This past weekend was the 50th anniversary of a story that never got nearly the coverage it deserved, but involved a Hall of Fame pro wrestler, who in 1965 was a star lineman with the San Diego Chargers in the fall and winter, and a pro wrestler in the summer. Ernie Ladd, who was the highest paid lineman in the AFL when he was later with the Kansas City Chiefs, left football after the 1968 season because he felt (and he turned out to be right) he could make more money as a pro wrestler. Ladd, who had suffered a bad knee injury that year, claimed to have doubled his football income in 1969, his first full year in pro wrestling. That isn’t to say that’s true, but he claimed he went from $67,000 in football (which was big money in the late 60s) to $135,000 in wrestling (which was a number that even Hall of Fame baseball players weren’t making at the time). Of course, wrestlers were known for creating the illusion they were making more money than they really were, but Ladd headlined multiple territories at the same time, cherry picking the best dates, and was one of the biggest stars in wrestling into the early 80s. According to an article in Sports Illustrated a week after the story originally went down(used for a story on the Ark’s Razor blog this past week which is the source of much of this), in January, 1965, the AFL (which a few years later merged into the NFL) had its All-Star game in New Orleans, nearly 50 years to the day of Monday’s Raw in the same city. When they got there, the black players selected for the game found that cab drivers would not pick them up. They were not allowed in certain night clubs. Ladd, who was first team defensive tackle on virtually everyone’s All-AFL team during the 1964 season, Dick Westmoreland and Earl Faison had a gun pointed at them at one club that wouldn’t allow them in. Then they couldn’t get a cab from the clubs that wouldn’t let them in, back to the hotel. At one point Walt Sweeney, who was white, was so upset that a cab driver refused to allow his fellow players in the cab that he went to attack the driver until Ladd and Faison pulled him away. Instead, they had to walk back to the hotel. Many were subject to verbal taunting, with liberal use of the N word. Faison recalled hearing people behind his back at the hotel ask if he was Ernie Ladd, and then hearing then say that he couldn’t be because he wasn’t big enough and that Ladd “was the biggest n***** in the world.” Another player was yelled at in a restaurant by a white woman because he hung his coat up near hers on the coat rack. Clem Daniels, one of the top running backs in football, met with a white player for breakfast at the hotel. When he hung his coat up, an old white lady threw it off the coat rack onto the floor. He calmly picked the coat up and put it back on the rack. She then threw it back on the floor. In a gathering of the top players in the AFL, Ladd was the leader that the others went to for advice. Part of that was because, at 6-foot-9 and 315 pounds, he had the reputation for being the toughest player in the league. He was also highly intelligent and well spoken, and had a reputation for not backing down. These traits served him well in pro wrestling, a business that had its own race issues, but at the end of the day, green trumped black and Ladd’s color was green. Bill Watts even hired Ladd as his booker on different occasions. Ladd, after at first being opposed to pushing the Junkyard Dog as the top star in Mid South Wrestling because he didn’t think he was a good enough in-ring performer, once Watts told him it wasn’t his call, was one of the architects, along with Watts and Buck Robley, of making JYD the biggest draw New Orleans ever had, some 15 years after the All-Star game that was scheduled in the same city. Ladd and Sherman Plunkett of the New York Jets called a meeting with the 22 black players chosen for the game, to meet in Room 990 of the Roosevelt Hotel. Ladd pushed the idea of boycotting the all-star game. This was a scary moment, because the public would not be sympathetic to their cause in 1965. Today the reaction would be different, but today, such a thing couldn’t have happened to begin with. The Chargers were, by the standards of the time, the most progressive pro football team in the country. In 1962, head coach Sid Gillman was the first coach to not just allow, but encourage black players and white players to room on the road. But Louisiana was not ahead of the curve. As late as 1959, there was a law in the books that blacks and whites couldn’t compete in the same sporting events. There were all-black colleges that played against each other. There were, at the time, no major league sports franchises in the state. In wrestling, a black wrestler could not wrestle a white wrestler. The Supreme Court overturned that rule. When that happened, the state legislature passed a new law, that at sporting events, there had to be separate seating for black fans and white fans. It wasn’t until a few months earlier that the Supreme Court ruled that illegal. Ladd also had a bad experience in 1964 preseason game in Atlanta, when several players went to a pool hall together and all the black players, including Ladd, were told to leave because they weren’t welcome. Ladd, and all the black players on the team, said they wouldn’t play in the game. The mayor of Atlanta came to meet Ladd and the players for breakfast and talked them into playing the game. When the same things, but worse, were happening in New Orleans, Ladd wasn’t as conciliatory. By a vote of 13-8, with one abstention, the black players voted to boycott the All-Star game. Ron Mix, a white player with the San Diego Chargers who was an all-time great offensive lineman, told the players that he sympathized with their cause, but felt this wasn’t the way to go about it, saying it would hurt blacks who live in New Orleans and would have to deal with the discrimination, which would get worse because whites would see it as how blacks cost them their All-Star game. Art Powell reportedly told Mix that they knew they weren’t going to change the way people in New Orleans treated blacks, but said he had to act on his own conscience. Powell and Mix continued to argue, with Mix continuing that they were going to make it worse for blacks who live in the city while the rest of the players like the two of them would leave and never have to come back. Powell argued that in playing, they were condoning the treatment they had received. Local NAACP chapter head Dave Morial, who later became the first black Mayor of New Orleans, pleaded with the players not to boycott. The players announced a boycott. A statement was read. The black players left. The white players did nothing at first, until the blacks found a surprise ally–Ron Mix. “I made a decision then that if the game were to go on despite the absence of the Negro (the term used in those years) players, I would not play. I felt it would be wrong in not playing, but that it was important for at least one white player, if the game had to be played in New Orleans, to join the Negros, to say, we’re with you.” In doing so, Mix, like the black players, were putting their careers in football on the line in defying the league and its owners. But Mix’s stand was necessary, because it went from a black boycott to just a boycott. But the key was next. Jack Kemp, the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, who had just won the AFL championship (and later was a well known politician who ran for President as a Republican, but never got the party nomination; and was Bob Dole’s Vice Presidential nominees in his losing 1996 Presidential election attempt), was among a group of white players who followed Mix. When the quarterback who had just won their championship (this was prior to the introduction of the Super Bowl which came two years later, and at this point the NFL and AFL were warring rivals) game made the stand, the league took notice, and it also saved the black players from being fired because at this point most of the best players in the league were united on the cause. At the last minute, Joe Foss, the commissioner of the AFL, announced that the game was being moved to Houston. But the cost was great. The game was sold out in New Orleans. Only 15,446 attended the last minute put together game in Houston. Ladd ended up getting the last word on the subject. “The AFL owners like Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams and Sonny Werblin and Barron Hilton were the greatest men I’ve known over the years. Our owners understood us. They took a stand, and they helped make pro football. The NFL had great players, but they weren’t real men. Whatever the owners told them, they did. The AFL gave birth to men who would stand up and fight. There were no yellow-bellied cowards in the AFL.” And yes, years later, yellow-bellied cowards was a term the heel Ernie Ladd used in his promos against people like Dusty Rhodes.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 03:40:47 +0000
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