1964 Season AFL All-Star Game

The 1964 Season
American Football League
ALL-STAR GAME

AFL

West 38

East 14

January 16, 1965
Jeppeson Stadium, Houston

Unfortunately, details of the American Football League All-Star Game held after the 1964 season are not readily available, possibly because the events prior to the game had much more historical importance than the game itself. Below is an article about those events. If you have any details on the actual game, please let me know.

See Todd Tobias' site 'Tales From the American Football League' to see the team rosters.

Jan. 16, 2005, 12:53AM
Fighting against racial slights
In January 1965, 21 blacks made history by forcing AFL All-Star Game out of New Orleans

By DAVID BARRON
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

After a year in which Houston hosted two of the biggest events in sports — the Super Bowl and the baseball All-Star Game — and landed the 2006 NBA All-Star Game, today the city marks the 40th anniversary of a lesser-known event that remains unique in the history of sports in America.

Only 15,446 fans filtered into Jeppesen Stadium for the American Football League's East-West All-Star Game on Jan. 16, 1965. The West All-Stars won in a rout 38-14, and it's not uncommon for participants to say they don't remember a thing about the events of the day.

And yet the game — more accurately, the events that led it to Houston in the first place — was a revolution akin to Muhammad Ali's refusal to enter the draft or Harry Edwards' efforts to organize a boycott of the 1968 Olympics by black American athletes.

When 21 black football players refused to play the All-Star Game as scheduled in New Orleans because of race-related slights, threats and insults they suffered in that city, they staged a signal event in the volatile mixture of sports and society that continues today.

"Someone had to take a stand and stop players from being treated as second-class citizens," said Ernie Ladd — then a 6-9, 300-pound defensive tackle, now a businessman in Rayville, La. "It's a great story. Spike Lee should do a movie about it.

"We didn't do it for publicity. We did it because of what was right and what was wrong."
The walkout of 1965 came in a time of great change and upheaval across the South in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ironically, it took place in a city that had made great progress in undoing past wrongs.
Like many Southern states, Louisiana adopted the policy of "massive resistance" in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling in 1954, said Charles Martin, a history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studied the history of New Orleans' segregation laws while a graduate student at Tulane University.

In late 1955, the Sugar Bowl had enraged segregationists by inviting Pittsburgh, which had one black player on its roster, to play Georgia Tech on New Year's Day. Within six months, the state Legislature passed a law that prohibited interracial sports events in Louisiana.

"The Sugar Bowl was in favor of (relaxing segregation rules) because they saw sports as part of tourism," Martin said. "But there was resentment in other parts of the state because they saw it as violating laws regarding desegregation and public accommodations. The Sugar Bowl people tried to get an exemption for their game, but the Legislature wouldn't do it."

That law was struck down by the Supreme Court in May 1959. Five years later, a year before the AFL controversy, the Supreme Court overturned another state law that mandated segregated seating at all public events in Louisiana.

In December 1964, almost one month to the day before the AFL players arrived in New Orleans, the Supreme Court also ruled, in the Heart of Atlanta Hotel case, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevented discrimination in public accommodations.

The Sugar Bowl had successfully hosted an integrated Syracuse team against LSU a couple of weeks before the AFL game, and Martin said the city's business establishment favored change as it sought to attract convention traffic to the city and built its bid to get an NFL franchise.

"You had the business elite wanting to abandon the Old South ideas of discrimination and segregation and massive resistance," Martin said. "It was the old-style Southern politicians that didn't want to change. The business types were pragmatic. They might prefer the old ways, but it was no longer pragmatic to do so."

Unwelcome guests

It was against that backdrop that the AFL All-Stars began to filter into the city a week before the scheduled Jan. 17, 1965, game.
Sid Blanks, a rookie running back for the Oilers who had been the captain of an otherwise all-white team at Texas A&I in the early 1960s, said the problems started at the airport.

"I couldn't get any transportation to the hotel," Blanks said. "I finally got a skycap to tell me, 'You need to get the right cab because you're colored.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'They won't pick you up.' I asked why not, and he said, 'It's a little different here. If you're colored, you can't ride in just any cab.' "

In an interview with NFL Films for a documentary on the history of blacks in pro football, San Diego Chargers defensive end Earl Faison said the insults and racial slurs increased even when players were able to track down a "colored" taxi to get them to their hotel.
"I was checking in to the hotel and heard voices in the background asking, 'Is that Ernie Ladd?' " Faison said. "And another guy said, 'No, Ernie Ladd is a bigger n----- than that. That Ladd is a big n-----.' "

When the players decided to visit Bourbon Street that night, Faison said insult nearly turned to injury — and worse.

"We walked past four or five different clubs (and were refused entry)," Faison said. "One guy shouted, 'You so and so, get off the street. John F. Kennedy is not playing here tonight.' "

At one club, Faison said, "A guy pulls out a gun and says, 'You are not coming in here. You n------ are not coming in here.' "

Ladd said he does not remember having a gun pulled on him. But he does remember the insults and the snubs and the anger.

"Walt Sweeney, one of our teammates with the Chargers, stopped a cab for us to go back to the hotel," Ladd said. "The cab driver wouldn't let us get inside. Sweeney wanted to bust the guy's head, but I said, no, we would walk back to the hotel.

"When we got back, Earl and I had a discussion, and I told Earl that I wasn't going to play in New Orleans under those conditions. Earl agreed and got in touch with (Jets offensive lineman) Sherman Plunkett, who got us in touch with the other guys on the East squad."

The next morning, Broncos defensive back Austin "Goose" Gonsoulin, a native of Port Arthur, met fellow Texan Clem Daniels, a running back from the Oakland Raiders, in the hotel lobby and suggested the two have breakfast.

"We walked into the restaurant, and Clem hung up his coat, and this little old lady came over and threw his coat on the ground," Gonsoulin said. "I said, 'Clem, don't worry about it. Just go get it and put it back on the hanger.' Then this woman came over and threw it back down again.

"We finished breakfast, and we agreed it was too bad that New Orleans hadn't come around to the times yet. Then we left, and I got on the bus to go to practice. Then I looked around, and there were no black players on the bus. We got to practice, but we stayed for only 15 or 20 minutes. We agreed it wasn't right to stay."

The 21 black players — more than a third of the players on the two 29-member squads — gathered at a hotel meeting room and voted 13-8 not to play.
They ignored pleas from promoter Dave Dixon, who was leading New Orleans' bid to land a pro football franchise, and NAACP chapter president Ernest N. "Dutch" Morial, the first black graduate of LSU's law school and later the first black mayor of New Orleans.

"We had a similar experience at an exhibition game a year earlier in Atlanta, and we had people there who lied to us and said things would be made right. We were not going to be taken in again," Ladd said.

They appointed Buffalo Bills tight end Ernie Warlick as their spokesman, and Warlick quickly drafted a brief statement.

"The American Football League is progressing in great strides, and the Negro players feel they are playing a vital role in the league's progression. They are being treated fairly in all cities in the league," Warlick wrote. "However, because of adverse conditions and discriminatory practices experienced by Negro players while here in New Orleans, the players feel they cannot perform 100 percent as expected in the All-Star Game and be treated differently."

Warlick might not have been as vocal as Ladd or running back Cookie Gilchrist, his Bills teammate, but the slights and insults cut just as deeply.

"I had served four years in the military. Then I played five years in the Canadian Football League," he said. "I was outside my country, but I had no problem going anywhere in Canada. Then I came back to my country and couldn't do things because of the color of my skin. So we decided to make a stand."

The next day, Monday, Jan. 11, AFL commissioner Joe Foss announced that the game would be moved to Houston.

"Dixon assured me that New Orleans was ready in all aspects for a game between racially mixed teams. Evidently, it isn't," Foss said. "They contacted as many businessmen as possible and got them to agree to treat the Negro players well. But they just couldn't get to everyone. Negro players run into problems in nearly every city. But I guess what went on in New Orleans was more than they could be expected to take. I can't say that I blame them."

As the players left for Houston, Warlick remembers that it was considerably easier to get a cab back to the airport than it had been a couple of days earlier traveling in the other direction.

"The same taxis that wouldn't give us a ride were now taking us in," he said. "So if we didn't do anything else, maybe that was one area where we brought about some change."

Moving to Houston

The players reconvened Tuesday and Wednesday in Houston, where Warlick remembers the AFL contingent as being the first racially mixed group allowed to stay at the Shamrock Hilton Hotel.

But Ladd said Houston wasn't always hospitable to black athletes.
A few years earlier, he said he experienced his most embarrassing moment in football at the hands of Lloyd Wells, who was then a prominent sportswriter for the Houston Defender newspaper.

"Houston treated (blacks) pretty poorly for a time. They made the black spectators sit in the end zone my first year in the league (1960)," Ladd said. "Lloyd Wells tried to get the players to strike, and I made a mistake by not listening to him.

"I'll never forget him saying, 'Ernie Ladd, you're gutless like a worm. Stand up and show some guts.' By then it was too late to do anything, but I'll never forget him saying, 'Look at you, you big old gutless Ernie Ladd. You can run, but you can't hide.' "

By January 1965, those days had ended, particularly by comparison to the incident that Chronicle sports columnist Wells Twombly facetiously called "the second great battle of New Orleans."

The nature of what had gone before, however, tends to overshadow the fact that the 1965 AFL All-Stars might have been the greatest aggregation of athletes to set foot in this city.

Nine of the 58 players are members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

An astonishing 43 are among the 100-plus AFL players listed in one fan's cyberspace version of the AFL Hall of Fame.

The game, not surprisingly, was something of an anticlimax. The West won in a walk, and Twombly wrote of the action, "A sloppier football game you haven't seen since the last Houston Oiler intra-squad scrimmage."

San Diego running back Keith Lincoln was the Most Valuable Player on offense with an 80-yard touchdown run and a 73-yard TD reception from the Chiefs' Len Dawson on the first offensive play of the game. Broncos defensive back Willie Brown, who later as a member of the Raiders would contribute one of the iconic images of pro football with NFL Films' slow-motion footage of his interception TD return in Super Bowl XI, was the defensive MVP.

Chargers quarterback John Hadl threw three scoring passes for the West. Blanks, the Oilers' rookie running back, set an All-Star record for kickoff returns and had a five-yard TD run for the East's only offensive touchdown.
The West players received $700 each as All-Star winners. The East players had to settle for $500 each.

'Stand up and fight'Dixon said NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle called him a few days after the walkout, told him the league still wanted a franchise in New Orleans and sent league employee Buddy Young, one of pro football's first black stars in the late 1940s and early '50s, to town on an inspection tour.

Young suggested a public display, such as having dinner with Dixon in one of New Orleans' finest restaurants, would go a long way toward offsetting the bad publicity.
And so Dixon called in a favor with Roy Alciatore, owner of the venerable Antoine's.

"Restaurants had been sort of integrated by that time," Dixon said. "If whites and blacks wanted to have dinner together, they would do so in the private rooms. So I called Roy and said, 'Roy, here's my situation. I want to sit in the middle of the restaurant, and I'd like to have John Ketry (one of Antoine's longest-tenured staffers) as my waiter. He said, 'Let's do it.' "

Young and Dixon dined together at Antoine's, and in 1967, the Saints came marching in to New Orleans as an NFL expansion franchise.

For AFL alumni, meanwhile, the All-Star walkout remains a source of great pride. Several AFL loyalists maintain that players in the staid, established NFL would never have stood up against the abuse, and they believe the esprit de corps the incident created among AFL players helped lead to the merger with the NFL a year later.

"The AFL owners like Lamar Hunt (Chiefs) and Bud Adams (Oilers) and Sonny Werblin (Jets) and Barron Hilton (Chargers) were the greatest men I've known over the years," Ladd said. "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."

Gonsoulin said the incident helped recruit players to the AFL in the final stages of the bidding war between the leagues.

"They knew they would be treated right in the AFL," he said. "It had to happen sooner or later. Somebody had to stand up, and I'm glad it was the AFL."

"I got hate mail and was invited to go back to Africa," said Warlick, who was a television sportscaster in Buffalo and later worked as a regional sales manager before retiring two years ago. "But when I think back, it was one of the thrills of my life.

"We were a unified group. Every time we get together as a group, we talk about how unified we were. We hung together and got along.

"It's a great thrill that I've carried with me ever since."

Gonsoulin, who lives in Silsbee, said he was in Ohio two years ago for a banquet honoring Hunt when he ran into Daniels, his one-time breakfast companion in New Orleans.

"We were waiting for dinner, and he said, 'Let's just you and I go out,' " Gonsoulin said.

"So we went to dinner and struck up a conversation, and I asked if he remembered what had happened that time in New Orleans. He said, 'Sure, but I didn't know if you remembered it.' I said, 'It's in my mind forever. That was a real turning point when they did those things to you.'

"And so we sat around the rest of the evening, talking about old times. We had a good time together. And nobody bugged us."

david.barron@chron.com

In the third quarter, East’s George Byrd (42) of Buffalo tries to lateral to Nick Bouniconti (85), but the ball is deflected by Clem Daniels (on ground) and the gets loose. Eventually, it was recovered by Art Powell of the West and taken to the East 11 yard line.

Keith Lincoln goes 73 yards on the game's first play.

Ernie Ladd pressures Babe Parilli.

Click to see AFL All-Star Squads
1964	West Squad	East Squad

SUMMARIES OF EACH AFL ALL-STAR GAME

        The American Football League did not play an All-Star game after its first season in 1960, but did stage All-Star games for the 1961 through 1969 seasons. All-Star teams from the Eastern and Western divisions played each other after every season except 1965. That season, the league champion Buffalo Bills played against a team made up of all-stars from the other teams.
        Because the games were played at the end of the season, they occurred in the next calendar year. Thus, the 1961 AFL All-Star game (with players selected as all-stars for the 1961 season) was played on January 7, 1962; the 1962 game was played in January 1963, etc.
         The links below will take you to summaries of each game, originally created by Mark Bolding. Most of the content of this and the other AFL All-Star Games was retrieved from the 'Internet Archive Wayback Machine' at archive.org/web/web.php, which claims copyright for the work.
         *Other than the final score and the image of the game program, his summary of the 1964 season all-star game incorrectly gave the report of the previous year's game.
         Bolding's original site classified the games by the calendar year they were played in. Since they were played at the end of AFL seasons and the All-Stars involved were so chosen for their play in those seasons, I classify them by the AFL season which they represented. Thus the AFL All-Star Game that featured stars of the 1961 season was played in January 1962, etc.

1961 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 7, 1962	'Wayback' link
1962 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 13, 1963	'Wayback' link
1963 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 19, 1964	'Wayback' link
1964 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 16, 1965	*'Wayback' link
1965 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 15, 1966	'Wayback' link
1966 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 21, 1967	'Wayback' link
1967 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 21, 1968	'Wayback' link
1968 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 19, 1969	'Wayback' link
1969 Season AFL All-Star Game:	January 17, 1970	'Wayback' link

Perhaps the greatest highlight of AFL All-Star Game history came not on the field of play, but in the actions of black players, supported by their white teammates and owners, when the best players in the AFL boycotted the City of New Orleans because of the disrespect black players were given when they arrived there for the scheduled 1964 season AFL All-Star Game, scheduled for January 1965.
The game was moved to Houston in a seminal action in the early civil rights movement in America. It is still recognized as such, as recently as a March, 2007 article by Evan Weiner on MSNBC. Another description of the incident is at my AFL Clippings page.

AFLdotcom

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