Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Nice to meet you all.
I'm a professional historian, now retired. I've published a number of books--there's a list at historyunfolding.com. Two of them, as you will see, are about baseball, a lifelong interest. I was also a tremendous NFL fan from about 1956 through sometime in the 1980s, when I got very busy on weekends with other things and kicked the habit. But I still very fondly remember the NFL of the 1960s-70s in particular.

And a couple of years ago, I decided to go ahead and do something that I had dreamed of doing for years. Using newspaper databases, I have written a history of the 1965 NFL season, certainly one of the most exciting ever. Most of the action, as some will remember, was in the much stronger western conference, where the defending conference champion Colts fought it out with Lombardi's Packers, now three years from their last championship, and with the Bears, who had improved just a little with the addition of two rookies named Sayers and Butkus. The drama escalated in the last month, which saw the Colts lose both Johnny Unitas and backup Gary Cuozzo, only to force a conference playoff with the Packers on the last weekend of the season, which the Packers won in overtime with some critical help from the officials. The Pack beat Cleveland for the title in Jim Brown's last game as a Brown.

The book is reasonably complete. There's quite a bit of video available right on youtube about that season. One thing I didn't do was try to contact any surviving players, although I still could. I did write a letter to Dick LeBeau but got no answer. I have joined this group and signed up on this forum to publicize the book among people who obviously would be interested, and to ask for advice on who might publish it. Certainly if Pro Football Researchers was interested, I would be too.

The book is entitled, When You Just Had to Win. I can be reached privately at KaiserD2@gmail.com. Thanks in advance!

David Kaiser

KaiserD2 wrote:Nice to meet you all.
I'm a professional historian, now retired. I've published a number of books--there's a list at historyunfolding.com. Two of them, as you will see, are about baseball, a lifelong interest. I was also a tremendous NFL fan from about 1956 through sometime in the 1980s, when I got very busy on weekends with other things and kicked the habit. But I still very fondly remember the NFL of the 1960s-70s in particular.

And a couple of years ago, I decided to go ahead and do something that I had dreamed of doing for years. Using newspaper databases, I have written a history of the 1965 NFL season, certainly one of the most exciting ever. Most of the action, as some will remember, was in the much stronger western conference, where the defending conference champion Colts fought it out with Lombardi's Packers, now three years from their last championship, and with the Bears, who had improved just a little with the addition of two rookies named Sayers and Butkus. The drama escalated in the last month, which saw the Colts lose both Johnny Unitas and backup Gary Cuozzo, only to force a conference playoff with the Packers on the last weekend of the season, which the Packers won in overtime with some critical help from the officials. The Pack beat Cleveland for the title in Jim Brown's last game as a Brown.

The book is reasonably complete. There's quite a bit of video available right on youtube about that season. One thing I didn't do was try to contact any surviving players, although I still could. I did write a letter to Dick LeBeau but got no answer. I have joined this group and signed up on this forum to publicize the book among people who obviously would be interested, and to ask for advice on who might publish it. Certainly if Pro Football Researchers was interested, I would be too.

The book is entitled, When You Just Had to Win. I can be reached privately at KaiserD2@gmail.com. Thanks in advance!

David Kaiser

The PFRA has a good relationship with McFarland & Company Publishers. Have you reached out to them?

I just self-published mine on Amazon and IngramSpark....I have been traditionally published before and that's a great route also....the thing I liked about self-publishing was it was out immediately....the downside is finding the right person to edit and someone to format it, etc.....the traditional route takes quite a long time but they take care of all that stuff....University of Nebraska Press published The Game Before the Money and they were great to work with...