The Cautionary Lesson of the NFL's Manifest Destiny and the Curious Case of Sonny Sixkiller

Saturday, Bloody, Saturday

November 13, 1971, was no ordinary Seattle Saturday.  In a city known for its legendary rain, it was not raining.  Instead, the weather gods produced an ominous mix of obsidian black clouds and violent near mid-latitude cyclonic winds.  The seven-win and two-loss 19th-ranked University of Washington Huskies (Yes, the Huskies from the 2024 NCAA National Championship game) were playing the 15th-ranked University of Southern California (USC) Trojans in a pivotal Pac-8 matchup with the potential to go to the Rose Bowl on the line.  University of Washington quarterback Sonny Sixkiller, all five feet and eleven inches of him, took the ball hike on a second-and-twenty-four yard down with less than four minutes left to play in the game and somehow was able to miraculously zip the ball through the swirling tempest of Seattle's freaky weather.  The ball was not perfect as it wobbled a bit through the dark and thick Husky Stadium air and closed in on a potential target in Husky wideout Jim Krieg.  Sonny’s Cherokee blood pulsed with adrenaline as he dropped back and watched Krieg effectively run a hook route with the USC defender Alonzo Thomas trailing him.  The ball found contact with Krieg, but Krieg was unconventional in his catching technique.  Jim Krieg typically caught passes at his shoulder height versus the traditional wide receiver with extended hands out in front approach.  This would prove fatal in this play as the clock was running down and the Husky faithful amongst the 59,982 people who had braved the elements on this anything but typical blustery November day, stood on their feet squinting through the swirl of wind and moving bodies on the field to witness Krieg’s potential first down catch.

Image:  Midjourney

Jim Krieg caught the ball by trapping it at his shoulder pad, but in an uncanny and unexpected turn of events, USC’s Thomas was able to recover his speed enough to catch up with Krieg in an almost superhuman fashion.  Thomas snatched the ball away from Krieg like he was taking a bottle from a baby and accomplished what would be a drive-ending interception.   A minute and a half later, double position backup quarterback and USC placekicker Mike Rae trotted onto the field and promptly nailed a death blow to the Huskies' Rose Bowl hopes with a 28-yard field goal.  Game over, the Trojans won by one point, 13 - 12.

For the Huskies' accomplished quarterback, Sonny Sixkiller, the disappointing ending to the game was only the beginning of what would prove to be an even more tragic night.  A few hours later, Sonny and his then-girlfriend and destined-to-be future wife, Denise Warner were driving through Seattle’s Latona Avenue Northeast and Northeast 56th Street intersection in Sonny’s 1971 VW Bug, when they were T-boned by another older VW Bug, and their car was jettisoned through a fence into a nearby residential yard.  After Sixkiller’s car ended up in the adjacent yard, a 1965 Ford Thunderbird came careening through the intersection and slammed into the other Volkswagen.  As destiny would have it, Sonny only suffered minor cuts and was released from the hospital and no one else was seriously injured.  Sonny survived the car accident and would go on to finish out the season and his career at the University of Washington with 385 completions for 5,496 yards and 35 touchdowns, and held fifteen school records.  

The Curious Case

The curious case for Sonny Sixkiller is despite his accomplishments on and off the field, he only played two professional football seasons and not one of them was with the National Football League (NFL) reportedly due to scouts seeing him as being too “small”.  While Sonny may have been deemed small in height, he was born into something bigger.

Sonny was born a member of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, a small town in eastern Oklahoma that serves as the capital of two federally recognized Cherokee tribes.  A year after Sonny was born, his family's destiny took them to Ashland, Oregon to allow his father to work in the local lumber mill.  He became the starting quarterback for the University of Washington Huskies during his sophomore year where given his unforgettable dope name, he wore the uniform number 6.  G.O.A.T. move.  After several failed NFL and Canadian Football League tryouts destiny would have it that he earned a role in a movie called “The Longest Yard” with Burt’s Reynolds.

Image:  Paramount Pictures/Originalfilmart.com

In 1974, Albert Ruddy, the producer of the movie “The Godfather” produced the prison dramedy, “The Longest Yard ''.  A movie that follows the rise and fall of a football quarterback, named Paul Crewe whom the dated and cringe-worthy trailer of the movie describes as “a hero so special he gets special treatment”.  Crewe ends up on the wrong side of the law and in prison.  Crewe was played by the actor and former Florida State football player, Burt Reynolds. The climactic scene of “The Longest Yard” features a football game organized by Crewe between a group of prison guards and Crewe’s prison mates.  While “The Longest Yard” was not destined to be a classic and was not as strong in accolades and money-making as “The Godfather”, it did cost 2.9 million dollars to make and would go on to gross 43 million dollars worldwide.  Not bad for a ‘70s prison yard flick.

Image:  Sonny Sixkiller Wiki

Today very little is remembered of “The Longest Yard” other than the 2005 remake starring Chris Rock and Adam Sandler and even that movie is forgettable to some.  If there is anything that should be remembered about the 1974 “The Longest Yard” movie, it is that a former University of Washington Huskie quarterback and member of the Cherokee Nation, Sonny Sixkiller played in it.

Image:  WFL Hawaiians

It was during 1973 that Sonny went unselected in the National Football League (NFL) Draft, eventually signing with the Philadelphia Bell of the fledgling World Football League (WFL)  in 1974.  Sonny would finish his pro career a year later in 1975 playing for the WFL’s Hawaiian franchise, “The Hawaiians''.

Image:  The Chicago Bears

While Sunny was starting his pro football career in Philly, I was a budding second grader 753 miles away in the south suburbs of Chicago getting in my first runs in neighborhood street football.  My mother bought me a Chicago Bears letterman-style jacket.  Unbeknownst to me, the Bears had just finished the 1974 season at the bottom of their NFL division at 4 wins and 10 losses and were on their way to a 4-10 finish in 1975 as well.  I wore that jacket to school and almost got into a fight because a classmate called me a “loser” for wearing a “loser” team jacket.  I did not want to wear that jacket to school ever again.  Of course, my mother forced me to, citing she wasn’t buying me another one.  Thus I credit the destiny of my wearing that jacket and my mom for helping me grow a new layer of thick skin.

Image:  The WFL Chicago Fire

Not long after the Bears jacket incident, I was looking through my father’s Sports Illustrated magazine and I saw an image of a fire engine red football helmet with a sweet flame logo with the caption, “the Chicago Fire”.  Wishful thinking, I asked my father if this was the new Chicago team and if they were any better than the Bears. It turns out the Fire played in the upstart World Football League and had started strong winning their first four games and drawing an average attendance to Soldier Field of 33,858, but also had a 10-game losing streak ending in a 60-17 final home game thrashing at the hands of Sonny Sixkiller’s future team, the Hawaiians.  

A few months later in late 1975, our family relocated to south Louisiana.  In what I thought would be an improved destiny, my mother bought me a New Orleans Saints NFL jacket and again I learned after much peer ridicule and thickening of skin that the Saints owned a paltry division bottom dweller 2-12 record.  I had to abandon the Saints as in the neighborhood where we played street ball it was customary to call out what team you repped and I had decided to go full bandwagon on the next nearest geographical winning team, the Dallas Cowboys.  Yes, those Dallas “America’s team” Cowboys and the ones who posted 1.14 billion dollars in revenue in 2022, making them the richest of the NFL franchises.  Back then I had always thought you generally supported your “home” team, but I had decided that with the Saints losing ways, the “Aints” and the paper bags over the fans' heads, I was destined to adjust my geographic prioritization to a wider radius.

It would be almost a decade before I would realign my destiny bandwagon to the Saints.  In 1984 one of sport's most enduring images was that of a Mayflower moving truck sitting outside a snow-bound Baltimore Colts practice facility during the owner’s stunning move of his football team from Baltimore in the dark of the night to Indianapolis.  This move followed two years from when the Oakland Raiders moved 370 miles from the Oakland Coliseum to the Los Angeles Coliseum, an event that began anew the NFL’s musical chairs of owners moving teams to greener and more prosperous and promising pastures where the taxpayers and fans would be willing to pay for new stadiums.  These were teams manifesting their destiny.  The New Orleans Saints threatened to move from New Orleans until the Louisiana State Legislature intervened opening the door for car salesman Tom Benson to buy the team in 1985 and bringing on a new era of winning that would climax in 2006 with the franchise’s first and only Super Bowl victory over, you guessed it, the Indianapolis formerly known as Baltimore Colts.

Manifest Destiny and More

It’s only appropriate that in Jackson Square in the proverbial heart of New Orleans sits a statue of the city’s War of 1812 war hero and the U.S. seventh president Andrew Jackson.  Andrew Jackson notably evoked “Manifest Destiny” as a tool for westward expansion.  The premise that it was the United States God-given right to expand its borders across the North American continent and spread democracy and capitalism was a term coined in 1845 by a newspaper editor, John O’Sullivan.  I learned of Manifest Destiny and all its manifestations in 1984 the same year the Colts bolted Baltimore for Indy, having read “The Autobiography of Andrew Jackson” as part of my high school AP American History class required reading.  Our teacher lamented to our class that without manifest destiny the United States would probably only exist east of the Mississippi.  Also let us not forget we would probably not have Sonny Sixkilleras we know him because in an unfortunate twist of fate manifest destiny became the basis for what began as a “voluntary” migration and quickly evolved into a brutal forced migration of Native Americans from the midwestern and southeastern United States, including Sonny Sixkiller’s Cherokee Nation people who marched the "Trail of Tears" from North Carolina to Oklahoma.  Manifest destiny is at the heart of so much of Americans' movement from our transient sports teams to families moving from the inner cities to the suburbs and exurbs and back again.  All done in the name of our "God given" freedom to move about the country.

Image:  SB Nation

The NFL's Manifest Destiny

An early example of manifest destiny in American football happened In 1959.  The Kansas City Chiefs were originally the Dallas Texans, a charter member of the newly formed American Football League (AFL) and precursor to today’s NFL American Football Conference (AFC).  This was well before “America’s Team”, as the Dallas Cowboys would not join the competing National Football League (NFL) as an expansion team for another year in 1960. In 1963, the then-owner Lamar Hunt moved the team to Kansas City and renamed them the Chiefs.  Hunt left Dallas due to the NFL was expanding to Dallas with the Cowboys and he had looked at several cities including New Orleans prior to Kansas City, but he did not want anything to do with selling tickets in a segregated stadium and wanted to sell as many tickets as possible. Kansas City promised Hunt they would not segregate their stadium and history is written.  

Image:  SB Nation

In 1970 the AFL and NFL merged, creating two separate NFC and AFC conferences.  Without the Chiefs in Kansas City, we might not have this year’s 2024 Super Bowl matchup between the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers and once again the Dallas “America’s Team” came up short of the big game.

Image:  NFL

If the NFL had their way, they would have us watching “America’s Team” every game.  Why not, Dallas is a top 10 population city and its fan base is massive.  The NFL also loves to show marquee games featuring NY, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia as they all play in the same division with Dallas and collectively represent more top U.S. population centers, translating into more eyeballs and ratings.

Fortunately my beloved Saints stayed put, but the NFL revolving door of destiny continued throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s and it seemed most pervasive in a handful of cities in Los Angeles, Oakland, Cleveland, Houston, Baltimore, and St. Louis cursed by multiple departures and arrivals over the next thirty years.  It’s mind-boggling that Los Angeles, the second largest city in the U.S., was without an NFL team for twenty years!  Houston, the U.S.'s fourth most populous city, was without a franchise for six years.  Ironically, thanks in part to the owner of “America’s Team”, the Dallas Cowboys having a hand in supporting the move that became the St. Louis Rams rebounding back to L.A. in 2015, Los Angeles went from a football famine to football feasting with not just one, but once again two NFL home teams.  So does that make Los Angeles psychotic or just too big to fail?  I don’t think this transient stuff happens in Great Britain’s Premier League soccer or Spain’s La Liga.

The other Los Angeles NFL team is the Chargers.  They departed San Diego for the brighter prospects of a new stadium when one could not be had in downtown San Diego.  The Chargers became synonymous in their latter years in San Diego for sometimes having as many if not more fans repping and cheering on the visiting team.  Not surprisingly this still happens since the Chargers relocated to L.A.  Both the L.A. teams have experienced the phenomenon of their home field being overtaken by the visitor’s fan base as they engage in trying to win over the fickle L.A. sports fans, many of whom would rather watch the NBA Lakers than either of these two NFL teams.   Perhaps twenty years was too long of a football famine and now L.A. is simply no longer interested in the NFL or better yet teams that they no longer have an affinity to.  I think if L.A. had a choice, they would have taken the Raiders back pronto, but given so many of the Raiders Nation faithful have either relocated from California to Las Vegas or love going there so much, the Raiders have found a sweet home in Vegas close to the briefcases of betting money.

Why NFL Backwaters Still Matter

I live in San Diego and like St. Louis, we are now an NFL backwater lacking any semblance of an NFL team.  While Oakland, San Diego, and St. Louis are out of the NFL rotation, should we consider that all bad?  While I wish San Diego did have the excitement of an NFL team, not surprisingly with the Chargers stadium less than two hours away there are still a large number of local Chargers fans in San Diego who support the team wearing their Chargers jerseys on game day.  They did not give up something that for many of them was a part of their lives since childhood and I think the NFL knows this and takes advantage of it when manifest destiny comes into play.  I assume the legacy Chargers fans did not have to grow the thick skin I did for wearing their team colors in the seventies as they had a sweet team back then quarterbacked by Hall of Famer Dan Fouts, wideouts John Jefferson, Kellen Winslow, and Charlie Joiner.

NFL backwaters have to go on and seem to find solace in other pursuits.  St. Louis just set the Major League Soccer (MLS) attendance record with the first season of their new MLS team.  San Diego razed the 70,561 seat three-time Super Bowl hosting Charger’s Jack Murphy stadium in favor of a smaller less than half size venue, 35,000 seat Snapdragon that now hosts the local National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team, the San Diego State football team, San Diego Legion pro rugby and San Diego’s future Major League Soccer (MLS) squad, FC San Diego.  I attended my first San Diego Legion rugby game at Snapdragon last spring and it exceeded my expectations with pre-game parachuting paratroopers, a family-friendly atmosphere, and a post-game DJ party.  For a fraction of the cost of attending an NFL game, you get as close to the action as possible and it smacks of so much future potential.

There Are Always Alternatives

This is not to say that the NFL is in any danger of losing its preeminent perch atop the U.S. pro sports heap, but it is food for thought that there could be a lesson here.  I first became a fan of the English Premier League’s London Arsenal team following a vacation trip to Paris that coincided with Arsenal playing in the May 1995 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup Final versus Spain’s Real Zaragoza.  My wife and I did not even attend the match, but it was not hard to get caught up in all the excitement of seeing passionate rival bands of each team’s fans marching the streets of Paris chanting their football chants and waving their team flags.  Also, we would be remiss to not acknowledge how these teams have played in their same origin cities since their inception.  That is called continuity.  Since that time I have continued down the slippery slope like a vortex for the beautiful game of soccer.  Even my twenty-something year old son loves soccer so much he has attended a Madrid Atletico game and he is planning a trip to London this year to see one of his favorite soccer teams play.  

Soccer is Advertising Innovation

It is worth noting, that the beauty in soccer is not just the sport itself and not so much the lack of advertising as much as it is how less disruptive the ads are versus U.S. football.  You can go ten to twenty minutes without a commercial break, unlike the NFL where there is a commercial break with every changeover on downs, injuries, play reviews, etc.  It is brutal and it may just be my soccer-induced ADHD, but I have a hard time watching American football.  It has also been exacerbated by the availability of commercial-free streaming TV.  I can’t even watch reruns of The Office without wanting to change channels the minute the first commercial break begins. So perhaps part of the lesson for the NFL could be to please integrate better seamless integration of ads and commercials without the commercial breaks…Fast.  Easy, right? 

The Future of NFL Advertising?

There are less than sixty minutes of live action in any given NFL game once you strip away the two hours plus of commercial and stoppage time. The retail industry has innovated with seamless digital advertising via retailer media, so why can't NFL advertisers take the lead on incorporating innovative seamless digital ads? Perhaps in exchange for longer spans of action between commercial breaks the NFL could offer fans a personalized experience via opt-in ads on their cell phone during game play-induced breaks, i.e., team time-out, officiating review, etc., and if you view the ads there are incentives like game ready fan emojis, free game ticket sweeps, alternative views of previous plays, etc.  With the technological breakthroughs we can expect to witness over the next decade behind the expansion AI, we should be able to figure less intrusive advertising.

Losing My Religion

I lost faith in the NFL’s brand of Sunday sports worship on January 22, 2019.  I have not watched a full NFL game since the Saints lost to the L.A. Rams on an interference no-call on that fateful day during the 2019 playoffs and it only got worse when the same thing repeated itself in the following year’s Saints playoff game exit.  It's not like my losing faith was as big as the momentum I was gaining with the distractions of mostly commercial-free Premier League or LaLiga soccer calling me on Saturday mornings.  I no longer limit myself to the Premier League thanks to streaming, I can watch MLS on Apple TV, and Google TV keeps a year-round fixture of matches from other international leagues around the world.  I would rather watch those streaming sideline ads in the background of the soccer match than see another NFL commercial break.  While I am “N of 1” and what I am seeing is not yet a trend, who knows what the future holds as these peripheral sports leagues continue to grow and get enabled via technological advancements from MLS to the Premier Lacrosse League?

General Scalability

I liken our current era of sports destiny to what happened in the latter part of the industrial era in the early nineteen hundreds when the U.S. saw the benefits of mass production.  It opened the door for the “generals”; i.e.,  General Electric, General Motors, General Mills, and General Dynamics.  Companies who specialize in mass production manufacturing.  This bled into the modern sports era ushering in a whole new era of general-purpose multi-purpose stadiums primarily built to host NFL and Major League Baseball.  Does anyone recall when the L.A. (Anaheim) Rams played in Anaheim, California, sharing a stadium with the MLB Angels?  This lasted until 1992, when Baltimore, perhaps still smarting from embarrassingly losing their NFL franchise in the dark of the night and probably feeling the little bro syndrome from its larger neighbors to the north and south in Philadelphia and D.C., decided to build a new baseball-only stadium.  Enter Oriole Park at Camden Yards. 

Camden Yard Dogs

Camden Yards was a Parthenon to baseball.  Specifically built to the sport and within shouting distance of downtown Baltimore, it sparked a downtown renaissance in Baltimore and all of the cities who followed suit in copying Baltimore’s goated MLB stadium move.  It also leveraged new building techniques that incorporated and preserved older nearby buildings into the park's design and it was built to look like it had been there for years.  Camden Yards ignited an MLB new ballpark boom across the U.S. and now almost every major U.S. MLB ballpark shares some of Camden’s DNA.  Camden Yards was the watermark that began the current era of specialization in stadiums that we are experiencing today.

The future will hold even more specialization, personalization, and customization in the form of more medium to smaller cities getting in on professional sports.  Columbus, Ohio, is a great example of how this has played out.  Columbus, Ohio’s 907,000 plus people are wedged within a one-and-a-half to two-hour drive between four mid-tier NFL markets in Cleveland to the north, Pittsburgh to the east, Cincinnati to the south and Indianapolis to the west.  As a result, Columbus has filled in the gaps with two pro teams in the NHL and MLS.  Columbus was the first U.S. city to build a pro soccer dedicated stadium in 1999 for their beloved Columbus Crew and not to be outdone by their cousins to the south in Cincinnati who built what was probably the first truly world-class solely dedicated to pro soccer U.S. stadium for their FC Cincinnati squad in May 2021, Columbus debuted a similar almost as classy new soccer only downtown stadium for the Crew in July 2021.  I mentioned in a previous edition how Kansas City built the first soccer stadium solely dedicated to professional women’s soccer.  Kansas City now has professional solely dedicated sports venues for the NFL, MLB, MLS, and NWSL and that does not include the 18,500 seat multi–purpose T-Mobile Arena downtown that was built to potentially woo an NHL team or bring back NBA to the “Paris of the Plains” since the Kings manifested their way to Sacramento back in 1985. 

Destiny's Future

The future could be bright for middle-tier cities like Kansas City and Columbus where real estate is still relatively cheap and there is sufficient upside for filling in professional sports gaps.  This would be like the transition from mass production to specialization mentioned above and similar to how department stores were at one time all the rage in the U.S. and now if you have a shopping center, you are more likely to want to have a two-story 60,000 square foot Zara, H&M or Forever 21 over another two story 160,000 square foot Dillards.  Specialization reigns and size does not always win out.

There is also a special case for larger metro areas for these fill-in-the-gap professional sports teams.  Manifest destiny has done a number on how we plan and build our cities.  In particular, adding lanes to expand freeways to handle more traffic and ease bottlenecks creates a phenomenon called “induced traffic”.  The additional lanes provide temporary relief to the traffic, but eventually, the additional lanes encourage more people to manifest their destiny further, and the traffic congestion returns. 

Induced traffic can be a friend or foe to professional sports.  We’ve seen this play out in larger topographically challenged metros like New York and the Bay Area where water in the form of a San Francisco Bay or the Hudson River plays a huge role in how people manifest their destiny traveling across these large metros.  The NBA Nets took advantage of this when they were in New Jersey and west of the Hudson River.  They enjoyed a fan base either not willing or wanting to brave the congested tunnels and bridge crossings into Manhattan to watch an expensive sporting event.  The Nets took a step further in 2012 when they manifested their way to Brooklyn, an even more densely populated metro anchoring the mostly captive audience of 7.6 million landlocked and water surrounded traffic congested bridge/tunnel limited Long Islanders (including to NYC boroughs:  Queens 2.271 million and Brooklyn 2.577 million).  

In the Bay Area, California opened a rebuilt and widened San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge eastern approach in the mid-2010s, opening up the possibilities for a team like the NBA Warriors to move from Oakland to San Francisco.  As induced traffic builds and takes hold on the new bridge span, the possibilities for East Bay fans to manifest their way across the bay will begin to dry up and hopefully, for Oakland and the East Bay, this will again open up more potential for adding back professional sports teams to the 2.8 million person captive audience on that side of the Bay.  In addition, COVID and the remote work revolution transformed the new Bay Bridge span into an exit gangplank for the manifestation of numerous San Francisco residents whose destiny was more space at less cost east of San Francisco in far-flung burgs as far away as Sacramento.

We live in a massively transformative time and while there is no need to over-promise on tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) as that is already being done. AI and the improvements it will bring in technology and building techniques will provide a boom in sports-related entertainment and advertising.  Also, AI could aid in supporting more efficient construction techniques that could not only benefit smaller upstart pro sporting leagues but also future NFL stadiums and expansion NFL teams.

The Democratization of Sports Ownership

We also will see wider access to sports ownership.  Well before there was a Robin Hood app, the ownership of stocks in the U.S. grew and became more widespread in the latter half of the previous century.  We can expect much of the same with the buying, selling, and trading of ownership in sports organizations and teams improved by greater access via technology.  In addition to being able to experience a more specialized and personalized sports experience, you will also be able to watch your team that you have some ownership in as more opportunities open up to own a share in teams from the minors to the pros.

What the NFL also lacks (besides seamless advertising) is a true talent-developing minor league like Major League Baseball or G-League with the National Basketball Association as the NFL mostly leverages the college ranks for its up-and-coming talent.  An NFL feeder league could serve as a way of filling in some of the gaps and providing cities lacking an NFL team a potential on-ramp or glide path to an NFL team.

The NFL will be OK and is in no danger of losing its grip on the tippy top of the American sports consciousness and its majority share of eyeballs.  The NFL is seeing record viewership and profits.  Sports betting is prevalent and growing every day and the NFL loves seeing the close games especially those involving the larger fan bases and markets.  Like any large pile of money, the NFL draws attention and whether it was the WFL in the ‘70s or the old XFL in 2001, the NFL has always found a way to withstand incursion from challenger leagues.  The current “threat” from the newly formed “United Football League”, growing out of the merger of the United States Football League and XFL, is the latest in what has been a line of many and I am sure the NFL will be unscathed.

Fortunately for the NFL, the 1974-1975 World Football League never posed a threat.  The WFL had huge ambitions including eyeing international expansion to places like Mexico City and Tel Aviv.  Imagine if it had happened.  Would we see a smaller footprint for international soccer if U.S. football had taken an earlier hold?  I doubt it, but it is fun to speculate. 

Image:  World Football League

For All of the Dawgs

Toward the end of the 1975 WFL season, Sonny Sixkiller and several of his fellow Hawaiian players quit the beleaguered Hawaiian team after the players were asked to take a 20% pay cut.  The WFL collapsed a week later.  A year later, Sixkiller would later tryout for the San Diego Chargers and did not make the cut.  

Image:  Sonny Sixkiller, Peninsula Daily News

Despite not playing a single down in the NFL, Sonny Sixkiller has gone on to be a hero for his alma mater, the University of Washington and he has been a force for philanthropy and working in the front office world of sports from sports commentating to working as a sports marketing executive at IMG College.  The reason Mr. Sixkiller appears so prominently in this edition is because he represented the thread and needle of manifest destiny from his ancestors enduring the "Trail of Tears" to his journey to professional football. He is a living legend whose destiny took him from Tahlequah, Oklahoma to professional football to being known for his generosity and love for the sport he contributed so much more than he has been given credit for.  Long live Sonny Sixkiller and American Football.