The Knights were New York City’s first experience of the newly developed sport of Arena Football back in the summer of 1988. The roster included a collection of ex-replacement players from the 1987 NFL player strike along with refugees from the recently defunct United States Football League. The Knights lasted just one season and a mere six home games at Madison Square Garden before going out of business.
The Newark Orioles were a short-season Class A farm club of the Baltimore Orioles during the mid-1980’s. The club played in the tiny village of Newark, New York (pop. 10,000), not the urban metropolis of Newark, New Jersey. The community had a previous entry in the New York-Penn League, the Co-Pilots, that operated from 1968 until 1979.
Two-year Arena Football entry that set up shop at the Superdome in 1991 and 1992. Even among Arena Football diehards, the New Orleans Night are an obscure and rarely mentioned franchise.ย To the extent they are remembered at all, it is often for sporting garish Zubaz stripes on their uniforms as part of a 1991 promotional campaign with the flash-in-the-pan athletic apparel manufacturer.
The New Orleans Nets were a six-person, co-ed professional tennis team that played out of the Superdome for the final season of the original World Team Tennis (WTT) league during the summer of 1978. The team also used the name “Sunbelt Nets”. The Nets roster included NBA star John Lucas, playing WTT during his summer break from the Houston Rockets and Lucas’ mixed-doubles partner, Dr. Renee Richards. Richards was a 43-year old trans woman whose efforts to play in the women’s field at the 1976 and 1977 U.S. Open tournaments became a cultural flashpoint during the late 1970’s.
The New York Eagles were a nomadic/sporadic entry in the lower-division American Soccer League between 1978 and 1981 until years of bad debts and bounced checks finally sunk the club. The club drew poorly, as you might imagine from the team’s forlorn advertising brochure (left), showcasing the empty, rundown grandstand at Mt. Vernon’s Memorial Field in all its grainy, black-and-white decrepitude.
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