SUPER BOWL XXI : THE NFL OWNERS : THE NFC CENTRAL

EDITOR’S NOTE

Who are the people who own the teams that compete in the NFL, and strive each year to make it to the Super Bowl? What kinds of people are they? Are they all rich? Are they all self-made? Do they own teams because they love the sport, or because the teams are good investments? The Times assigned staff writers Bob Oates and Earl Gustkey to research and write about the NFL owners with these, and other, questions in mind. Their stories appear in the adjoining columns. Oates writes about the AFC’s owners, Gustkey the NFC’s.

HUGH CULVERHOUSE, Tampa Bay Buccaneers

In 1979, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers made it to the NFC championship game, where they lost to the Rams.

In the 11 seasons Hugh Culverhouse has owned the franchise, that’s the high-water mark . . . and there is no second place.

Well, OK, so the Buccaneers beat the New York Jets in John McKay’s last game as a coach, in 1984. That was a nice touch. But everything else is bad news, folks. We’re talking two winning seasons since 1976 and none since ’81.

The search for items of achievement or even terms of endearment in the Buccaneers’ clip file is futile. The news is all bad, year after year after year . . .

Now, the worst development possible: The fans, entire sections of them, are giving up on Culverhouse and his team.

The Buccaneers, who played before packed houses even when they lost 26 straight in 1975 and ‘76, are now last in attendance in the NFL. In a 74,000-seat stadium, they averaged 39,500 a home game last season. In 1985, they hit a low of 25,577 for their season finale against Indianapolis.

What a difference a decade makes. When the Buccaneers snapped their 26-game losing streak at New Orleans in 1977, more than 8,000 fans welcomed the team home at the airport.

If things get much worse, 8,000 may show up at the airport to see them leave. Tampa Bay just completed a 2-12 season, and Culverhouse fired coach Leeman Bennett and hired one of football’s ranking sourpusses, Ray Perkins of Alabama.

All of this failure does not sit well with Culverhouse, who was a proven winner in tax law, banking and real estate investment when he acquired the Tampa Bay franchise in 1974. In 1986, Forbes magazine ranked him as the 282nd-richest American, estimating his wealth at $210 million. But with the Buccaneers, little has been achieved except for the steady rise of the franchise’s value.

Folks in Tampa Bay are still sore at Culverhouse for losing Auburn running back Bo Jackson, a Heisman Trophy winner, to baseball’s Kansas City Royals. But that one may be a bad rap. Jackson, rated in a class with O.J. Simpson by pro scouts, was drafted No. 1 by the Buccaneers last year but shocked everyone by signing with the Royals for much less money than Culverhouse was offering.

In an interview with Tampa Tribune columnist Tom McEwen, Culverhouse said his team didn’t lose Bo Jackson because of money. “(The contract offered to Jackson was) one that would make him the highest-paid rookie in history . . . as well as the highest-paid running back in the NFL right now,” Culverhouse said. “We did not lose Bo Jackson to baseball because of money. He never asked to be traded . . . I don’t think being drafted by the Bucs was a negative factor. He indicated it was not.”

Culverhouse said that he believed Jackson had chosen baseball in part due because of the higher risk of injury in football, that he was swayed by a career-threatening injury suffered by former Auburn player William Andrews of Atlanta in a practice session.

Culverhouse, 67, is a product of Depression-era Birmingham, Ala., where he was the son of an engineer. While he studied accounting at the University of Alabama, he worked summers, swinging a 16-pound sledgehammer for the state road department

After spending World War II in the Army Air Corps, he earned a law degree at Alabama and worked in the state attorney general’s office from 1947 to ’49.

He then took a $4,200 cut in pay--from $12,000--to go to work for the Internal Revenue Service in Ohio. He remained with the IRS through most of the 1950s, learning nuances of tax law that would one day make him one of the country’s most respected tax attorneys.

The prime jewel in Culverhouse’s financial empire, it is said, is 12,000 acres of undeveloped land in Sarasota County, Fla., which represents about 70% of all the undeveloped land in the county.

In the past, he has been criticized for serving as an adviser to Georgia Frontiere, the Rams’ owner. Culverhouse was a co-executor of the estate of Frontiere’s late husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, who died in 1979. Some have called him the Rams’ godfather. He dismisses it all.

“When I first got this franchise, I consulted Carroll Rosenbloom on many things,” he told Florida writer Patrick Zier. “When I was selecting a coach, he gave me a list of possibilities. It’s interesting to me that nobody ever referred to him as the Bucs’ godfather.”

Employees, from time to time, have branded their boss as Scrooge-like. The most frequently cited example is the famous office memo he wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1976, about his official photos.

Official photos of him for public distribution, he said in the memo, would be taken from then on in Tampa, rather than Jacksonville, because he had recently paid $10 a print for 20 pictures, a price “which I think is excessive,” the memo concluded. WILLIAM CLAY FORD, Detroit Lions

In 1934, in the days when National Football League franchises sometimes moved when bill collectors showed up, the Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans moved to Detroit and renamed themselves the Lions.

The late Edsel Ford took his 9-year-old son, William Clay Ford, to see the Lions’ first game in Detroit. Ford, now 62, has been involved with the Lions ever since, first as an ardent fan and since 1963 as the franchise owner.

He is a grandson of Henry Ford, who in 1903 founded the automobile-making company that today operates in 200 countries and employs half a million people.

He’s the youngest of the four children of Edsel Ford, the founder’s son, who ran the company until his death in 1943.

The Lions’ owner is active in the company--he is one of four men serving in the office of the chief executive, is chairman of Ford’s executive committee, and serves on the finance, policy and strategy committees--but currently serves under company President Philip Caldwell, the first non-Ford to run the Ford Motor Co.

The 1986 Forbes magazine ranking of the 400 richest Americans listed William Clay Ford 131st, with a net worth of $360 million.

The Lions’ owner is regarded by students of the Fords as the family’s best athlete. He played varsity tennis and soccer at Yale. In fact, had it not been for a severe Achilles’ tendon injury that required two operations in the 1950s, Ford has said that he might have wound up running the car company instead of a football team.

His tennis days over, he sought a way to stay involved in sports and obtained a seat on the Lions’ board of directors in the 1950s. In 1963, he bought the franchise.

Some auto industry observers had William pegged to succeed his older brother, Henry Ford II--the man who fired Lee Iacocca--when Henry II retired as Ford president in 1980. They neglected to ask William.

” . . . if I’d done that (become Ford president), it would have meant getting out of the Lions,” he told Industry Week magazine last year. “And I’m not about to get out. I’m looking for a Super Bowl. I’m having too much fun--and it’s a good change of pace from regular business.”

Fun?

If owning the Lions is so much fun, how come Ford kicked in the screen on his TV set while watching them lose a game in 1973? Under his stewardship, the Lions--who haven’t won a championship since 1957--have been largely pussycats. Under Ford’s ownership, the Lions have been losers in 16 out of 23 seasons. The high-water mark was 10-4, in 1970.

In defeat, Ford has been patient but not always serene. In 1973, after watching a 20-0 Lion loss to Washington, he called his club “a coast-to-coast disgrace. . . . It looks like they want to stand around quietly and get in their time for the pension.”

Still, he maintains that he is in pro football for the enjoyment and laughs at the idea of pro football as a serious business proposition. He enjoys saying: “The only way to make money in pro football is to get out of pro football.”

That would be particularly true in Ford’s case, since he bought the team for $4.5 million. Some assess the Lions’ worth today at about $80 million.

He points out, however, that common-sense economics seldom apply to owning a football team.

“One reason NFL franchises change owners is because (some owners) don’t operate it as a business,” he told Industry Week magazine. “They run up huge player payrolls and expenses and get in trouble with the banks.”

He calls Lions’ profits “ridiculous,” meaning ridiculously low.

“From an operating standpoint, the profits are far from outstanding,” he said. “For a $75-million investment, they’re ridiculous--terrible. The way to make money in football is to get out of football . . . but you didn’t get in to get out.”

The Detroit Free Press looked at the Lions’ balance sheet after the 1984 season and reported that the Lions took in $23.9 million that season and spent $23.6 million. It said the typical NFL team in ’84 had made a $2-million profit.

In 1975, Ford took the Lions out of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium to an 80,000-seat soft-domed suburban stadium, the Silverdome, in Pontiac. The Lions haven’t exactly been a smashing gate attraction there. The team sold 40,000 season tickets last season and played before only one full house, for a game against the Chicago Bears. Average attendance has declined for five of the last six seasons.

But don’t worry about William Clay Ford. He owns 64,000 shares of Ford common stock, a mansion in posh Grosse Pointe Shores, golf courses, and real estate in other parts of Michigan, California, New York and Florida. He has never given an indication that he will ever sell the team, leading most to guess that there’s another Ford in the Lions’ future--William Clay Ford II, the owner’s son. MICHAEL B. McCASKEY, Chicago Bears

The old man kneels on one knee, his chin resting contemplatively in the palm of one hand, as if he’s studying something intently.

The statue of George Halas, the man who made pro football work, rests behind the desk of the president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Bears. Halas, in bronze, appears to be looking over the shoulder of his grandson, Michael B. McCaskey, studying his every move.

For most of his life, McCaskey, 43, had no intention of being involved in the NFL franchise founded by his grandfather in 1920. He was an academician, a lecturer at the business schools of UCLA and Harvard, and the author of an economics textbook, “The Executive Challenge: Managing Change and Ambiguity.”

For sure, Halas would be happy with the state of the Bears today, despite the recent tantrums thrown by one of his favorites, Mike Ditka, the coach. In the three full seasons his grandson has been running the franchise, the Bears have won a Super Bowl and run up a 43-11 record, the best in football.

McCaskey is one of 11 children of George Halas’ daughter, Virginia, the actual owner of the team, and her husband, Edward, the Bears’ chairman of the board.

“My mother, Virginia McCaskey, is the Bears’ majority stockholder,” McCaskey said. “My grandfather left (most of) the stock to my mother and the remaining stock to his 13 grandchildren. She controls the votes.”

Virginia McCaskey has never taken an active role in the running of the team, however, and Michael McCaskey said that he spoke for the team and the family.

A Yale man, he lettered there in football as a wide receiver, served two years in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, returned to obtain a doctorate in business at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, then taught at UCLA’s graduate school of management and at Harvard Business School.

While at Harvard, he also started a management consulting firm with his wife, Nancy.

While McCaskey was flourishing in academia, his grandfather had turned to his son, George S. (Mugs) Halas, Jr., to carry on with the Bears. Mugs died suddenly of a heart attack in 1979, at 54, and Papa Bear, at 84, resumed command.

Increasingly, though, the family looked toward Michael McCaskey.

Eleven days after Halas died at 88 in 1983, McCaskey was named president.

Having spent most of his life assuming he would have no involvement with the Bears, McCaskey was suddenly running them.

“Growing up so close to the team, I might have daydreamed about it once in a while, but things were pretty well set up for me to head in another direction, and that was fine,” he told the Chicago Tribune a year ago.

McCaskey says that his top priorities now are to maintain the recent high-level field performances of his football team, and to find a new place for it to play.

He said there is a privately financed, 75,000- to 80,000-seat stadium in the Bears’ future, somewhere in Chicago’s suburbs, but where he doesn’t know.

“Everyone who has looked closely at Soldier Field, including the mayor and the governor, agree that the stadium will not last the term of our lease, through 1999,” McCaskey told The Times.

“We would be foolish not to begin planning for a new stadium now. We’ve looked at quite a few parcels of land, and we’re looking very closely at three or four right now. We’re looking at a privately financed, open-air stadium with natural grass.

“We simply have to have a new stadium to maintain a winning tradition. There’s a big gap in revenues in the NFL between successful teams playing in big stadiums and small stadiums. And we’re in a marketing area of 7 million people.”

McCaskey, who was named to the NFL’s long-range planning committee by Commissioner Pete Rozelle, said he’d like to see improvements made in the manner in which player salaries are determined. Remember now, this is a Harvard Business School professor talking.

“The league needs a better system of player compensation,” he said. “We pay the players a lot of money, but the system grew up over time in a hodgepodge fashion. There’re a lot of anomalies and irregularities to it. It isn’t equitable.

“I have some ideas of a salary advancement plan that has elements in it that create a strong correlation between salaries and on-field performance.”

Obviously, McCaskey hasn’t spent much time with Gene Upshaw, president of the NFL Players Assn., yet.

McCaskey’s attention to stadium and salary matters tends to be diverted occasionally by the volatile Ditka. Ditka threw a tantrum recently, after McCaskey had fired the general manager, Ditka’s good friend Jerry Vainisi. Ditka threatened to quit, then said he really hadn’t meant that.

But McCaskey wasn’t grief-stricken to learn that his coach was angry. He said his two years in Ethiopia gave him perspective.

“I taught science and English in the boonies of Ethiopia,” he said. “I was there from 1965 to ‘67, teaching junior high kids in a provincial town called Fitche. The per-capita income was $75 per year. I saw a lot. Some kids had malnutrition, some didn’t.

“They were two of the most important years of my life. They were fulfilling and challenging. I worked very hard and I feel I achieved something.” JUDGE ROBERT J. PARINS, Green Bay Packers

In the NFL, there are basically two types of owners.

First, there are those who made fortunes in other fields, then bought football teams. Examples are Norman Braman of the Eagles, Hugh Culverhouse of the Buccaneers and Rankin Smith of the Falcons.

Then you have those who grew up in the NFL, those for whom their football teams are their livelihoods. Examples include Bill Bidwill of the Cardinals, the Maras of the Giants and Al Davis of the Raiders.

Then there are the Green Bay Packers, Judge Robert J. Parins presiding.

Judge Parins doesn’t own the Packers. The team’s stockholders do. Green Bay has the NFL’s only publicly held team.

Parins was hired by the Packers’ 45-member board of directors to be the franchise’s president in 1982. At NFL owners’ meetings, he’s the man who represents the team.

He’s a retired Brown County circuit court judge--Green Bay is in Brown County--who had served on the Packers’ board since 1966 and later as a team vice president.

The Green Bay Packers are the NFL’s last living link to its roots. In 1918, a former Green Bay East High School football star named Earl (Curly) Lambeau was working for the Indian Packing Company in Green Bay. His boss, Frank Peck, offered him $250 a month to remain with the company in 1918, instead of returning to Notre Dame, where he had become one of Knute Rockne’s first lettermen.

Lambeau stayed, but he missed playing football. According to NFL historian Howard Roberts, Lambeau one day suggested to Peck that he purchase some football uniforms and let him put together a team.

“We could call ourselves the Packers,” Lambeau is supposed to have said. “It’d be good advertising.”

In their first year, the Packers routed every town pro team in Wisconsin but one. In the state title game, against the Beloit Fairies--the team was sponsored by the Fairbanks-Morse Co.--Green Bay lost, 6-0.

In 1921, the Packers joined the reorganizing American Professional Football Assn., the forerunner to the NFL that had been formed the year before in Canton, Ohio. But in 1922, burdened with debts, the Packers nearly folded.

Under the leadership of Green Bay newspaper publisher Andy Turnbull, however, civic leaders came up with a loan of $2,500, and the Green Bay Football Corporation was founded. Stock sold for $5 a share, and each buyer was given a box seat. By the 1923 opening game, there were 500 shareholders.

Today, the Green Bay Packers have 1,798 shareholders who own 4,625 1/2 shares. As a practical matter, Packer shares are almost useless, not something you need in your investment portfolio. They can’t be traded, they have no par value, there are no dividends, and no one is allowed to own more than 200 shares. No new shares have been issued since 1950. Shareholders can’t even get preferred season seats. Or a Lambeau Field parking space.

The Packers have shareholders in 48 states and 4 foreign countries. At one time, the majority of the team’s shareholders lived in Green Bay or elsewhere in Wisconsin.

“The shares are more like family heirlooms than investment vehicles,” said Phil Pionek, a Packer spokesman. “Most of the shares today date to the 1950 offering, but we still see some shareholders who have 1923 shares at the annual meeting.”

All a Packer shareholder gets is an invitation to the annual meeting, at the Green Bay Motor Lodge, held the first week of June.

There, shareholders elect the 45-man board of directors, who in turn elect the seven-member executive committee: president, vice president, secretary, treasurer and three at-large officers. Only the president draws a salary.

The Packers’ 68-year-old helmsman, Judge Parins, is pure Green Bay, born there the same year Lambeau persuaded Frank Peck to buy some football uniforms.

He attended Green Bay East High School and obtained undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin. He opened a law practice in Green Bay in 1944 and began a career on the bench in 1967, when he began the first of three six-year terms on Wisconsin’s Eighth Judicial Circuit Court.

Despite having lost his right arm in a bicycle-car accident when he was 12, Parins played golf regularly for years, once shooting in the mid-80s.

The Packers. In Green Bay, they’re the only game in town.

Roberts tells a story about them, possibly true, maybe apocryphal: In the days before television, a woman lay dead in the funeral parlor of Art Schumacher, Green Bay mortician. It was a Sunday, and the Packers were playing in Boston.

The phone rang and Schumacher, recognizing the voice, said: “I think I can have the body ready by 1:30 p.m.”

There was a pause, then the voice on the other end said: “Couldn’t you make it 4:30? The game broadcast will be over by then.” MAX WINTER, Minnesota Vikings

There’s just one way to describe the ownership picture of the Minnesota Vikings these days.

It’s a mess.

Max Winter, 81, one of the five founders of the expansion franchise in 1961, was still in charge until, in 1985, he tried to sell his one-third share of Viking stock to Minneapolis businessman Irwin Jacobs, Minnesota Twins’ owner Carl Pohlad and former Viking quarterback Fran Tarkenton.

Winter was taken to court by two other Viking executives, John Skoglund and Jack Steele, and the team’s general manager, Mike Lynn. They claimed that prior agreements with Winter gave them a right of first refusal, should Winter want to find a buyer for his stock outside the organization.

With Winter’s stock sale ensnarled in court, Lynn has assumed operating command.

Skoglund is the son of H.P. Skoglund, who, with Winter, was one of the franchise’s founders in 1960. He’s also the Vikings’ chairman. Steele is also a board member, representing shares owned by his wife’s family.

Why all the fuss over a team that has had two winning seasons since 1980? The Vikings, it turns out, are one of the NFL’s most profitable franchises.

“It’s a moneymaker, No question about it,” Robert A. Thomas, executive vice president of the Minneapolis Convention & Visitor Commission, told Business Week magazine. “Every game is sold out.”

One source reported that the Vikings had the second-highest revenues in the NFL in 1984--and the second-lowest payroll.

Through the tangled, twisted legal proceedings, the most visible figure, as always, has been the Austrian-born Winter, incorrectly perceived by many in pro football as the Vikings’ sole owner of many years.

“Winter has an Art Rooney-like image, as the long-time Vikings’ owner, but it’s false,” said Bob Sansevere, who covers the Vikings for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“He’s never owned more than 50% of the stock, and right now he’s powerless. Mike Lynn is in complete charge of the team.”

Another veteran Minneapolis reporter said of Winter: “He’s a nice old guy, but he likes to have people believe he’s the man who brought the Vikings to Minneapolis, and it’s not true. It was an entire group of people who brought the team here.”

The 5-foot 5-inch Winter, who says he still does 100 push-ups a day, was involved with pro sports in Minneapolis long before he helped bring the Vikings there. He was the first owner of the Minneapolis Lakers, who later moved to Los Angeles.

He grew up in Minneapolis, where his family settled after leaving Austria in 1913. He once was a promoter for the Harlem Globetrotters and several Midwest automobile shows before building the Lakers into the first NBA dynasty, in the 1947-1954 era.

With the Lakers, one of the players he signed, in 1949, was a standout from the University of Minnesota and later a World War II hero in the Pacific, Peter (Bud) Grant.

With the Vikings, Winter suffered through the dreary, early days of Norm Van Brocklin, then enjoyed the Super Bowl era of Bud Grant, Joe Kapp and Fran Tarkenton.

Grant, the Viking coach for 18 years, took the team to four Super Bowls. He told The Times in 1985 that his and Winter’s working relationship was near-perfect. “In all the years, we never had a heated discussion,” Grant said.

Lynn, 50, joined the Vikings in 1974, when Winter hired him from among 50 applicants to be his assistant. He was the Vikings’ “ramrod” in Minneapolis’ planning for the construction of the 63,000-seat Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, the Vikings’ home since 1982.