Rozelle

  Objective sources put the rfk attendance at 8,760 fans in Wash-

  ington and 5,331 in LA.

  Very few stars showed up to play in either. It was no surprise

  because there was no money for personal injury insurance. In that

  matter each player would be on his own. They knew the strike

  would ultimately end. They needed to be ambulatory when it did.

  Playing a football game without medical coverage was not calcu-

  lated to keep them that way.

  The “showcase” games were badly promoted and sold on the

  cheap to the Turner Network. Officials were recruited from high

  school and college football leagues.

  Garvey, a highly skilled labor lawyer, had reduced himself to

  the role of a sandlot football promoter. The strike ended with a

  player revolt against its own union. Garvey had no choice but to

  resign. The consequences of bargained- away leverage also set back

  player free agency.

  The final nfl work stoppage under Rozelle’s tenure occurred in

  1987. Rozelle, of course, was still barred from negotiations through

  his own management council, but this one had a profound impact

  on his sense of how the league’s business should be conducted.

  The strike in 1987 put tremendous pressure on him but not

  from the source you would expect. It came from his own manage-

  ment council. There had been a short period after Garvey’s “taxi

  Power to the Tackles

  193

  cab dispatcher” description when Rozelle felt the creation of the council was a good idea because it served to insulate him from the

  public perception that he could not be neutral.

  But the aggressive stance of the Schramm- Culverhouse faction

  was not meant to negotiate; it was meant to crush. And the most

  powerful owner in that strategy was Tampa Bay’s Hugh Culver-

  house. He had become a power in the management council dur-

  ing the 1982 strike and was so forceful now that nflpa president

  Gene Upshaw said that “at times, the whole league seemed to flow

  from this one guy.”

  Over Rozelle’s private but heated objection, the management

  council got approval to use replacement players once the nflpa

  players walked out in the second week of the season. Rozelle was

  incensed. From a public relations standpoint, the greatest pr man in

  the history of sports commissioners knew the three weeks of “scab

  football” would be a disaster. From a labor- management standpoint,

  however, the move eventually split the union. A large number of

  picketing veterans discarded their signs and joined their teams.

  The biggest defection was in Dallas, where Schramm, in a right- to-

  work state, wrote personal letters to Cowboys who had negotiated

  annuities with the team, warning them they might never get them.

  Rozelle held his public silence, but early during the negotiations

  Upshaw did not. Surprisingly, he told the media, “There is a ‘mys-

  tery person’ who could bring the strike to a quick end.” Shortly

  afterward, a union spokesman said that Upshaw had met with this

  “mystery person” in New York City. The “mystery man” was Pete

  Rozelle. The strike went on, but the reason for the meeting was

  for the union to try to bring the commissioner into the situation

  as a moderating force with the management council.

  That represented the polar opposite of the view Garvey had sold

  them in 1982. And Rozelle did manage to do one thing with that

  secret meeting. He brought both sides back into larger- scale bar-

  gaining talks. When the strike ended in major victory for man-

  agement, he did not gloat. Part of that was because it was not in

  his nature, and part of that rarely discussed was a symptom of his

  194

  Power to the Tackles

  subliminal anger at how the management council had emasculated his effectiveness in labor negotiations.

  He never forgot how some in the media had criticized him for not

  taking a more forceful role in negotiations without doing enough

  homework to understand why his own management council had

  isolated him from doing so. For the record, six years later in 1993,

  the nfl and the union concluded another negotiation that brought

  the players free agency and management a hard salary cap.

  Instead, he spoke of how the strike had damaged both sides and

  how a strike always does. Rozelle retired on November 5, 1989.

  Tagliabue, the new commissioner apparent, got the owners to

  approve a change that put him totally in charge of the manage-

  ment council in 1990. Without that agreement he would not have

  accepted the job. Jack Donlan resigned within a year.

  The terms of Donlan’s severance package were never clear. There

  were some in the league office who believe the reason for that was

  the fact that Hugh Culverhouse deliberately misled the bulk of the

  other owners on the numbers. For the record, Donlan’s manage-

  ment council severance after ten years with the league was actu-

  ally larger than Rozelle’s after twenty- nine. Later, Donlan served

  as a trustee of the Hugh Culverhouse Foundation. You may draw

  your own conclusion about the relationship between Dolan and

  one of the men who was supposed to have supervised his every

  move on behalf of the league.

  Meanwhile, Rozelle remained bitter over being pushed out of

  labor negotiations. Culverhouse and his group believed more and

  more in strong- arm tactics. Rozelle’s success in creating trust

  between union and negotiating team became an empty thought.

  He confided in Paul Tagliabue, who would eventually succeed

  him, that the owners had created the perfect mess. The lesson

  was not lost on Tagliabue, who when elected commissioner would

  demand full authority in labor negotiations and got it.

  Power to the Tackles

  195

  13

  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  “You know, commissioner, my mother was really down on you these past

  few weeks.”

  “Well, Joe, my mother wasn’t too thrilled with you either.”

  —Dialogue just before Joe Namath and Pete Rozelle announced the

  end of the Bachelors III dispute

  [The owners] don’t even understand what the hell you are doing— thank

  God.

  —Rozelle to nfl Films’ Steve Sabol

  It was 1969. It was the time of Vietnam. It was a time when the very

  soul of the country was torn apart, as it had not been for decades.

  In a real sense the unrest that shook American campuses and the

  tension between the country’s youth and its middle- aged, the emo-

  tional gaps between hard hats and radicals and between long hairs

  and crew cuts, were the unavoidable fallouts from what at the time

  was the most unpopular war in America’s history.

  Incredibly, the division even swirled around a controversy

  between the commissioner of professional football and the quar-

  terback who was fresh off engineering the Super Bowl upset that

  shocked both their worlds. The fact that a football player and the

  football establishment were caught in these emotions was more a

  comment on what p
rofessional football had become to too many

  Americans than what was, in reality, a commonsense business deci-

  sion. What made Pete Rozelle’s role even more difficult was the

  fact that “Joe Willie” Namath had come to mean all things to all

  men— and all women.

  196

  It is fair to say that as a youngster living in a family dealing with hard economic times and in a town of limited horizons, Namath

  was hardly the stereotypical boy next door. The real shaping of

  much of what he would become was done on the campus of the Uni-

  versity of Alabama under the influence of his coach, Paul Bryant.

  The football and leadership skills he learned there set the stage

  for what followed far beyond the football field once Sonny Werb-

  lin signed him for four hundred thousand dollars for the New

  York Jets. In the beginning it catapulted him into a lifestyle far

  beyond his maturity at the time.

  It has been said that his signing helped save the afl— and it did.

  It also was said by no less an authority than Vince Lombardi that

  stylistically, he was one of the greatest pure throwers of a football

  who ever played the game.

  There were the Manhattan bachelor pad, the items in the gos-

  sip columns, the groupies on the road and at home. Then he beat

  the Colts and the nfl old- guard establishment in the Super Bowl.

  A jock hero with long hair? Young America had fallen in love.

  At the same time, the echoes of discord rocked the country:

  Vietnam, campus riots, the Students for a Democratic Society and

  the Weathermen, hard hats marching down Wall Street singing

  “God Bless America,” the clubbing of America’s youth from Chi-

  cago’s Grant Park who protested outside the Democratic National

  Convention.

  All of this, light- years removed from the playing fields but part

  of the backdrop as the infamous Bachelors III Affair took shape.

  In the middle of the cross fire stood Pete Rozelle.

  Perhaps no issue moved him so often and so intensely as his belief

  in the need to keep the league’s integrity totally above reproach

  or innuendo. He was not some kind of Frank Merriwell at play in

  a field of dreams. His role was born of intelligent business deci-

  sions based on the shrewd knowledge that once a product like pro-

  fessional football loses its credibility, the entire structure would

  come tumbling down. Rozelle always saw his job as commissioner

  as central to that notion.

  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  197

  It was the rationale behind his Karras- Horning gambling probe.

  It was the reason he brought in Jim Hamilton, the LA supercop

  to set up his security program. It was the reason for his close ties

  to law enforcement agencies across the country. Next to the stan-

  dards Rozelle set for the league’s image, Caesar’s wife might as

  well have been an Eighth Avenue hooker.

  It began with a tip, typical of the many tips that find their way to

  the nfl offices just about every week. The word was that some law

  enforcement agency had put a tap on the pay telephones at Bache-

  lors III, an East Side Manhattan watering hole that Namath had an

  ownership piece of and which his nightly appearances had turned

  into one of the most popular singles joints in an area of the city

  famous for its boy- looks- for- girl- and- girl- looks- back nightspots.

  At the same time other rumbles began to drift into the league’s

  Park Avenue command post. As a case in point there were disqui-

  eting reports about the joint’s liquor license. Both Namath and

  his former Alabama teammate Ray Abruzzese each conceded he

  was not the principal owner, although theirs were the only names

  on the license.

  Now the league’s security people began to call in old favors and

  offer new ones to their contacts to find out exactly what the hell

  was going on here. The more they learned, the more acid inges-

  tion began to spread across their tummies.

  What they learned was that the joint had become a special gath-

  ering place for a large number of questionable characters. Among

  them was John William DiGiovanni, an ex- boxer, convicted bank

  robber, and much- sought- after bail jumper of whom the post office

  posters read: “Likely to be armed and extremely dangerous.”

  Other frequent attendees included Carmine Persico (alias Car-

  mine the Snake) and Thomas Mancuso (alias T- Balls), both of

  whom were said to be intimate members of the Colombo Cosa

  Nostra family. The lawmen also turned over the names of four

  other regulars who were hardly strangers to the fbi.

  The story began to leak out into the streets. The very week that

  the Pro Football Writers of America were to hold their annual din-

  198

  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  ner in New York, a former main- event boxer sat in another East Side place with a visiting nfl general manager and nearly knocked

  him off his seat when he told him, “They’re going to knock over

  your superstar’s joint, you know. If you don’t know it, you are the

  only one in this bar who doesn’t.” The reason it jolted the foot-

  ball guy so hard was that here was a total outsider who knew it.

  The standard nfl player contract gave the commissioner the

  responsibility of seeing that players do not patronize such places—

  let alone own them. Rozelle realized by then that the weight of

  evidence indicated that the moment of truth was fast approach-

  ing. He also knew Namath and the way he relished the role that

  hero worshippers had assigned him. He also knew, based on that,

  that there was no way he could anticipate the way the quarterback

  would react when the pressure was applied.

  But in truth it was Joe Willie who he felt was his biggest hurdle.

  He was deeply concerned that any illegal activity— if made public—

  would immediately catapult Namath’s name into the headlines.

  And it was even more of a real fear that too many of the wrong

  people in a place that would naturally be patronized by football

  players could turn it into a clearinghouse of casual but significant

  information for gamblers. Football players, like everyone else, have

  been known to talk too much when they drink.

  Rozelle made a brief but stunning statement. Joe Willie Namath

  would give up his ownership in Bachelors III or be suspended.

  Teammates would rally to the quarterback’s defense. “If it was

  that kind of place,” charged Gerry Philbin, the Jets’ all- pro defen-

  sive end, “then why wasn’t it off limits to us? I took my wife there.

  We could have been raided.”

  What Philbin had no way of knowing was that for months,

  Rozelle had desperately tried to induce Namath to sell the joint.

  First, he spoke directly to him, but that conversation achieved noth-

  ing. Then he prevailed upon Phil Iselin, the president of the team,

  and Arnold Grant, its treasurer, to intervene. Each had Namath’s

  respect, but again Namath declined.

  There followed several negotiating sessions with Mike Bite,

  Another Day, Another Dra
gon to Slay

  199

  the young Alabama lawyer who had handled Namath’s original Jets contract but who apparently did not handle the legal work

  for Bachelors III. Once again, the word came back that Namath

  would not sell.

  And then the suggestion became an edict. The commission-

  er’s security people had been fed the most disturbing leak of all.

  They were told that law enforcement people had enough evidence

  to strike at any moment against people using the telephones at

  Bachelors III for bookmaking purposes.

  Namath was totally innocent, but the mess that could follow such

  a situation could play hell with his image and that of the league.

  Rozelle was also informed by his people that the arrests could

  come in one of two ways. The joint itself would be raided, or the

  arrests would come elsewhere in the city, but the charges would

  cite illegal acts that took place in the bar owned by football’s most

  visible superstar. To make it even worse, Rozelle was told that a

  paid informer had been working in the bar for some time. All the

  ingredients for a scandal that would rock the nfl were in place.

  On June 6, 1969, Joe Willie Namath held a press conference.

  He wept unashamedly. He spoke about loyalty and friendship and

  being his own man. In his words, “rather than sell out, I will quit

  pro football forever.” He said this even after he had identified pho-

  tos of known criminals for the police, men known to patronize

  his bar. Yet within a month he traveled to Boston and announced

  plans to set up additional Bachelor III clubs and said, “I will con-

  tinue my interest in Bachelors III until somebody shows me where

  there is something wrong.”

  Exactly how much more he needed in the way of evidence puz-

  zled logical people. Rozelle never hesitated at this point. He did

  the smartest thing he could possibly do. He had offered a choice.

  The door was open, but there would be no more public statements.

  In his mind he had already decided that should Namath elect to

  sell, there would be no punishment or further embarrassment. A

  way would be found to give him the best of it publicly.

  Then from the West Coast came a familiar voice. It belonged

  200

  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  to Al Davis, and he was quoted copiously by the wire services and television commentators. Surely, somebody would be willing