Pete Rozelle

• 1. Introduction

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  Pete Rozelle walked into a room in January 1960 and changed American sports forever. He was 33 years old, a surprise choice picked on the 23rd ballot by NFL owners who could not agree on anyone else. Most of those owners were older than him. Several were wealthier, better-connected, more experienced. But Rozelle had something they needed: a gift for making rival powers sit down and deal. He would serve as NFL commissioner for nearly thirty years, retiring in November 1989. The league he inherited had twelve teams playing to half-empty stadiums. The league he left behind had twenty-eight, a sixteen-game schedule, and a grip on the American imagination that no other sport could match. The questions worth asking are not just how he did it, but what it cost, who he fought, and what outlasted him.

• 2. The Education of a Publicist

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  South Gate, California, in the Great Depression was where Rozelle grew up, later moving to neighboring Lynwood. He graduated from Compton High School in 1944 alongside Duke Snider, already lettering in tennis and basketball. That same year he was drafted into the U.S. Navy and spent eighteen months in the Pacific aboard an oil tanker. When he returned, the path he chose was not the playing field but the press office. At Compton Community College starting in 1946, he worked as the student athletic news director and took a part-time job with the Los Angeles Rams doing public relations. Pete Newell, head coach of the University of San Francisco Dons basketball team, came to Compton in 1948 on a recruiting visit. Newell was impressed enough by Rozelle to arrange a full scholarship so Rozelle could do similar publicity work at USF. There, Rozelle drew national attention to the Dons' 1949 National Invitation Tournament championship basketball team, demonstrating early that he could put a story in front of a broad audience. After graduating in 1950 he was hired full-time as USF's athletic news director, and by 1952 he had rejoined the Rams as a PR specialist. A stint marketing the 1956 Melbourne Olympics for a Los Angeles-based company followed. Then in 1957 he returned to the Rams again, this time as general manager of a disorganized and unprofitable franchise lost in the sprawling L.A. market. Despite a league-worst 2-10 record on the field in 1959, he made the Rams a business success within three years, the clearest proof yet that his real skill was organizational and commercial, not athletic.

• 3. Television and Revenue Sharing

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  Twelve teams, a twelve-game schedule, and stadiums that were frequently half-empty greeted Rozelle when he took office. The NFL's business model had barely evolved from the 1930s. Among his earliest moves was helping the league adopt profit-sharing of gate and television revenues, which stabilized small-market franchises that would otherwise have struggled to survive. Then came the television contracts. Rozelle negotiated deals to broadcast every NFL game each season, playing one network against another with deliberate skill. By early 1962, the owners re-elected him to a five-year contract at a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year; within five months they had added a ten-thousand-dollar bonus and raised his annual pay to sixty thousand. The financial transformation he engineered did not happen by accident. Revenue sharing meant that a team in a small city could stay competitive with a team in New York, and that structural equality would eventually define how the whole league was perceived.

• 4. The Kennedy Weekend

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  the 22nd of November 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, left Rozelle facing a decision that would follow him the rest of his life. He knew White House press secretary Pierre Salinger personally; the two had been classmates at the University of San Francisco. Salinger urged Rozelle to let the games proceed, and Rozelle agreed. His reasoning was direct: "It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy. Football was Mr. Kennedy's game. He thrived on competition." After the Washington Redskins beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Philadelphia that Sunday, the Redskins' players asked Coach Bill McPeak to send the game ball to the White House, saying they were playing for President Kennedy and in his memory. Not everyone agreed. The AFL and most major colleges had cancelled their games that weekend, and some players and news outlets objected to the NFL going ahead. Rozelle later said it might have been wiser to cancel. Even so, Sports Illustrated named him their Sportsman of the Year for 1963, citing his aptitude for conciliation with owners, his role in expanding the NFL, and his crackdown on player gambling.

• 5. The Merger and the Super Bowl

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  The American Football League had become a genuine threat by the mid-1960s, armed with a new NBC television contract and a new superstar in Joe Namath. Bidding wars for talent drove salaries and bonuses upward sharply. The two leagues agreed to merge in 1966, with Rozelle leading the negotiations on the NFL side. He then took the argument to Washington. In October 1966 he testified before Congress and persuaded legislators to permit the merger. One condition of the deal was a championship game between the two league champions, first played in early 1967 as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, which would eventually become the Super Bowl. Television contracts kept the AFL and NFL operating as separate leagues through 1969, but in 1970 the AFL was fully absorbed. Ten AFL franchises, along with the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and Pittsburgh Steelers from the old NFL, formed the new American Football Conference. All remaining pre-merger NFL teams became the National Football Conference. By 1970 the reconstituted league stood at 26 teams. Rozelle's role in building the Super Bowl into the most-watched sporting event in the United States was central, not incidental.

• 6. Monday Night Football

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  In 1970, Rozelle pitched his prime-time weeknight concept to Roone Arledge, then the president of ABC Sports. Arledge bought it. Monday Night Football premiered in September 1970 with the Cleveland Browns hosting the New York Jets; the Browns won 31-21. The first announcing team was Don Meredith, Howard Cosell, and Keith Jackson. Except for the 1998 season when games aired at 8:20 p.m. Eastern Time, the program ran at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time. It aired on ABC for 36 seasons, from 1970 through 2005, before moving to ABC's sister network ESPN in 2006. The program is still broadcast today. Meanwhile the league kept expanding: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Seattle Seahawks joined in 1976, bringing the total to 28 teams, the number that would hold for the rest of Rozelle's tenure.

• 7. The Rozelle Rule and Al Davis

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  Two legal battles defined the friction inside Rozelle's long reign. The first involved the Rozelle Rule, enacted in 1963, which required any team signing a free agent to compensate that player's former club with players and draft picks, with Rozelle himself as the sole arbiter of what compensation was owed. The rule was exercised only four times, but on the 30th of December 1975, Judge Earl R. Larson ruled in Mackey v. National Football League that it violated antitrust law. Plaintiffs had argued successfully that the rule discouraged teams from signing free agents because the cost of doing so was unpredictable. The second battle was more personal. Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, sued the NFL in the 1980s to move his franchise from Oakland to Los Angeles. Rozelle represented the NFL in court and testified to block the move. The NFL lost. The Raiders moved to Los Angeles in 1982. The tension between the two men had roots in Davis having once wanted to be NFL commissioner himself. In January 1981, just after the relocation case was settled, the Oakland Raiders won Super Bowl XV, and Rozelle as commissioner was required to hand the Super Bowl Trophy to Davis personally. The Raiders eventually returned to Oakland in 1995.

• 8. Legacy and Honors

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  Rozelle was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985, while still serving as commissioner. He retired on the 5th of November 1989. The Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award was established that same year to recognize lasting contributions to radio and television in professional football, awarded annually by the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 1990, the league created the Pete Rozelle Trophy to honor the Super Bowl MVP; it was first awarded at Super Bowl XXV on the 27th of January 1991. Also in 1990, Rozelle received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. A month after he died in December 1996, the NFL honored his memory with a decal on the back of helmets worn by the teams competing in Super Bowl XXXI. His influence reached beyond American football: in 1986 the Australian Football League Commission adopted an equalization policy modeled on the revenue-sharing approach Rozelle had pioneered. The AFL credits that decision with allowing expansion clubs and smaller-market clubs to survive, pointing to the 1996 AFL Grand Final between North Melbourne and the Sydney Swans as an example of what equalization made possible. Rozelle died of brain cancer on the 6th of December 1996, at the age of 70, at Rancho Santa Fe, California, and was interred at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.