The power of persuasion

Sporting News, The, Dec 20, 1999 by Paul Attner

Pete Rozelle was no tyrant. He influenced people with his foresight, intelligence and charm. And in lifting Ute NFL from third-class status to social colossus, he wielded mere power than any sports figure in Ute 20th century.

For a self-described mere league employee, Pete Rozelle wasn't a half-bad commissioner. With a vision that visits only a blessed few, he recognized the future of television, understood the need for competitive balance, realized the necessity of revenue-sharing among teams and grasped the power of having friends in high political places, all to turn a semi-major sports organization into the colossus we now recognize as the National Football League. In the 1950s, before Rozelle, pro football was a distant third in popularity behind baseball and college football. Now, it is hard to fathom what it would be like on a fall Sunday afternoon-or a Monday night or an occasional Thursday evening-without NFL games dominating our family room television and affecting the lives of so many sports fans.

The numbers that are today's NFL-$3.5 billion in expected revenues for 1999, $57 million salary cap for each team, $5 million players, 127.5 million watching the last Super Bowl-are Rozelle's legacy to a league once wallowing in its own limited imagination. Pro football now is, by far, the most influential and most watched sport in all of the United States, steamrolling into year 2000 with a swagger that befits its prominent role within our social structure. Without Rozelle, the NFL would not be the ratings-gobbling, argument-provoking, dollar-generating, thoroughly entertaining and amazingly dominant conglomerate it is today, and because of that, THE SPORTING News has selected him as the Most Powerful Sports Person of me century.

This is how successful Rozelle's vision has become: In 1998, three television networks paid $18 billion for games that had not even been scheduled, with no idea how good the teams or the stars would be in the eight years covered by the contracts. But Rozelle's obsession about competitive balance, where there would not be obvious haves and have-nots, where every club could envision playoffs and championships, has produced, year after year, a dependable audience delivery system that pleases television and keeps stadiums full in virtually every league city. Baseball, for one, still is trying to understand Rozelle's theories.

His memory even today, a decade since he retired after 29 years as commissioner, stirs emotion in his contemporaries, who grew to appreciate how this unassuming 33-year-old man, a compromise candidate approved in 1960 by feuding owners on the 23rd ballot, grabbed hold of an opportunity and, through a combination of wit, intelligence, persuasiveness and grit, produced a league beyond their wildest imagination.

"He was the greatest commissioner I have ever seen in sports," says Steelers owner Dan Rooney, son of an NFL founder and a Rozelle contemporary. "If Pete had not been commissioner, we would have gotten on as a league, but we wouldn't be the sport we grew to be under his tenure, the top American sport. And we wouldn't have obtained the respect the NFL has."

It is sentimental, of course, to say that it was a different sports world when Rozelle took charge. But it was. The NFL offices were located in a suburb of Philadelphia, near a pharmacy where then-commissioner Bert Bell liked to have lunch. Five teams had their own television contracts; the others were left with peanuts. Virtually every club used baseball stadiums; no one built lavish facilities for football teams. The 1958 overtime championship game between the Colts and Giants had given the league its first lasting prominence, but the national pastime was baseball, unchallenged.

But Rozelle thought the big time was possible. He moved league headquarters into New York and began shoving the NFL forward. A public relations man who had served three years as the Rams' general manager, he was pleasant and approachable, a great schmoozer, comfortable working smoke-filled rooms and having a Rusty Nail and a Carlton cigarette with the boys at the bar. That was how business was done then; not through lawyers, but through intimate meetings and respectful negotiations, elements in which the informal, self-effacing Rozelle thrived.

Tall and relatively thin, with a perpetual tan and a smile that made him instantly likable, Rozelle hardly was formidable looking or intimidating. Instead, he blended in well with a crowd. But he would not blink in a stare-down, would not compromise his integrity, would not speak before he carefully thought out what he was about to say. He was a guide, not a dictator; he had the art of convincing you he was right, and then having you walk away wondering how you ever could have presented your argument in the first place.

Think about it: Here is this young guy who hadn't even met all the owners who hired him, and he was soon persuading Halas and Rooney and Mara and Reeves and Marshall and Paul Brown and the rest of the legendary football gods of that era to think league, not I. Agree with me, he told them, and we will generate television revenues far beyond what any of you can garner on your own. And when he did, he established credibility that would grow into Paul Bunyan proportions. He not only predicted the future; he made it happen. That was his key. He saw football as a television game, and he persuaded the networks to ante up; they now pay each team $75 million a year. He persuaded Congress to allow revenue-sharing and single-entity television negotiations. He persuaded hard-line owners not only to merge with the maverick American Football League, but also to induce three teams--the Browns, Steelers and Colts--to switch into what would become the American Football Conference. He persuaded television to show Sunday doubleheaders, then add a weekly Monday-night game that now, other than 60 Minutes, is the longest-running prime-time show in television history. And he did it by selling everyone on the concept of being partners with the NFL, where no one lost and everyone became winners. And they all won, big-time.