Going Long book cover
Going Long: The Wild 10-Year  Saga of the Renegade American Football League in the Words of Those Who Lived It.

Jeff Miller
  

               Oral history books about baseball have been a tradition stretching back four decades to the pathbreaking book The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter.  In that book, Ritter went back and compiled extensive oral interviews with a large number of aging major league baseball players, largely from before World War II. The book was a sensation, and this format has been followed by many others in baseball, such as Danny Peary’s We Played The Game about players from 1947 to 1964.

                Such oral histories have not been as common about American football. A terrific recent contribution to this genre, however, is Going Long, by Dallas Morning News sports editor Jeff Miller. Miller has chosen an entertaining topic and has succeeded in bringing in a phenomenal array of those who made the old American Football league so interesting.

                Like many start-up sports leagues, the AFL was plagued by financial insecurities and, in many cases, poor facilities in which to play. But Miller does a fine job of bringing in stories about these elements of the AFL and making them seem entertaining and almost charming. Miller worked extraordinarily hard to interview AFL players, owners, writers and others involved in the league and their stories are delightful to read. While some AFL stars are noted for their absence–the tart refusals to be interviewed by George Blanda and others gets some discussion–they are hardly missed with a cast of interview subjects that includes Joe Namath, Lamar Hunt, Len Dawson, Bobby Bell, Ralph Wilson, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Floyd Little, Jim Otto, Ben Davidson, Merle Harmon and Jack Kemp, among literally dozens of others.  Miller’s interviews even include key National Football League  figures the AFL faced in the early Super Bowls, such as Bart Starr and Bubba Smith. 

                Miller has done a fine job organizing the interview material into thematic chapters that begin with the time before the league even started play to the aftermath of the NFL’s merger with the AFL.  The AFL was the right sort of league at the right time: it brought pro football to many growing cities left out by the NFL, such as Denver; it offered a high-scoring, flashier, more passing oriented game compared to the NFL or that time, and it came just as televised sports (and in particular televised football) were becoming much more popular.  Not all of it was easy: Miller and his interviewees do not gloss over the rickety early stadiums, business problems. or moves to new cities seen in the early days of the AFL. One of the most interesting chapters of the book, “Taken for a Ride”, discusses both another such challenging chapter for the AFL and a stirring victory for the civil rights movement: the player boycott of a 1965 All-Star game to be held in New Orleans due to poor treatment of black players such as Ernie Ladd and Houston Antwine there. When white players joined them, the game was moved to Houston instead and went forward, but not before national attention was given to the racist treatment of the black players in Louisiana. The books is not all about serious matters, however, and even readers unfamiliar with the old AFL will get many great stories and laughs from this book.

                Some football fans feel the National Football league of today has become a corporate entity where “NFL” stands for “No Fun League”. These fans in particular will enjoy this look back at a colorful and fun era of American football history that has been masterfully assembled and described by Jeff Miller in this exceptional book.

—Jim Melcher, May 2007 

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