Rozelle

  be a cadet there and the heat Davis is alleged to have taken made

  it clear to Al that an assistant’s job at a military college was not a vehicle for him. He moved on to usc, and when that football program wound up on probation Davis was out of a job.

  His first pro football stop was San Diego under a man Rozelle

  once fired, Sid Gillman. Meanwhile, the once fratricide- bound

  multiplicity of Oakland owners had faded away. Of those remain-

  ing, level- headed businessman F. Wayne Valley was in charge. He

  jumped at the chance to hire Davis.

  Davis was a brilliant football mind, and he proved it. He could

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  coach and he could plan, and the Raiders became a power. Davis’s Brooklyn accent, his dark glasses, his slicked- back hair, and his

  design for the team’s new black and silver uniforms all spoke to

  a two- word résumé: street fighter— which was exactly what the

  whole damned league needed.

  Sonny Werblin had dominated show business through mca by

  the use of the star syndrome. Every top money earner in the mca

  stable was a star, one who had often been created by Sonny. The

  Jets moved to Shea Stadium in 1964 and on opening night drew

  an actual crowd of more than sixty thousand. Werblin sat in the

  owner’s box, pondering how to put an exciting face on his team,

  when the public address announcer did it for him.

  The Jets had a rookie linebacker named Wahoo McDaniel out

  of the University of Oklahoma. He was a Choctaw- Chickasaw

  Native American. Several times in the first quarter Werblin heard

  words booming over the pa system: “Tackle by Wahoo McDan-

  iel . . . Tackle by McDaniel . . . Tackle by Wahoo McDaniel.”

  Werblin raced down the aisle to the pa booth, hammered on

  the door, and hollered at the announcer, “From now on its just

  Wahoo and if he comes within 10 feet of the ball carrier, he gets

  credit for the tackle.”

  By the third quarter he would shout “Tackle by Who,” and the

  crowd would shout back, “Tackle by Wahoo.” Stardust had finally

  come to the American Football League.

  And on the other coast, Davis created a pr juggernaut. He was

  a great coach, whose posture as the league’s resident rogue came

  off as a kind of 100- yard Robin Hood who would steal from the

  nfl rich and give it to the afl poor.

  He was the league’s coach with charisma. Valley would call

  him “my genius.” Later, when Davis ousted him to win control of

  the team in a postmerger power struggle, Valley would call him

  something else.

  But now with Werblin an immediate threat to the Maras in the

  East and Davis an equal threat to the 49ers across the bay in San

  Francisco, the pressure mounted for either all- out victory or com-

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  115

  promise. That pressure began to show on Joe Foss, the war hero who had been chosen as afl commissioner from its very inception.

  I remember that when Foss was tapped for the new job, Harold

  Rosenthal, my colleague on the New York Herald Tribune at the

  time, had said to me: “Perfect choice. Absolutely no skeletons in

  his closet. The guy was the governor of South Dakota for crying

  out loud. Do you even know anybody else who lived there? And

  he won the Congressional Medal of Honor as a Marine pilot. He’s

  a general in the Air National Guard. Who the hell is gonna write

  anything negative about a guy like that?”

  Harold was right. But as time dragged on and the afl desper-

  ately needed to do better than just stay alive, some of the own-

  ers were beginning to think he was too mild mannered and not

  aggressive at all. In the spring of 1965, he set out to disprove that

  notion. He planned to deliver the league’s first expansion franchise.

  Ivan Allen, the mayor of Atlanta, had already brought the Braves

  to the city from Milwaukee, and he was pushing hard for a foot-

  ball franchise to share the newly built Fulton County Stadium

  A man named Leonard Reinsch, president of Cox Broadcasting

  Corporation, was coming to the afl league meeting in New Jer-

  sey with $7.3 million and tremendous newspaper backing, seek-

  ing an Atlanta afl franchise. Unfortunately, he forgot to lock up

  a stadium.

  A week before that meeting, Arthur Modell stopped by the nfl

  office in Manhattan to tell Rozelle about Reinsch’s mission. But

  not surprisingly, Rozelle already knew. Because he always studied

  the media, he knew that while Reinsch would seek a franchise in

  the name of the Cox Communications people, Cox had scrupu-

  lously stayed out of his two newspapers’ policies.

  Reinsch was coming on behalf of the Atlanta Constitution, but

  Rozelle knew that the sports editor of the Atlanta Journal would fight to convince his boss that the nfl was a better deal. Rozelle

  knew that Jess Outlar, the Journal’s sports editor, could be an ally.

  He told Modell what he wanted to do.

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  “What if I went down there and stole the city on the same day that the afl was meeting at Werblin’s racetrack?”

  “That would be dynamite,” Modell said. “But, Pete, what if you

  go down there and don’t get the city and the story appears in the

  media? Think of how bad we’ll look.”

  “He was right, of course,” Rozelle later told me,

  and I had to consider that. But I knew what a propaganda coup it

  would be for us if somehow we did lock up Atlanta.

  So I went down there and toured the stadium on the same morn-

  ing that the afl was meeting in New Jersey. I told the stadium author-

  ity people that I couldn’t give them a definite yes but I felt they had a real shot. I pointed out that the afl would still be there as an insurance policy. I suggested to Mayor Allen that he not sign a stadium

  lease with anybody until we held our own league meeting.

  He agreed so quickly I knew we had them.

  That agreement to delay was the death knell for the Reinsch

  group. It may be said with a certainty that a funny thing happened

  to afl commissioner Joe Foss that day. Somewhere between the

  conference room and the men’s room, he lost the city of Atlanta.

  He also lost his job. That wasn’t official until April of the fol-

  lowing year, when his written resignation was spiked with a defense

  of his tenure: “The league has come to the stage where problems

  are fewer and the owners have more time to get into mischief. . . .

  I have never been a dancing bear for the owners, and never could

  be. This is the time for me to leave.”

  I also remember something he said to me when I called him that

  day. He had always felt the big- city nfl writers were against him.

  He was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner and a war hero

  and the former governor of South Dakota, but I always believed

  he carried within him the doubts and sensitivity of a country boy

  dropped into the big city.

  He confirmed that for me when he said, “Well, the New York

  media got what it wanted.” He felt we didn’t understand him when

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  in fact it was probably the other way around. We were not after him. We were after the kind of insight that an elusive commissioner could not provide.

  His departure came in the spring of 1966, just two months

  before the two leagues merged. Davis was unanimously chosen

  as the new afl commissioner the very next day. And he, every bit

  as much as Rozelle, became the reason the two leagues merged.

  What had been a chess matchup until then immediately morphed

  into a dog fight, with the new afl field general unleashing a pit-

  bull strategy of attack, attack, attack. Looking back, without him,

  there would never have been a merger.

  With that in mind, it is worth backing away for a moment and

  taking a fresh look at the new heavyweight contender. Al Davis

  knew when he took the job that there was no shortage of trou-

  ble among his own people. One of his first official acts as com-

  missioner, much to the delight of the media, was to break up a

  rolling, squirming attempt at a fistfight between Oilers presi-

  dent Bud Adams and a sportswriter named Jack Gallagher on

  the floor of the Shamrock Hilton. The Houston Post carried shots of the tangled combatants across seven columns on the front

  page.

  Davis had always held pr folk in disdain, but the demeaning

  spectacle of one of his owners rolling on the ground with a writer

  was the last straw. Davis did not come to this job without a lit-

  tle serious study about the other army’s general. It was his the-

  ory that Pete Rozelle’s greatest single strength lay more in his pr

  ability than his football expertise. He respected that talent, but

  it did not enter his mind for a single minute that given the war

  chest and the support, his own particular natural talent was more

  suited to the battle.

  To cut into Rozelle’s enormous media advantage, he had already

  begun to hire a staff of experts. As Rozelle had done when he

  organized his first office, Davis immediately hired three men

  with public relations or newspaper experience. From the sports

  information office at Syracuse, his alma mater, he got Val Pinch-

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  beck, who had helped make Floyd Little an All- America. From the Angels’ pr department (Davis was a fanatical baseball fan)

  came Irv Kaze, a well- liked and experienced pr guy in sports

  and television. And from the ludicrous fistfight he had halted he

  decided to seek out the Houston Post’s popular columnist Mickey Herskowitz, who said:

  The way it happened with me goes back to that mess with Gallagher

  and Adams. He called me at home that night and asked me how he

  should handle it. I told him to forget it. That it was already going to be in the papers the next morning and that anything he would do would

  keep it alive unless he let it die a natural death. Then he thanked me and told me I would be hearing again from him soon, which I interpreted to mean absolutely nothing.

  Then he called me back in a few days and laid it out for me. He said

  there would be management opportunities for me if things worked

  out because he indicated he planned to go back to Los Angeles with

  a new team to fill the void the Chargers had left when they moved to

  San Diego. He mentioned New Orleans, which was still without pro

  football, as a possible expansion franchise and even Chicago, where

  he thought the afl could go head- to- head with George Halas.

  I had only met Al once at an Astros game when a pitcher named

  Don McMahon, who had gone to high school with Davis, introduced

  me to him. Davis was with the Chargers then and he had always been

  paranoiac about writers, but I assumed he thought I was a writer that

  his old friend trusted.

  Actually, that probably was all he knew about me. But he calls that

  second time and offers me a job. I was then the sports editor of the

  Post, and I was twenty- six years old and knew I couldn’t go any higher because it was a family paper, so I asked for a week to think it over and he said, “Absolutely not. Have your answer when I call tomorrow.”

  So he did and I said I was coming, and then there was a long pause

  and I thought he was having buyers’ remorse, sort of like a guy who

  chases a broad, gets her consent, and then isn’t sure he did the right thing. The pause seemed to last forever, and then he suddenly asked,

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  119

  “Can you name the offensive line of the Denver Broncos?” and I said,

  “Can anybody? I’ll look it up if you want,” and then he said, “All right.

  Be in New York in two weeks.”

  Davis was like a heavyweight contender who finally got his title

  fight. In his first season as a head coach (1963) he had turned the

  Oakland Raiders, once the joke of the league, into the talk of the

  afl and, in fact, all of football. His roster was a blend of over-

  looked veterans, a few future superstars, and players who were

  developed by him. He was the afl Coach of the Year that sea-

  son. Nobody ever dared to doubt that Al Davis had a brilliant

  football mind.

  He was the perfect candidate to run the afl’s battle for sur-

  vival. In truth the media, in general, did not feel this would be

  an even battle.

  He was going to wage war against the most talented mind in the

  history of all sports administration. And make no mistake about

  it, he wanted this fight the way Frazier yearned for Ali. The anal-

  ogy is not misplaced. Looking back, it can be said that inside the

  ring, those two made each other better than they had ever been

  and ever would be again.

  It would be much the same with Davis and Rozelle. For his part

  Davis was absolutely convinced he would win. And he was, indeed,

  an imposing adversary who relished the role of the guy with the

  black ten- gallon hat.

  His Brooklyn accent— he called his team the “Raiduhs”— his

  slicked- back hair, sunglasses. Years before we had a Darth Vader,

  we had Al Davis. As a case in point, there is the oft- repeated but

  possibly apocryphal story about the time John Robinson, the head

  coach at usc and a friend of Davis, invited him to watch the Tro-

  jans practice.

  Afterward, he is supposed to have told Robinson, “John, see

  that apartment house over there? Anybody with binoculars could

  get up on one of the high floors and film your whole practice.”

  “Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

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  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  “Sometimes in this business a little paranoia is a good thing.”

  Clearly, he was ready.

  And it was a damned good thing, because on the day he was

  introduced at the plush Plaza Hotel as the new afl commissioner,

  the nfl was meeting in Washington. Even the nfl owners did

  not realize that their own commissioner was about to up the ante.

  When they finally settled in, Rozelle stepped to the rostrum and

  in a well- modulated voice announced that the Giants had signed

  a new placekicker and he had approved the signing. The player’s

  name was Pete Gogolak.

  And then all hell broke loose because Gogolak was on the ros-


  ter of the afl Buffalo Bills. He had been the first placekicker in

  a decade or two to draw the attention he drew years earlier as an

  undergraduate at Cornell. He was the first of the soccer- style side-

  wheeling placekickers. He lined up as though he were facing the

  stadium comfort station but kicked the ball straight through the

  uprights from incredible distances with incredible accuracy. He

  also kicked it so far that opening- game kickoffs became a social

  event for Cornell students.

  When he joined the Bills, he was the most exciting new weapon

  in all of professional football. He demanded more money, couldn’t

  get it, and played out his option year. Now he was a free agent and

  willing to jump leagues for the right price.

  Bitter as this war was, nothing like this had ever happened.

  Gogolak got himself an agent named Fred Corcoran, who had

  handled Ted Williams’s affairs and was better known for his work

  with professional golfers.

  Then Gogolak and Corcoran hired a lawyer named Michael

  Mooney. They contacted the New York Giants and told them

  that Gogolak was a free agent and willing to become the first afl

  player in history to jump to the nfl.

  The instant Rozelle announced to assembled owners that he

  had approve the signing, the joint sounded like the Tower of Babel

  construction crew on a very bad day.

  Just before Rozelle made his announcement, Vince Lombardi

  Sex, Lies, and Bringing Up Baby

  121

  leaned over and whispered to Art Modell, “Arthur, I’m afraid one of my oldest friends has done something that’s going to cause all

  of us a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  Modell thought the whisper had come from Lou Spadia of the

  49ers on his other side and said, “Who, Lou?” But Rozelle imme-

  diately turned the floor over to Mara, who was speaking about the

  terms. There was no bonus, and nobody will ever know the rest

  because Lombardi was on his feet, shrieking at his old Fordham

  classmate. He was so loud it’s a wonder he didn’t peel the paint off

  the walls. Maybe he did, but nobody could have seen it because

  they were all yelling at once.

  “I tried to tell them,” Rozelle explained. “I had discussed this

  with Manny Celler [the Brooklyn congressman who had been

  helpful with congressional approval for the nfl’s single- network

  television policy], and he agreed that when a player finishes his