It is hard to believe, but the Carolina Panthers are not Charlotte’s first pro football team. That honor belongs to the Charlotte Stars/Hornets of the old — and doomed — World Football League. The Hornets played at Memorial Stadium and were actually good enough to get jobbed out of a playoff spot when not enough tickets were sold to a game against the Florida Blazers. The WFL was a shaky deal, you see.
The amazing Helmet Project fills in the details:
he New York Stars … relocated to Charlotte after thirteen weeks of the 1974 season and played a single game at Chicago on October 3 as the “Charlotte Stars”. According to the traditional account, the Stars obtained a set of “C” decals from the NFL’s Chicago Bears and placed these atop the “star” decal that the New York Stars had worn on their helmets, in order to cover up the “NY” monogram on the earlier decal. The resulting “logo” was presumably therefore a burnt orange “C” with a white outline, atop a yellow star with a white outline (apparently the middle of the “C” decal was not transparent, so that it obscured the middle of the star). The crummy photograph here confirms that this is at least basically what the helmet looked like, but I would greatly appreciate a clearer photograph than this one. …
… After playing one game as the Charlotte Stars, the former New York Stars were renamed the Charlotte Hornets for the last six games of the 1974 season (the WFL played a 20-game regular season in 1974). The team apparently continued to use black helmets for these last six games, but managed to obtain some actual decals of the letter “C” in some light color (probably white or yellow), and wore these on their helmets in place of the weird hybrid decals that were used during the game at Chicago in week #14.
Anyone with any pictures of the old Stars/Hornets helmets should go to the Helmet Project right now and share that info.
More Charlotte (football) Hornets info here at this trippy site, including stats, results, and photos.
