Mike Pawlawski is still around football a bunch as the color commentator for his alma mater Cal’s radio team and as a mental skills coach helping quarterbacks. But it takes people quite a bit older than the high school and college-aged QBs to know what the San Francisco Demons were.
When they do, he told SFGATE in a phone interview, the reaction is the same: “Oh, the XFL? What the hell was that like?” (As for the youngsters, he has a go-to quip to offer: “I can always direct people to YouTube to watch my game footage in standard definition.”)
It’s been 25 years since Pawlawski was the primary starting quarterback for a football team at the home of the San Francisco Giants, which wasn’t even a year old in the spring of 2001. And for the former Giants marketing leader Pat Gallagher, it’s still something he looks back on with delight, even if that wasn’t a consensus feeling.
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“I’m a marketing guy, an event guy, so I loved it,” Gallagher told SFGATE in a phone interview last month. “Not everybody loved it, not everybody in the organization loved it, yeah, but, but we had sort of said, ‘We’re gonna try to do other things.’ So the XFL was one of the more outrageous things that we did.”
For those who might not be aware, the XFL was born out of a partnership between the WWF, the professional wrestling empire now known as the WWE, and broadcast television titan NBC. WWE leader Vince McMahon felt the NFL was “afraid” to play smashmouth football in the modern era, and the XFL would bring that back while also blending in some elements of the gaudy wrestling world — on-field cameras, scantily-clad cheerleaders and over-the-top storyline building. All told, the two entities poured a combined $100 million into starting up the league.
The Bay Area got one of the eight teams in July 2000, and the Demons originally were going to play in San Jose before the Giants swooped in and offered their brand new ballpark for the team. They officially got the team in mid-September, with kickoff set in 5.5 months.
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FILE: Mike Pawlawski, center, of the San Francisco Demons drops back to pass during the game against the Los Angeles Xtreme at the Pac Bell Park in San Francisco on Feb. 4, 2001. The Demons defeated the Xtreme 16-15.
Tom Hauck /Allsport/Getty Images
“When we opened the ballpark, I had taken on a new role, trying to figure out what to do with the ballpark when we didn’t play baseball,” Gallagher said. “We actually figured out that you could fit a football gridiron in there — it was pretty tight, but it did fit.”
It could have been viewed as an ominous sign when an attempted stunt went horribly wrong, as an XFL-branded blimp flying over an Oakland Raiders playoff game crashed into a waterfront restaurant. But Gallagher said the Giants found a lot of interest when they went to sell tickets.
“A sales call would go like, ‘Are you interested in buying season tickets for the San Francisco Demons?’ And they would go, ‘I don’t know, what does it cost?’ We’d say $125. ‘Oh, that’s kind of expensive.’ And we’d go, ‘No, that’s for the whole season,’” Gallagher said. “A lot of people who had sort of gotten shut out of the 49ers and the Raiders came.”
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Pawlawski remembered being one of the 54 million people who watched the very first game the night before the Demons’ opener at then-Pacific Bell Park. The New York-Las Vegas showdown stood out to Pawlawski, who had already started a career in broadcasting, not for the action on the field but more for WWE’s telecast choices.
“There was a lot of low angle shots of the cheerleaders,” Pawlawski said. “I didn’t know whether to be kind of excited or a little bit embarrassed.”
The next day, though, remains one of Pawlawski’s favorite memories in football. In front of more than 38,000 fans, the ex-Cal quarterback threw two touchdowns and led a last-second drive to a walk-off field goal as the Demons beat their SoCal rivals, the Los Angeles Xtreme, 15-13.
FILE: The XFL game between the Los Angeles Xtreme and San Francisco Demons in San Francisco’s Pac Bell Park on Feb. 4, 2001. The Demons won 16-15.
Tom Hauck /Allsport/Getty Images
“The park itself was just awesome,” Pawlawski said. “It was a really beautiful day — it was sunny, it was nice. It was just a perfect football day. And the fans were phenomenal.”
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But even in that game, some major problems arose. For one, the quarterback said the distinct red-and-black footballs were so slick that they were hard to grip. And then, there was the talent gap of the football players who made up the league compared to the NFL — which was making things especially challenging for Pawlawski under center.
“I love my offensive linemen, they were awesome, but it takes a lot longer for an offensive line to gel than it does for a defensive line to gel, because defensive linemen only have to make one move,” Pawlawski said. “So yeah, it was a lot less safe for quarterbacks in that league.”
Pawlawski was sacked four times in that first game and ended up with a fracture in his neck after a sack in Week 4. He told SFGATE he actually submitted retirement papers after that injury, but then got an epidural shot that made “everything normal again,” so he un-retired and returned to action after missing two weeks. (He said he also played through a torn rotator cuff and torn cartilage in his knee.)
Still, the quality difference that was apparent to everyone led to a massive drop-off in fan interest. The XFL started with a shockingly strong 9.5 rating for that first game. But by season’s end, a startling 1.5 rating in back-to-back weeks at the end of the regular season set a record low for primetime TV programming. Clearly, whatever gimmicks the league was trying couldn’t overcome that talent gap.
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“I think they were trying to figure out what the product really was supposed to be, and I don’t think they could necessarily agree on it,” Gallagher said. “Taking the camera into the locker room, all of that stuff they thought would be really interesting, it proved to be sort of distracting. If you’re a serious football fan, the quality of the product, I think, sort of revealed itself as the season went on.”
FILE: A television camera operator zooms in on San Francisco Demons’ Eric England during a game vs. Los Angeles Xtreme QB Tommy Maddox at Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco on Feb. 4, 2001.
Brad Mangin/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
Pawlawski said he didn’t have any inkling about a possible shutdown when the Demons pulled off a playoff upset to reach the “Million Dollar Game” against those same SoCal rivals, the Xtreme. In the same week his son was born, Pawlawski felt confident about the Demons’ chances … until the game started.
“I knew exactly what they were going to do,” Pawlawski said. “I was literally coaching our players and practicing like, ‘Do this. This is what they’re going to do. When they do X, you do Y, when they do Y, you do Z.’ And so I knew, it showed on film. They did it every single time, and we did not get it right once. It’s like, we were so bad.”
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The Xtreme scored the first 38 points and crushed the Demons for the championship, 38-6. Midway through the third quarter, the quarterback recalled one moment when he realized this might be his final game — while still on the field.
“I’m sitting back there, I was literally about to call for the ball, and all that [injury] stuff ran through my head, and my baby boy is sitting at home,” Pawlawski said. “And I’m like, ‘What the f—k are you doing still playing football? It’s time to grow up’ — ‘SET, HUT.’”
Pawlawski finished that series, but when he was pulled later in that quarter, he admitted, “I thought that was my last snap.” (It was.)
FILE: Matt Keneley of the Los Angeles Xtreme attempts to tackle Mike Pawlawski of the San Francisco Demons during the XFL Championship game at the Los Angeles Coliseum in Los Angeles on April 21, 2001.
Scott Halleran/Allsport/Getty Images
The same was true for the league, whose title game in LA drew 10,000 fewer fans than the Xtreme’s season opener, and garnered a paltry 2.1 rating. Less than a month after the championship, the WWE and NBC announced they were folding the league. But in hindsight, the XFL was a success in San Francisco. The Demons drew at least 33,000 fans for all five home games at the baseball stadium and had by far the highest average attendance in the XFL.
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“The ballpark, we built it for baseball, but we also knew that we could do other things there,” Gallagher said. “We experimented with a lot of stuff, and I thought it was great. I’m proud of what we were able to do.”
Twenty-five years later, you’d be forgiven if you had forgotten all about the Demons. The Giants don’t have any display for the team at Oracle Park, and even Gallagher rues that he “wasn’t fast enough” to get a helmet to keep. Pawlawski still has his helmet, at least, and displays it proudly in his podcast studio. Both look back on their time with Demons with joy, even if the whole XFL thing didn’t work.
“It’s like everything in life, everything seems like it just happened, yet it seems like it’s so far, so long ago,” Pawlawski said. “You look at the styles of everything, and you can definitely tell it was the early 2000s, but I remember those days fondly.”
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Gallagher added, “It was a short-lived thing, but we had fun with it, and I think the fans had fun with it.”