  the world football league (wfl) was a short-lived american football league that played in 1974 and part of 1975. although the league's proclaimed ambition was to bring american football onto a worldwide stage, the farthest the wfl reached was placing a team â the hawaiians â in honolulu, hawaii. the league folded midway through its second season, in 1975. a new minor football league began play as the world football league in 2008 after acquiring the rights to its trademarks and intellectual property. ==history== gary davidson was the driving force behind the wfl. he had helped start the successful american basketball association and world hockey association, some of whose teams survived long enough to enter the established national basketball association and national hockey league. his world football league did not bring any surviving teams into the nfl, much less survive as a whole league. to get the league off the ground, davidson knew he needed investors. at a press conference held in chicago, davidson announced his core of investors, a group of men he called the "founding fathers".http://www.worldfootballleague.org/ these men were robert schmertz, who owned the wha's new england whalers and nba's boston celtics; a former hockey prospect named howard baldwin (future owner of the nhl's pittsburgh penguins), who ran the boston bulls charter; ben hatskin, who owned the wha's winnipeg jets; and r. steve arnold, another wha associate. perhaps one of the biggest of the "founding fathers" was a canadian movie producer, john f. bassett. a former tennis prodigy and owner of the wha's toronto toros, bassett came from a wealthy canadian family. the family owned, among other entities, two toronto newspapers and interests in television stations. the younger bassett himself had been mulling over starting his own professional football league when he happened to meet davidson and was given a franchise for toronto. along with the original founding fathers, the rest of the owners would soon fall into place, including a man whose own dreams of playing football were ended by a heart ailment, thomas origer, who would run the chicago fire. several prospective owners were forced to drop out. davidson was willing to sell his philadelphia team to investor ha
1974_establishments_in_the_United_States 1975_disestablishments_in_the_United_States Defunct_American_football_leagues Defunct_national_American_football_leagues Organizations_established_in_1974 TVS_Television_Network World_Football_League