Paper-Gate: The Philadelphia Bell and the “Scandal” That Brought Down the World Football League

On August 4, 1974, Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Frank Dolson reported that the Philadelphia Bell, a team in the World Football League (WFL), lied about the number of tickets they had sold. Dolson determined the team only sold 20,000 of the 120,000 tickets reported by Bell officials. The team gave the other 100,000 away to fill the stadium in an action known to show business promoters as “papering.” Coining the term “Paper-Gate,” Dolson vilified the Bell, equating their operations with the Nixon Watergate scandal occurring at the same time. Dolson’s use of the suffix “-gate” was an early example of the use of it as shorthand for scandal. His Paper-Gate term quickly became a national phenomenon as reporters in other WFL cities learned of widespread papering throughout the league. Within days the league was a national joke, the Bell and other teams were on the verge of bankruptcy, and Bell president Jack Kelly resigned on the same day as President Richard M. Nixon.