Rozelle

  money played a role in settling that dispute. Garvey would emerge

  as a favored son, and his connection with the winning side would

  take him overseas to run at least one international conference.

  His brilliant career in law school is still remembered with awe

  by many, and Nate Feinsinger, later professor emeritus at Wis-

  consin Law, once called him “wise beyond his years. He’s going

  to be a Congressman or a Senator one of these days.”

  On October 3, 1970, the Associated Press sports wire carried

  a brief article, announcing that quarterback Joe Kapp, who had

  Power to the Tackles

  185

  played out his option while leading the Vikings to the Super Bowl, had signed with the New England Patriots. Then, as the Pats went

  to camp, owner Billy Sullivan alerted Rozelle that Kapp was hav-

  ing some problems with what form the contract with the Pats

  should take. No big deal, he told Rozelle, “just a few problems.”

  The commissioner promised to look into it.

  “Sullivan called again,” Rozelle told me, “and said that Kapp’s

  financial advisers wanted to review the contract. I said fine. You

  can always make modifications. I didn’t believe he would throw

  away six hundred thousand dollars.”

  Finally, preseason camp opened and still no contract. I told Billy I

  couldn’t let Kapp go in. I mean, I was not going to let him into camp

  without a contract. If we permitted that, nobody would have a con-

  tract, and we would have chaos. Looking back now that it’s over, I

  still feel that way.

  Anyway, I later got another call from Sullivan. They were in camp

  and Kapp wanted me to talk to his lawyer, and I suggested he talk to

  one of ours because we weren’t getting anywhere. One last phone call,

  he hadn’t signed, and I told him Kapp was out. Nobody ever men-

  tioned this, but the collective bargaining agreement that the nflpa

  had signed clearly stated every player would sign a contract before

  preseason camp. And then Kapp went home.

  He sued, and before the Kapp affair ran its course, the own-

  ers, the players, and the American jurisprudence system were all

  going to have his name forever in their memories.

  Kapp went to court and claimed the contract was unconstitu-

  tional and in restraint of trade. He won a summary judgment after

  four years. But two years later (April 1, 1976) in the trial for dam-

  ages, the jury ruled he was not damaged.

  Nevertheless, the original verdict ultimately led the nfl to the

  wisdom of devising the rules on free agency and culminated in

  a multimillion- dollar settlement between the nfl and the nflpa.

  It was an enormous setback for the league, although Kapp never

  played another game. Now Rozelle and the league’s version of sta-

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  Power to the Tackles

  tus quo would be tested as never before. It took a long time for revisions, but it was the Kapp case that opened the door.

  “The Rozelle Rule,” the commissioner said to me one day and

  then shook his head. “God, how I hate that name. It was Kapp’s

  lawyer who hung it on the compensation clause, and I wish to hell

  he never had. It just put my name on something I didn’t decide all

  by myself in the first place.”

  Rozelle, as almost always, understood the wisdom of compro-

  mise. Not everyone agreed.

  Rosenbloom, for example, who would have blamed Rozelle for

  the French and Indian War if he could have, jumped on the Kapp

  case. “He should have let it slide,” he told me.

  He should have done what any smart businessman would have done.

  He should have looked the other way instead of jeopardizing our busi-

  ness over nothing. Hell, here was a guy who really didn’t want to play any more football, and in a year he would have been gone.

  All Rozelle had to do was nothing. Instead, he takes this guy who

  probably couldn’t have made any team a year later, hands him a suit,

  and now we have a hell of a lot of trouble. He relies too much on law-

  yers. When I want to do something in my business, I do it and then

  tell my lawyers to justify it. Instead, he asks his lawyer, who says nothing and then sends us a bill.

  When I told Rozelle what Rosenbloom had said, the commis-

  sioner seemed to struggle to straddle a fine line between anger

  and rage.

  Beautiful. “Let it go by.” That’s fine. But my contract says I must . . .

  not I should or I can . . . but must . . . enforce the league constitution.

  You will find a hell of a lot of owners who would have been more than

  a little upset if I had just “let it go by.”

  With no contract a player would not be subject to discipline. He

  could even have openly bet on games, and I couldn’t do a damned

  thing about it. My job— unless it changed five minutes ago— is to

  enforce the league constitution.

  Power to the Tackles

  187

  Meanwhile, Garvey was not idle. He would decry the merger between the nfl and afl, move the nflpa offices to Washington,

  and say: “I admit this was like buying a fire extinguisher after

  the Great Chicago Fire. We should have been there earlier. The

  merger that they slipped over on us never should have happened.

  “The old Association [pre- Garvey] didn’t fight it, didn’t lobby,

  didn’t use the players the way the nba did to block an nba- aba

  [American Basketball Association] merger. We got licked and we

  got hurt. It was a fact before I even got this job. We’ve had to work

  to put things together since.”

  Garvey unleashed a fusillade of legal actions. Complaint upon

  complaint were shoveled onto the agenda of the National Labor

  Relations Board by him. Mackey and a coterie of other players

  filed a class- action suit against Rozelle, the league, and the owners.

  Meanwhile, Garvey hit upon the one strategy never tried in

  professional football. It was brilliant. If Rozelle was the Big Bop-

  per of all previous negotiations, then, Garvey reasoned, the play-

  ers would not fight him. Instead, they would neutralize him.

  “Who is Pete Rozelle?” he demanded .

  Is he the neutral guardian of the sport as the public thinks and the owners would be pleased to have us all think? Or is he, as the players think, a man with quasi- governmental powers, who is the primary spokesman for the owners in their effort to preserves the present system?

  Look, we consider his whole function is to keep costs and salaries

  down. We consider that he cannot be a neutral arbiter. How can he

  mediate anything about player- owner relationships when he is part

  of ownership? Let him go down (to Washington) and speak on the

  tv blackout and other things that deal with the owners’ business. But

  don’t say he’s neutral and don’t say he can mediate labor- management

  debates because that doesn’t make sense.

  Suddenly, the shrewdest and most powerful man in sports was

  put on the defensive. It was a role that he was locked into by the

  very nature of the owners’ past history. But when I asked him

  about that, he came out swinging.

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  Power to the Tackles

  “The commissioner, in
my view, represents the players, the owners, and the fans. But when he doesn’t, then the unique self-government of sports will have had it.

  “If any one of the three groups doesn’t get a fair shake, then

  your self- government is in trouble. When they talk about the own-

  ers paying me,” he said with controlled but mounting anger, “then

  Garvey squawks, but that’s a crock. I wouldn’t care if the players

  paid part of my salary.

  “Listen, I have always demanded long contracts so that I can

  be free to do what I think is right. Everyone talks a lot about the-

  ory, but in practice, what happens?

  “I fine owners. I would say that about half of the player- owner

  disputes that I’ve settled have gone in favor of the players.”

  It was obvious that there was little affection between commis-

  sioner and labor union chief. Garvey once told Steve Guback of

  the Washington Star that “this is nothing against Rozelle but I find that as an attorney the whole struggle of civilization is to move

  away from arbitrary power invested in one man. No matter how

  good the man is, he still has his weak spots.”

  To the best of my knowledge, Rozelle never said publicly what

  he thought of Garvey or for that matter what he thought Garvey

  really wanted. Privately, in the commissioner’s view, he believed

  that Garvey wanted a world wherein the owners could make no

  moves without his permission. He believed that confrontation

  instead of negotiation would give him that. It was then that the

  owners finally took the bait.

  Garvey continued to hammer away at Rozelle publicly. He

  angered the owners when he publicly cited a Labor Relations Board

  case involving a taxi cab company in which the board ruled that

  by virtue of who paid his salary, the company’s dispatcher could

  not possibly be considered neutral. The board had ruled he was

  management and not impartial. “I consider Rozelle to be no more

  neutral than that taxi cab dispatcher,” Garvey said.

  Recalling that, Paul Tagliabue, then a senior legal counsel to

  Rozelle and later his successor as commissioner, told me:

  Power to the Tackles

  189

  Wellington [Mara] and Tex [Schramm] went crazy when they heard that and considered it a major insult to Pete’s integrity. They told

  Pete not to get involved, to stay out of the room and from now on

  they would take care of it.

  What they did was to create the nfl Management Council and

  after several false starts hired a man named Jack Donlan in 1980,

  whose career was built around negotiating opposite unions, trac-

  ing back to his prior employment at National Airlines. In the begin-

  ning its purpose was to protect Pete, but as years went by its purpose became to isolate him.

  It made sense in the beginning, and it worked in the beginning,

  but later on Tex and Tampa Bay owner Hugh Culverhouse felt Pete

  was too soft on the players. It created a split. So then instead of the management council being in place to protect him, they used it to

  exclude him. It led to two strikes; the second one in 1987 led to the

  use of replacement players— which Pete definitely did not want—

  fifty- seven lost games and what had seemed a good idea at the start

  turned into a tragic mistake. They felt he was too soft— too willing

  to make concessions— but actually Pete was still interested in solv-

  ing problems rather than confronting them.

  The power bloc among the owners clearly had a different agenda

  than the commissioner. The late Bob Oates of the LA Times, who had exceptional contacts around the league, explained the side-tracking of Rozelle like this in a 1987 column: “Donlan, the man

  who heads the Management Council’s negotiating team, gets his

  instructions in strike committee meetings or directly from Culver-

  house. Donlan is the extension of Culverhouse, who is the exten-

  sion of a majority of nfl owners. It was at an owners’ executive

  session that this year’s most radical policy measure was adopted.

  The proposal: Continue the regular season with nonunion players.”

  It was strategy to which Rozelle was fiercely opposed, but he was

  powerless under the authority granted the management council.

  History would prove Rozelle right. When Tagliabue succeeded

  him, one of his preconditions was that the owners agree he be

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  Power to the Tackles

  given full control over the management council. Without that he would not have accepted. “It was the first thing we did when I

  took over,” Tagliabue told me.

  There are still a lot of folks who truly believe the strikes of 1982

  and 1987 never would have happened and, certainly, there never

  would have been “replacement football” if Rozelle had not been

  pushed aside by the management council.

  Even before Donlan was hired, Rozelle had suspected that unlike

  the old civilian blood- and- thunder unions, “solidarity forever” was

  more rhetoric than belief among the majority of nflpa members

  with whom he wanted to be able to deal. A lot of them were look-

  ing for solutions other than a strike. Some of Garvey’s concepts

  were not necessarily theirs. As a case in point, he knew all about the

  “Anderson Letter.” In 1976 a new president, Dick Anderson of the

  Dolphins, released a letter he had written to all twenty- eight of his player reps in which he said: “I really believe that we will never be

  able to achieve an agreement that will be acceptable to Ed Garvey.

  He wants too many things that management will never give up.”

  Then Anderson made a courageous move. He met secretly with Dan

  Rooney of the Steelers management. The management council did

  not know. Garvey did not know. But one suspects that Rozelle, who

  had been legislated off the management council, had to know. He

  and Rooney and Rooney’s father, Art, were extremely close. And

  how else would Rozelle have been able to take advantage of the bitter

  union meeting that followed with a shrewd maneuver of his own?

  Anderson had authored a document that included a modified

  acceptance of the Rozelle Rule. But Anderson was no match for

  his union’s executive director. Garvey’s response was to tell the

  players that if they accepted a modified Rozelle Rule, they (read:

  the nflpa), could ultimately be sued along with the league by a

  disgruntled player. To prove that point, he brought in five law-

  yers to back him up.

  The meeting in Chicago lasted ten hours and produced the

  most bitter internal warfare the union had ever engaged in. Gar-

  vey shrewdly beat back the challenge by employing a parliamentary

  Power to the Tackles

  191

  maneuver that forestalled any vote, pending a future clarification of the legal aspects. He had won a stalemate.

  But at Super Bowl XI in January 1977, Rozelle took center stage

  in the debate by casually saying during his traditional mass press

  conference that the owners were highly receptive to any agreement

  that would yield some kind of assurance from the players about the

  college draft. Without the voice or lead of the management council,

  he had put a fertile ground for negotiation
on the table, knowing

  the nflpa membership would have professional reasons to accept.

  The very next day Garvey, battling to get back in control of

  his union, said the players would be agreeable, providing the legal

  hurdles could be worked out. Well, you can bet your Field Turf

  they were, because here was a pool of tough, young kids coming

  into their league with the express purpose of stealing some of the

  members’ jobs. Screw them. Let them deal with management any

  way management wanted.

  After Rozelle won that concession I asked him how it was legally

  possible for nfl owners to deal with a union to which the college

  kids had not yet joined to mutually decide their employment fate.

  “There is a legal precedent,” he said.

  “I find that hard to believe,” I told him.

  “Go check out the seamen’s union,” he said.

  And, holy anchors aweigh, the lion lay down with the lamb on

  this one, keeping Garvey solid with his members and Rozelle one

  jump ahead.

  But under the surface the war between management and labor

  continued to boil. Garvey knew his tenure was at stake. Things

  reached a disastrous turning point in 1982.

  All of the court cases seemed to be going the union’s way. The

  nlrb even ordered the league to pay back twenty thousand dollars

  in fines. But Garvey knew he was still in trouble. The players were

  winning court cases and losing their pension fund. The owners,

  bound by no contract, had simply stopped contributing to it and

  could not be legally forced to do so. Garvey had to do something.

  Despite the fact that he did not have an adequate strike fund

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  Power to the Tackles

  to back him up, he still went ahead and induced his members to strike. It was both a ferocious and a devastating battle that lasted

  fifty- seven days. Among the demands, the nflpa was seeking what

  proved to be a flawed wage scale based only on seniority and not

  position or achievement.

  To finance his hurting members Garvey scheduled a series of

  all- star games. They ought to be remembered as the Disaster

  Bowls. Only two were actually played, the first at rfk Stadium in

  Washington and the second in the Los Angeles Memorial Coli-

  seum. Garvey claimed an attendance of roughly 20,000 in each.