This photograph is alleged to show Frank Olivo
at the game in question, before the pageant.
December 15, 1968: Philadelphia Eagles fans boo Santa Claus. You've heard of the legend. And this one is true.
In 1960, the Eagles won the NFL Championship, under head coach Buck Shaw and quarterback Norm Van Brocklin. They both retired. But Van Brocklin retired as a player because Eagle management had led him to believe he would be named the new head coach, with his backup, Sonny Jurgensen, becoming the new starting quarterback.
Instead, Nick Skorich was named the new head coach. Van Brocklin was offered the head job of the expansion Minnesota Vikings, and he took it. Skorich was not a good coach, and was fired after 3 seasons.
In 1964, former Notre Dame coach Joe Kuharich was named Eagles head coach and general manager, and made one of the worst trades in football history, sending Jurgensen to the Washington Redskins for Norm Snead. Jurgensen was a carouser, and the moralistic Joe Kuharich hated that. Snead was a straight arrow. With the Redskins, Jurgensen continued his Hall of Fame career, throwing the most touchdown passes of any quarterback in the 1960s. The quarterback with the most interceptions in that decade? You may have guessed: Snead.
As recently as 1966, the Eagles had finished 2nd in the NFL Eastern Division. But age and injuries caught up with them, and Kuharich, regarded by Notre Dame fans as one of the worst coaches they ever had, was in over his head. In 1968, the Eagles lost their 1st 11 games, and fans began wearing buttons reading "JOE MUST GO" to games.
At least the Eagles were going to come out of their worst season ever with the top pick in the 1969 NFL Draft. Except they won 2 straight, so they weren't even going to get the chance to draft a running back who looked like he was headed for the Heisman Trophy and a shot at back-to-back National Championships for his school. They would have to settle for the 2nd pick.
So as 54,530 fans, about 13,000 short of a sellout, filed into Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania -- forming a dichotomy of the NFL's most blue-collar fan base watching their team play its home games at an Ivy League university's stadium -- on December 15, 1968, to see their team take on the Vikings (Van Brocklin had since moved on, to the Atlanta Falcons), Eagle fans were in one of their occasional very nasty moods.
This was not helped by the fact that there was a snowstorm the night before, and that the stadium maintenance crew did a poor job of clearing the snow, and that it was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit at gametime.
It was the last game of the regular season, and it was 10 days before Christmas. A short Christmas pageant was scheduled for halftime. Now, part of the legend that everybody gets wrong is believing that, just like the parade at the start of the movie Miracle On 34th Street, the man hired to play Santa Claus was drunk. The truth was, the hired Santa couldn't get his car out of the snow, and called ahead to say he couldn't make it.
Bill "Moon" Mullen was the Eagles' entertainment director. He figured, someone in the stands must have come dressed as Santa Claus, and could be hired for the pageant. He figured correctly: Frank Olivo was a 20-year-old college student, and for a few years now, even as a teenager, had gone to the last game of the season dressed as Santa.
The game began, and the Eagles took a 7-0 over the Vikings, who tied the game 7-7 going into halftime. Then the pageant began. The Eagle cheerleaders were dressed as elves. The idea was that "Santa" would appear on a large motorized float "pulled" by 8 life-size fiberglass reindeer. But, typical Eagles luck, the float got stuck in the mud. So Olivo had to walk out onto the field with his "bag of toys" (actually filled with locker room towels) slung over his shoulder, as a record of "Here Comes Santa Claus" played over the loudspeaker.
Fans saw what was obviously not a jolly old fat man with a beard and a costume that at least looked authentic, but a kid in a fake beard and a bad copy of a Santa suit. They booed. He tried to mollify them by throwing candy canes. The canes didn't get anywhere near the stands. The fans responded by throwing snowballs -- Olivo later estimated being hit by over 100 of them -- and other objects, such as beer bottles and even hoagies.
He later said that he understood, even telling one fan, "You're not getting anything for Christmas!" Was he at least paid for his trouble? No, he didn't get any money, but the Eagles did give him football-shaped cufflinks and a tie tack. As for the game, the Eagles lost, 24-17, ensuring them a 2-12 finish and the 3rd pick in the Draft.
The Philadelphia newspapers mentioned the incident the next day, but not with big headlines. And there is no surviving footage of the incident: With videotape being expensive, CBS just taped over their broadcast, so we don't even know if they showed the incident, or just the game; and NFL Films didn't capture it, either.
Indeed, this incident might have remained a legend, with nothing to back it up, had it not been for one person: Howard Cosell. At the time, ABC aired a Weekend Report after the Sunday night local news, and Cosell gave a sports round-up. He didn't have footage of the game, let alone the incident, but he mentioned it, and people all over the country heard about it.
In 1970, ABC began airing Monday Night Football. And every time the Eagles were on it, and every time the ABC cameras caught a fan at a game wearing a Santa costume, Cosell would mention the time the Eagles fans booed Santa Claus.
Incidents among Philadelphia sports fans are legion, but most are one person's (or group's) word against another's. The Philadelphia Catholic League includes some suburban high schools, including Archbishop Wood of Bucks County and Monsignor Bonner of Delaware County. That's a nasty rivalry. Legend has it that, after years of basketball games hearing Wood fans chant, "We smell B-O -- N-N-E-R!" the Bonner fans finally chanted back, "It's your mother!" I have no doubt that this actually happened, but there's no footage.
Likewise, there's no surviving footage of the 1968 Philadelphia Eagles Christmas Pageant, so the only people who saw a man dressed as Santa Claus getting booed and hit with snowballs were the people watching in the stadium and on TV at the time. But there's enough testimony to back it up to know that it happened.
Kuharich was indeed fired after the 1968 season. But the Eagles still didn't make the Playoffs again until 1978, or the Super Bowl until the 1980 season.
And that Number 3 draft pick they "earned" for 1969? They selected Leroy Keyes, running back from Purdue University. He had a decent rookie season for the Eagles, but didn't play much in 1970. He was moved to strong safety and had 2 good seasons there, before being traded to the Kansas City Chiefs, and playing his last pro down at age 26. He went back to Purdue, working in its athletic department, and died earlier this year of cancer, at age 74.
The 2nd pick in that draft, that the Eagles also couldn't get? Van Brocklin and the Falcons used it on George Kunz, who had helped Notre Dame win the 1966 National Championship. He played 12 seasons in the NBA, making 7 Pro Bowls, and became a successful lawyer. He is still alive, at 74.
And the Number 1 pick? Well, he did win the Heisman, after finishing 2nd the year before. But he fell 1 game short of making it back-to-back National Championships for the University of Southern California. The Buffalo Bills drafted him. His name was Orenthal James Simpson. The Eagles organization has much for which to answer, but no Eagles fan will ever have to explain to his children that the Eagles once had O.J. Simpson.
In 1969, the Eagles offered Frank Olivo the chance to reprise his performance, under better conditions. He declined, but continued to go to games as the team moved to Veterans Stadium in 1971 and Lincoln Financial Field in 2003. He remembered:
It happened years ago. You know, time to move on... It went away for a while, but, every now and then, you hear some guy on TV who only knows Philly for the cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell talk about the time fans threw snowballs at Santa. It was cool to hear it back then, when it went national, and Howard Cosell is saying your name on TV. But, today, when you hear it, it's like, "Shut up already."
In 2003, the Philadelphia 76ers tried a publicity stunt, gathering the most people dressed as Santa Claus in one location, and Olivo participated -- presumably, wearing a better costume. All this time, he had kept going to Eagles games, but had stopped wearing the Santa suit at the last game after the '68 edition. Finally, in 2009, he did it again, and was cheered.
In 2015, after a longtime battle with heart trouble, Frank Olivo died at age 66. He did not get to see the Eagles finally win the Super Bowl in 2018.
*
December 15, 1968 was a Sunday. These other games were played in the NFL that day:
* The New York Giants lost to the Dallas Cowboys, 28-10 at Yankee Stadium.
* The Washington Redskins beat the Detroit Lions, 14-3 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium the next year.)
* The San Francisco 49ers beat the Atlanta Falcons, 14-12 at Atlanta Stadium. (It was renamed Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in 1975.)
* The New Orleans Saints beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, 24-14 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.
* The Green Bay Packers beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Bears, 28-27 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
* The football version of the St. Louis Cardinals lost to the Cleveland Browns, 27-16 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.
* And the Baltimore Colts beat the Los Angeles Rams, 28-24 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
In the American Football League:
* The New York Jets beat the expansion Cincinnati Bengals, 27-14 at Shea Stadium.
* The Miami Dolphins beat the Boston Patriots, 38-7 at the Orange Bowl in Miami.
* The Houston Oilers beat the Buffalo Bills, 35-6 at the Astrodome in Houston.
* The Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Diego Chargers, 40-3 at San Diego Stadium.
* And the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos, 33-27 at the Oakland Coliseum.
There were 3 games played in the NBA that day:
* The New York Knicks lost to the Philadelphia 76ers, 110-104 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. There is no record of anybody at this game being hit by a snowball or anything else.
* The Cincinnati Royals beat the expansion Phoenix Suns, 119-101 at the Cincinnati Gardens.
* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 115-114 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.
There were 3 games in the American Basketball Association:
* The New York Nets lost to the Houston Mavericks, 105-103 at the Sam Houston Coliseum in Houston. The Mavericks became the Carolina Cougars in 1969 and the Spirits of St. Louis in 1974, before folding in 1976.
* The Kentucky Colonels beat the Miami Floridians, 123-102 at Freedom Hall in Louisvlle. Neither team was among the ABA teams admitted to the NBA in 1976.
* And the Denver Rockets beat the Los Angeles Stars, 113-110 in overtime at the Auditorium Arena in Denver. The Rockets became the Denver Nuggets in 1974. The Stars became the Utah Stars in 1970, won the ABA title in 1971, reached the Finals again in 1974, and folded in 1976, after they, unlike the Nets, Nuggets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs, were denied admission into the NBA.
There were 5 games played in the NHL:
* The New York Rangers lost to the Philadelphia Flyers, 3-1 at the new Madison Square Garden.
* The Boston Bruins beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 5-3 at the Boston Garden.
* The Detroit Red Wings beat the Minnesota North Stars, 5-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.
* The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Oakland Seals, 7-4 at the Chicago Stadium.
* The St. Louis Blues beat the Los Angeles Kings, 3-1 at the St. Louis Arena.
* And the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs were not scheduled.