The Forgettables

Despite operating for only three short years in the Atlantic Coast Football League from 1968 to 1970, the Pottstown Firebirds may just be the most famous minor league football team in the history of professional football, kept alive by a multiple Twitter and Facebook pages, fan websites and online memorabilia shops.

I’d never heard of the Firebirds prior to this year. My first discovery of the team came about when I was doing research on Phil Tuckett, the former VP of Special Projects at NFL Films, whom I interviewed on my podcast back in February. I originally invited Phil on the show to discuss his NFL Films origin story and his great documentary, Football America, a collection of human interest pieces that showed our game of football at its most obscure and grassroots levels.

But as I typed Phil’s name into the YouTube search engine, I was continuously recommended a documentary that Phil directed known as Pro Football, Pottstown, Pa., that followed the 1970 season of a successful minor league squad known as the Pottstown Firebirds, told through the eyes of the head coach, Dave DiFilippo, a defensive end with a passion for poetry, Joe Blake, and Jimmy “King” Corcoran, the exuberant showman quarterback who over time mythologized himself better than any Madison Avenue ad agency could.

It had been recommended to me few times before, but once I watched the film, I was immersed in the lives and pursuits of these Firebird characters, and I now had an additional topic of conversation to discuss with Phil on the show. But my research also exposed me to another work about the 1970 Pottstown Firebirds - Jay Acton’s The Forgettables.

Acton, a journalist by trade, embarked on an assignment to spend a season with this minor league franchise (and perhaps by doing so, became one of the forefathers of a new brand of sports journalism). He conveys a time that is no longer recognizable, yet feels relevant in some ways, as he discusses the once prominent culture of minor league football, which by the 1970, had fallen in popularity after the rise of television that bolstered the NFL and AFL to new heights. Many minor league teams in the Continental Football League, the ACFL, and the United Football League had arrangements with NFL teams to have their taxi squad members on their roster, in order to get them more in game action. Most teams received hand me down uniforms and helmets (which is why the Firebirds, the having an arrangement with the Philadelphia Eagles, gave themselves their name).

But as we see today, with each new challenger league (or, at the very least, alternative league) that rises and falls, viewers are both reminded of old names that flamed out of the NFL after failing to live up to their hype and are exposed to even more new names that will be forgotten much quicker than when the league closes its doors for good. It happened with the World Football League, United States Football League, XFL and Alliance of American Football, just to name a few. It’s a narrative that reappears every few years, but the Firebirds’ saga was the first to document this theme to the world. It’s this narrative that makes Acton’s book stand out, as it doesn’t just to show what the Firebirds were like off the field, but rather reflects on where a coach or player goes when they are deemed not good enough for the National Football League.

Acton states in his book that, “Pottstown cherishes its blue-collar flavor, smack its lips with its ingrained puritanical streak, is comfortable with its small town sense of morality.” The town’s chief of police was none other than a man named Dick Tracey, a former Chicago police sergeant to oversee what Acton called, “the big city problems of 1950” that had now become the small town problems of the 1970s. Robert Boyle, the editor of the local Mercury newspaper, describes the people of Pottstown as, “strong minded and off the record, quote, singleminded. If you’re not a native Pottstownian, you’re an outsider.” During various interview throughout the book, Acton asks his subjects about the racial tension and drug problems within to the city, all of whom downplay both issues as anecdotal and compartmentalized.

Given these sentiments, Pottstown is the perfect setting to follow a group of men who recognize that they have nothing to lose in a town that largely couldn’t care less how well the team performs. But while this theme and mood is felt at moments in Pro Football, Pottstown, Pa, it is not the overall tone of the film, which predominantly focused on the oddities and comedic personalities of the squad. The Forgettables, however, put more emphasis on the journey of these men who were “a step to slow, an inch too short or who have personality or motivational problems.”

Moments throughout the book capture what it meant to have something to prove, to keep the fight alive and make it to the NFL, even though deep down, it seemed all but unlikely. Take Dave DiFilippo, for example, a man with combined 39 years experience in the game of football, going back to his days as a player for the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference and Eagles of the NFL, to coaching stints at various levels of organized football, including Pop Warner, the NCAA, the Continental Football League and finally the ACFL. His only non-playing NFL experience came briefly as a scout for the Eagles. When interviewing Dave early in the book, Acton writes,

Here is the sum of a man’s earthly works. To die a contended man, all he lacked was an undefeated season and an opportunity at an NFL coaching job.

“Every bit of energy I had went into starting the Firebirds. If nothing comes up after the National Coaches Convention in Houston in December or the Super Bowl in January, I just don’t know whether I’ll be coming back here. Nothing is forever”

A man who had been through the semipro football wars at such places as Lancaster, Tacony, and Haverford knew this, above everything else, to be true.

DiFilippo seems like the stereotypical coach of the time that held Lombardi on a pedestal and viewed football as a grand analogy of life. But beneath it all, Acton paints him as the coach that’s seen hundreds of players in his lifetime, and his commitment to them wasn’t just for his own personal gain and career ambition, but for their success as well.

Then there are those played for the Firebirds with no dreams of making it to (or back into) the NFL. Bill Stetz is one such player, a defensive tackle that fits the description of a “gentle giant.” He wore his hair long, had a Fu Manchu mustache, and owned a clothing and craft store in town. Bill told Acton about his journey prior to Pottstown, having been drafted in the thirteenth round by the New Orleans Saints in 1967 before a stint with the Philadelphia Eagles and finally topped off his NFL career off in the Denver Broncos training camp.

I said frig football, I’m never going to play again. I hadn’t really made any money, I had no home, nothing stable, and my wife was getting really uptight about it. I mean it had been three years and we had nothing to show for it. So I wasn’t going to play football again.

Stetz had then gotten the call from coach Dave to play for him for decent money, won a championship in ‘69 and returned in ‘70, not concerned about his pro football career so much as he was concerned with “being happy.”

The book is full of more players and coaches that were has beens or have nots. Some were able to make it in the NFL and have decent success. But the book isn’t so much about success, and perhaps not even about the failures of the individual. Rather, it largely succeeds because it at once captures the bitterness one can experience as they get older in life, realizing that their dream may never come to fruition, while also keeping a sense of hopefulness that in the end, everything will work out.

The Forgettables may not stand out as the best “season in the life” entry into the genre, but it certainly has a unique angle and timeless quality that when read today brings to mind the hundreds, if not thousands, of players and coaches that have tried to reach the big times only to experience defeat along the way. Some keep trying, despite having fewer stable options today than the 20th century, but for every feel good story of a man having his name mentioned on Sundays, there are many more stories like that of numerous players and coaches from 1970 Firebirds that keep trying until there’s nothing left to give.