Touch football

Sporting News, The, Dec 16, 1996 by Paul Attner

Maybe some of the other owners thought this guy Pete Rozelle was the right man to become NFL commissioner. But cantankerous George Preston Marshall, the aging owner of the Redskins, knew better. He was convinced Rozelle was too young and too inexperienced for the job. When Rozelle presided over his first meeting with the owners, in a hotel suite, Marshall showed his displeasure with Rozelle's appointment by showing up in a bathrobe, pajamas and slippers.

When the meeting was about over, after Marshall had interrupted the proceedings so frequently that the new commissioner stopped talking, Rozelle stood and stared directly at his adversary. "Now I'd like to tell everyone," he began, "how I think the league should proceed from now on." By the time he finished, everyone else in the room was so charmed by the speaker that even Marshall staved quiet. Rozelle had preserved the old man's dignity by never telling him he was out of order. But at the same time he had asserted his firm leadership. It was the first glimpse the owners received of how well the NFL would be served for almost 30 years by Rozelle's fascinating combination of tactfulness and intelligence.

"Pete was great at working people and getting them to agree to what he thought best," says Dan Rooney, president of the Steelers and a close friend of Rozelle's. "When you were around him, you couldn't help but be charmed by him. He made you feel he wanted to know how you thought and that your opinion was important. But you came to know he had a good idea of where he wanted everytbing to head long before he asked anyone."

Return with me for a moment to Rozelle's first meeting with the owners, to early 1960, to when the NFL was still a 12-team league run from a Philadelphia office, lacking a national television contract or a franchise due south of Washington, D.C. We are in a generation now that has no comprehension of the dominance baseball held over the NFL in those days; this was a second-tier league run by a goocl ol' boys network, still mired in thinking that began when George Halas and his brethren first met in that Canton auto dealership.

And here was Rozelle, in his 30s, telling legends such as Halas and the Maras and Marshall that to grow they must give up their individual TV deals and agree to divide equally revenue from a yet-to-be-negotiated nafional TV contract. That is the type of mindboggling consensus that today's baseball owners can't even fathom, yet Rozelle conceived it and achieved it with George Halas staring him down. And the wisdom of revenue sharing became the foundation upon which the NFL colossus began to grow - the colossus that dominates TV ratings, that has turned Monday night into a football must, that changed the pace and intensity of sports, that gave us the Super Bowl and 30 teams spread throughout the country watched by audiences spread worldwide.

Rozelle's passing last week of brain cancer at age 70 cuts off yet another link between this quaint past and the present glory of the NFL. In many ways, the league still runs on the momentum provided by Rozelles leadership, which officially ended when he tearfully retired in 1989. Asked how he should be remembered, he replied: "I did my best."

His best was enormouz. His accomplishments are now part of the fabric of America - the marketing. the television, the old films, tbe postseason - but it is just as fascinating on a more personal level to see how his gifts of leadership created such incredible loyalty among those who worked with him to construct the colossus. To men such as Rooney and Art Modell and Tex Schramm, men with widely differing personalities and ambitions and motivations, he was not the commissioner. He was Pete. Simply Pete. Even now, when they talk about him, there is respect and admiration and, yes, love in their voices that is so deeply intense and impressive. It is the kind of emofional bond that you can only envy.

Rozelle didn't have to demand loyalty. Instead, he created it through his wisdom, charm and charisma. As good as David Stern is at this commissioner's business - and he is wonderful at it - he still isn't a Rozelle. How could you not feel satisfied working for or with someone who never seemed flustered, who never lacked for a plan, who always conducted himself in public with a flair and dignity and humor that almost immediately won over all but the harshest of critics?

His was a leadership that, outside the NBA, is so sorely missing in sports today. The human touch was Rozelle's forte; in contrast, just how cold do the NFL and Major League Baseball seem in the '90s? Team moving from established cities, World Series being canceled, labor agreements going unapproved for months - no wonder Rozelle grew tired of the turmoil and wisely got out before he was dragged even deeper into the quicksand of greed.

If you are a fan in Cleveland, watching a season go by without a team, waiting patiently until the end of the century for another taste of the NFL, you should wonder what might have happened to your Browns if Rozelle still was commissioner. After all, he solved a far more difficult problem in the mid-'60s, merging the warring AFL and NFL.