JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – “Football fans, pinch yourselves.”
Short. Emotional. Succinct. To the point.
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Tom Wills delivered those four words to local viewers on Nov. 30, 1993, right before the Jacksonville Jaguars were made official in a Chicago Hyatt hotel that afternoon. To the city, they served as the introduction of Jacksonville’s entry in the sports mainstream, the result of years of laborious work and the vision of a small cluster of people here. For Wills, they were the most impactful words related to sports he said during his nearly five-decade career in town.
To fully understand just how important those four words were, you’d have to wind the calendar back 14 years earlier.
In mid-August 1979, 50,000 football-starved fans were buzzing about the possibility of Jacksonville becoming a real NFL city with a team of its own. Wills was a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh franchises, the Steelers and the Pirates, but in the South, the year-round ravenous appetite for football made things quite a bit different.
Wills, who is retiring Friday after 49 years in Jacksonville, had been on the anchor desk here four years by 1979 and had already covered a career’s worth of notable events, including the tragic plane crash that killed four members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd.
MORE: Stories celebrating Tom’s 49 years at WJXT
Then, he experienced Jacksonville’s football fever.
Volatile Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay, irked by growing issues about a new stadium, had begun flirting with cities about moving the Colts.
Jacksonville was one of them.
“Matt Cooney broke the story at the end of his 11 p.m. sportscast on Channel 12, almost as a throwaway, that Robert Irsay was considering Jacksonville as a possible new home for his Baltimore Colts,” Wills said. “The story was a banner headline the following morning on the front page of the (Times-Union). Our highly emotional news director, Bill Brown, came into the newsroom at 9 a.m. waving the newspaper in the air and shouting, ‘We will own this Colts story by the end of the day!’”
The station owned the story, Wills said, and Irsay arrived in Jacksonville, on Aug. 15, 1979 — with a little help from Channel 4.
“The mayor got somebody to donate free soft drinks and hot dogs for whomever showed up; 50,000 people came to the Gator Bowl to see Robert Irsay — dressed head to toe in a white suit — step out of the Channel 4 helicopter onto the 50-yard line,” Wills said.
Mayor Jake Godbold was just seven months into his first term and felt the football fever itch, too. It was Godbold’s zest to bring an NFL team to Jacksonville that jumpstarted the process.
Irsay’s arrival gave the city faint — and false — hope that it could pull off the impossible and land an NFL team.
“The crowd chanted, ‘We want the Colts,’” Wills said. “Irsay told Godbold privately the Gator Bowl was a dump and would have to be completely rebuilt to accommodate any NFL team.”
Of course, the Colts didn’t come to Jacksonville. The buzz waned. And then years later, in the late hours of the night on March 28-29, 1984, they packed Mayflower moving vans and went to Indianapolis. It remains one of the most cutthroat moves ever by the owner of a professional sports franchise.
Despite the disappointment, Colt Fever had certainly done something in Jacksonville. The short-lived USFL was immensely popular in town with the Jacksonville Bulls in 1984 and ‘85.
“I still have a Lindy Infante T-shirt from the days of the Jacksonville Bulls,” Wills said.
The Bulls were one of the league’s best draws before the league bottomed out. The Jacksonville football fuse had been lit.
An NFL team in Jacksonville?
Ten years after Colt Fever, Touchdown Jacksonville! was formed with the singular goal of bringing an NFL franchise to Jacksonville. It was bold. And that drive to be an NFL town, ignited under Godbold, was now under Mayor Tommy Hazouri’s purview.
The NFL hadn’t publicly talked about expansion yet, and the city had made two attempts to pry existing teams to the area, the Colts in 1979 and the Bud Adams-owned Houston Oilers in 1987.
To have a realistic shot to land an NFL team, Jacksonville couldn’t expect to put a team in the Gator Bowl. It was fine for two college football games a year, the Florida-Georgia showdown and the annual bowl game. Within the first six months of 1991, the city voted to give the Gator Bowl an NFL-type makeover, and the league unveiled its intentions to expand from 28 to 30 teams.
Between that announcement in 1991 and when Wills and longtime sports director Sam Kouvaris went to the NFL owners meeting on Oct. 26, 1993, the maneuvering to keep the Jacksonville NFL bid alive should have evaporated on no less than a half-dozen occasions: From stadium cost overruns to not selling enough tickets to squabbles among the ownership group, the council and Mayor Ed Austin.
But the city’s dream to become home to a pro football team kept kicking.
Kouvaris and Wills both agreed that the key to the Jaguars becoming a reality was owner Wayne Weaver’s addition to the Touchdown Jacksonville! team.
“We had what some of us felt was a secret weapon; that was Wayne Weaver. When you saw Wayne interacting with the other owners, he fit in with them,” Kouvaris said. “In a conversation I had with [Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones .. Jerry told me not only was Wayne popular with other owners, and that was easy to see if you spent time with him, but his business acumen, how he took [women’s shoe and accessories business] Nine West and had manufacturing plants in South America and Brazil. That was very attractive to other NFL owners. That was a glimpse of how they could take the next step with the next generation of fans. That was very attractive to NFL owners. Tom and I were able to watch that together and see how he interacted, how comfortable he was with other NFL owners, guys like Jerry Jones.”
‘He will get Jacksonville a team’
At that NFL owners meeting on Oct. 26, 1993, the league was expected to announce two franchises had been awarded that afternoon.
Instead, the only one was, Carolina. The decision on the second franchise was pushed back a month, generally seen as a delay to help the St. Louis NFL expansion bid get its affairs straightened out.
Jacksonville as a city was jolted. Wills said that he, like most in the city at the time, was not confident that Jacksonville would be the second franchise selected from the five finalists.
“Hindsight is 20-20. I was friendly with Ron Weaver, Wayne’s brother. We went to the same church for years,” Wills said. “We ran into each other at a social event, and I could not resist sharing my skepticism with Ron. I’ve never forgotten what he told me that day. He said, ‘Tom, my brother Wayne always gets what he wants. He will get Jacksonville a team.’”
Kouvaris and Wills both said that there was a push from the league to pry Weaver away from Jacksonville’s expansion bid, something Wills said would have been an insult to Ron Weaver.
“Tom and I knew the league had approached Wayne after that meeting to abandon Jacksonville and take over the St. Louis bid,” Kouvaris said.
Just over a month later, Wills and Kouvaris went back to the owners meeting in Chicago, at the same Hyatt hotel they were at in October. The buzz was undeniable. Kouvaris was in the room with the Jaguars expansion committee when Ron Weaver barreled in and delivered what he’d just heard — that Jacksonville was being awarded the 30th franchise.
In the surreal moments that followed, Kouvaris made his way out of the room, hopped on a primitive early 1990s cellphone and called the station.
“I called the news director at the office and I said to [news director] Nancy Shafran, ‘Tangerine,’ which was the code word [for getting an NFL team],” Kouvaris said. “She said to me, ‘You’re ******* kidding me. You’re on the air in like 5 minutes.’”
Kouvaris met Wills downstairs in the hotel and delivered the news that “Tangerine” was confirmed. First through Ron Weaver, then through another member of the Touchdown Jacksonville! contingent, David Seldin, and finally, through checking the stash of memorabilia like banners and shirts for the expansion cities.
The apparel and garb for Baltimore, Memphis and St. Louis remained in the room. All of the Jaguars memorabilia had been removed to be handed out after the announcement.
“I walked in and Tom was wide-eyed,” Kouvaris said. “He said, ‘We’re on the air in 30 seconds.’ He said ‘We’re getting a team; are you sure? We’re going to look into the camera and we’re going to tell the people of Jacksonville we’re getting an NFL team?’ I said ‘Yes.’”
Wills said that moment remains one of the most seismic in his career, and one he included in his 10 biggest stories of his 49 years here.
“Moments earlier, I spied a Jacksonville Jaguars banner lying on the floor backstage behind the podium,” Wills said. “Nevertheless, we could not quite believe it until we heard the words come out of [NFL Commissioner Paul] Tagliabue’s mouth, and then the excitement just boiled over. I leaned over and whispered to Sam, ‘Sam, the mountain has just come to Mohammed.’”
Then, Wills said the phrase that summarized decades of hope and heartbreak in Jacksonville’s quest for an NFL franchise.
Looking straight into the camera, he said, “Football fans, pinch yourselves.”
‘Unforgettable saga’
The return trip home wasn’t what you’d expect, Wills said. Maybe it was being emotionally drained.
Kouvaris stayed in Chicago to handle the reaction from up there. Wills headed back to Jacksonville to cover the unbelievable welcome home celebration here.
“I don’t remember how this happened, but I wound up flying home from Chicago as a passenger in an available seat on Wayne Weaver’s private jet,” Wills recalled.
Maybe the realization of what they’d accomplished hadn’t sunk in. But the contingent that just won an NFL franchise was relatively subdued, Wills said.
“Contrary to what you might have expected, as we waited to take off, everyone on the plane, including Mr. Weaver, sat in absolute silence,” Wills said. “No lights were on in the cabin. Each of us sat quietly with our private thoughts. I remember thinking, ‘Jake Godbold’s dream has just come true.’”
Kouvaris, who was at WJXT from 1981 to 2018, said that Wills set the standard for everyone at the station and it stretched across departments, from the anchor desk to the producers to those in the control room, on what it meant to be on a team. When the two were reporting together in Chicago on the biggest sports moment in Jacksonville history, Kouvaris said they operated together as a team, something that he’s always appreciated.
“When I first came there in 1981, Tom, he set the standard, not only the standard for professionalism and how to be a journalist, but how to act with your fellow employees. In order for the newsroom to function at the effort and high level we did it at, you always got the feeling you were a part of a team,” Kouvaris said. “I always thought there was this leadership team and we all were of like minds that we were a team and we were all doing our jobs to make the whole product better. Tom set the standard for that. I was lucky he saw it the same way. [Former anchor] Deborah [Gianoulis] saw it the same way. [Former meteorologist] George [Winterling] saw it the same way. Later, Mary [Baer] saw it the same way. It was fun being there.”
There have been many moments since then in Wills’ journey covering the news side of sports. Wills was in Godbold’s private box for one of the most iconic plays in Florida-Georgia history in 1980, the Buck Belue to Lindsay Scott play — “Run, Lindsay, run!” His first time on an NFL sideline was Jacksonville’s 1996 playoff debut during that magical season and surge to the AFC championship game. Wills said he nearly got trucked by bruising running back Natrone Means in that game at Buffalo, a 30-27 Jaguars win.
“No TV news anchor has ever moved that fast to get out of his way,” Wills said.
Wills remembers the Jacksonville Tea Men soccer franchise warmly and has fond memories of the Bragans, Peter Sr. and Peter Jr., running the Jacksonville Expos and Suns teams for decades. Wills covered the Super Bowl in Jacksonville in 2005 when the city had to charter cruise ships to use as hotel rooms. Tim Tebow, whom Wills interviewed alongside his parents, Bob and Pam, in 2007, has since won a Heisman Trophy, two national championships and retired from both professional baseball and football. The first head coach of the Jaguars, Tom Coughlin, won two Super Bowls — although they came with the Giants — is now retired from coaching and was a first-time Pro Football Hall of Fame finalist last year.
“Congratulations on your retirement, Tom,” Coughlin said. “You’ve been a steadfast presence in the Jacksonville community since I moved here in the mid ‘90s, and Channel 4 has been lucky to have you.”
The Jaguars, who were nothing more than a distant vision for Jacksonville when Wills arrived in town, are ready to embark on their 30th season this September.
And for the first time in the franchise’s history — and nearly 20 years before that — Wills won’t be at the anchor desk talking sports about his adopted NFL team. He’ll be able to cheer on his other adopted team, the Gators, every Saturday and root for the Jaguars on Sunday. There will be no more worries about objective reporting when it comes to cheering them on now.
“An NFL team put Jacksonville on the map. It has enhanced the quality of life for every sports fan in our area,” Wills said. “... I got to cover every step of that unforgettable saga.”
Jacksonville is better because of it.