Rozelle

  Young, a University of Illinois All- America running back and

  the National Collegiate Athletic Association (ncaa) sprint cham-

  pion, was a football pioneer. Small at five- foot- five and 150 pounds, the flanker position was invented for him when he played for the

  Colts; he was the league’s top salesman in the eyes of many black

  players. He delivered Gayle Sayers to George Halas.

  He was also a point man for the nfl into the virtually untapped

  all- black colleges. Once, in the confusion of the nfl war room,

  Buddy answered one of what seemed like 254 telephones that were

  always ringing. “What you mean the boy’s father just died?” he

  said to the man he had entrusted with the care, feeding, and iso-

  lation of a prospect in Mississippi. Has the boy been told? What

  are the arrangements?

  “Don’t worry about it,” he was told. “It’s all taken care of. I’m

  the only funeral director in town.”

  You can best understand Young’s role as a babysitter as told to

  me by his wife, Geraldine: “Buddy never spoke much about what

  he was doing, but I can tell you that one day I looked around my

  home and realized I was cooking for thirteen college players—

  black and white.”

  “I didn’t know much about what Rose and Young were doing

  because I was just a kid in the mail room at the time,” said Joe

  Browne, now the league’s in- house chief of governmental affairs.

  “All I knew about what they did was that it seemed to me that there

  was always a lot of cash around that office.”

  Once Rozelle determined to move the battle from team responsi-

  bility into league responsibility, he found himself at the apex of a

  system so complex that it wound up training people for a job that

  could only put themselves out of business if they were successful.

  “We barely paid these guys,” Rozelle explained.

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  They were professional people or fans who really wanted to be around this strange game— and it was a hell of a fascinating one. We set up

  regional schools for them to learn what we wanted them to know.

  We gave them sales kits outlining our sales pitch and the sales

  pitches of every club in our league. We taught them how to sign peo-

  ple, and we gave them blank nfl checks. Then they would call the

  club that had drafted the prospect, and the club would tell them what

  bank to fill in. We gave them air travel cards.

  Now during the last period, you know the last week before the

  draft, they would be with the kid wherever he went. In some cases

  the kid might be out of school, so they would take him to some great

  places. Sometimes that would be great for the babysitter, too— plush

  hotel, palm trees, drinks poolside, the whole deal.

  And sometimes, well, I remember one kid went home and our guy

  went with him and there was a blizzard, so the kid’s old man sent him

  out to get the cattle in and there was that poor bastard babysitter running around and freezing his ass off with him.

  There were, indeed, unbelievable stories. There was the time

  that Green Bay of the nfl and Kansas City of the afl had each

  drafted a huge Grambling tackle named Al Dotson. Grambling

  had gone down to Miami to play Florida A&M in the Orange

  Blossom Bowl, and Dotson’s afl shadow had lost touch. So there

  was a telephone call to a friend who had another friend who had

  a third friend who was a Florida state senator and damned if the

  Florida State Police didn’t cut off the Grambling team bus after

  the game so that the afl guy could get on it and sit next to Dotson.

  On a flight to West Virginia, Brandt sat down next to a lady who

  turned out to be the daughter of Vic Fusia, the UMass football

  coach. When he told her he worked for the Dallas Cowboys, she

  said her dad had been to the Chargers’ camp and they had signed

  one of his players, Milt Morin— that’s how the nfl learned that

  the afl had held a secret draft.

  The battle became more heated. There were fistfights. There

  were lies and massive examples of blatant deceit. Sex and booze

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  became major factors when luring players. The objects of all this pursuit caught on quickly. They learned to play the game in one

  hell of a hurry. For some it was played in sets of two:

  The nfl motel weekend and the afl motel weekend . . . the nfl

  offers of a car and the afl offers of a car . . . and, both sides would privately admit to me, a girl or two if that worked. Everyone was

  riding the craziest merry- go- round in the history of sports.

  Back at nfl headquarters there were ten supervisors, each with

  his own blackboard with five to ten names on it, depending on how

  important the players were and how much effort the league was

  willing to go to sign them. They would keep a running tally of vital

  information about the guy next to his name: college major, parents’

  occupations, girlfriend’s name, address, and telephone number.

  It was ludicrous. Both sides were operating with code words

  and aliases on hotel registers and logistical planning that would

  have done honor to D- day. A kid sitting in a Dallas motel would

  suddenly hear the babysitter suggest a trip to Las Vegas, and they

  headed out to the airport just about the time the rival babysitter

  was within sight of the motel.

  Brandt delights in telling a special story about the nfl catch that

  got away. It was the night before Thanksgiving 1965, and Buddy

  Young and a babysitter- stockbroker named Wallace Reed drove to

  the Prairie View A&M campus northwest of Houston and picked

  up Otis Taylor, a great tight end that everybody wanted, and his

  buddy Seth Cartwright, a mediocre lineman that nobody wanted.

  Taylor insisted his friend come along.

  The inducement was a weekend in Dallas. As Brandt recalls they

  were stashed at the Holiday Inn off the North Central Express-

  way in suburban Richardson. Buddy left, leaving Reeves to sit out-

  side the front door while the two recruits inside were occupied by

  whatever the nfl had provided.

  Meanwhile, when calls to Taylor’s dorm room went unanswered,

  Klosterman called Taylor’s mother and said he feared that people

  unknown had kidnapped her child. Then he called Lloyd Wells,

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  a Chiefs operative who was close to the Taylor family and had known the player since junior high school.

  Reed, who had a little too much to drink that night, had fallen

  asleep outside the door in his chair. From the parking lot below

  Lloyd threw stones at Taylor’s window. When Taylor opened it,

  Lloyd shouted up to him, reminding him of their kinship in pur-

  suing women and the chance that Lloyd would lose his job if he

  couldn’t sign him. He also spoke seductively of a red Thunder-

  bird for which Taylor had expressed a desire.

  The pair climbed out of the window, Wells took them to Kan-

  sas City, and Taylor signed and drove home to Texas in a red

  Thunderbird.

  That same weekend Al Davis signed Fred Bil
etnikoff, a brilliant

  receiver at Florida State, immediately after the Gator Bowl. It was

  a scenario straight out of Groucho Marx. “I signed him,” Davis

  said, “while his mother and people from the Lions who had drafted

  him were on the sidelines screaming ‘Don’t sign, Fred, don’t sign.’”

  Best of all was the story related by Blackie Sherrod, sports edi-

  tor of the Dallas Morning News and the unofficial poet laureate of sportswriters in the Southwest. Blackie and his wife, Marilyn,

  were just sitting down to dinner in their apartment in Dallas’s Oak

  Cliff neighborhood when the doorbell rang. It was Klosterman.

  “I want you to see something,” he told them.

  So they went upstairs to a vacant apartment in the same building

  that just happened to be owned by Lamar Hunt. Junius Buchanan

  was sitting on the couch. He is six- foot- eight and weighs several

  tons more than a small freighter. After Junius drops all of him-

  self onto a couch, Lloyd’s of London would be reluctant to insure

  the upholstery.

  “He’s beautiful,” Klosterman said, “and he’s going to be all ours.”

  For three days Claire Klosterman cooked for him. She cooked

  everything in Buchanan’s apartment. Then she cooked all the food

  in the Sherrods’ apartment for him. Three days later he signed

  his contract, possibly because the Klostermans and the Sherrods

  were the only humans he had seen all week.

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  But perhaps the most interesting dialogue of all was between Lou Curl, one of Ralph Wilson’s insurance agents turned babysitter, and an Ohio State lineman named Birtho Arnold.

  “Mr. Arnold,” said Curl, who was five- foot- five and weighed 135

  pounds, “I’m with the Buffalo Bills.”

  “Christ,” gasped Arnold, who was six- foot- six and 310 pounds.

  “What position do you play?”

  Because of the undercurrent of mistrust among some of the nfl

  owners, Rozelle made it clear that each of his supervisors main-

  tain the secrecy of his “client’s” location as if he’d taken a blood

  oath. The routine they evolved was for an interested team to call

  the nfl switchboard, which, in turn, connected him to the proper

  supervisor. Once the call was cleared, the supervisor would have

  the switchboard patch the caller into the location where the pros-

  pect was stashed.

  “Thinking back on all this,” Rozelle told me, “it’s hard to keep

  from laughing. One day the supervisor got a call from the 49ers,

  and he patched him in to the Jack Tar Hotel where the kid was

  stashed. The 49ers’ office was in the same hotel. They could have

  simply taken the elevator to see him. But, of course, we never told

  them.”

  If there was a winner during this period, it was the players.

  Basically, the two leagues battled pretty much to a standoff in the

  matter of collegiate superstars, although the nfl did a little better

  in the matter of middle- echelon players. In truth it was not the

  battle of the babysitters that would change the thinking of either

  side. Other factors were coming into play.

  First came a deadly duo with the kind of hunger that would con-

  vince Rozelle that it was time to turn to diplomacy. Beating the

  afl over the head with the collective nfl wallet was beginning

  to leave his side’s wallet a little light. He never doubted the nfl

  could win that kind of battle, but everything he had experienced

  since he got into this league convinced Rozelle he could wind up

  with a devastatingly expensive pyrrhic victory.

  All through his career he had made it his business to know all

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  the significant players in the game he was working, whether it was the battle for media space at usf and Los Angeles, the support-ing cast in the Reeves- Paley feud, and key people in the afl. But

  suddenly, two new major players would emerge as point men for

  the rebels. In Sonny Werblin and Al Davis he faced two men no

  less determined and no less equipped for the battle than he was.

  Harry Wismer’s reach continually exceeded his grasp. If adjec-

  tives, boasts, and hot air were decisive weapons in the battle, Wis-

  mer would have won by technical knockout (tko) on the way into

  the ring. But they were nothing more than added burdens the

  afl could not endure. Typical of Harry’s operation was the day

  the towel man showed up after practice and told assistant coach

  George Sauer Jr. that if the Titans wanted to shower, they could

  roll in the grass to get dry.

  “Harry will take care of your problems. Just give us the towels.”

  “Sure,” Sauer was told. “Just give me the money.”

  Sauer paid out of his own pocket and was never reimbursed.

  The day after Thanksgiving 1963, with Wismer a million dol-

  lars in debt, the league kicked him out and put the franchise up

  for sale for the cost of its debts.

  A five- man syndicate headed by David “Sonny” Werblin bought

  the club in a bargain- basement deal not seen in the city since Peter

  Minuit paid what was to be twenty- four dollars for all of Manhat-

  tan, including the land on which the Titans’ home field, the Polo

  Grounds, ultimately stood.

  Werblin was coming from a milieu where financial hand- to-

  hand combat was a way of life and talk softly but carry a big stick

  was a hard- and- fast credo. He had been the president of the Music

  Corporation of America, a giant octopus of a monopoly that he

  had joined as an office boy. It was the most misnamed corporation

  in all of show business. It handled music, all right. It also covered

  actors, writers, directors, producers, film distributers, band lead-

  ers, booking agents, television sales, and so on, and on.

  This is the way Werblin explained his early show- business expe-

  rience to me the week he bought the club: “Julie Stein was the pres-

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  ident and I was out to impress him. He always started work at 8 in the morning and I would get there at 7:55 to impress him. When

  I did that he started arriving at 7:45 so I came in at 7:30. Then he

  came in at 7:15. Then he had called me over to demand why the

  pencils hadn’t been sharpened. They had been but he deliberately

  broke every point. Welcome to the world of show business.”

  Werblin was sent on the road as a band boy for Guy Lombardo

  and his Royal Canadians to get him the hell out of the office. He

  would make all the stops from band runner to agent to supersales-

  man to president. Among his better- known clients were Frank

  Sinatra and Ronald Reagan. He became the single most power-

  ful man in a business that thrived on power and devoured all but

  the strongest.

  Werblin was a devoted sports freak. He was president of Mon-

  mouth Park Race Track. He was the number- one booster of Rut-

  gers University football. And he was well aware that the Titans,

  whom he would rename the Jets, were scheduled to move into a

  brand- new stadium about to be built in Queens. With this back-

  ground he was
more than equipped to become a serious factor in

  the afl’s run to daylight.

  He proved it that very year. At mca he had become a close friend

  of Robert Sarnoff, the president of nbc, placing a number of shows

  on that network. Sarnoff’s relationship with Werblin undoubtedly

  had something to do with what I learned almost by accident. In the

  summer of 1963 I was in Paris and bumped into Ralph Wilson and

  Lamar Hunt, who were having dinner together. They were ecstatic.

  “You heard the news?” Wilson asked.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, we’re celebrating. cbs just signed a $28.2 million con-

  tract for a two- year deal with the nfl.”

  “And this helps your league how?”

  “You bet it does. nbc- tv has to stay in our game at just the

  right time.”

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  113

  “You’re a reporter,” Lamar said. “Figure it out and go ahead and report.”

  He was right. nbc came up with $36 million. Admittedly, it

  was spread over five years, but it was enough to become a critical

  factor, and it is a little- known fact that nbc then loaned various

  sums of money to different franchises to help them sign players.

  And then along came Al Davis.

  If Sonny was the point man to a new access to television board-

  rooms, Al Davis would add a set of much- needed brass knuckles

  on a very different level. You may recall the way he held off Fred

  Biletnikoff’s mother and several Detroit Lions executives at the

  Gator Bowl and successfully signed Lance Alworth when he was

  assistant at San Diego.

  That day he proved he totally understood how to deal with these

  college kids when he explained it was the bonus that made Alworth

  ignore his mother. He had been quoted as saying, “I asked him

  if he understood what he was signing and he said yes . . . yes but,

  of course, he didn’t. You put $5– 7,000 in front of them and that’s

  what they really wanted.”

  Davis knew recruiting; as an assistant at the military college the

  Citadel, in South Carolina, he had made that team better. How-

  ever, and the story may be apocryphal, he failed to explain to a cou-

  ple of recruits that, the Citadel being the Citadel, they would be

  required to play toy soldiers in the afternoon. The message from

  the commandant, General Mark Clark, about what it meant to