Kickoff

For two years, the new All-America Football Conference managed to make the headlines without playing a game. It lured away 120 players from the well-established National Football League, upped players' salaries about 35% in the process, spent a cool $3 million getting started. Last week the new eight-team* pro league finally kicked off its first football.

The biggest crowd (60,135 fans) ever to see a regularly scheduled pro game jammed Cleveland's Municipal Stadium to watch Cleveland's Browns run away from Miami, 44-0. The big attendance was no lucky accident: Arthur McBride, the Browns's owner, had hired 25 telephone operators to call everybody in Cleveland, to urge them to get out to the game. The runaway score made it no match to watch, but the management had thoughtfully advertised big half-time shows, with everything from fireworks to a leg show by a $50,000 all-girl band. Two days later, 35,000 paying customers packed San Francisco's Kezar Stadium to see the New York Yankees beat the '49ers 21-7.

Just which league was better no one yet knew. All-America had a prize crew of ex-All-Americans, such top-salaried stars as Chicago's Elroy ("Crazy Legs") Hirsch; Los Angeles' "Jarrin' " John Kimbrough; Brooklyn's thread-needle passer Glen Dobbs; New York's flat-footed Frank Sinkwich; San Francisco's 245-lb. fullback Norm Standlee. So far the old league wasn't speaking to the new, though they played in three of the same cities--New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Until their feuding stopped, pro football would have no World Series.

*New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Rockets, Buffalo Bisons, Cleveland Browns, Miami Seahawks, Los Angeles Dons and San Francisco '49ers.

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