Jersey Jays

Continental Football League (1969)
Atlantic Coast Football League (1970)

Our Favorite Stuff

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Jersey Jays Logo T-Shirt

This cheery, elegant late 60’s-era logo represents the Jersey Jays, a minor league football outfit from Newark – and later Jersey City – that briefly served as a farm club of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns in 1969.

 

This Jays design is available from American Retro Apparel in white or sport grey and in sizes small through XXXL today!

 

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The Urban Legend

Here’s an intriguing article from Tris McCall of The Star-Ledger in Newark on the compelling but apparently unprovable rumor that the late Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons of The E Street Band played minor league football for Newark’s Jersey Jays in the late 1960’s.¹McCall, Tris. “Clarence Clemons: His semi-pro football past”. NJ.com (Newark, NJ). April 30, 2012

The Jays were a farm club for one season of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns in the autumn of 1969.  The Continental Football League folded after the 1969 season. The Jays moved from Newark to Jersey City and plugged along in the even deeper obscurity of the Atlantic Coast Football League for one additional autumn before going out of business.

Clemons claimed to have been scouted by the Cleveland Browns before a car accident short-circuited his pro football dreams.  He also makes a reference to a stint playing center and defensive end for a New Jersey semi-pro team in his autobiography Big Man, a book which McCall asserts is “loaded with fabrications”.²McCall, Tris. “Clarence Clemons: His semi-pro football past”. NJ.com (Newark, NJ). April 30, 2012  Elderly former Jays coaches and players that McCall tracked down seem to vaguely recall Clemons being around, although none of the Jays 1969 game programs have a record of him.  Some suspect he shuttled in and out during training camp as part of the typical minor league churn.

Whether or not it’s true, it’s a fun bit of E Street legend and minor league mythology.

Jersey Jays Shop

Our Favorite Stuff

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Continental Football League
Logo T-Shirt

 Variously described as everything from “semi-pro” football to the “third Major League” behind the NFL and AFL during the late 1960’s, the Continental Football briefly established a sprawling network of pro football clubs that stretched from Florida to Mexico City to British Columbia. The Continental League helped launch the careers of Hall-of-Famers Bill Walsh and Ken Stabler and other NFL stars of the 1970’s including Otis Sistrunk, Bob Kuechenberg and Coy Bacon.

Our friends at Old School Shirts make the only Continental League shirt we’ve found and like all of their retro Americana tees, it’s soft and fits great!

 

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Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales
by Clarence Clemons Jr. with Don Reo
Order Today at Amazon

Links

Continental Football League Media Guides

Continental Football League Programs

Atlantic Coast Football League Media Guides

Atlantic Coast Football League Programs

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