When Rozelle Saved The Owners, He Forever Saved The Face Of Football

One thing that always amazed me about Pete Rozelle almost as much as what he did, was how few enemies he made doing it.

The only two I could think of off-hand were the late Carroll Rosenbloom and the intractable Al Davis. And if those two guys didn’t like you, you had to be doing something right. Maybe everything.

Rozelle, after all, wasn’t exactly swept into the commissioner’s office in a landslide.

The owners were so divided in that fateful 1960 election that they went through 22 fruitless ballots before finally electing the 33-year-old Rozelle, who was running strictly as a compromise candidate.

There was nothing in such a fractious “mandate” to suggest Rozelle would be able to unite the owners in anything, let alone get them to agree to share revenues with each other.

But he did. And this was perhaps the most valuable part of his priceless legacy.

He would also change the face of both pro football and sports television, make Monday a day to look forward to as much as Friday in the fall, and lay the foundation for a golden, nay, platinum age in all sports.

Yes, all sports.

And he did it all his way - gently, quietly, tactfully. He was the calm during the many storms, from strikes to franchise shifts, to mergers, that buffeted the NFL during his 29-year reign.

The only small thing about Rozelle was his ego.

In his heyday he was the emperor of all he surveyed. And he surveyed just about everything. But he never acted like an emperor or sought the trappings of one.

Nobody carried a bigger stick than Rozelle. Or spoke more softly.

Make no mistake about it, he imposed his will on his bosses. But he did it so smoothly that hardly a feather was ever ruffled, at least publicly. We’ll probably never know how many times behind closed doors he saved NFL owners from themselves.

What we do know is that owners in all sports need constant saving from themselves. And the more any sport prospers, the more its owners need saving. (Baseball went into a coma at the peak of its prosperity primarily because there was nobody to do it.)

And although saving owners from themselves has roughly the same degree of difficulty as defusing a time bomb (except that the former calls for more delicacy), Rozelle managed to make it look as easy as falling off a diet.

I was critical of him in his later years for fighting a useless and costly fight to keep Al Davis from moving to Los Angeles. I felt that for all his success, in fact because of it, he was ill-suited to deal with the problems posed by the emancipation of the players and the declaration of independence by Davis.

Suddenly he wasn’t all powerful. Suddenly the courts and the Congress were telling him what to do instead of vice versa. Suddenly there were rocks all over the landscape, and lawyers under almost every one of them.

Some of that I still feel. But the recent rash of franchise shifts suggests Rozelle was right to fight against what he called “free agency for franchises” even though it was a losing battle.

Rozelle handled the press as deftly as he handled the owners.

His annual Super Bowl press conference (a.k.a. the real State of the Union address) was a masterful example of a tall, deeply tanned man strolling through a mine field without sweating so much as one bead.

But while style was an important part of Rozelle’s success, there was substance of steel under the surface smoothness.

Rozelle, in sum, was a giant. In fact, the giant of his time.

If you were to ask me to name the two men who had the most impact on sports in this century, my answer would be George Herman Ruth, whose booming bat and effervescence saved baseball …

And Alvin Pete Rozelle, whose vision, savvy, and persuasiveness took pro football where no other sport had ever gone before (and still hasn’t).

Giants owner Wellington Mara had it right when he said Rozelle would forever be remembered as “The standard by which all sports executives are judged.”