On October 18, 2017, the Gridiron Club of Greater Boston honored Larry Eisenhauer of the Boston Patriots as its Man of the Year. Larry was a superb defensive end for the Pats; he played from 1961 to 1969 and retired just before the American Football League merged with the National Football League.
I served as Master of Ceremonies for the evening. My welcoming remarks follow.
Joe Foss, American Football League Commissioner
Good evening, and welcome to the 22nd annual “Legends Night” of the Gridiron Club of Greater Boston.
We usually call this “NFL Legends Night,” but that’s not true this evening. We’re honoring a hero of the American Football League, so welcome to AFL Legends Night for 2017.
The AFL, born in 1960. With commissioner Joe Foss. Let me tell you about Joe Foss.
He was governor of South Dakota at the time he was asked to be AFL Commissioner. Joe was a Greatest Generation member. In World War II, he was Marine fighter pilot in the Guadalcanal campaign. He was launched off an aircraft carrier, by catapult, and flew 350 miles to that island in the South Pacific.
The Marines had already landed there. They were in desperate straits, surrounded by the Japanese, hemmed into a small perimeter that fortunately had an airfield.
Joe Foss became head of what they called the Cactus Air Force. Guadalcanal was code named Cactus.
The fight for that island, and in fact the fight for the Pacific, was decided largely in the skies. The Japanese fought with Mitsubishi Zero fighters; there were 72 of them shot down in the skies over the Solomon Islands. Joe Foss shot down 26 of them. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt. Joe Foss’s total victories matched those of Eddie Rickenbacker, the “Ace of Aces,” in World War One.
What better guy to lead the American Football League – to lead a revolution against the establishment National Football league – than Joe Foss?
Joe Foss receiving the Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as his wife and mother look on.
He would have been a great president of the United States of America.
Joe came to mind when I was thinking about how we might begin this evening’s program. But something else that kept coming up was a television show about early America. I’m sure some of you remember it. The HBO series about John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti, back in 2008.
Now, John Adams is a guy I’ve always felt a little sorry for. He was a one term president, between Washington and Jefferson, and the history books have always given him short shrift. The HBO series and the biography by David McCullough changed that. That’s a good thing.
Adams made a lot of mistakes and made a lot of enemies. But he was a true patriot, devoted to his country and his cause, and he was right on all the big questions.
What brought the series to mind, as I was thinking about tonight, was an interview with the producer. He talked about how they did not sugarcoat the portrayal of colonial times. There was hardship always – worried about money – violence, brutality and unfairness. It was hard, just to survive. They wanted to show just how hard it was.
Boston Patriots’ founding owner Billy Sullivan
Well, it wasn’t easy for the American Football League to survive, back in those early days. In fact, it was pretty darn hard. The money? Well, let’s just say that an AFL salary might pay for a couple of practice sessions of NFL players today. The playing and practice conditions? Maybe we’ll hear something of them later in the program.
But like John Adams as president, the AFL with Joe Foss at the head, got one thing right. One very big thing, that the NFL did not get right.
When President Kennedy was assassinated on that Friday afternoon, Foss and the guys he worked for, Billy Sullivan and his fellow owners, cancelled the games for that coming Sunday. Billy, if memory serves, was the league owners’ representative at JFK’s funeral.
Pete Rozelle ordered that the NFL play its games anyway. And to Pete’s everlasting credit, he always maintained thereafter that the decision was the biggest mistake he made in his illustrious career as NFL commissioner.
But the AFL got it right the first time.
The Gridiron Club of Greater Boston’s 2017 Man of the Year, Larry Eisenhauer.
In drawing analogies between the birth of the American football league with the American nation – I really don’t mean to say that they are remotely comparable in importance. Pro sports are society’s toy department, and the AFL owners were building another section of that department. Our Founding Fathers were building a new country.
And it was a whole lot harder for General Washington, John Adams, and all of the founders of that day, to take on the British Redcoats than it was for Billy Sullivan and his motley band of revolutionaries to take on the mighty National Football League.
But take on the NFL they did. They prevailed. And unlike the Founding Fathers and the people of those colonies that became the United States of America, they had one helluva lot of fun along the way.
And so did we who watched them and cheered for them.
Let’s hear about those days now, and begin our speaking program.
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