Just Kick It Tales of an Underdog, Over-age, Out-of-place, Semi-pro Football Player

Prologue: Outside the Lines When I delved into the history of semi-pro football, I discovered that trying to dig up the roots of football at this level could quite possibly cause me an aneurysm. Stalin's Russia -- Winston Churchill famously described it as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" -- had nothing on semi-pro football. Records were spotty and contradictory. Accurate statistics were virtually nonexistent. But I needed to clear this up (as much as possible, anyway) and try to find out just where semi-pro football leagues came from and to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for sustaining it over the decades. Enter Steve Brainerd. Steve, a member of the Minor League Football Hall of Fame and the United States Football League Association Hall of Fame, is widely considered one of the foremost historians and researchers on semi-pro/minor league/amateur football (see, there are even three names for it). Whatever the name, he knows all about the approximately 800 teams and 70-odd leagues currently playing semi-pro ball from Maine to Hawaii, and where their roots were planted. Thirty years ago Brainerd and his wife, Wisconsin natives, perhaps tired of harsh midwestern winters, packed up their car and headed for California. Along the way, they planned to visit friends in Tucson. Their car, however, had a different itinerary. Somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico, it broke down, forcing the Brainerds to use up all their money getting the car repaired, after which they limped into Tucson. "But then we thought, 'Hmm, this seems like a nice place,'" Steve tells me, "Why don't we just stay here?" So they did. And they've been there for three decades, happy with their decision not to continue on to California. "LA is a great place to visit," he says, "but I now know I wouldn't want to live there. Although, if we're talking about semi-pro football, they've got it all over California. They've got teams coming out of their ears -- LA, Orange County, San Diego, up north. And they had some great minor league teams back in the thirties and forties. I hope that if LA ever gets an NFL franchise back, they call them the 'Bulldogs.'" The Bulldogs, he explains, were a minor league team who, in the late thirties, played exhibition games against NFL teams, the supposed cream of the American football crop, the best of the best, teams perpetually stocked and restocked with Heisman-winning talent from the Harvards, Yales, Notre Dames, Armys, and Navys of the eastern football world. The results? The minor league Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League won five, lost four, and tied three. "They were a very,verygood football team," Steve says, with obvious admiration. Why were they were so good? Thanks to their location, the Bulldogs and other big-name teams like the Hollywood Bears had a virtual monopoly on all the California football talent. Remember, the westernmost outpost of pro football in those days was Chicago, home of the Bears and Cardinals. There was no San Francisco 49ers, no Oakland Raiders, no San Diego Chargers. As far as football was concerned, Southern California might as well have been Neptune. This was long before ESPN andSportsCenter's Top 10 plays, scouting combines, rankings services, streaming video feeds, and other invaluable cogs in the massive, unstoppable, worldwide football recruiting machine with which today's football scouts and recruiters can find even the most obscure football talent in Mountain Goat, Oregon, or Cow Pasture, Texas, unearth that diamond in the rough, and, in minutes, deliver everything from his yards-per-carry, to his 40-yard-dash splits, to his DNA and Wunderlic scores straight to the BlackBerry of the head coach at, say, University of Miami, all with the pinpoint accuracy, speed, and precSt Amant, Mark is the author of 'Just Kick It Tales of an Underdog, Over-age, Out-of-place, Semi-pro Football Player', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743286756 and ISBN 0743286758.