Rozelle Succumbs To Cancer Ground-Breaking Nfl Commissioner Dies At 70
Pete Rozelle, the father of the Super Bowl who put the NFL on TV just about everywhere and transformed the way Americans spend Sunday afternoons, died Friday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 70.
Rozelle died from brain cancer at 5:45 p.m. PST at his home. He had undergone surgery for brain cancer in December 1993.
“He’ll forever be remembered as the standard by which all sports executives are judged,” New York Giants owner Wellington Mara said. “He did more for professional football and the NFL than any other sports executive has done.”
As perhaps the premier commissioner of all sports, Rozelle led the National Football League for nearly three decades before retiring unexpectedly in 1989, helping it survive bidding wars with three rival leagues and three player strikes.
He oversaw the league’s expansion from 12 teams to 28, turned the NFL into a Sunday obsession and guided the league to the preeminent position it still holds today - the nation’s No. 1 spectator sport.
Rozelle did it by linking the game with television, creating Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl, which blossomed into America’s most-watched sporting event.
It was, on the one hand, a financial coup, bringing a league that got $75,000 from Dumont television for only its title game in 1951 into one of the wealthiest sports entities in the world. The current television contract, for which Rozelle set the groundwork, gets $1.58 billion for four years from Fox alone, more than 2,000 times what Rozelle got in his first contract with CBS in 1962.
It was Rozelle who brought sports into 10 figures when he negotiated a landmark five-year, $2.1 billion contract with television’s three major networks in 1982. Then he expanded the NFL’s TV exposure to cable, selling a Sunday night series to ESPN as part of the next contract in 1986.
But his biggest contribution may have been introducing revenue-sharing in pro football 30 years before it created havoc in other sports. Doing so allowed teams in minor markets like Green Bay to equally share TV revenues the biggest part of the NFL pie with teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.