The original Winnipeg Jets were charter members of the WHA in 1972. They moved to the NHL in 1979, along with three other WHA squads. In 1995, they were sold and moved to Phoenix for the 1996-97 hockey season. The name was revived when the Atlanta Thrashers moved to Manitoba in 2011 and assumed the Jets name but not their history.
The original Buffalo Bills football team, related to the current National Football League (NFL) franchise in name only, began as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) in 1946. In 1949, three AAFC teams joined the NFL, but the Bills were not one of them, despite success on the field and at that gate. What happened?
The Baltimore Elite Giants got their start in Nashville, before moving to Columbus, Ohio for one year, then to Washington, D.C. They moved down the road in Baltimore in 1938 and played there until 1950, before spending their final season back in Tennessee.
The Toronto Toros started out as the Ottawa Nationals, a charter member of the World Hockey Association (WHA) in 1972. They moved to Toronto for their playoff games and were referred to as the Ontario Nationals. Less than a month later, the team was sold and permantely relocated to Toronto, where the became the Toros.
The Atlantic City Surf were one of the six original franchises in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. The Atlantic League was (and remains) the most ambitious league to arise out of the independent baseball boom of the 1990’s. The Surf played at the Sandcastle, a 5,900-seat ballpark built on the grounds of Atlantic City’s municipal airport, Bader Field. The stadium was built with $11.5 million in Casino Reinvestment Development Authority funds and $3 million in taxpayer bonds.
This doomed 2nd division men’s club was part of the disastrous Lehigh Valley Multi-Purpose Stadium project, intended to bring minor league baseball and pro soccer to the Easton/Allentown region of Pennsylvania during the late 1990’s. The Steam would be the region’s first outdoor pro soccer team since the Pennsylvania Stoners, who played out of Allentown and Bethlehem, folded in 1984. When the stadium project failed to come to fruition, the Steam embarked on a single, futile season in the USL A-League during the summer of 1999, cobbling together a schedule of “home” matches in various sites around Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Steam officially disbanded in December 1999.
The remarkable story of Kurt Warner, who rose from supermarket stock boy to Super Bowl Champion and NFL Most Valuable Player over the course of five years, is one of the great legacies of the now-defunct Arena Football League. Warner, undrafted out of college, famously signed on with the Arena League’s Iowa Barnstormers in 1995. He led the Barnstormers into back-to-back Arena Bowl title games in 1996 and 1997, before earning his shot at the NFL with the St. Louis Rams. By 1999, he was the NFL’s MVP and quarterback of a Super Bowl championship team in his first season as a starter. Warner’s fame briefly made the Iowa Barnstormers an object of cult fascination, if not quite a household brand name. So what became of the Barnstormers?
A detailed history of the New Orleans Buccaneers (1967-1970) a founding member of the ABA that played three seasons in the Big Easy and later moved to Memphis.
The Memphis Mad Dogs were a short-lived chapter in the Canadian Football League’s expansion misadventure into the United States between 1993 and 1995. The Mad Dogs arrived at the Liberty Bowl just in time for the final season of the CFL’s three-year American experiment in the fall of 1995. The ‘Dogs featured an outstanding defense and CFL legend Damon Allen at quarterback but never quite put it all together and finished their only season at 9-9. The team did make a star out of unheralded community college wide receiver Joe Horn, who leapt from the Mad Dogs to a 12-year career in the NFL and four Pro Bowl nods. The team folded after the 1995 season.
