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exhibition game at City Park Stadium. They distributed pledge forms for 1963 season tickets, along with small pencils advertising the “New Orleans’ Saints, 1963.” At some point that fall the deal with the Texans collapsed.
Dixon began working on plans to purchase the Oakland Raiders and even prepared financial projections for their 1963 season as the New Orleans Saints, but some of Dixon’s investors backed out at the last minute.
Dixon spent 1963 and 1964 promoting exhibition games for other NHL teams at Tulane Stadium. In 1964 his company, the New Orleans Pro Football Club, paid for coupons in the newspaper providing free rides on public transportation in the area around Tulane Stadium to alleviate traffic and parking problems in the residential neighborhood.
At the beginning of 1965, Dixon and his club were preparing to host the AFL All-Star Game, pitting the league’s top players from the east division against the west, scheduled for January 16. Upon their arrival in New Orleans, many of the African American players experienced racial hostilities, including refusals of service by taxi cabs and restaurants. The 21 African American players from both teams voted to boycott the game and left town. Some of the white players joined them later. The AFL hastily relocated the event to Houston, and Dixon was left refunding tickets.
In May 1965 Sports Illustrated reported Dixon’s efforts to establish the United States Football League, with a winter season running from January to May. Dixon prepared a detailed brochure explaining the concept and proposed operation of the league. (Although the initiative remained dormant for 17 years, Dixon eventually did launch the USFI. in 1982. The league played three seasons, from 1983 to 1985, before financial losses and management disagreements brought it to an end.)
I he possibility of competition from both the AFL and prospective USFL got the NFI’s attention, and by August 1965 Dixon was promoting NFL exhibition games at Tulane Stadium, including one with an announced attendance of 75,229—a preseason record for a nonleague city.
By May of the following year, Dixon began advocating i new stadium to accompany the franchise for which he was fighting. He and well-known sportswriter Hap Glaudi, a stadium opponent, publicly debated the issue in several televised editorials. Despite Dixon’s optimism, Glaudi and others were not convinced of the wisdom of spending tax money on a stadium. Governor John J. McKeithen, however, was one of Dixon’s most enthusiastic collaborators, and he led the New Orleans delegation in presenting its bid for a franchise at the
Detail, front page of the States-Item, November I, 1966
NFL owners’ meeting on May 18, 1966. In June the NFL and the AFL announced plans to merge into one league, forming the National Football League as it exists today, and the merger was considered good news for New Orleans’s franchise chances. August 1966 newspaper advertisements printed by the Pro Football Club for the annual preseason exhibition games cheered on the cause with the headline, “Allons Pro! Let’s Go Pro!” The NFL finally awarded the franchise and announced it at a press conference that Dixon cleverly scheduled for November 1—All Saints’ Day. The front-page headline from that evening’s States-Item read “N.O. Goes Pro!” A plaque displaying that headline became one of Dixon’s prized souvenirs.
The story of David Dixon’s role in the birth of the Saints ends here, but Dixon’s papers contain many more stories. Once the Saints came to town, Dixon turned his energies to other initiatives, including the construction of the Superdome and the founding of the United States Football League and World Championship Tennis (a professional tennis tour begun in 1968 that helped change the major tournaments from amateur-only events to the open format used today). Also documented is Dixon’s more-than-20-year effort, begun in the mid-1980s, to establish a Fan-Ownership Football League, in which the fans would own majority stock in the teams rather than having a few wealthy owners in control. He never succeeded in this campaign. Dixon’s papers also explore other facets of his life, including his service as a bomber navigator in the Marine Corps during World War II; his family (wife, Mary Shea, and sons Frank, Stuart, and Shea); and his achievements as a golfer, including competing in the 1956 U.S. Open Golf Championship.
The David F. Dixon Papers (MSS 597) and the stories within are available to the public at the Williams Research Center.
—Michael M. Redmann The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 11