Rozelle

  to help this fine young man . . . surely, somebody who was not a

  bureaucrat but a football man who understood football players.

  Yes, if asked to mediate, Al would pay any price and travel to any

  battlefield to save this young man for the game both he and the

  young man loved.

  Rozelle didn’t even bother to say thanks but no thanks. Does

  the keeper of the henhouse invite the fox in to do the census?

  The mail from the public was staggering in size— not only in

  the league office but in newspaper sports departments all over the

  country, the battle lines were clearly drawn. In their view Joe Wil-

  lie Namath was either a spoiled brat or a freedom fighter.

  And then, as quickly as it began, it ended. Namath held a joint

  press conference with the commissioner of football to announce

  his return from limbo. All of the previous week, Joe Willie had

  met with teammates in secret and had indicated that it would soon

  be settled.

  Rozelle’s handling of what followed was superb. To begin with,

  he stayed in the background and let Namath have center stage. It

  wasn’t easy. With a style and a charm and a soft Alabama accent

  by way of western Pennsylvania that had morphed into his verbal

  trademark, Namath said that “so much was written and so many

  people were involved that it just got out of hand.”

  He implied that mysterious forces such as the press, the mag-

  azines, and the commissioner’s office were responsible for the

  confusion. About one thing he was right. It had been blown out

  of proportion, and the kid with the bicycle pump who did it

  was Broadway Joe himself. It ended with the exact result that

  Rozelle had sought in the first place. But in between Joe Willie

  had behaved like an eighteen- month- old Onassis demanding a

  solid- gold pacifier.

  It was, indeed, Joe Willie who created the impression that he

  was fighting for the right of anyone who ever wore a jock strap

  to own his own bar. It made you wonder how all the teammates

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  201

  who bought that claim squared it with his announcement that he would sell the bar.

  In the end Rozelle— aware of the value of the man who brought

  the notion that the Super Bowl would now be competitive front

  and center— made Namath a winner by the way the surrender was

  orchestrated. Consider that the way it worked out, it must have

  taken more than a few mantras and some heavy breathing exercises

  to enable Rozelle to keep his temper as the only adult in the debate.

  He permitted Namath to recover gracefully after the boor-

  ish way in which he and his designated speakers handled their

  mess. For openers, he wanted the press conference on Friday, and

  that’s what he maneuvered. Understand that with no Internet back

  then and newspapers as the main source, the stories would run on

  Saturday— the day of the smallest paper of the week. For decades

  politicians had used that technique to underplay breaking stories.

  Tested as he was, Rozelle never lost his sense of humor. He

  could still laugh at himself, as witnessed by this anecdote he told

  me about one of those meetings with Namath:

  “He came to my apartment, and my teenaged daughter kept

  staring at him in a kind of awe, and I said, ‘Well, Anne Marie, I

  think you better go to your room.’ So we talked, but when it came

  time for him to leave, she rushed out and got close to him out and

  said, ‘I just want you to know, Mr. Namath, that not every Rozelle

  hates you.’

  “So much for parental discipline,” Pete recalled, and then he

  broke out laughing.

  Not everyone agreed with the pressure he put on Namath during

  negotiations. Steve Sabol, the president of nfl Films, stopped by

  his office one day when Pete was going through the mail his staff

  had scanned for him. “This is interesting,” he told Sabol, holding

  up the letter. All it had was one word on a blank page. The word

  was asshole. “People,” he said, “often forget to sign their names.

  Now, here’s a guy who signed his name but forgot to put in a letter.”

  In truth the battle of Bachelors III was easily settled with no

  major impact on the league itself. But a family feud that damn

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  near tore apart the league’s showcase franchises would require the intervention of Rozelle, the statesman, at his best.

  You cannot underestimate the importance of old Tim Mara, the

  bookmaker turned pro football pioneer who brought the game to

  New York in 1925 for a franchise fee of five hundred dollars. He

  didn’t understand football, but he understood New York City.

  “Hell,” he once said, “even an empty store in this town is worth

  five hundred dollars.”

  He called the team the New York Football Giants, and it became

  a linchpin for the nfl. Later, he passed it on to his two sons, Wel-

  lington and Jack. But he made a terrible mistake when he gave each

  of them 50 percent ownership.

  It would bring the franchise to the brink of implosion in the

  1970s. By then Jack had died, leaving his 50 percent to his widow

  and children. His son, Timothy J. Mara (Timmy), then became

  part owner. When the team’s performance plummeted as never

  before, Timmy challenged his uncle for control. Their feud grew

  so volatile that even the other owners took sides. Fan burned tick-

  ets in the parking lot.

  On November 19, 1978, with twenty- six seconds left and the

  Giants about to upset the Eagles, the fans’ disgust reached a white-

  hot zenith. Instead of falling down and killing the clock, Giants

  quarterback Joe Pisarcik tried to hand it off to Larry Csonka.

  There was a fumble on the exchange, and the Eagles’ Herman

  Edwards scooped up the ball and ran it in for a touchdown and

  Philadelphia won.

  It was the ultimate indignity for a furious constituency. On

  December 10 a small plane flew over Giants Stadium trailing a

  banner that read, “Fifteen years of lousy football.”

  The Mara family feud seemed to explode, capturing all the

  headlines and all the speculation in the newspaper columns. At

  season’s end both Tim and Wellington agreed on just one thing,

  the firing of head coach John McVay.

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  203

  Now there was no coach. There was no general manager. When Wellington announced that he alone would now hire a coach, all

  hell broke loose.

  Each contacted Rozelle, who suggested they hire Jan Van Duser,

  who worked in the league office, to be the gm. He immediately

  declined.

  “What I think happened,” Timmy later told me, “was that he

  worked in the city, and every day the newspapers were filled with

  the Giants’ mess, and he must have said, ‘The hell with this. I

  don’t need it.’”

  Timmy had his own version of what followed. So did Wellington.

  But this is what really happened, according to Rozelle. To under-

  stand what he did, you have to understand
that too many high-

  profile people, including former Giants, were voicing their opinions

  publicly. Rozelle understood that the league’s image was headed for

  hell in a handbasket if the prestige franchise went down the tubes.

  Art Modell, who had been Wellington’s close friend from the

  day he bought the Browns, told me at the time, “This is a disgrace.

  Who the hell does that kid [Tim] think he is? Did you know that

  under our bylaws we could break the deadlock by seizing the fran-

  chise? I’d be for that, and then I’d propose we sell it back to Wel-

  lington for a dollar.”

  It was becoming the kind of nightmare every league commis-

  sioner dreads. Rozelle called the old Notre Dame coach Ara Par-

  seghian and told him he could have the job if he wanted it. He

  declined in about ten seconds. It was now the end of January, and

  the Giants had become a late- night television joke. Without a

  coach or a gm, their organization lay dead in the water.

  Now Pete put his own underground network to work. Bobby

  Beathard, the Redskins’ gm, and Frank Gifford, Rozelle’s close

  friend, each recommended George Young, who worked for Don

  Shula in Miami.

  Rozelle called Tim and told him he needed five names but to

  make sure George Young was on his list, along with Frank Ryan,

  the former Browns quarterback who was the athletic director at

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  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  Yale. Then he told Wellington to make a list of five names, put George Young on it, and make him last choice. Rozelle knew that

  as long as each man felt Young was not the other guy’s choice, they

  would each pick him.

  They both pushed Young as the solution. That was on Friday.

  The following Wednesday Rozelle took them over to the Drake

  Hotel, where Young was waiting, and they interviewed him for

  two hours and then moved over to Rozelle’s office on Park Ave-

  nue. George wanted to fly back home and talk to his wife. Pete

  said no. He wanted it settled now. So Pete and Tim and Wel-

  lington were in one room crossing t’s and dotting i’s on a contract, and George was in another one on the phone with his wife.

  The two Maras showed the contract to Pete. It was for three

  years. Pete said the money just wasn’t good enough. He did not

  want to take a chance on another rejection. Now it was seven

  o’clock, and George finally said yes.

  Meanwhile, I was on the other side of Manhattan with a gaggle

  of reporters and columnists and photographers, who were advised

  to go to the second floor at Gallagher’s Restaurant and wait for

  somebody to announce that somebody was going to be named either

  coach or general manager or something, anything, of the Giants.

  Back at league headquarters the trio had just come out of the

  lobby elevator when Rozelle suddenly said, “Damn, I can’t believe

  this. Wait here.”

  In this, the most public relations— minded office in all of sports,

  nobody had written a press release and nobody had called the Asso-

  ciated Press. So there was Pete Rozelle in the darkened offices of

  his empire, sitting down to write the first press release he had writ-

  ten in roughly two decades. “I remember I looked up,” he told me,

  “and I thought, ‘I can’t believe this. Here I am doing this on Valen-

  tine’s Day, and it just also happens to be my wedding anniversary.’”

  And if you understand the intensity of anger a family feud can

  generate, then you are aware that he had just finished presiding

  successfully over negotiations worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

  It was typical of Rozelle’s style that he knew that by making each

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  205

  man think he was getting the better of the other that the problem would disappear. The operative word here was think.

  Frank Gifford put it better than anyone else. To understand this

  you begin with how close they were and the times Gifford saw

  someone try to change Rozelle’s mind— and fail. They shared seri-

  ous personal problems. They ultimately reached a point when there

  was very little each would not tell the other. Frank understood his

  style and, therefore, his power of persuasion. “His ability to ‘lis-

  ten on his feet’ gave him a tremendous edge. It was the key to his

  ability as a negotiator. Guys would come away saying, ‘Wow, that

  was a great conversation we had,’ and then they’d think, ‘What

  the hell did he say?’ and then they’d suddenly realize that they had

  walked out of the meeting with their pants around their ankles.

  “He could read people one- on- one or read the thrust of critical

  public opinion even as it was forming. His ability to put his fin-

  gers on an idea whose time had come was uncanny.”

  A classic example was his creation of nfl Properties. Originally

  formulated with all licensing fees designated to go to charity (it

  would and still does fund nfl Charities), it grew to the point where

  the owners could get revenues and still support worthy causes. But

  there was a time when such an idea was laughable— until Rozelle

  seized the opportunity and put it into practice. When I asked him

  about what triggered the notion, he explained that he had been

  disturbed for some time about what could happen to the league’s

  public image with the wrong commercial exposure. It had both-

  ered him for some time that as pro football’s popularity exploded,

  so did the efforts of what seemed like every manufacturer on the

  planet to create a product they could tie to the game.

  The league’s limited licensing procedures were left in the dust.

  “It occurred to me,” he explained one day, “that someday I would

  walk into a supermarket and see nfl toilet paper or into a drug-

  store and find an nfl jock- itch remedy. Enough was enough.”

  Back in 1963 nfl Properties was born. “Properties,” as it calls

  itself today, was so effective that today in Super Bowl host cit-

  ies, nfl “deputies” roam the streets (often with local police sup-

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  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  port) and confiscate nonlicensed nfl apparel with team names or league logos. They are policing what has grown into a billion-dollar licensing company here and abroad.

  Rozelle’s next move was the stepping- stone to the kind of national

  and international visibility that no other sport or business could

  even have imagined. A company named Telra had filmed the 1961

  nfl Championship Game between the Packers and the Giants for

  a rights fee of fifteen hundred dollars. There had been no other

  bidders.

  Down in Philadelphia the following spring, a man named Ed

  Sabol was mired in a career selling overcoats for his father- in- law.

  It was a job of virtually no appeal for a man who had once been in

  vaudeville and films and a play with a limited run on Broadway.

  Deep within each of us there is a Walter Mitty, yearning to break

  free. Most of us never hear his voice or listen to his voice. But Ed

  Sabol was not most of us. Sabol was forty- five years old, but roughly two decades earlier he
had received a Bell and Howell film camera as a wedding present from his mother- in- law. It was that same

  camera that would ultimately give life to Sabol’s dream. He had

  used it to film the boyhood of his son, Steve: the first haircut, the

  high school football practices, and family excursions in between.

  When Sabol read how little Telra had paid for the rights to the

  1961 game, he thought, “Hell, I can beat that,” which is why Thelma

  Elkjer, executive secretary to Pete Rozelle and official gatekeeper to the Rozelle appointment book, got the telephone call. “I had nothing to lose,” Sabol told me. “I called and said I wanted to make a bid for the film rights to the 1962 game. She told me to come on up.”

  Sabol went to lunch with Pete and offered more than double

  what Telra had paid. Logic dictated that Pete used the bid to get

  more from someone else rather than give what he considered the

  nfl showcase to a man whose portfolio was basically the kind of

  home movies that make visitors get down on their hands and knees

  and crawl out of the room once the lights go out.

  But he saw something in Sabol. It was something you couldn’t

  put your finger on, but the Rozelle instincts knew it was there. He

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  sold Sabol the game rights. The result was a film called Pro Football’s Longest Day. For the next two years. Sabol retained the rights to the title game. Then he came back to Rozelle with a proposal

  that the nfl form its own film company.

  When the owners agreed, he produced his first film for them.

  It was named They Call It Pro Football, and the press premiere was set for Toots Shor’s restaurant and saloon on West Fifty- First

  Street in Manhattan. The venue itself ensured an impressive and

  influential audience. For years it had been the magnet for every

  sports columnist in the Great Megalopolis. When the clock was

  ticking and you still needed a column, you went to Shor’s. Every-

  one from Joe DiMaggio to Alex Webster could happen to be there

  and solve your problem.

  Rozelle felt that Shor’s was the ideal place to showcase the new

  baby. At the time pro football trailed baseball and college foot-

  ball in the television ratings. Rozelle had seen the film, and he was

  impressed that the company he had put in business had made it

  without marching band music and with incredible use of montages

  that broke down the emotions of the crowd and the piece- by- piece