Professional Football Researchers Association Forum
PFRA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of professional football. Formed in 1979, PFRA members include many of the game's foremost historians and writers.
Rupert Patrick wrote:While we're on the topic of defunct football leagues, do game books exist for the WFL or USFL?
It's not whether or not they exist - it's who has them?
Tod, as the co-author of the World Football League Encyclopedia, would you happen to have game books for the WFL, and if so, would you consider contributing them to our game book library?
I only have the New York Stars gamebooks. The Hall of Fame has a few 1975 gamebooks.
Rupert Patrick wrote:On the subject of game books, I was going to wait until I had a couple complete seasons of AFL play-by-play before I made the announcement, but I have been exchanging emails with the PR and Media people with a couple of the former AFL teams (Chiefs, Chargers, Titans/Oilers, still waiting to hear from the Jets and Bengals) to help me fill in the missing game books from the AFL of the 1960's. I was unsuccessful in getting a game book for the 9/8/63 Bills-Chargers game, both the Chargers and Bills only had the scoresheet of the game in their archives, no play-by-play. I am currently seeking about 26 game books from the entire 1960-69 AFL, and I have all the gamebooks for 1961.
At this point, I am also going thru each of the game books to make sure the play-by-play is complete and readable. I have done this for several AFL seasons (1961, 1963 and 1966) and found three or four for each season that I am going to try to get alternate copies of the game book from one of the other teams who were involved in the games in the hopes that their copy is of a better quality than the one I have. Some of these that are nearly impossible to read we might have to try to decipher them using the final statistics and the remaining play-by-play and try to piece the rest of it together as best we can.
The thing that bugs me about those old gamebooks is that they often are missing the lineup/game participation page. Makes it difficult to come up game started data - and in the early 1960s AFL (particularly 1960) the existing games played numbers are flat-out wrong.