Rozelle

  ity, causing the Swedish maid to turn her back to me and shout

  at Emory: “Dammit, Ted, I tell you ten times. Ven you use bath-

  room, open vindow. You stink up whole kitchen.” And welcome

  to Chez Wismer.

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  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  When I asked Harry how he chose his team’s name, he almost shouted at me: “What’s bigger than a giant? A titan, that’s what.”

  In his second year of operation, Harry called a news conference

  at which he accused Daily Mirror columnist Harold Weissman of

  discrimination against his league because he said the guy’s son

  was a ball boy with the Giants. The man had no children, and I

  leaned over and told him, “Better call home. He may know some-

  thing you don’t.” Then Harry went on a rant about the coward-

  ice of the Giants and challenged them to an end- of- season bowl

  game for the city championship.

  When the conference broke up, I asked Sid Youngelman, an

  nfl exile and a starter for the Titans, what he thought of Harry’s

  challenge. He said, “I think he has insurance policies on all of us

  and is trying to get us killed.”

  Financially, the league’s most important franchise began life as

  a disaster. Even though Harry announced crowds of thirty thou-

  sand a game, the truth was they were averaging a little more than

  four thousand. Cynics even doubted those numbers, referring to

  his crowds as people who were disguised as empty seats.

  Small wonder the old guard of the nfl hardly felt threatened

  by Lamar Hunt’s operation and had no plan of attack. It had every

  reason to believe the Oakland and New York franchises would do

  the job for them.

  Rozelle, who was used to being an initiator, understood that until

  he could convince his owners that they were, indeed, in danger,

  his time was better spent in serious housekeeping. He cleaned up

  the potential Hornung- Karras gambling scandal. He spent much

  of his time in court, the biggie being the afl’s multimillion- dollar

  lawsuit against the nfl that Rozelle eventually won.

  Then there were those cases that gave the lie to the popu-

  lar adage that college football players learn nothing in college. If

  nothing else during this war between rival leagues, they learned

  how to write their names. They were so good at it that some of

  them learned to write them twice— once on an afl contract and

  once on an nfl contract.

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  99

  Rozelle knew firsthand how that went. In 1960, as the Rams’

  gm, he signed Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of Louisi-

  ana State University and agreed to keep the contract a secret so

  Cannon could play for lsu in the Sugar Bowl. But in the end zone

  after the Sugar Bowl, he signed with the Oilers and shook hands

  with Bud Adams, the Oilers’ owner, for the television cameras. The

  case went to court, and Adams won it after the judge castigated

  Rozelle, who had been a witness, saying he had taken advantage

  of “a poor naive, country boy.” For years, each time the commis-

  sioner ran into Peter Finney, the gifted columnist for the Times-

  Picayune, who knew Cannon well, he greeted him with, “Hey,

  how’s that poor, naive country boy doing?”

  Another court battle between the Giants and the Chargers

  over Charlie Flowers, a Mississippi All- America and a statewide

  hero, did not end with such a forgiving attitude. Jim Lee Howell,

  the Giants’ player personnel director, who had been called as a

  witness, told me: “I wasn’t sure how the case was going until the

  judge said to me, ‘Sir, are you comin’ down here all the way from

  New York City to tell me that this fine Mississippi boy is a liar?’

  and then he turns to Flowers and he says in a very loud whisper,

  ‘Now, Charlie, where did ya say y’all want to play?’ I just got up

  and headed for the airport.”

  With that some of the nfl lodge brothers began to view the new

  league a little differently— but only some. Without a consensus

  that would dictate full warfare from his congregation, Rozelle— in

  typical Rozelle style— did not rush to force the issue.

  He had, indeed, begun to formulate a battle plan. The Charlie

  Flowers affair had privately convinced him that one was going to

  be necessary. But as afl attendance figures were still hardly intim-

  idating, he knew he could afford to wait. Instead, what he did next

  was to clean up the last piece of business that the late Bert Bell had left behind. It would take a delicate balancing act because it would

  involve the close- to- home interests of George Halas, who could

  become either his tremendous ally or a serious enemy.

  Chicago was the only two- team football town in the nfl. The

  100

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  only other one had been New York, where both the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers (aafc team, not the baseball Dodgers) over

  in Ebbets Field had shared the city. But the Dodgers were long

  gone. In Chicago the Bears were pretty much the soul of the city’s

  football history, but the Chicago Cardinals were at times a thorn

  in George Halas’s backside.

  It was a rivalry with more history than equality. The Cardi-

  nals, like the Bears, were charter members of the league when it

  was formed in 1920. But only once in all those years (1947) had it

  won a clear league title.

  In 1932 the late Charles Bidwill bought the team for fifty thou-

  sand dollars. He was the president of the Chicago Stadium Corpo-

  ration, the owner of race horses, and the head of a local printing

  company. Ironically, he had once been a partner of Halas in a local

  basketball team and even loaned him fifty thousand dollars to keep

  the Bears out of the red.

  Bidwill never did see the Cardinals win. He died earlier in their

  championship season, and his widow would later marry Walter

  Wolfner, who became the team’s general manager. Wolfner did

  not defer to the man they called Papa Bear.

  Halas and Wolfner did think a lot about each other. You could

  not call theirs a relationship. Try, instead, vendetta. Stuck on the

  South Side of Chicago in a deteriorating neighborhood around

  Comiskey Park, Wolfner’s club lost more money with each pass-

  ing year. To end the Bears’ domination of the city, he even offered

  to pay Halas to leave Chicago. Halas laughed at him.

  The bond between Bell and Halas was suspiciously strong. Year

  after year Wolfner always seemed to get the lousy home schedule.

  One year Bell, who made up the slate, scheduled him to open at

  home in the same park he shared with the White Sox on the day

  the White Sox opened at home in the World Series. In response

  to Wolfner’s feverish telephone calls, Bell told him, “Work it out

  with the baseball team.”

  People did not flock to see the Cardinals. It is doubtful you could

  have “flocked to them” with a gun, a whip, and a chair. They were

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  101

  a lousy team, playing in a crumbling stadium, and in three previous seasons
they had managed to win three whole, entire games

  while losing twenty- eight.

  It was Wolfner’s idea that although he couldn’t pass, catch, or

  run with the ball, he sure could do something about a venue. Or

  so he thought.

  In desperation, while formulating a master plan to a better

  financial future, he signed a one- year lease with Soldier Field; at

  the time that big white elephant was a place in which the college

  all- star game, Army- Navy, and the city high school champion-

  ships were the only football played there. The field was unsuit-

  able. It should be noted, parenthetically as a measure of which

  team owned Chicago, that it was made reasonably usable for the

  Bears after the Cards left town.

  But Wolfner did have a plan. He made a deal with Northwest-

  ern University in the nearby suburb of Evanston to move his home

  games there the following year. There was parking as well as a

  well- maintained stadium and comfortable seats. To Wolfner it

  would be a chattel mortgage on the 100- yard promised land for

  which he yearned— and take that, George Halas.

  At least that’s what he thought— until Halas delivered the fatal

  blow. George went back into the old safe and pulled out a docu-

  ment that Wolfner’s predecessor, Bidwill, had signed decades ear-

  lier. In all of sports there has never been a signed document like

  this one. In it Bidwill agreed (for considerations never made pub-

  lic) never to play a game north of Madison Street, the traditional

  dividing line between North and South Chicago.

  When Halas dropped his bombshell, everyone in the Cardinals’

  office six blocks away ran for the map of Chicago. They could have

  saved themselves the trouble. Nobody had to tell George Halas

  where Northwestern University was in relation to Madison Street.

  Bell had only delayed the solution by ignoring Wolfner. The

  owner of the Cards would show up at league meetings to complain

  about the schedule Bell had forced upon him. They would vote,

  and the vote was always eleven to one against him.

  102 The 100-Yard Armageddon

  It fell to Rozelle to find some way out of the mess. If Wolfner had to leave town, St. Louis, Rozelle reasoned, made the most

  sense. In a sense there were two reasons that swayed him. First,

  the population indicated that it could support a pro football team.

  Second, and in some ways more important to the commissioner,

  an nfl team in St. Louis would impact the growth of the rival afl.

  It would shut the door to that territory forever. Measured against

  his feeling that it was time to get his constituents out of their leth-argy and strike some blow against the afl, it was little enough for

  Rozelle to do to start the war drums beating.

  But to move a football operation under those circumstances

  drastically costs money. Among the major expenses, the remain-

  ing lease with Soldier Field had to be paid off. The tab to make it

  all work was figured at approximately five hundred thousand dol-

  lars. Wolfner, fueled by rage, immediately balked.

  It was then, with little publicity and great skill, that Rozelle

  pulled off a major triumph. He prevailed upon an anonymous

  owner to pick up the major share of that tab for the good of the

  league. And who was that masked angel? George Halas. The com-

  missioner had brilliantly put a ribbon around the entire package

  with that master stroke.

  That was in March. By the summer the fledgling American

  Football League was staggering toward its first season. All that

  year Rozelle had been quietly waiting to see what line of attack the

  new league would take. Secretly, he hoped it would try to induce

  nfl players to jump to the new league, thus violating their exist-

  ing contracts. That would have given the old guard a course of

  legal action against the newcomers. But the afl had wisely cho-

  sen a different route . . . one that was twofold.

  First, it would take the nfl to court over everything it could

  think of, from antitrust violations to jay walking. Second, it would

  make its stand with barrels of money in the annual collegiate draft,

  and that, too, as Rozelle knew from Flowers and Cannon, could

  also wind up in the courts.

  But slowly, as it became clear that television money was a pow-

  The 100-Yard Armageddon

  103

  erful tool for the rebel league, Rozelle was inching toward the battle that would change the face of professional football forever. It

  would cost millions of dollars for both sides, and when it was finally finished it would actually give birth to a brand- new monopoly.

  I remember the day the commissioner sat in his office and

  recalled the moment he knew that the gloves had to come off and

  the battle had to be taken to a whole new level. “I think the Flow-

  ers signing was the tip for me about what we had to do,” he said.

  At that point, I didn’t feel we’d lose our experienced players to them . . .

  at least not yet. But if they stayed in business, we would have a serious problem with the rookies.

  The thing that became clear was that we were going to have to

  protect the college kids we wanted to sign. And I knew they would

  try to do the same. The answer was that little by little, both sides got into this babysitting thing. With the Hornung case behind us and

  the American League starting to spend real money in their drafts,

  I’d have to say that 1964 and 1965 were the years we finally decided

  to go to war.

  104 The 100-Yard Armageddon

  8

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  This is Junius Buchanan. He’s 6- 8. He’s beautiful and he’s going to be all ours.

  —Don Klosterman, general manager of the afl Dallas Texans

  The first thing you did was to find out what car they wanted, and off the top of my head I got to know the price of all of them.

  —Gil Brandt, part of the nfl’s babysitting high command

  In all of sports there was never anything like it. Huge football

  players who, if provoked, could have pounded holes in the side

  of the uss Forrestal suddenly claimed to be kidnap victims, held against their will by men five- foot- eight, 145 pounds, forced to

  sleep with wild women, drink whiskey, accept automobiles regis-

  tered in their name, fly to exotic places, and endure this kind of

  torture until they signed a contract.

  This was the War of the Babysitters, and the truth is that

  Rozelle’s old- guard army was late getting to the front lines. Right

  from the start the afl came out with guns and checkbooks blazing.

  Don Klosterman, who had once been a star quarterback at Loyola of

  Los Angeles against Rozelle’s old usf teams, and Al LoCasale, then

  with the Chargers, were among the best of the rebel league’s body

  snatchers. Klosterman said, “When they evacuated the Congo, the

  last three to leave were two Belgian nurses and a Charger scout.”

  He was stretching it a little, but in the beginning the afl’s depu-

  tized body snatchers seemed to be everywhere.

  What compounded the nfl efforts to get its own babysitting

  brigade organized was the fact that there were still brothers in the
<
br />   105

  lodge hall who didn’t trust each other. Rozelle admitted as much to me years later when he said, “We didn’t sign guys to league

  contracts, and we didn’t share costs. We did try to isolate guys

  so that whoever drafted them in our league would get the chance

  to see them.

  “But we used nfl employees for that because we didn’t want any-

  one else on our side to know where they were until we told them.

  We didn’t want one of our teams hurting another one.”

  With that in mind, he did what he always did in such tight sit-

  uations. He relied heavily on his associations of the past.

  “It wasn’t much different than what he had learned at usf from

  Pete Newell. Recruiting is recruiting,” said Gil Brandt, who worked

  for Rozelle as a scout with the Rams and later become player per-

  sonnel director for Schramm in Dallas and Kansas City and who

  as a high- placed babysitter for Rozelle would log enough frequent

  flyer miles to fly to Saturn and back.

  The principle was the same. In college you scouted the high school

  kids. What you did back then was to get an alumnus in his hometown

  to find everything out . . . what schools he leaned toward . . . what

  position he wanted to pay in college . . . did he need a car. Just like you couldn’t sit back in the spring when other schools were making

  moves on the kid, well, it was the same thing with us on the pro level.”

  Pete knew that game well, and he knew the people to make it work.

  Bert Rose had been the sports information director at the Uni-

  versity of Washington when Rozelle hired him to head the Rams’

  publicity team. He also knew a lot about recruiting. He later left

  the Rams to become the Vikings’ first general manager, and when

  that didn’t work out, Dan Reeves brought him back to run a mod-

  est scouting operation. He would be the guy Rozelle tapped to

  run his body snatchers.

  Rose immediately set up a network of high school coaches, fringe

  professional football people, friendly college boosters, and just plain football nuts to serve as his field men. Two critical soldiers brought on board by Rozelle himself were Buddy Young, who would later

  106

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  become an administrative aide to the commissioner and the first African American in the nfl’s front office, and Brandt, who may

  have been the very best at it.