Dave Steidel - The Uncrowned Champs: How the 1963 San Diego Chargers Would Have Won the Super Bowl

Copyright 2015 by Dave Steidel

Foreword copyright 2015 by Lance Alworth

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Jacket design by Tom Lau

Jacket photos courtesy of the San Diego Chargers

All helmet images that appear in the text are courtesy of the NFL and Craig Wheeler

ISBN: 978-1-63144-046-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63144-047-2

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to the players of the 1963 Champion San Diego Chargers.

CONTENTS

Tobin Rote

Earl Faison & Ernie Ladd

Dave Kocourek

John Hadl

Chuck Allen

Bob Petrich & George Gross

George Blair

Lance Alworth

Dick Harris

Wright, DeLuca, Rogers, Shea, Mix,

Gruneisen

Schmidt, McNeil, Karas, Maguire, Whitehead, Norton, Robinson

McDougall, Jackson, MacKinnon, Buncom, Mitinger

Paul Lowe

Keith Lincoln

Bottom Row: (from left to right) Paul Maguire, Sam Gruneisen, Chuck Allen, Jerry Robinson, Frank Buncom, Bob Lane, Jacque MacKinnon, Walt Sweeney, equipment manager Tom Denman

2nd Row: Trainer Kearney Reeb, Dave Kocourek, Don Rogers, Earl Faison, Emil Karas, Ron Mix, Keith Lincoln, Gerry McDougall, Ernie Ladd, Ernie Wright, offensive line coach Joe Madro

3rd Row: Head coach Sid Gillman, defensive coach Chuck Noll, defensive line coach Walt Hackett, Bob Jackson, Sam DeLuca, Charlie McNeil, Pat Shea, Tobin Rote, Hank Schmidt, Bob Petrich, Bob Mitinger, George Gross, receivers coach Hugh Taylor, publicity director Bob Burdick

Top Row: Bud Whitehead, Dick Westmoreland, John Hadl, Dick Harris, Lance Alworth, George Blair, Wayne Frazier, Paul Lowe, Don Norton

PROLOGUE

I n 1963, I was a San Diego Chargers fan, as well as a Chicago Bears fan. I watched and rooted for both teams to win their championship games that were played a week apart. The Little League team I played for at the time was the Downtown Youth Center Bears, so I felt I had some kind of bond with the Chicago team. I was also drawn to their Monsters of the Midway, hard-hitting reputation. And even though the Bears quarterback Bill Wade looked three steps slower wearing his old-style high-top football shoes, he was my favorite player because I was also the quarterback for my Bears team.

Then there was the AFL and the Chargers. The glamor team of the league had those great powder-blue uniforms (although I couldnt appreciate them on my black-and-white television set) and also Lance Alworth, Paul Lowe, and Keith Lincoln speeding and weaving down the field on long scoring plays. They also had their own version of monsters in 6' 9" defensive tackle Ernie Ladd and 6' 5" defensive end Earl Faison leading their Fearsome Foursome while shoving people around almost at will. And of course, those lightning bolts on their helmets were just the thing that young football fans such as I were infatuated with.

Truth be told, I rarely saw the Bears play a game. I formed my opinion, as most kids did, by reading newspapers and magazines and collecting bubble-gum cards. The NFL league rule at the time was that only local teams away games (my local team was the Philadelphia Eagles) could be televised. There was no national game of the week for the NFL either, so if you were going to watch a Sunday afternoon football game and your team was playing at home, the only thing available to you was the AFL game. I watched the Chargers every time they were on, and with the league presenting an early East Coast game and a late afternoon double-header game from the West Coast, the Chargers were on a lot. The only time I saw any smidgen of a Bears game this season was when the Eagles traveled to Chicago or an occasional highlight on the news.

The AFL was still relatively new and the NFL dwarfed it with media coverage and fan interest early on. The quality of play and personnel was mostly described as thin and the idea that any AFL team could compete in the NFL was thought of as ludicrous, or years away. Its funny how over those early years I never heard anyone debate whether the 1960 AFL champion Houston Oilers could have beaten the NFL champion Philadelphia Eagles, nor how the 61 and 62 AFL champion Oilers and Dallas Texans would have fared against the Vince Lombardiled Green Bay Packers either. But bring up the 1963 football season and that is where the road separates and the debates begin. So intriguing was an AFL vs. NFL matchup that Sports Illustrated wrote about the fans desire for an interleague championship game and included legendary Hall of Fame quarterback Otto Graham speculating that the AFL champion San Diego Chargers could defeat their NFL counterpart Chicago Bears.

The AFLs stepsister treatment by the NFL partisan media, which seemed to slant nearly every story toward a superior NFL point of view, is now legendary. And the AFLs struggle for respectability at the time seemed so unachievable because of this bias that former AFL receiver Chris Burford described the leagues effort for fair and objective treatment by the press as being like pushing water up hill. It just wasnt going to happen, as sports writers of the day appeared to write with their minds already made up about the quality of the league before their fingers hit their keyboards. They described the new league as a bunch of rejects from other leagues and made up of over-the-hill veterans and second-rate college players. They even predicted that the league would not last beyond their second year if it even lasted that long. So how could anyone ever fathom an AFL team getting within a first down of beating an NFL champion?

After reading with nostalgic enthusiasm a very well-written book titled 63: The Story of the 1963 World Champion Chicago Bears by Gary and Maury Youmans, I felt compelled to take the debate one step further. Although the Bears were indeed an excellent team with a superior defense and a competent and steady offense, I believed that the other side of the story also needed to be told; about how good a football team the AFL Champion San Diego Chargers were in 1963. I then wanted to take an extra step by staging a computer-simulated AFL vs. NFL Championship Game using as many detailed facts, figures, and researched offensive and defensive team tendencies that could be generated to play an objective and impartial game to see just how well each team would fare against each other. In essence, a Super Bowl I three years before it became a reality.