Rozelle

  Then, he says, Rozelle, a chain smoker, took a long, slow drag on

  his cigarette, blew out a column of smoke, and replied, “Because,

  Joe, in some circles, some folks are said to believe that Donald

  Trump is a liar.”

  When I told that to Moyer, he said that was as close as he came

  during this incredibly stressful time to voicing an opinion about

  what he felt. “Through the litigation,” Moyer continued, “I never

  saw him take a vindictive attitude. He put on a brave face, but you

  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  247

  could tell he honestly felt he didn’t deserve all that Myerson put him through.”

  What eventually blunted Trump’s testimony once Rozelle got

  on the stand was Trump’s determination to slough off facts and,

  instead, interpret how he interpreted other people’s thoughts

  because of his own intellect and business acumen. Rothman offered

  repeated objections that were often sustained.

  He became particularly vulnerable when he explained what

  he insisted were Rozelle’s attempts to buy him off with a merger.

  During Rozelle’s subsequent testimony (this time as an nfl wit-

  ness), Trump’s version of the circumstances and the content of his

  one- on- one meeting with the commissioner in the Hotel Pierre

  were held to fire.

  Trump had testified that Rozelle had told him he would never

  get a fall television contract because he controlled the networks:

  rothman: Commissioner, did that conversation take place in the

  lobby of a public hotel (as Trump claimed)?

  rozelle: That’s preposterous it never took place in a hotel lobby

  or a hotel ballroom.

  rothman: Did it take place anywhere?

  rozelle: No.

  rothm an: (reads from record that Trump said he and Rozelle

  were good friends in 1981 and 1982 before Trump bought the

  Generals)

  rozelle: No, he wasn’t a friend.

  rothman: (reads from record where Trump said they had multi-

  ple conversations during that time before March of 1984)

  rozelle : Never. I did not. The only times I spoke with him

  were . . . a couple of charity affairs and then all I would say was hello.

  rothman: (continued to read from the record that Trump testi-

  fied at that meeting at The Pierre hotel Rozelle had offered him

  an nfl franchise)

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  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  rozelle: I certainly did not. That would call for 21 (owners) votes.

  I did not offer it, suggest it or encourage him.

  Among other parts of the Trump testimony that Rozelle denied

  was Trump’s assertion that Rozelle had called him to set up the

  meeting at the Pierre. It was Trump who called him, and ulti-

  mately Rozelle was not in the office at the time. He ultimately

  called Trump back, and Trump set up the meeting, renting a suite

  at the Pierre.

  When Trump said he wanted a franchise, Rozelle testified that

  he asked him what he would do with the Generals if he managed

  to get one. Rozelle said Trump told him he would “sell them to

  some stiff.”

  When Rozelle left the stand the figurative scoreboard now

  seemed to read: Myerson, 1; Rothman, 1.

  “I think after Pete’s testimony rebutting so much of what Trump

  claimed,” Moyer says, “and the way Pete rebutted it when Frank

  put him back on the stand, Trump sort of became a symbol of

  everything negative about the usfl.”

  All along, Rothman had been waiting to cross- examine the next

  witness. Howard Cosell claimed he was striking a blow for New

  York City and for free enterprise because the Giants and Jets had

  been stolen away by New Jersey. He was vociferous in self- praise

  as the self- anointed warrior destined to crush the nfl’s profes-

  sional football monopoly.

  He was also the same Howard Cosell who loved the sound of

  his own voice so passionately he never seemed to know when it

  was time to shut up. The world casually sensed that was happen-

  ing more and more with the retired broadcaster.

  And Frank Rothman was counting on it. Rothman’s plan was

  brilliant. While Myerson’s dramatic rhetoric, accusatory stares,

  and bombast scored early points, in the end it was Rothman’s

  velvet stiletto that made the difference. Myerson devoted every

  breath in his body and every question he asked to hitting a grand-

  slam home run.

  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  249

  Rothman, on the other hand, turned to the oldest of boxing maxims, and it brought him the knockout. Trainers put it like this:

  “Kill the body and the head will die.”

  And if Trump and Cosell had been boxers, they would have left

  the ring on wobbly legs. First, Rothman used Rozelle’s role as an

  nfl witness to counterpunch to hit the body of Trump’s testimony.

  Then he used a vocal rope- a- dope to keep Howard talking, and

  the more Howard talked under Rothman’s seemingly gentle prod-

  ding, the more Howard blew himself out of the fight.

  “With Trump,” Shep Goldfein said, “you got the feeling that his

  impatience brought an enterprise down that might have succeeded

  in the spring as most of the owners wanted. He came across as a

  kind of impatient megalomaniac. And with Cosell, well, Frank just

  let him keep talking because he looked (and sounded) as though

  he made absolutely no sense.”

  Cosell’s testimony degenerated into a side show once Rothman

  began to cross- examine him. He lectured the jury on the history

  of pro football in stentorian tones that were more arrogant than

  informative. Rothman gave him his head and let him take it all

  where Rothman wanted it to go.

  rothman: Mr. Cosell, if I ask you a question you don’t under-

  stand, you stop me, okay?

  cosell: If you ask me a question I don’t understand, you’ll have

  the biggest story of the century.

  During one such dialogue, Cosell rambled on and on and on.

  Then he paused, and Rothman innocently asked, “Is it my turn

  now?”

  Cosell was a counterpuncher like Rothman’s ideal target.

  rothman: Have you not indicated that the three great men of

  American television journalism would be Walter Cronkite for news,

  Johnny Carson for entertainment and Howard Cosell for sports?

  cosell: Words spoken with an obvious jocularity sometime con-

  tain total truth, sir and that happens to be so in this case.

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  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  Arrogance may have helped Cosell feed his ego, but beyond entertainment it did not help get the usfl message across to the jury.

  rothm a n: Mr. Cosell, what I am trying to understand is how

  did they deter you when they let you (here Cosell interrupts and

  Rothman has to raise his voice) . . . I didn’t finish the question, sir.

  cosell: I am sorry if you have difficulty with your interroga-

  tion, sir.

  rothman: I do have difficulty in being interrupted. I will ask

  the question and only the judge will tell me when I do it wrong,

  not you, sir.

  The more Cosell obf
uscated, the closer Cosell came to com-

  mitting witness hari- kari. His arrogance overrode his expertise.

  rothman: Let me see if I understand that, Mr. Cosell.

  cosell: I can’t understand your inability to understand.

  rothman: I am not as smart as you are, sir.

  cosell: Well, we have learned that long ago.

  rothman: Are you through?

  cosell: Apparently you are groping for thought.

  rothman: I have a degree of civility and I am going to use it.

  cosell: Frank, you used to be my lawyer and I am sure you will

  use it.

  rothman: And I had trouble with you then, too.

  Cosell had come to testify with a battle plan. He had already

  retired at abc. But Howard needed a stage, and this would be it—

  he thought. He would be the centerpiece that would topple Rozelle.

  When the Giants moved to New Jersey, Howard had railed against

  them and the commissioner who helped authorize it. He was “the

  Cosell,” and he would put the nfl and its boss in their place now.

  Now he, alone in his brilliance, would square all debts with the

  league. This, he believed, would be the valedictory that would

  remind the sports world he was always right. But instead of How-

  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  251

  ard as a superhero, his appearance played out as a requiem for Howard as Pagliacci.

  When he left the stand, Cosell walked past the defense table,

  turned, and said to Rothman, “How could you do that to me? I

  thought you were my friend.” He never considered the possibility

  that he had done it to himself.

  Soon after that, with all the testimony and both lawyers’ clos-

  ing statements a part of history, there was nothing to do but wait.

  “We did what we always did during the trial. We left our tem-

  porary office and walked the two blocks to the courthouse as we

  did each time the jurors’ lunch break was over. I don’t recall who

  was with me,” Joe Browne says.

  Further uptown, Rozelle was having lunch with Val Pinchbeck,

  his television guy. When he was told the jury was back, they headed

  down toward the courthouse.

  Meanwhile, out in Kirtland, Ohio, at the Browns’ preseason

  camp, Art Modell was telling Ernie Accorsi, his general man-

  ager, “Well, Rothman did all he could, but if we lose anything

  like the $1.7 billion they are asking for, well, Ernie, I could be

  out of business.”

  And then the jury was back, and the foreperson, a woman named

  Patricia McCabe, began to read the verdict. The verdict sheet from

  which she read was unusually long because there were so many

  charges. It took perhaps four or five minutes to get through it.

  Rarely have so many people gone from so many lows to so many

  highs in a span of just three hundred seconds. The first thing she

  read was guilty on the charge of antitrust violation.

  Out in Kirtland Kevin Byrne, the Browns’ communications

  director, was walking slowly toward Modell and Accorsi. His head

  was down. He was perhaps thirty feet away when Modell said,

  “Oh, my God, we lost.”

  Back in New York, after finishing lunch with Rozelle, Pinch-

  beck had turned the car radio to wins, an all- news station, and the

  announcer was saying: “This just in. The jury has just found the

  nfl guilty.” Rozelle had no desire to walk into that courtroom. He

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  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  told Pinchbeck to turn the car around and head back to the office.

  “I remember,” Shep Goldfein recalled, “that Donald Trump

  was standing in the back of the courtroom with his arms folded.”

  Modell ran into the Browns’ trailer and called New York. Joe

  Browne was on the phone with Rozelle. McCabe was still read-

  ing. And then all hell broke loose.

  Out in Ohio Modell dropped the telephone and began to laugh

  hysterically. Browne, who was on the phone to Rozelle, almost

  shouted, “Wait . . . wait . . . wait a minute . . . the damages are a

  dollar. The punitive damages triple it. The judge says with inter-

  est that comes to $3.76.” Rozelle told Pinchbeck to turn the car

  back around and head toward the courthouse— again.

  On the telephone again Modell said to Rothman, “As soon as

  Pete signs the check, I want to be the one who personally deliv-

  ers it to Trump.” Goldfein, stunned by the strange verdict, told

  Rothman, “I can’t believe we lost,” and Rothman answered, “Don’t

  ever say that again. The only thing we lost was that the nfl has

  to pay their legal fees. We didn’t lose. We won.”

  Now Rozelle was on the courthouse steps, and he kissed Roth-

  man right there. Inside the court, meanwhile, Goldfein looked

  toward the back of the courtroom. Trump was gone. For Rozelle,

  it was a time for celebration. He had no way of knowing that it

  would be perilously close to serving as a last hurrah.

  Never Take a Knife to a Gunfight

  253

  17

  The Final Battles

  It was the day before the Super Bowl in Miami, and Hugh Culverhouse and I were supposed to wrap up the new free- agent deal, so we went to Pete’s suite at 8:30 in the morning. He opened the door, and he was white as a ghost. Tears were streaming down his face. He said, “I can’t talk now. My stepson is dead.”

  —Gene Upshaw on Pete Rozelle’s very private trauma

  I thought, as a young woman who lived in the city would, that he was great and charming, and yet with all the pressure of the league and raising his daughter by himself, he just might be desperately alone in New York City.

  —Blair Sabol on the Pete Rozelle people never saw

  For almost three decades he had been all things to all men . . .

  a statesman holding his ground among the partisans— far more

  leader than czar. Rozelle fought the battles in the boardroom, in

  the media, and in the courtrooms. And you could see the physical

  marks of the toll it was taking. “I would be part of some special

  meetings in the league office usually around 9 a.m.,” recalled Gil

  Brandt, who was one of the point men in the babysitting opera-

  tions of the nfl- afl war and whose scouting knowledge still kept

  him in the loop, “and he’d come bouncing in tanned and ready to

  listen and act and take on the world.

  “But in the end the spring was gone from his step, and the tan

  was less noticeable, and, looking back, I realize now how much

  those battles had aged him.”

  “You could almost feel some of the air going out of him by this

  time,” Paul Tagliabue recalled.

  254

  He had to cope with so much. I think it started with the Davis move to Los Angeles with those two trials and a huge verdict against us

  at the end.

  Then Robert Irsay moves the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle

  of the night, and because of the Davis trials, Pete couldn’t do anything about it. There were the two player strikes . . . the first the battle with Garvey and the second strike when the management council forced

  the replacement games on him against his intense objections, and,

  again, he had no authority to countermand them. There was the usfl

  trial and the horrible shock of his steps
on’s death in 1989 on the eve of the Super Bowl.

  There were so many things that he just couldn’t come to grips

  with the way they kept happening. Two pictures of him on my wall

  come to mind— one with me and one with George Halas. In those

  pictures, his usual tan is gone. He has bags under each eye. He looks

  like a guy who hasn’t slept for two weeks. They are a reminder to me

  of how many battles he had to fight.

  He was in California testifying off and on for a year and a half in

  the first Al Davis case, and the judge declared a mistrial. There was

  another trial, and then he was in Washington trying to get legisla-

  tion passed. Then there was the usfl trial when he came under per-

  sonal attack.

  You would have thought that somehow, after all the years in

  which he had brought order out of chaos among feuding owners

  and replaced their self- centered passion with his logical reason-

  ing, the post- usfl trial years would have been a walk in the park.

  As far back as 1970 he engineered a plan in which his league

  had stolen Monday nights from America’s living rooms, saloons,

  and pta meetings. Just as he had handled the Great Super Bowl

  Mystery (Who got to televise the first one? “Hell, I’ll sell it to

  both football networks”), he set out to merchandize a new football

  night in America. Rebuffed by nbc and cbs, which did not want

  to give up their prime- time shows, he muscled abc by threatening

  to move the whole deal to the emerging outlet of cable television.

  The Final Battles

  255

  Roone Arledge, who ran abc Sports at the time, finally agreed to Monday- night games.

  And then Rozelle paused for an instant and doubted his own

  wisdom when Arledge told him he was putting Howard Cosell

  behind one of the microphones. “Why didn’t you just go out and

  dig up Caligula?” an unhappy Rozelle told him.

  But Pete, to his own reluctant delight, was totally wrong. Amer-

  ica learned to either love or hate Cosell, and whichever it was,

  Howard drove the ratings higher and higher.

  Asked why he originally had the idea, Rozelle replied, “There

  are a lot more tv sets in use on Monday night than on Sunday

  afternoons.” The league reached a zenith in popularity. The Super

  Bowl became a worldwide phenomenon. nfl Films made big money

  and won critical acclaim. nfl Properties seemed to clothe half