Any Time, Any Place

There are three things a businessman can do about competition. He can fight it. He can join it. Or, like the National Football League, he can pretend it isn't there. But the five-year-old American Football League is getting too big to overlook. With half the 1964 season still to go, attendance in the eight-team A.F.L. is already nearing the 1,000,000 mark, and next year, a new TV contract will dump $900,000 a season into each club's coffers. Maybe all that money is going to their heads. Last week the New York Jets offered to take on the N.F.L.'s New York Giants "any time, any place." And up in Buffalo, where 39,621 frantic fans somehow squeezed into the 38,167-seat War Memorial Stadium to watch the home-town Bills wallop the Jets 34-24, the battle cry was: "Bring on the Baltimore Colts!" Slightly Nuts. Buffalo fans have alway been slightly nuts. As far back as 1949, 25,000 of them signed a petition promising to buy season tickets if the N.F.L. would give them a team. The N.F.L. only snickered--but Buffalo got its team anyhow, when Insurance Man Ralph Wilson Jr. bought an A.F.L.

franchise in 1959. The fledgling Bills promptly lost their first three home games. That wasn't exactly what the fans had in mind, and when the Bills wound up last in the Eastern Division in 1961, they took to demonstrating their displeasure by pelting the players with beer cans. But then came Coach Lou Saban, a man whose own record was nothing to brag about: he had been fired by the Boston Patriots. He spent two years rebuilding the squad, and by last week the jeers had turned to cries of glee. Victory over the Jets ran the Bills' season's record to 7-0, making them the only unbeaten team in pro football.

Maybe they could handle the Colts at that. The Bills lead the A.F.L. in scoring, total offense and total defense --averaging 415 yds. and 33 points, holding opponents to 243 yds. a game.

Most teams have one topflight quarterback, if that. The Bills boast two: Jack Kemp, 29, who led the San Diego Chargers to two straight Western Division championships before going to Buffalo on waivers for $100; and Daryle Lamonica, the ex-Notre Dame star, who has engineered winning touchdown drives in four of the Bills' seven games.

On defense, Buffalo's "front four" make most N.F.L. linemen look like underfed schoolboys: bulwarked by massive Tackle Jim Dunaway, a Mississippi All-America in 1962, they average 265 Ibs.

per man. But that is only half the story. The other half is Carlton Chester ("Cookie") Gilchrist, 29, who at 6 ft.

3 in. and 251 Ibs. is the biggest back in all of pro football.

Daddy Called Him Doughnut. Cookie Gilchrist ("My mother called me 'Cupcake,' my father called me 'Doughnut,' so we settled on 'Cookie' ") has been a pro ever since he was a 185-lb.

teen-ager playing for Har-Brack high school in Brackenridge, Pa. "Guys would shake hands with me, and there would be bills in their palms," he remembers--and sometimes the take ran to $150 a week. The N.F.L.'s Cleveland Browns signed him at 18, shipped him off to Canada for seasoning. Cookie liked it so well he decided to stay. By 1962, when he quit and shuffled off to Buffalo, Cookie was the No. 1 back in Canadian football and a $20,000-a-year man with the Toronto Argonauts.

In his first season at Buffalo, Gilchrist gained 1,096 yds., was voted Most Valuable Player in the league. Crippled by injuries last year, he still put on the greatest one-man exhibition in pro history: in a final game against the Jets, he carried the ball 36 times, scored five touchdowns, and gained 243 yds.

"When you weigh 251 Ibs.," he says, "there's no sense in trying to run around smaller people. I just run through them." Against the San Diego Chargers earlier this season, Gilchrist caught a swing pass from Quarterback Kemp. Nobody was fooled. One after another, four defenders piled on top of Cookie. He finally went down--after staggering 25 yds.

What's more, unlike many top pro runners (including Cleveland's great Jimmy Brown), Gilchrist is a superb blocker. With Cookie picking off the blitzers, Buffalo's quarterbacks have had to eat the ball only six times all season.

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