In the Dallas Texans’ single 1952 season in the NFL, the team posted a record of 1-11, were demoted midseason, and their assets were returned to the league – eventually to be awarded to the Baltimore Colts.
A Wikipedia entry like that would seem ignominious enough, but the story of how the 1952 Dallas Texans got nowhere fast is a Texas tale filled with bad karma, bad luck, bad management, and all around bad timing.
A new book on their colossally bad first and only season is filled with warmth and a wicked sense of humor. It’s called “A Big Mess in Texas: The Miraculous, Disastrous 1952 Dallas Texans and the Craziest Untold Story in NFL History.”
The team’s story is reconstructed and retold by longtime sports journalist David Fleming, formerly of ESPN, who joined the Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You know, most folks hearing “NFL” and “Texans” think of that team from Houston, not Dallas. I mean, besides, the Cowboys have their own backstory. ’52 Dallas Texans, no relation, right?
David Fleming: No, there have been several iterations of this team. I think there was a hockey team and a minor and an arena football league team and of course the team that eventually became the Kansas City Chiefs, but this was the original NFL team in Dallas, in Texas.
It was the NFL’s first attempt to put an NFL franchise in the South. And it was technically the last NFL team to go bankrupt in, of all places, Texas.
Of all places. You know, reading about these 1952 Dallas Texans, it almost seems like the whole thing was scripted as a farce. I mean, there’s one misstep after another, and the guy who decided to buy the team in the first place, the scion of a textile magnate, his dad saw this as maybe the dumbest thing his son had ever done.
And I’m thinking Texas loves football. Why was this seen by so many as a dumb move?
Yeah, I think it’s a great example of what I want people who think they’re NFL fans to read and understand what the game was like before the television money changed everything.
And back in the Wild West era of the NFL in the 1950s, 31 of the first 43 NFL franchises went bankrupt.
That’s crazy.
It is crazy. When you think about how buttoned down and how much money the NFL makes today, it’s very hard for fans to even understand what it was like during this era, but it was fantastic. It was colorful and chaotic and violent. And the NFL just didn’t know from week to week if it would even survive.
And I think yeah, Clarence Miller, who was at the time known as the king of textiles in the South, he knew right away that the NFL was a terrible investment. But his son went ahead and blew their entire family fortune trying to become America’s team.
Well, at its core though, was it a bad idea? I mean, Texas loves football. Dallas, great football city. They even had a place to play there, the Cotton Bowl, right?
Yeah, and I think the whole thinking financially was, “my gosh, we can get 50,000 people in the Cotton Bowl for high school football games and we can get 60,000 people in the Cotton Bowl for SMU games, even though at the time they were in last place in their conference.
And they thought “all we need to do is draw half that and we’ll be financially viable.” And you know what? They didn’t even come close to that.
What went wrong? Why couldn’t they make the Dallas Texans work?
You know, I’m using air quotes even though we’re recording this. But at the time, I think the NFL was considered undignified, right? People loved college football, they loved high school football, they thought playing football for money was undignified, and of course they didn’t like playing football on Sunday, which is supposed to be the Lord’s Day.
And then I think I’m using the air quotes when I say they didn’t like that there were, quote-unquote, “foreigners” representing Dallas and Texas on a national scene. In other words, players who weren’t born and raised in Texas wearing the Texas uniform. People just they hated that. They just wouldn’t support it.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
Wow, that’s really incredible. There are so many sidebars and crazy things, though, that happened both on and off the field. Do you have a favorite incident that sort of illustrates just how nuts things were behind the scenes?
Yeah, well, that is great. There’s so many of them. I would wonder how much time we have because it’s just one crazy story after another crazy story, and it feels like this team is like the Forrest Gump of the NFL. As bad as they were, they still managed to sort of connect to every aspect of NFL history and change the course of NFL history.
But I have to say, the one that sort of comes to mind – and most people know him as this sort of stoic, dignified man of honor – Don Shula, the Hall of Fame coach of the of the Miami Dolphins… But things were different in the 1950s, and he was a player in the 1950s, and he actually got in trouble once in Milwaukee, after a Colts game, for stealing a cab to get back to the team hotel from a bar before curfew.
And my favorite part of the story is that according to teammates and the police, Shula would have managed to get away with it but he had actually put the cabbies’ hat on and was collecting fares from his teammates.
And yet, despite all the madness behind the scenes, there were triumphs, including this massive Thanksgiving Day upset of the mighty Chicago Bears. And of course there was quite a bender in the aftermath, right?
Yeah, of all the crazy things that happened to this team, the fact that they were able to… They had been moved to Pennsylvania after they had gone bankrupt and sort of partied their way out of the NFL and it was like a moment in a sports movie where the team says…
And the Texans were technically loaded with talent. That was the other thing that was very really interesting about this team. So many future Hall of Famers that got their start on this crazy team.
But they had been moved to Pennsylvania, they were forced to play the Bears on Thanksgiving in Ohio after a high school football game, and it was a moment from that sports movie where people, the players, just said, “enough is enough.” And they came together to pull off what the Chicago Tribune called the greatest upset in the history of the NFL.
And it made George Halas so angry that afterwards they served Thanksgiving dinner to the players, but he went up and down the rows of tables and slapped the turkey dinners off of the table in front of his players ’cause he said they didn’t deserve Thanksgiving for losing to the Dallas Texans.
You know, I’m tempted, as with many writers, I would say, well, why write about this subject? And as a sports writer such as yourself, I would wanna know why would you wanna write about the Dallas Texans?
But I guess maybe a better question would be how long did it take you from the moment you heard about this story to write the book? I mean, this must have been irresistible to a storyteller like you. This would make a great movie.
Oh, these are the kinds of stories and the kinds of characters that someone like me who loves sort of the weird, quirky, stranger-than-fiction side of sports… I mean, it’s what I live for.
And when I started to learn this story and learn about this team and learn about the characters and the players, the hair on the back of your neck just stands up. And the next thing you do is you just cross your fingers and you pray that no one else has written a book about it. So I was ecstatic to find out that I would get to be the one to tell this story.
I think the other thing that really cemented it for me was the connection to Giles Miller, who was the original owner who made this crazy attempt to bring NFL to Texas. His grandson is Rhett Miller.
Of the Old 97’s.
Yes, yes. And Rhett was just a great resource and a big help during the research process. And when I met Rhett and he really helped me connect to family members and connect to research, that’s when I knew that this whole project was special.
You know, most people haven’t heard of the Dallas Texans. Do you think that over time the story was intentionally swept under the rug?
Yes, and I’m so glad you brought that up. A hundred percent.
You know, this team, we talk about them being the Forrest Gump of the NFL. They went on to become, out of this disaster, they eventually became the Johnny Unitas Baltimore Colts, the sort of like shiny, iconic team that saved the NFL.
And I guarantee the NFL does not want people to know that that incredible and important team started with this disastrous season in Dallas.
