The power of persuasion

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

When the leagues were merging, the arguing went on for days. The Steelers, for one, didn't want to move into the new AFC. Dan Rooney, in particular, was opposed. One night, he and his dad, Art, went to dinner. When they came back, Rozelle handed them a small slip of paper. Four names were on the paper: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Houston. The younger Rooney laughed. Rozelle had delivered to the Rooneys the divisional lineup that would cause them to switch. The merger was on; the Persuader had won.

Rozelle would summon George Halas to New York, and the curmudgeon would balk, then come. He would suspend Packers star Paul Hornung for a year because of gambling offenses, and Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi would agree. He would sit calmly in a league meeting while one of his few enemies, Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom, would attack him with particular venom and instead of reacting, would merely say, "Time for lunch." He would form a competition committee and encourage Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm to push his innovative concepts to improve the quality of play. He would approve NFL Films and NFL Properties and overseas preseason games and see the Super Bowl become the biggest sports event in American sports. All the time, he would be so innovative and open and independent and diligent and brilliant and unfailingly polite that the rest of the sports world had no chance to keep up. He became the transition between the roots of the NFL--Halas, Rooney and their peers-and the contemporary, jazzed-up league of today.

"The greatest thing about Pete is that he was the right man for the right times," says Schramm. "He was young, he was up on television, on all the new trends and the way things were going. He could step right in and feel comfortable moving in those directions. He had the right blend of personality, intelligence and public relations sense to pull it off."

He was impressively unpretentious, often shy, as comfortable spending a week cruising the Caribbean with Schramm and their cronies or vacationing in the Far East with Art Modell as he was having dinner with a senator. It was years before Rozelle would allow himself to be driven to work; instead, he took the train. The loyalty he generated among his staff was remarkable. He surrounded himself with smart, young, energetic men who considered him a visionary, and woe to the outside critic who dared question his decisions. Just ask Al Davis. When the ornery king of the Raiders took on Rozelle and the league in a series of lawsuits in the 1980s, he was successfully portrayed as an enemy of the nation by the NFL P.R. machine and friendly national media.

When Ernie Accorsi, now the Giants' general manager, began working in the NFL office in 1975, he was instantly struck by Rozelle's total control of his ego. "He had a genuine, precious humility. He had a charisma, a magic that just inspired people. I always felt that this is how it must have been to be around John F. Kennedy. More than anything, though, he was smarter man anyone else we'd spend hours discussing a subject, and he would summarize it and solve it with four sentences. And you'd say, `Why didn't I think of that?'"