Rozelle, Pete

Pete Rozelle

1926-1996

American football commissioner

For nearly three decades, Pete Rozelle guided professional football as the commissioner of the National Football League (NFL). Under his direction, pro football attained unprecedented popularity with the American public, as well as a level of profitability that far exceeded anything seen before Rozelle. He engineered the merger of the rival American Football League (AFL) into the NFL, paving the way for the annual Super Bowl, a face-off between the best in the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). Upon Rozelle's death in 1996, Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, told USA Today : "I think his greatest achievement was to supervise and organize growth at a time when other sports were battling and fighting among themselves. He had the ability to create compromise and make things work." A Gallup Poll in 1960, the year Rozelle took over the reins of the NFL, showed that thirty-four percent of Americans named baseball as their favorite sport, while twenty-one

percent preferred football. In just the first twelve years of Rozelle's leadership of the NFL, the game's popularity skyrocketed. In another Gallup Poll taken in 1972, thirty-six percent of Americans picked football as their favorite sport, while baseball had fallen to a popularity rate of only twenty-one percent.

Born Near Los Angeles

He was born Alvin Ray Rozelle in South Gate, California, near Los Angeles, on March 1, 1926. His uncle gave him the nickname "Pete" when Rozelle was only five years old. Raised in nearby Compton, Rozelle showed an early interest in sports, playing tennis and basketball for Compton High School. He graduated from Compton High in 1944 with World War II still raging in Europe and the Pacific. Fresh out of high school, Rozelle enlisted in the U.S. Navy, in which he served until 1946. After leaving the Navy, he returned to California and enrolled at Compton Junior College, where he served as the school's athletic news director. Rozelle also worked briefly as an assistant to the public relations director of the Los Angeles Rams, which had selected the junior college's athletic fields for its training camp. After completing two years at the junior college, he headed north to continue his studies at the University of San Francisco (USF). He remained close to sports at USF by editing the Rams' game programs in his spare time. While still a student at USF, Rozelle married Jane Coupe of Chicago, whom he had met while in the Navy. The couple, who eventually divorced, had a daughter, Anne Marie, born in 1958.

After graduation in 1950, Rozelle went to work for USF as its athletic news director. In that job, he attended a broad range of sporting events, building a network of contacts that would serve him well in the years to come. In 1952, Tex Schramm , general manager of the Rams, hired Rozelle as the team's public relations director. He stayed with the Rams for three years until 1955 when he left to join the San Francisco public relations firm of P.K. Macker. When Schramm left the Rams in 1957 after conflicts with some of the team's owners, NFL Commissioner Bert Bell asked Rozelle to take over as general manager of the Rams. The new general manager's ability to resolve conflicts within the Rams organization was particularly impressive to Dan Reeves , who owned fifty percent of the team.

Replaces Bell at Helm of NFL

After the sudden death of Bell in 1959, NFL team owners met in 1960 to find a successor and also map a strategy against the rival AFL. When owners deadlocked on Bell's replacement, Reeves offered Rozelle as a compromise candidate. Over the opposition of some of the league's most influential owners, Rozelle was elected the new NFL commissioner. He set to work immediately to convince NFL team owners to pool all media revenues and share them equally among all teams, putting each franchise on an even footing with the others. The rival AFL had already announced its intentions to follow a similar policy, and Rozelle thought the NFL needed to do the same to ensure its competitiveness against the new league. He also urged that the NFL provide a united front for the teams by bargaining collectively with the television networks for coverage contracts. To accomplish the latter, Rozelle was forced to argue before Congress for an exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act. In September 1961 Congress approved such an exemption for the NFL.

As its television exposure grew, football attracted more and more fans. In 1962 Rozelle negotiated a $9.3 million contract with CBS TV. Football's growing popularity benefited not only the NFL but the rival AFL. The two leagues became locked in a costly bidding war for new players during the first half of the 1960s. By 1966, the situation had become untenable. Rozelle consulted with team owners in both leagues to promote the idea of a merger between the rival organizations. He also went back to Congress to argue for another exemption from antitrust law to make such a merger possible. He was successful on both fronts, and the AFL was merged into the NFL in 1966. The AFL became the American Football Conference (AFC), while the NFL teams were grouped in the National Football Conference (NFC). The merger and related organizational changes paved the way for the first Super Bowl, which was played between the Green Bay Packers of the NFC and the Kansas City Chiefs of the AFC in January 1967. A few years later, in 1969, Rozelle negotiated a contract with ABC TV creating "Monday Night Football." In 1974, Rozelle married Carrie Cooke, the former daughter-in-law of Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke.

Chronology

1926	Born in South Gate, California, on March 1
1944	Graduates from Compton (CA) High School
1944-46	Serves in U.S. Navy
1946-48	Attends Compton Junior College
1949	Marries Jane Coupe of Chicago (later divorced)
1950	Graduates from University of San Francisco and becomes university's athletic news director
1952	Goes to work for Los Angeles Rams as public relations director
1955	Joins public relations firm of P.K. Macker in San Francisco
1957	Replaces Tex Schramm as general manager of the Rams
1960	Elected commissioner of National Football League
1974	Marries Carrie Cooke
1989	Retires from NFL
1996	Dies of cancer in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on December 6

Awards and Accomplishments

1960	Moved headquarters of NFL to New York City
1961	Won antitrust exemption allowing NFL to negotiate TV contracts collectively
1966	Engineered merger of American Football League into the NFL and subsequent organizational changes
1969	Negotiated contract with ABC-TV creating "Monday Night Football"
1977	Negotiated four-year TV deal with ABC, CBS, and NBC
1982	Negotiated five-year, $2.1 billion contract with ABC, CBS, and NBC
1985	Elected to Pro Football Hall of Fame
1985	Won Tuss McLaughry Award of the American Football Coaches Association

New Challenges Emerge

Despite the rapid ascendancy of the NFL under Rozelle's leadership, new challenges continued to emerge. A new rival, the World Football League, was launched in 1972 but was disbanded only three years later for lack of adequate financial support. Over the objections of Rozelle and the city of Oakland, California, the Oakland Raiders in 1980 moved to Los Angeles when it was able to negotiate a more favorable lease on a stadium in Southern California. The NFL and Oakland asked the courts to block the Raiders' move but were rebuffed when the courts ruled that such NFL constraints on teams' ability to move would violate antitrust laws. Another challenge arose over the matter of players' contractual rights. For most of its history, NFL rules forced players to renegotiate only with their team rather than offer their services to all NFL teams. After the merger of the AFL into the NFL, Rozelle had instituted what came to be known as the Rozelle Rule. The rule required any team that signed a player that previously belonged to another team to pay compensation for the lost player, and it had a chilling effect on the signing of free agents within the league. Players struck in 1982 and 1987 to win some form of free agency. Eventually the Rozelle Rule was suspended, and a controlled form of free agency was put into effect, along with a salary cap

With Rozelle skillfully leading negotiations, the NFL's television revenues continued to climb steadily through the 1970s and into the 1980s. In 1982 the NFL signed a five-year, $2.1 billion contract with ABC, CBS, and NBC to televise all regular season and post-season games. In 1987, the league and the three broadcast networks concluded a three-year contract worth just over $1.4 billion. That same year the NFL signed its first contract with a cable television network, agreeing to let ESPN broadcast thirteen prime-time games over the course of a three-year contract.

Elected to Hall of Fame

Rozelle in 1985 won some long overdue recognition when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame while still active in professional football. This was a unique honor in that most Hall of Fame candidates are not inducted until after the end of their football career. Despite all that Rozelle had done to strengthen professional football and increase its popularity, the latter half of the 1980s saw a gradual erosion of faith in his leadership among NFL team owners. In 1989, with two years remaining on his contract, Rozelle reluctantly stepped down as NFL commissioner. He served briefly on the board of directors of NTN Communications Inc. of Carlsbad, California, but spent most of his time at his home in Rancho Santa Fe. A heavy smoker for much of his life, Rozelle died of cancer on December 6, 1996.

Probably no single person has had as profound an effect on a sport as Rozelle had upon football. After his death at the age of seventy, friends and professional colleagues alike were lavish in their praise of Rozelle's contributions. Lifelong friend Don Klosterman told USA Today : "He was the most incredible person I've ever met. Given that power, he never had an ego. A lot of people can't live with success. He was so easy with it. He was never a showboat." One of the highest tributes came from Paul Tagliabue, Rozelle's successor as NFL commissioner. Tagliabue told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "No one was more responsible for the success of the National Football League and public passion for the NFL game than Pete Rozelle. Though he would credit others, Pete was the driving force in changing the face of professional sports in this country. His vision, integrity, and commitment made him the ideal leader."

SELECTED WRITINGS BY ROZELLE:

The Super Bowl, Random House, 1991.

Related Biography: NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue

Like his predecessor as NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue's boyhood passion was basketball and not football. After he was sidelined by a ligament tear in his sophomore year at Georgetown, he began spending more time on academics, leading him eventually into a career in law. It was as a lawyer that Tagliabue first came into close contact with the NFL.

He was born Paul John Tagliabue in Jersey City, New Jersey, on November 24, 1940, the third of four sons born into a working-class family with roots in Italy. As a boy, he excelled in both academics and sports, playing three sports at his Jersey City high school. It was his prowess at basketball, however, that eventually won him a scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Georgetown, he studied law at New York University. He began his career as a law clerk in the U.S. Claims Court in 1965. In 1969 he joined Covington & Burling, where he gradually took on more and more of the firm's NFL account. In the 1980s, Tagliabue became a managing partner at the firm and was made its lead lawyer on NFL matters. The decade saw an explosion of litigation involving the NFL, during which Tagliabue became a close adviser to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle.

Ironically, the flood of litigation that brought Tagliabue closer to the NFL and Rozelle are believed to have played a large part in Rozelle's decision to retire from the league in 1989. Tagliabue was tapped as Rozelle's successor. Of Tagliabue's qualifications for the job, Minnesota Viking President Mike Lynn told the St. Paul Pioneer Press : "He's a forward-thinking man. He's a man of ideas who can take us into the next century."

Tagliabue and his wife, Chandler, whom he married in 1965, live in New York City, which is also home to the headquarters of the NFL. The couple has two children, Drew and Emily.

(With Joseph Hession) Forty Niners, Foghorn Press, 1993.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Harris, David. League: The Rise and Decline of the NFL. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.

"Paul Tagliabue." Newsmakers 1990. Issue 2. Detroit: Gale Group, 1990.

"Pete Rozelle." Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Volume 19. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999.

"Pete Rozelle." Newsmakers 1997. Issue 4. Detroit: Gale Group, 1997.

Periodicals

Celizic, Mike. "More Than a Visionary, Rozelle Exuded Class." Record (Bergen County, NJ) (December 8, 1996): S13.

Forbes, Gordon. "Deft Negotiating Touch Good as Gold for NFL." USA Today (December 9, 1996): 4C.

Glauber, Bob. "1926-1996: Rozelle Got Last Word In on Detractors." Newsday (December 8, 1996): B6.

Jones, Del. "League Community Mourns Former Leader's Death." USA Today (December 9, 1996): 4C.

Kindred, Dave. "Most Significant Developments This Century: No. 4, Pete Rozelle Becomes NFL Commissioner." Sporting News (April 21, 1999).

Lewis, Michael. "TIME 100: High Commissioner Pete Rozelle." Time (December 7, 1998): 188.

"NFL Visionary Pete Rozelle Dies." Minneapolis Star Tribune (December 7, 1996): 1C.

Wilbon, Michael. "Visionary Pete Rozelle Left NFL Monumental Legacy." St. Louis Post-Dispatch (December 15, 1996): 1F.

Other

"Pete Rozelle." Pro Football Hall of Fame. http://www.profootballhof.com/players/mainpage.cfm?cont_id=100119 (October 17, 2002).

"Rozelle Was NFL Innovator." ESPN Classic. http://espn.go.com/classic/s/add_rozelle_pete.html (October 17, 2002).

Sketch by Don Amerman