eyewitnesses. Hard-core fans with long, long memories will delight in the gridiron minutiae, but other readers may be baffled by the scrimmage. B&w photos.