Some Sacramento Football History

While I grew up in Sacramento, we had, at two different times, two football leagues station teams in our fair city.

The first was the WLAF, which was pronounced in Sac as "we-laugh", but it stands for World League American Football, and the Sacramento team was one of the charter members. The league eventually became NFL Europe after the remaining teams in America folded.

The Sacramento team was called the Surge. They lasted just one season.

Here's the helmet:

Jeeze. It screams 1991 design cue. The teal, bright yellow...wow. I still have, somewhere, a set of trading cards of the entire team. It was a big deal...for a while. Then when the quality of the product was suspect (like any first year start-up league), people in Sac stopped caring. I guess, I was 12.

The next team we got in Sacramento came in 1993, when the CFL expanded into America. That's right: the Canadian Football League. Who remembers that in Sac? Since the field in CFL is larger (110 yards) and the ball is a slightly different size and shape, we had to endure a whole slew of obnoxious advertisements. Trying to drum up support for a team named the Gold Miners with ads that blasted in large typeset "Our Balls are Bigger" may not have been the best idea. Again, the team only lasted one year.

Here're the Miners look:

Uh...did they have a bunch of white helmets with teal facemasks laying around? Did they think that the fine folks of Sacramento couldn't understand a football team is they didn't have a white-and-teal-and-gold look? Here they made the gold more of a gold color, instead of yellow, but damn. Creativity on the wane. Maybe they were trying to pay homage to the Surge. Usually you pay homage to things that were great or beloved, not things that quickly faded...

Wait! This just in: it turns out that the after the WLAF suspended operations in 1992, the Surge rebranded themselves as the Miners and worked their own way into the CFL expansion. Well now, that I can follow and respect.

It's that kind of information that I would have been able to follow if I at the time I hadn't been just a kid. Now the entire design similarity makes sense. The story is complete...