by David Fleming
As David Fleming began researching his book, A Big Mess in Texas, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Giles Miller, the owner of the first southern NFL football team in history, was quite the colorful character. Read on as Fleming introduces The History Reader to this renegade Texan who is at the heart of the most disastrous NFL team in football history. Once you’re done, check out this featured excerpt of A Big Mess in Texas.
AN NFL OWNER once flipped me the double-bird.
It was November 2009 in Nashville, and to be fair, the Titans’ feisty octogenarian owner Bud Adams was essentially waving his wrinkly middle fingers at everyone on the visiting side of the stadium after a 41-17 win over the Buffalo Bills. Adams, a Texas oilman through and through, was forced to apologize and fork over a $250,000 fine, but if I’m being honest, I thought the gesture was absolutely hilarious. Awesome, even. (And I’m certain Bud felt the exact same way.) If there’s one thing I’ve learned covering the NFL on a national level for three decades, as an author and writer at Sports Illustrated and ESPN, it’s that the NFL’s most colorful characters are often the owners themselves. Eccentrics and the mavericks like Bud Adams; Jerry Jones; Al Davis; George Halas, who once offered to fight Pittsburgh owner Art Rooney over gate receipts; bookie-turned-Giants-owner, Jack Mara; Al Capone associate Charles Bidwill; and, of course, the most outlandish owner in NFL history: Giles Miller, the dreamer and schemer at the heart of the 1952 Dallas Texans and A Big Mess in Texas.
You can’t imagine what a thrill (and a relief) it is to start researching a book and find out your main character is a former Golden Gloves boxer and band leader who was raised by a Black butler, then kicked out of law school, only to become the youngest NFL owner in history, all while hiding a secret second family. And, trust me, that description barely scratches the surface of Giles Miller or his escapades throughout A Big Mess in Texas as he went about changing the course of NFL history.
While growing up in a twenty-room mansion across from the swanky Dallas Country Club, Miller was once banned from the course for f-bombing a Methodist bishop who had committed the unforgivable sin of hitting into his group. (Miller should have just used sign language, like Bud Adams.) Traveling to Chicago for work while representing his father’s Texas Textile conglomerate, Miller often frequented a dark, dungeon-like tavern on Clark Street called The Ivanhoe. One night, a drunk patron trying to get a laugh jumped out of a dark doorway, hoping to rattle the eminently poised playboy. Miller coldcocked the guy, readjusted his tie, and stepped over the joker’s prostrate body without spilling so much as a drop of his bourbon.
In other words, Miller was the personification of the booming anything-is-possible post-war America in the 1950s that produced the final Wild West era of the NFL, long before TV money changed everything.
Blessed with movie star looks, a deadly right cross apparently, and a swagger bankrolled by his father’s massive textile fortune, in 1952 Miller, 31, was perhaps the only person in America who thought a Dallas NFL franchise was a good idea. Reacting to the news that the NFL was coming to Texas, the Saturday Evening Post declared that, “Giles Miller has stamped himself in the minds of folks from coast to coast as an All-American sucker.”
But as America, and NFL commissioner Bert Bell would soon find out, Giles Miller was a force of nature and a true Texas renegade who made bird-flipping Bud Adams seem like Mr. Rogers. And Miller’s initial plans for the new Dallas Texans, the first NFL franchise in the South, matched his larger-than-life persona: the players would be required to wear ten-gallon cowboy hats at all times off the field, the game uniforms would feature sewn in pistol belts, the game balls would be delivered by helicopter, or on horseback, and the roster would be packed with the best players money could buy, regardless of race, or the laws of Jim Crow South.
“He saw himself as a rock star and he was definitely larger than life,” said Giles’s grandson Rhett Miller, who just happens to be an actual rock star, as the lead singer of the renowned alt-country band Old 97s. “My grandpa was so charming, and the charisma and swagger just emanated off him. Sure, he didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to owning a football team. But he loved the idea of it, which meant it was only a matter of time before everyone else around him would love the idea of the NFL in Dallas, too.”
This is how insanely brash Giles Miller was: with zero experience running a football franchise he actually thought he could take the worst team in the NFL–with a roster packed full of hard-drinking, hard-hitting, loveable misfits like Art “Fatso” Donovan–and singlehandedly transform it into the original version of America’s Team, all while changing the course of NFL history.
As you’ll see on the pages of A Big Mess in Texas, somehow, Giles Miller nearly pulled it off.
And all it cost him was everything.
DAVID FLEMING is the author of four books and a Peabody-nominated correspondent for Meadowlark Media. During the last three decades at ESPN, Sports Illustrated and Meadowlark, Fleming has been one of the industry’s most prolific, versatile, and imaginative longform storytellers. His unique work has earned numerous national awards as well as a handwritten note from the White House. Fleming is the author of Who’s Your Founding Father?, Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship, and, Noah’s Rainbow. A native of Detroit, and a former D1 wrestler, Fleming and his wife, Kim, live in North Carolina with their daughters.