The mid-1970s was a time of new leagues and sometimes even new sports, at least to U.S. sports fans, starting up. There were new arenas and stadiums in a lot of cities, and some of these venues needed new events to bring in customers during the off-seasons of their main tenants. The big things that did this, mainly for indoor arenas but sometimes also for stadiums, were rock concerts. But the new sports leagues, such as World Team Tennis, the World Football League, and multiple soccer leagues. One or more of the soccer leagues may still be in existence, but the other leagues generally folded or maybe got merged into more established ones.

One such sport that was the subject of a new league around 1974 was box lacrosse. A team called the Maryland Arrows played in the Capital Centre in Landover, MD. As someone who was much more interested in baseball than box lacrosse, when I looked at the Arrows' roster in 1974, I noticed that it contained three names that could also be found among those wearing the uniform of the Chicago White Sox that year: Pat Kelly (admittedly a common name, one that has been the name of two other major leaguers since then), Wayne Granger, and Chuck Tanner, who was the White Sox manager that year.