Big League City! 100 Years of Football in Jacksonville

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On November 30th, 1993, Jacksonville, Florida was awarded the NFL’s 30th franchise. Local reporters still remember it as the most electric night in city history. Fireworks exploded over the St. Johns River, the party at the Jacksonville Landing lasted until daybreak, and future mayor John Delaney ran through his downtown office shouting “Big League City!” Though many in the national media considered Jacksonville’s improbable expansion victory over St. Louis, Oakland, and Baltimore to be one of the greatest upsets in sports history, to locals, it was truly the culmination of their city’s century-long love affair with the sport of football.

Big League City! 100 Years of Football in Jacksonville, the new book by Metro Jacksonville member Ken Bowen, chronicles Jacksonville’s unmatched gridiron fervor, from Florida’s first college football game held in the wake of the Great Fire of 1901, to the birth of the Florida-Georgia game and the Gator Bowl Classic, to the numerous professional teams from long-forgotten leagues that have called Jacksonville home, through the new era of Jaguars football currently underway. Years in the making with research drawn from thousands of sources and featuring an exclusive foreword written by Jaguars owner Shad Khan, Big League City! is the most in-depth book ever written on Jacksonville’s football history.

What follows in an excerpt from Big League City! , detailing the meteoric rise and chaotic fall of Jacksonville’s first true professional football team, the Jacksonville Sharks of the turbulent World Football League. Though the Sharks were short-lived, this 1974 franchise served as an important stepping stone toward Jacksonville winning an NFL expansion franchise two decades later.?


Jacksonville’s World Football League Sharks


Images courtesy of WFLFilms.com

The worst day of Fran Monaco's life began like any other. The 5'-2" Florida businessman rolled out of a hotel bed in Houston, enjoyed a light breakfast with his beloved wife Douglas, and readied himself for a weekend of Super Bowl festivities in Texas. Monaco loved football, and was fortunate enough to have traveled to every Super Bowl to date after his lucrative collection of medical supply laboratories in Deland had made him a millionaire several times over. Monaco had even partnered with Chicago Bears legend Dick Butkus to open a central Florida steakhouse, Log Cabin, several years earlier, where he frequently rubbed elbows with the NFL's elite.

Yes, in January 1974, Fran Monaco was on top of the world.

That night, as Monaco mingled with friends at a Houston Super Bowl party, a stranger approached from the shadows. Perhaps Monaco was targeted, or perhaps he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, but soon, the mysterious gentleman would present him with an offer that would, within one year, not only cost Monaco his reputation and fortune, but would also bring his wife to death’s door.

Years later, when recalling that evening, Monaco said with a broken voice, "I wish I had never gone to Houston that January... but I did."

The stranger's offer was simple:

Get in on the ground floor of the forthcoming World Football League. Purchase a franchise while prices were low, and become rich, famous, and powerful beyond your wildest dreams.
The stranger’s proposition was risky. The WFL's business plan was constantly changing, and the league's financing was so tenuous that St. Petersburg's Evening Independent joked, "The World Football League has an easier time finding players than accountants."

Monaco’s interest was piqued, however, and he was quickly referred up the ladder to other WFL investors who formally offered him a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to purchase one of the league's first twelve franchises. For a mere $450,000, Monaco would gain exclusive territorial rights over Florida and could locate his franchise anywhere in the state that he chose.

Monaco probably should have thought it over a little bit longer and heeded the advice of his inner circle, but the lure of professional sports ownership was simply too great. “Look, my CPA and my lawyer both advised me against building the Deland laboratory. Now I have three,” he told reporters. Within six short months of that unfortunate evening, Monaco's Jacksonville franchise would play its first home game at the Gator Bowl.

Jacksonville's first pro football franchise – the Jacksonville Sharks – arrived with great fanfare that spring. Fireworks, balloons, and confetti marked the occasion.  For a city that had suffered through 50 years of failed attempts to lure pro football to downtown's north bank, the Sharks were a godsend. Jacksonville Mayor Hans Tanzler called it, "a dream come true."

A short 14 weeks later, that dream would descend into nightmare.

The Sharks would be repossessed by the WFL. Fran Monaco would be forced into bankruptcy and thrown out of the league. The teams’ only potential investor was blacklisted by the WFL and later arraigned on over 20 federal charges, including five counts of grand larceny.  Players would go without pay.  The head coach would sue the franchise. And creditors would swoop in to take the few tangible assets the Sharks had left, including helmets, pads, jerseys, blocking sleds, and tackling dummies.

In fact, the franchise's tenure in the city can perhaps best be summed up by once hopeful Mayor Tanzler's simple words on the team in the fall of 1974:

"The situation is a disgrace."

Gary Davidson, founder of the WFL, was no stranger to pioneering new sports leagues. His American Basketball Association and World Hockey Association both proved incredibly successful, with several teams from each respective league eventually merging into the NBA and NHL. Davidson’s goal with the WFL was to field professional football teams in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with future expansion teams ultimately being added in Europe and Asia.

At the time, the NFL had the lowest pay scale of any of the four major sports, and Davidson believed that if the WFL could offer higher salaries than his competition (sometimes even in the form of multi-million dollar personal service contracts guaranteed even if the league were to fold), players may be persuaded to jump ship from the NFL. Davidson assembled a group of investors and began making preliminary plans for his new league.


The WFL's unique game ball.

Had the WFL launched in 1975 as Davidson originally intended, perhaps the league would have lasted longer than a year and a half. Instead, a strike by the NFL Players Association in July 1974 coupled with rumors that another upstart league was in the planning stages forced Davidson into launching a year earlier than he had originally intended. “Gary, your concept is good, but your timing is terrible,” Davidson recalls being told by a wealthy investor. That summer, the economy was in the gutter, with a prime interest rate of 15%, widespread oil embargos, some of the highest foreclosure rates in U.S. history, and a Dow Jones Industrial Average hovering near 550.

Twelve franchises, all within the United States, were established in time for the 1974 season, and a $1.5 million television contract was signed with a patchwork of regional networks. Sports Illustrated readied a major feature on the new league, and shot a magazine cover featuring Gary Davidson along with two Honolulu Hawaiians players, Calvin Hill and Ted Kwalick. Minutes after the magazine went to print, Hank Aaron hit his 714th home run. The cover was quickly changed, but the few prints that survive are among the rarest in sports magazine history.
 
Monaco originally favored Tampa for his WFL franchise, but NFL expansion into Florida’s Bay Area led to his decision that the new team would call Jacksonville's Gator Bowl its home. "In selecting Jacksonville as the home of the Sharks," Monaco said, "I took many factors into consideration. Two of the foremost reasons are the fans of Jacksonville and the great Gator Bowl facility, which is surely one of the finest stadiums in the nation."

The Florida Tourist Board was outraged by Monaco’s decision to call his franchise the Sharks, fearing the name may be detrimental to tourism at Florida’s beaches. The Board aggressively petitioned for a name change, suggesting alternates such as the Stingrays and the Suns, but Monaco refused, insisting that his team would only be known as the Jacksonville Sharks.

Monaco appointed his wife Douglas as second in command for the Sharks. What she lacked in football experience, she more than made up for with her love of dogs. Douglas Monaco’s habit of spending home games walking her poodle up and down the sideline in front of the Sharks bench proved particularly infuriating to the team’s coaching staff.

Bud Asher, a personal friend of Fran Monaco’s that he described as “a combination of Vince Lombardi and Don Schula,” would serve as the inaugural head coach of the Jacksonville Sharks. In addition to his successful run coaching the Southern Professional Football League’s Daytona Beach Thunderbirds, Asher's eclectic resume also included stints as talent scout for the Oakland Raiders, municipal judge, owner of several hotels and a geriatric hospital, and former coach of a New Smyrna Beach high school football team.  Locals were unimpressed with Asher, soundly booing him during pregame introductions, but Monaco repeatedly stressed that as long as there were Jacksonville Sharks, Bud Asher would be his coach.

Two weeks before the season began, the WFL finalized a 19-week, 20-game regular season for each franchise, with games taking place between July and November. Most games would be held on Wednesday nights (or Sunday for the league's Hawaii franchise), and a special nationally televised game would be take place each Thursday night.