Rozelle

“Then she went on location to a little village outside of Calcutta,

  and the guy in charge of the trailers told her he only had one with air conditioning, but she could have it if she slept with him. So she did.

  “That night she had dinner in the filthiest place in which she had

  ever eaten. As she lay on her bed in the violent throes of ptomaine poi-soning, she called her agent back in Los Angeles and weakly croaked

  into the telephone, ‘Now who do I have to sleep with to get the hell

  out of here?’”

  Pete laughed and then he said: “That’s exactly how I feel.”

  Clearly, it was movin’ time.

  The Final Battles

  271

  18

  Death Be Not Proud

  A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason and respect.

  —Joseph Conrad

  Reputation is what people think you are, and your character is what you really are.

  —Pete Rozelle, recalling what one of his high school coaches taught

  him and he never forgot

  On November 5, 1989, Paul Tagliabue took over as commissioner

  of the National Football League. As promised, Pete Rozelle had

  stayed on in New York during the selection process that had nar-

  rowed down to Jim Finks and Tagliabue and was privately pleased

  with the choice.

  His respect for Tagliabue had been heightened three years ear-

  lier, just before the start of the usfl trial. He had always respected the lawyer’s intellectual and legal abilities. Now he had an important personal reason to admire Tagliabue’s willingness to fight for

  a principle— one that influenced his own conviction that Tagliabue

  should be his successor.

  Rozelle’s integrity had been personally challenged by the pre-

  trial ramblings of Howard Cosell and Donald Trump. To him,

  those charges had crossed the line, and now he was more than

  ready to fight. But not everyone else was.

  Shortly before the annual spring meeting that year (1986), Jay

  Moyer, Rozelle’s in- house counsel, had taken Bob Fiske to dinner.

  Fiske, a respected New York lawyer, had been hired specifically

  272

  for the usfl case, and he shocked Moyer (in Moyer’s own words) when he suggested that the nfl should settle and not go to trial.

  “I couldn’t blame Bob,” Moyer said, “because he was doing what

  he thought was best to protect Wellington Mara and people like

  that. He thought they could be destroyed if the trial went badly.

  But Pete and Paul and I did not agree with him.

  “We had an owners’ meeting, and Norman Braman [Eagles]

  asked Bob what he thought we should do, and when he said we

  should consider settling, I elbowed Paul and said he better speak

  up right now, and that’s what he did.”

  Tagliabue said he told Braman that “the usfl suit was full of

  holes and that a jury was very likely to see through their claim,

  and, therefore, it was far too early to settle.”

  But afterward, in private, he told Rozelle what he really thought.

  He said that he “would have to be crazy to settle; that personally,

  he wouldn’t settle on any basis whatsoever.”

  You could make a strong case that in that moment Rozelle, who

  had begun to think of retiring, knew exactly who it was that should

  succeed him. Three years later, when a selection committee chose

  Tagliabue, Rozelle was delighted. He was convinced he was leav-

  ing the league’s unfinished business to someone he trusted to fin-

  ish the job the way he would have wanted it done.

  When Pete left in November Carrie was already in California,

  planning the new home. She was spending a lot of time with the

  Kleins, who had become their closest friends in Southern Cali-

  fornia. Beyond their friendship Klein had been Rozelle’s constant

  ally in his consistently abrasive relationship with Al Davis. Klein

  himself had his own high- profile battles with Davis.

  At one point he actually sued Davis, claiming that the Raiders’

  owner’s inclusion of him in a suit against the league was vindic-

  tive, without merit, and triggered his first heart attack. Incredibly, he actually won that case initially but lost it on appeal.

  Klein, whose initial income came from a highly successful used-

  car dealership, had become Rozelle’s racetrack buddy. As president

  and chairman of the board, he turned National General Corpora-

  Death Be Not Proud

  273

  tion into a major financial player. An avid sports fan, he headed the group that brought the nba to Seattle and bought the San Diego

  Chargers from Barron Hilton.

  His shared passion with Rozelle for race horses was what brought

  them together socially. After he sold the Chargers in 1984, he

  hired Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, and together they

  won the Preakness, the Kentucky Derby, and seven Breeders’ Cup

  championships.

  Rozelle had been a fan of the racetracks for a long time. When

  Jack Landry, perhaps his closest friend, had put together the pro-

  posal for a New York stakes race to be called the Marlboro Cup,

  he and Rozelle visited Penny Chenery Tweedy at her summer

  home up in Saratoga to try to convince her to turn the first one

  into a match race between her two great horses, Riva Ridge and

  Secretariat.

  Rozelle loved to tell the story of the day Secretariat ran the great-

  est Belmont Stakes in history: “As he turned for home, I knew I

  was looking at greatness. I was totally focused on him. I was yell-

  ing and jumping up and down, and I felt a hand on my leg. I looked

  down and realized it was someone trying to steady me because in

  my excitement I had jumped on top of a table.”

  “To this day,” he later told the writer Bill Nack, “I have abso-

  lutely no recollection how I got there.”

  The retirement home of Pete and Carrie Rozelle was on a choice

  piece of property at Rancho Santa Fe, overlooking the Del Mar

  Training Center that Klein had built.

  “They had built a kind of kitchen area facing the track,” Lukas

  told me, “and I could look up there and see him watching the

  horses during their morning works.”

  He had an office on our grounds. Sometimes he would walk down

  the hill, and we would talk.

  He was an interesting guy. Usually when an outsider comes up to

  you, he will ask you something like, “Who do you like in the third

  race at Delmar?” but not Pete. He never once did that. I don’t recall

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  Death Be Not Proud

  him as any kind of bettor at all. Instead, he wanted to know how you decide where to place a horse . . . why you move him up from six fur-longs to, say, a mile. . . . What was the theory when you stretched

  him out? He had a very analytical mind, and he was intellectually

  curious. He was a hell of a guy.

  With all their common interests, the Rozelles and the Kleins

  shared an active social life. They were, in fact, planning a trip to

  the South Pacific when Klein suffered his third heart attack and

  died in the spring of 1990, just four months after Pete had joined

  Carrie at Rancho Santa Fe.

  And then Pete and Carrie were diagnosed with brain tumors

  almos
t simultaneously. They were told that hers was malignant and

  his benign, prompting him to say in an interview, “I look at her,

  and I love her so much I wish mine were the one that is malignant.”

  “After his initial surgery,” Moyer said, “he came back to New

  York to visit, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The tumor was benign.

  He was tanned. The bags under his eyes were gone. I thought,

  ‘My God, he has turned back the clock fifteen years.’ Ironically,

  although her tumor had been diagnosed as malignant, she would

  outlive him by a number of years.”

  Meanwhile, back in New York, Thelma Elkjer was still running

  a kind of “Rozelle- in- exile command post.” There was a perma-

  nent office waiting for her on the West Coast at the edge of the

  Delmar Training Center, but her dog was too sick to travel, and

  she would not leave him. She continued to handle all of Rozelle’s

  correspondence and appointments. There was plenty to do. He

  had invested in a housing project in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, with

  the man who had built the Rancho Santa Fe home, and he often

  consulted on league matters with Tagliabue.

  Her job had not diminished. Neither had her influence.

  Back when Tagliabue and Jim Finks were competing for Rozelle’s

  job, Thelma was no fan of Finks. When he called to speak to

  Rozelle, the guardian of access to the commissioner would invari-

  ably transfer him to Don Weiss, an aide de camp. In his book The

  Death Be Not Proud

  275

  Making of the Super Bowl, Weiss tells of one such time when Finks didn’t even bother to identify himself when he heard Weiss’s voice.

  He simply said, “I guess the damned dog is still alive.”

  Nor did the newly minted successor to Rozelle have much more

  success with her. “I had this idea,” Tagliabue explained, “that I

  wanted to decorate the hall with pictures of the league’s founding

  fathers and patriarchs— you know, Halas . . . Thorpe . . . Rooney . . .

  Mara, but Thelma stopped the guy from doing it.”

  The man who had now risen to the most powerful position in

  the nfl, and possibly all of sports, explained to the secretary of the man who was no longer even in the building, “Well, these are the

  pioneers, Thelma. They are the men that made the league happen.”

  She simply replied, “Not a good idea. If you want to do it,” said

  the lady who had refused to let Rozelle put his own stuffed fish

  on her office wall, “then so will someone else.”

  Tagliabue laughed when he told the story and then said with a

  hint of awe, “I actually had to wait until she moved to California.”

  In the early days of his retirement, Rozelle remained active. He

  also never lost his sense of concern for others. During a hospital

  visit he was introduced to an octogenarian and asked him, “Do you

  know who I am?” The fellow responded, “Of course I do. You are

  Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the National Football League.”

  Rozelle immediately grinned and said, “That’s right.”

  When a doctor tried to correct the man, Rozelle shook him off.

  Eventually, the time finally came when Thelma prepared to join

  her old boss. She had a fear of flying, so Anne Marie was recruited

  to serve as her companion on a chartered flight along with Elkjer’s

  cats. Once in Rancho Santa Fe, she bought a car, found an apart-

  ment nearby, and set up shop in Rozelle’s little office.

  Rozelle’s condition had worsened even as Carrie’s had improved.

  He was diagnosed with another brain tumor. This one was malig-

  nant. By January 1996 he had begun to fail.

  The Super Bowl that year would be played in Tempe, Arizona.

  At that time there remained six writers and five photographers

  who had covered every one. It was Weiss’s idea to set up a confer-

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  Death Be Not Proud

  ence call between them and Rozelle. For all of them it would be a chance to offer their final farewells. We were at kickoff minus

  forty- eight hours when Rozelle’s voice came over the speaker.

  It was weaker than we remembered but stronger than we

  expected. He spoke to us one at a time, and as he was told a name

  it would trigger a flood of memories for him. With each of us, he

  would bring a shared moment for which the common denomina-

  tor was laughter. Each anecdote was laced with the intense power

  of affection.

  We had come to the time expecting to console an old friend,

  but just as he had always seemed to do during the tough debates

  with us in more vibrant times, he had turned the situation com-

  pletely around.

  It was the way he wanted it. He knew that while the telephone

  conversation would limit us to audio, it also afforded us the gift of

  supplying our own video, enabling each of us to remember him as

  tanned and still boyish, with a look in his eyes that reminded you

  his ubiquitous laughter was always just a beat away.

  The image of that evening remains evergreen even today. It

  gave each of us a small but significant victory over death’s obscene

  technique. The last thing he said was, “I wish I could be there with

  you guys tonight. Don’t forget to have a drink on me.”

  There was total silence after the connection was broken, and

  then somebody symbolically raised his glass and the others fol-

  lowed. We knew we would probably never hear his voice again, but

  to these friends and writers who knew him better than anybody

  else in this business, the message was clear: “Raise the glass. Sing

  no sad songs for me. We had us some times, didn’t we?”

  As summer stretched out toward autumn and the end of his

  fight grew more obvious, Thelma became the traffic cop for the

  steady stream of old friends who made the trip to see him one last

  time. Myer recalled:

  I had spoken to him on the telephone in September, and he was slur-

  ring his words so badly. He was saying the right things, but he was

  Death Be Not Proud

  277

  having great difficulty articulating them. I was so shocked that I called Thelma and asked to know what was happening here. She told me the

  cancer had come back, and it was multiplying rapidly.

  The next time she called she said, “I know you want to see him,

  and he wants to see you, so you better get to it soon.” That same day

  we made arrangements to fly to San Diego. We spent a day there with

  him. He was fine cognitively, but physically he was gone. He couldn’t

  walk by himself. He was speaking in a whisper and slurring his words.

  But everything he said made perfect sense.

  The last thing he said was, “We had a hell of a run, didn’t we?” and

  I said, “Yeah, Pete, but it was your run, and we were just there to help.”

  And then he looked at me, and he said, “Remember, the best things

  in life are family and friends. Please take care of [your wife] Terry.”

  For Joe Browne, it was much the same:

  I was in Los Angeles, and I had to go to San Francisco next, but Paul

  [Tagliabue] said you better not wait. So I drove down there the next

  day. He was in his den. Three tvs were going with football, an
d there

  was an ashtray with a cigarette burning in front of each of them the

  way he had always done.

  I knew the end was close, so I did most of the talking, and he’d say,

  “Is that right? Is that right?”

  He did a lot of nodding. He looked very pale and bloated from the

  medicine. He recognized me, but he had nothing to say. I was there

  for about an hour.

  For Tagliabue, the last visit held no surprises.

  I had lunch with him a few times that year and dinner at least once,

  and we had seen him back in January when we talked about the league.

  My wife and Carrie talked about personal stuff, but Pete and I talked

  about football.

  The last time I saw him was in California not long before he died.

  He was so sick. I remember that afterward I made some notes because

  I wanted always to remember the visit, and then I went back over them

  and changed the word “said” to “whispered.” He could barely speak.

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  Death Be Not Proud

  Time was rapidly melting away, but Anne Marie will always remember those final months for two surprising but dramatically poignant moments. The first would link her even closer to

  Thelma Elkjer.

  There had been a moment more than two decades earlier when

  her father decided to take Anne Marie with him to a league meet-

  ing in Miami Beach. This was not uncommon for him, and in the

  past various owners’ wives would share the role of babysitter. But

  as she recalled, this was going to be a particularly sensitive meet-

  ing, and he didn’t want to involve them with her.

  He asked Thelma to make the trip and look out for his teen-

  age daughter.

  “For her,” Anne Marie said, “this was a huge, huge deal.”

  I remember that she asked me if I would go shopping with her. We

  were staying at the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami Beach, and we went

  across the street to the Bal Harbour mall, and she bought her first-

  ever bathing suit— a yellow one- piece.

  We had this gigantic suite with three separate bedrooms for us,

  and every night we would change into our pajamas and bathrobes,

  and we’d have a nightcap and then go to bed.

  I remember that one night I was coming out of my room to join

  them, and they were on the terrace. She was wearing this long pei-

  gnoir. They had a drink in their hands, and they were looking at the