Rozelle

the block could do, and for a half I was pleased that they kept it close.

  But I did have a rooting interest that was strictly triggered by what

  I knew was in the future. I have to tell you that I was rooting hard

  for Green Bay in that first game. The reason was that I was think-

  ing about future tv contracts for the game. After all, it was a simul-

  cast, and I was more concerned about the future money that would

  be coming from cbs, since it had two of the next three.

  But I will tell you something that I never said before. Later on,

  when the Jets gave the afl its first victory in Super Bowl III, I was

  quietly rooting for them— hard. We really needed an afl victory to

  protect our product, and when the Jets gave it to us I was as relieved as I was happy.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  153

  Three years after that inaugural game in Los Angeles, the final bill of the merger came due. It was 1970, and under the terms of

  the agreement this was the year that the twenty- six franchises

  were to split into two conferences, with the winners meeting in

  the Super Bowl. When the process began they were no closer to

  that than they had been during their premerger vendetta.

  As Rozelle prepared for that realignment battle, it would have

  been more helpful had he brought along a Ouija board, a set of

  thumb screws, the collected works of Sigmund Freud, the UN

  charter, and the unabridged version of Mrs. Esther’s Never Fail

  Lucky Number Dream Book. It was going to be that kind of struggle.

  The tip- off should have come from the nfl’s interim restruc-

  turing plan. Working within the framework of the peace treaty’s

  three- year grace period, the old guard had to keep some frame-

  work alive so it could come up with a way to have a Super Bowl

  the first two years. The afl, of course, had remained intact over

  that span, and the nfl reorganized in what it knew would be a

  temporary alignment.

  It elected to go with four divisions, which it named Century,

  Coastal, Capitol, and Central. For the record, it was agreed that

  the Century and the Capitol would last one whole entire year,

  with New Orleans and New York then switching divisions. The

  Coastal was a handy traveling unit with two teams on each coast

  with a mere three thousand miles in between them for commut-

  ing purposes. The Central, well, the Central was a quartet of four

  cities born to host December football because all of them were

  without noticeable sunlight between Arbor Day and Christmas.

  Right away you knew the structure could not last.

  But the main thing it did was to provide something to keep the

  boat afloat until the Great Realignment Day was upon them three

  years later. Rozelle could and did do a lot of things, but freezing

  the calendar was not among them. As far back as the new nfl divi-

  sional debut, it was clear that not only was there trouble in Eden,

  but Rozelle had not given them a road map to find the joint.

  One of the most important things that marked Rozelle’s style

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  was his ability to avoid surprises, as explained by Ernie Accorsi, who worked for him and also later served as general manager of

  both the Browns and the Giants. “It was hard to surprise him

  because he was one of the best listeners I ever knew. What he’d

  do is go around the table and ask for opinions and thank us for

  them and then tell us what he was going to do. He was a quick

  study and a great listener.

  “With the owners, he would ask for straw votes and leave the

  room while they cast their temporary ballots. But friendly own-

  ers would tell him where everybody stood, and he was ready to

  come back and work the room.”

  It is clear, therefore, that as the calendar melted away, he knew

  that Wayne Valley, still in control of the Raiders, and the Jets’

  Werb lin felt they were winning— their opposition, the 49ers and

  the Giants, was awful. The Jets and Raiders were now stealing head-

  lines from their rivals. Valley believed the Bay Area was behind

  him. Werblin was sure Broadway Joe Namath would give Broad-

  way lock, stock, and barrel.

  Neither wanted to be merged, and they would be two of the

  main obstacles on the way to permanent realignment. In Octo-

  ber 1966 Valley confirmed that for me. We were sitting in his

  San Leandro office, and he spared no invective to explain that he

  and Sonny voted against the merger and had not been informed

  it was in the works (as Davis, now back with Oakland as a minor-

  ity owner, had not been), and both he and Werblin were enraged

  at having to pay reparations to a pair of franchises, to quote Val-

  ley, “whose asses we had kicked.”

  “Well, details seem to cloud a lot of afl positions about realign-

  ment. When I asked a variety of owners who they want to be

  grouped with in 1970 and how they expected to be treated, I got

  blank looks and mumbles in return.”

  Valley smiled and nodded. “If there hadn’t been a merger,” he

  said, carefully choosing his words, “there might have been a mur-

  der. We were at the stage where this could have been a bitter bat-

  tle.” (One shudders to think what he considered bitter if what had

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  155

  already happened did not qualify.) “In the long run we will all benefit. There are other things I better not say except for the fact that now that I have been merged, I expect to be treated accordingly

  by the commissioner and his group— and I better be.”

  “And do you think you will?”

  “I think there are still some honorable people left in this world,

  and if we are full partners, we must . . . we must . . . be treated on equal footing.”

  “But they can outvote you 2– 1.”

  “So you understand how I feel. They better understand as well.

  You come from the East. You know what a street fight is. In a street

  fight, I wouldn’t be afraid of 15– 9 odds against me [the way it was

  in 1966], but I don’t know what I’ll get here.”

  Clearly, by 1970 the Raiders and the Jets would not go into that

  last realignment meeting bearing the olive branch of peace, and

  if Rozelle permitted himself to think so, he might just wind up

  picking olive pits out of his forehead.

  Additionally, there was tremendous pressure (or at least as much

  as they dared to apply) coming at him from nbc. The structure of

  the existing telecasts locked nbc out of home bases in Los Angeles

  and Chicago. Moreover, within the afl- nbc structure, San Diego

  and Denver were not very lucrative markets. nbc was demanding

  a solution that fitted its obvious needs.

  To complicate an acceptable solution even further, the afl itself

  was split over its future identity. Lamar Hunt thought it would be

  nice to somehow retain the old gang’s identity. Virtually all of the

  rest of the rebel group wanted the other side to ship them three

  viable teams from the nfl social set.

  As for the old- guard nfl, it didn’t want to get, give, or get up

  off of anything. As always in a league- wide dif
ference of opinion,

  Rozelle cranked up his pr machine and took his case to a friendly

  audience. With the media in the room, he held a press conference

  in Dallas, a city with an old- guard franchise and the residential

  homes of Schramm and Hunt, his merger point men. “There are

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  certain areas of difficulty about switching leagues or conferences,”

  he said, leaving the assembled media to test the waters. “For exam-

  ple, would Cleveland with an 80,000- seat stadium want to play in

  the same division as Denver with far less seating?”

  And from the back of the room, in a voice calculated to shat-

  ter all the windows in the Dallas Mercantile Building, Art Mod-

  ell could be clearly heard saying, “Over my dead body.”

  They met twice and failed to make progress. Then it came

  down to May and the spring meeting in New York. Now the unre-

  solved makeup of the new realigned National Football League had

  dumped even more problems on Rozelle’s plate. The urgency of

  both television networks’ need to make plans, coupled with the

  need for a 1970 league schedule and the need for sanity, decided

  Rozelle. They would settle this thing now or pitch tents along the

  Hudson River and not leave until they did. Without a solution, he

  told his confidants, nobody was going anywhere.

  At the previous meeting in March they had battled, they had

  huffed, they had puffed, and nobody had achieved a damned thing.

  The truth of that matter and the mechanics of the solution had

  been put forth by, of all people, Al Davis. Then a minority part-

  ner but knowing he could eventually become the majority leader

  of the Raiders, Davis put aside rancor, profanity, and his man-

  in- black pose and turned to the reasoning power of a visual aid.

  Stepping to a blackboard, he wrote the names of all ten afl

  franchises on one side and all existing nfl franchises on the other.

  Then he drew a vertical line between them. Then he spoke. “If

  you take three teams from the right side and move them to join

  the ten teams on the left side, there is an excellent chance that you

  will wind up with two thirteen- team leagues. And if you don’t,

  what will I tell my little boy if he sees sixteen teams in one league

  and only ten in the other?”

  It was first grade arithmetic and the ultimate solution, but nobody

  on the right side was killed or herniated trying to drag his fran-

  chise over to the left. They adjourned to think it over.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  157

  “I was thinking when we adjourned,” Rozelle would later tell me, “that we had to find the least disruptive move. To me that

  meant St. Louis and two of our expansion franchises.

  “The reason it made sense to me was that the Cardinals had

  spent so much time in Chicago before their relocation that they

  no longer had a geographical rival. Moreover, Kansas City, which

  shared Missouri with them, would make for an excellent natural

  rivalry, much like Washington and Baltimore or New York and

  Philadelphia.”

  But that got nowhere and they adjourned until May, and the

  commissioner had determined that this would be the final hour of

  decision. They would not meet as expected in a conference room

  at their usual home- away- from- home New York base. They could

  check into the St. Regis Hotel as usual, but they would meet at

  the league’s Park Avenue offices. Those offices contained a lot

  of things, but they did not include superfluous items like beds.

  Rozelle was going to get a resolution by convincing them that

  sleep was overrated.

  “nbc was pressing furiously for a 13– 13 setup,” Wellington Mara

  told me later, “and I couldn’t blame them because they did have

  what at the time was a less attractive package. Personally, I didn’t

  know who was going to be willing to move.”

  That night, on the eve of the final session, an emotional blood-

  bath during which Rozelle would hold them there for thirty-

  five fours and forty- five minutes, Rozelle, Schramm, and Modell

  agreed to have dinner together. On the way to the restaurant,

  Modell told his two old friends, “In case you are interested, there’s

  something I want you to know I am considering. I would be will-

  ing to move the Browns to the afl under certain conditions,” I

  recall he told me.

  Pete’s reaction was negative. He wanted to move the Cardinals, and

  he was right because they had no traditional rivalry. But I had spoken to the Bidwill brothers [who then owned the team], and they made

  it clear they did not agree on the proposed move [actually on that or

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  anything else because later they dissolved their partnership]. So then I told Pete that if I did go, I had to go with the Steelers in my division. I’d want them because of our great rivalry, and I wanted Paul

  Brown in Cincinnati with his Bengals because the inter- Ohio rivalry

  made sense. “What about Rosenbloom?” Pete asked. “Don’t ask me.

  Who knows what he thinks?”

  The subject did not come up again at dinner,

  The next morning, just as it looked as though there may be some

  daylight here, Art Modell showered, shaved, dressed, came down

  to the St. Regis lobby, and collapsed. He was taken by ambulance

  to Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a

  bleeding ulcer. “I told Rooney that morning what Art had said,”

  Mara told me, “and he wondered what I would do, so I said it could

  work because we could always preserve the Giants- Browns rivalry,

  which was one of the best we had, with an annual preseason game,

  and he agreed. Then we heard about Art and drove up to the hos-

  pital with Art’s son Dan to see him. Our league meeting wasn’t

  until the afternoon.”

  “I know Rosenbloom likes to tell it differently, but this is exactly

  what happened,” Modell told me years later.

  I’m in bed propped up, with Wellington to my right and Art to my

  left, and I’m facing Dan. I told them that this issue had gone on far

  too long, and I wanted to stop it. If I can keep the Giants- Browns deal alive and you guarantee that the Steelers go with me, I will move.

  The two conditions are each of you must approve.

  I recall Danny interrupting and telling me, “Mr. Modell, the Pitts-

  burgh Steelers are going nowhere. We are staying in the National

  Conference, so you will have to get somebody else.” And then Rooney

  put his arm around his son’s shoulder and said, “Dan, you can do

  what you want, but I’m leaving with Art.” And then we all laughed.

  So Mara and the Rooneys left to attend the meeting, and imme-

  diately yet another problem arose. There would be debates. A third

  team had to be found, and each involved owner had to agree or

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  159

  disagree. Then the lawyers said, “No, you can’t tape another person’s voice. It has to be heard here.”

  And then Pete Rozelle came up with a solution. “We used to have

  this ancient squawk box,” he said, addressing his staf
f. “I think it

  will work. Go find it and get it here, and Art can listen and speak

  from his hospital telephone.

  “It was unbelievable,” Rozelle later told me.

  Here we are cutting a deal worth maybe a billion dollars over the

  years to come, and we are gathered around this silly- looking box,

  and over on the Upper East Side Art is gulping medicine and trying

  to listen and talk at the same time, and the damned box sounds like

  it has frogs living in it. It’s going “Beep . . . beep . . . beep.”

  And then someone says to ask him for the exact divisional lineup

  he would like. It sounded like this: “Beep . . . beep . . . Cincinnati . . .

  squawk . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep.”

  They finally got it figured out, and thus the Great 100- Yard

  Migration was accomplished not with a whimper, not with a bang,

  but with a beep . . . beep . . . beep and a round of applause for

  good old Arthur.

  “Rosenbloom made it three,” Modell says, “when he agreed to

  take his Baltimore Colts to the afl, but you know he did it for the

  money and not to save the league, as he sometimes said. You know

  the three teams would be paid.”

  All that remained was to sift through five different plans and set

  up the new divisions for the National Conference. Again Rozelle

  knew his people who were travel weary, half starving, and more

  than a little groggy. Rozelle placed five envelopes in a crystal

  bowl. “Here’s the deal,” the commissioner said. “Thelma, please.”

  Thelma Elkjer, Rozelle’s executive secretary for twenty years,

  stepped forward. She had been with Rozelle since his Rams days.

  She was the gatekeeper to his office, the companion of Pete’s daugh-

  ter, Anne Marie, even the keeper of the hat Reeves had told him

  to buy on his election as commissioner in deference to New York

  City fashions but which he had never worn. She fielded calls from

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  irate team owners, congressmen, and reporters. She even reminded him of dinner dates he may have forgotten.

  But now she was about to rewrite the geography of the National

  Football League. She picked out the envelope that became the new

  thirteen- team National Football Conference. Nobody applauded

  this end to the marathon session. What they did was head for the

  airport before they collapsed.