SUPER BOWL XXI : THE NFL OWNERS : THE NFC EAST

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.

BILL BIDWILL, St. Louis Cardinals

One of the National Football League rumors that won’t go away has the St. Louis Cardinals moving to Phoenix.

The team’s owner, Bill Bidwill, a shy, low-profile man in a high-profile business, won’t confirm or deny that the Cardinals’ days in St. Louis are numbered.

“All I’ve ever said is that we can’t compete in the NFL playing in a stadium that size,” he said recently. “The income differential with the other teams is just too much.”

The Cardinals play in 51,000-seat Busch Stadium, the second-smallest facility, behind the Astrodome, in the NFL. Last season, they sold 32,000 season tickets. Phoenix has offered Arizona State University’s 73,000-seat Sun Devil Stadium in nearby Tempe, where, Arizonans promise, the Cardinals could probably sell 70,000 season tickets in their first year.

However, the taciturn Bidwill, called the Big Red Chief in St. Louis, offers few hints on how he’s leaning.

“We’ve talked to him numerous times, and the strongest comment we’ve ever gotten out of him was ‘never say never,’ and ‘you never know,’ reports Bob Jacobsen, sports editor of the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

On one of Bidwill’s visits to Phoenix--he was meeting with some municipal politicians--an Arizona Republic columnist, Bob Hurt, learned that Bidwill’s wife, Nancy, was house hunting in Phoenix.

Meanwhile, back in St. Louis, city and county politicians continue to talk about possible domed stadium projects in Maryland Heights or downtown, as part of a convention center facility.

Bidwill, 55, is an owner in the old-school tradition of Halas, Mara and Rooney. He’s not a millionaire’s son and he didn’t make millions in oil, cars or condos and buy a football team as a toy. The Cardinals are his life. He owns the football team that his father bought in 1932 for $50,000, when the team was in Chicago, running a poor second to the Bears in the affections of the fans.

Working for the Cardinals--he started as a water boy on game days in the 1930s--and later owning them is all Bill Bidwill has ever done for a living.

“He’s a real working owner,” a Cardinal front office man said. “He’s here every day.”

Charles Bidwill, Bill’s father, bought the Cardinals the year Bill was born. The Cardinals had generally dismal seasons, until their “dream backfield” of Paul Christman, Marshall Goldberg, Pat Harder and Charley Trippi took them to an NFL championship in 1947. For the Bidwill family, however, it was a bittersweet victory. Charles Bidwill had died suddenly in April of that year and didn’t see his team win a title.

Ownership of the Cardinals passed to Bidwill’s mother, Violet. When the franchise was moved to St. Louis in 1960, one Bidwill son, Charles, Jr., better known as Stormy, stayed behind in Chicago, to run the family’s race tracks. In 1962, the Bidwills’ mother died, and an event occurred soon thereafter that shook both men profoundly.

Walter Wolfner, Violet Bidwill’s second husband, challenged her will bequeathing the Cardinals and a large part of her estate to her sons. Wolfner claimed that both Bill and Stormy had been illegally adopted and were therefore not entitled to the estate.

It was a bombshell. Neither Bidwill had ever been told he had been adopted. They spent a year in court, proving their adoptions were legal.

When writer Kim Plummer of the St. Louis Globe Democrat asked him about it last June, Bidwill would say only: “That was a long time ago.”

Always in a bow tie, Bidwill is an introspective man, rarely photographed while smiling. His favorite topics, other than the Cardinals, are Georgetown basketball--he’s a graduate--naval military history and Italian food. He gets his sports news from a United Press International sports wire in his office.

A quirk: Unlike most executives, he makes most of his own phone calls. “It’s not the New York way, but it’s the way I do it,” he explained. “It saves time, and I think people appreciate it.” NORMAN BRAMAN, Philadelphia Eagles

In the 1940s, at the Philadelphia Eagles’ training camp at West Chester, Pa., coaches, trainers, equipment men and other team officials had an awful time chasing off a skinny, persistent young man who showed up often, volunteering to carry the water buckets.

Sometimes he asked for autographs. Sometimes he asked to do odd jobs. But mostly he just hung around.

The skinny kid kept coming around during the season, too. He’d ride trolley cars, subways and walk for an hour and a half to Shibe Park or Connie Mack Stadium, where he’d sneak in to watch the Greasy Neale-coached Steve Van Buren teams.

Buy a ticket? Out of the question. Norman Braman was the second son of an immigrant father who grew up in a Polish town where Jews had to conform to a quota system regulating how many of the town’s Jewish children could go to school.

As a small boy in Philadelphia, Braman can remember walking several extra blocks to a market with his mother, who had come to the United States from Romania at 12, to save one cent on a loaf of bread.

And so when Norman Braman, at 54, bought the Philadelphia Eagles for $65 million in 1985, one of Philadelphia’s sons, in a real sense, had come home.

A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked him shortly after he had bought the team from Leonard Tose if he had any regrets.

“The only major regret that I have--and I think about it so much--is that my dad is not around now to enjoy this,” he said. “It would have been very important to him. He loved sports.”

Braman’s father ran a barber shop in Center City, Pa., until he died in 1976.

Braman, who graduated from West Philadelphia High School and Temple University, with a B.A. in business administration, had left Philadelphia as a 36-year-old millionaire in 1969. After leaving Temple, he went to work as a marketing representative for Seagram’s distillery. Then, with a $29,000 bank loan, he went into the discount clothing business with his father-in-law--against his wife’s wishes.

When he sold his share of that business, he invested in a group of drugstores called Keystone Discount Stores, which grew to a chain of 46 stores.

Through the 1960s, Braman bought Eagle season tickets every year and drove 90 miles each weekend from Lebanon, Pa., for the games. He also saw “20 to 30” Phillie games each summer.

Next, Braman took in two partners and they combined his drugstores with Philadelphia Laboratories to form a public corporation, Philadelphia Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics.

By 1969, Braman was a millionaire. He moved to Miami Beach, where he bought a waterfront mansion--he also owns a country estate in the south of France--and promptly grew restless in retirement.

So, in 1972, he bought a Cadillac dealership in Tampa. In 1975, he bought another in Miami. Today, he’s the king of a booming luxury car market in South Florida, with 16 dealerships said to be grossing $100 million a year.

It hasn’t all been clear sailing. Braman survived an investigation by the Florida attorney general’s office into alleged misleading sales practices of 180 Florida auto dealers in 1982.

He became active in South Florida politics in the early 1970s and raised, by his own count, $100,000 for the Reagan campaign in 1980.

In 1981, President Reagan nominated him to become commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. While awaiting confirmation of his appointment, he suddenly withdrew from consideration. His stated reason was a need to pay closer attention to his auto dealerships, but some said that Braman, an ardent supporter of Israel, withdrew in protest to a decision by Reagan to sell arms to Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Braman followed with casual interest the deepening financial woes of Eagles owner Leonard Tose. When, by the mid-1980s, it became clear that Tose would have to sell, Braman remained only casually interested.

But when word got out that Tose might transfer the team to Phoenix, Braman became extremely interested.

The Eagles in Phoenix? Never, he vowed.

In the spring of 1985, negotiations were long, complicated and tedious. Some close to the negotiations said that Tose, 70, was under great pressure to sell from the Crocker National Bank, to whom Tose owed, it was reported, $30 million.

Norman Braman, the Philadelphia son of a barber and a mother who walked three extra blocks to save a penny on bread, had come home. H.R. (BUM) BRIGHT, Dallas Cowboys

H.R. (Bum) Bright, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is one of America’s wealthiest men, said to be worth something like $500 million.

He came out of World War II with most of the pay he had earned as a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers saved, returned to Dallas and started buying oil and gas leases.

He likes to tell interviewers he had $12.76 in his checking account on his 27th birthday, but he was a millionaire at 31. He went on to amass a great fortune, even by Texas standards, first in the “oal bidness,” then in savings and loans, trucking companies and real estate.

Bright owns so many drilling companies that he ran out of names for them long ago. Many are named for rocks, such as azurite, barite and beryl, and others are named for noodles, such as manicotti, fettuccine and the like.

So why, he was asked recently, would such a smart businessman spend $60 million on a professional football team? Is that any way for a guy to make money?

“No, not after what I paid for the team,” he said, in his Texas country-boy drawl. “But I’ll tell you what, if anyone ever offers you a free one, take it.”

Bum Bright, a man Fortune magazine called one of the nation’s wealthiest “private rich,” is an old wildcatter, an ex-oilfield roustabout who says he still has nightmares about going broke again.

A friend swears that Bright angrily walked out of a Dallas restaurant last year when he was charged 85 cents for a cup of coffee. It’s also said that he keeps his family on a $200,000 yearly budget, well below its means. He works 12-hour days and takes few vacations.

A business partner of 30 years, Herbert Schiff, once told the Wall Street Journal: “Do you know why we worked so hard all those years? We were both afraid we’d end up back where we started, flat broke.”

After spending the last two years of World War II building bridges and pipelines for advancing U.S. troops in France, Bright returned to Dallas and spent a year working for Sun Oil as a petroleum engineer. With $6,500 he had saved from his Army and Sun Oil pay, he started buying and selling oil and gas leases but retaining royalty interests.

“I bought all I could find, and sold them for more than I paid for them--sometimes on the same day,” he said.

“One time an old farmer wouldn’t sell me a lease but his wife wanted him to. She wanted to buy a piano. I said, ‘You get him to sell, and I’ll buy you that piano. When she asked me how she could convince him to sell, I told her to lock him out of their bedroom until he did. He came around in a few days.”

Bright, 66, didn’t grow up dreaming of owning a football team, but he certainly wasn’t averse to the idea.

“Tex Schramm (Cowboy president) called me in 1983 and told me Clint Murchison wanted to sell the team and that they both wanted me to buy it,” he said. “It took awhile, but I put together some limited partners (there are seven) and we got it done.”

A Texas A&M; graduate who once had 25,000 matchbooks printed to celebrate an Aggie victory, Bright was asked if the Cowboys or the Aggies are his favorite team.

“That’s a tough one,” he said, after a long pause. “Really, that’s a toss-up.”

As an owner, his style is strictly light touch. Six months after buying the Cowboys, he had spoken to Coach Tom Landry once, he said.

“I have never met Herschel Walker,” he said. “I meet with Tex (Schramm) every two weeks during the season and once a month in the off-season. I see Landry maybe once or twice a year, at social occasions.”

He was asked whether A&M; Coach Jackie Sherrill would be a candidate to succeed Landry, if the only coach the Cowboys have ever had should retire.

“I have no idea, because I would never get involved with that kind of a decision,” he said. “I told Tex when I bought this team that one of my conditions was that he had to stay and make those decisions.

“My getting involved in a decision over a coach would be like me going to one of my savings and loans (he has 110 of them) and hiring a teller.” JACK KENT COOKE, Washington Redskins

On a knee-deep-in-mud dirt road outside a Saskatchewan prairie town, 22-year-old Jack Kent Cooke peered between his inadequate windshield wipers at a driving summer rainstorm.

He also listened to the tires on his Ford roadster spin uselessly in the mud.

That was 1934. Cooke is now 74 and one of America’s wealthiest men. But on that miserable day long ago, he took stock of his life.

“Here I was, right in the middle of a great Depression, traveling around the Canadian prairies trying to sell the worst encyclopedias ever published,” he said.

Later that day, Cooke made a sale, to a high school principal in Veregin, Saskatchewan. With part of the $5 deposit on the $39.50 encyclopedia set, he bought lunch for him and his wife, Barbara--soda crackers and cheese--and they ate while seated on the roadster’s running board.

In 1986, Cooke, the owner of the Washington Redskins, was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 60th-wealthiest American. Forbes pegged his net worth at $600 million. The Guinness Book of World Records used to list him as the world record-holder in the most-expensive-divorce category--$50 million in 1979.

Before 1934 had ended, Cooke had 11 encyclopedia salesmen working for him, and was making $200 a week.

In 1936, he was a salesman for Colgate, Palmolive-Peet. Years later, Ralph Hart, the man who hired Cooke, said that Cooke became the greatest salesman in company history.

In the late 1930s, Cooke tried to break into the broadcasting and publishing businesses. On Jan. 1, 1937, he went to work for radio station CJCS in Stratford, Ontario, for $25 a week. Half a dozen years later, he was a millionaire.

Cooke and his boss, Roy Thomson, began selling national advertising in Toronto for Thomson’s three radio stations. Programming was fine-tuned, ad sales increased and balance sheets turned black.

The Thomson-Cooke partnership dissolved in 1949, and Cooke made his debut in professional sports when he bought Toronto’s International League baseball club in 1951. He also began spending a lot of time in the United States.

He was assembling a business empire that included publishing, broadcasting, pro sports, real estate, plastics and die casting.

He didn’t hit the U.S. sports scene in a major way until 1965, when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers from Bob Short for $5.2 million. After buying the Lakers and later getting a National Hockey League expansion team--the Kings--Cooke built the Forum in Inglewood, for $12.5 million.

He would have been on the sports scene earlier, but a couple of big league deals fizzled.

First, he unsuccessfully bid $5.5 million for the Detroit Tigers in 1955.

Then, in the late 1950s, Gene Autry and Cooke vied for an American League expansion baseball team. Cooke wanted to put one in Toronto, a city then without an adequate stadium. Autry got the team, which he named the Los Angeles Angels.

In 1960, Cooke tried, and failed, to buy control of the Redskins for $4.5 million. Instead, he wound up with a 25% share. Cooke became majority owner of the Redskins in 1974, though, and acquired 100% ownership in 1985.

The Canadian-born Cooke, who became a U.S. citizen by special Congressional act in 1960, has added more publishing and real estate entries to his financial empire in recent years.

He bought downtown Phoenix, for example. Well, part of it. In 1983, he paid $52.5 million for the 15.4-acre Rosenzweig Center, which includes a high-rise hotel and two office buildings.

In 1985, he paid $176 million for the Daily News newspaper in Van Nuys.

He is one of the NFL’s most magnetic personalities, seemingly with something to say about almost anything. Just ask. Cooke never attended college, yet prides himself on speaking meticulous English--and insists that his employees do the same.

Oft-told story: The Laker uniforms he designed were purple, but Cooke hated the word purple. So he demanded that radio announcer Chick Hearn and every other employee call them Forum blue. He kept a dictionary on his desk and constantly sent Hearn memos, pointing out his on-the-air mistakes in grammar.

He has been called jovial, vain, calculating, daring, demanding, overbearing and gushy. But never a wallflower.

In 1983, his Redskins won the Super Bowl, and Times columnist Scott Ostler asked him what it felt like to be awarded the game ball.

“Oh-h-h-h, that game ball,” he said. “I’m going to have (it) anointed. Oh, I was so proud of that. Can you imagine? I was so surprised! I had a lump in my throat.

“Boy, when (quarterback Joe Theismann) handed me that ball, I thought, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ And that’s not false humility, it was honest-to-God humility. Geez, these wonderful guys. They’re a marvelous bunch of guys, you know.” WELLINGTON and TIM MARA, New York Giants

The most amazing aspect of the New York Giants’ presence in the Super Bowl has nothing to do with Bill Parcells’ coaching, Phil Simms’ quarterbacking or Lawrence Taylor’s linebacking.

The stunner is that an NFL team could actually put together a 14-2 season while being run by two owners who haven’t spoken to each other, club insiders say, for eight years.

Wellington Mara, 70, is the son of Timothy J. Mara, who founded the Giants in 1925. He left 50% ownership of the team to two sons, Wellington and Jack, who died in 1965.

Jack Mara left his half of the Giants to his son Tim, daughter Moira, and widow Helen.

Today, Wellington carries the title of club president. Tim, 51, is listed as vice president and treasurer.

“The team of Wellington and Jack was a good one,” said Norm Miller, who covered the Giants for 13 years for the New York Daily News. “Wellington was the football operations man, and Jack was the dollars and cents guy. The problems began when Tim Mara, Wellington’s nephew, began to assert himself.”

Tim Mara’s side of the family, of course, maintains that the problems began in 1973 when, with Wellington at the helm, the Giants began a string of eight straight losing seasons.

The family squabbling was kept largely private until an open break occurred in 1978, over Wellington Mara’s hiring of the NFL Management Council’s Terry Bledsoe as the club’s assistant director of operations. The feud has been burning since.

The Maras have adjoining luxury suites at Giants Stadium. Wellington Mara had a Venetian blind installed in the window on his side, and keeps it closed. Tim Mara had his side covered with wood paneling.

The man in the middle of this family feud is General Manager George Young, who wasn’t hired by either Mara. He was hired, in effect, by Rozelle, during one of his mediation efforts.

On the surface, Young says life in a war zone can be productive.

“Both these families are my friends,” he told the New York Times. “I have no problem. Hell, I worked for Joe Robbie in Miami and Carroll Rosenbloom in Baltimore. Next to them, these guys are choir boys.”

The patriarch of the New York Giants, Timothy J. Mara, entered the scene when the NFL was fighting for its life.

The era belonged to Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden and Bobby Jones. In the 1920s, the National Football League was a waif, a league that operated out of automobile glove compartments and cheap hotels. It paid players $100 a game--providing they agreed to repair their own uniforms.

Nevertheless, Mara, a New York horse racing promoter, had a hunch about George Halas’ rag-tag league of out-of-work baseball players, pro wrestlers, longshoremen, part-time cowboys, some All-American football players and factory workers.

In the summer of 1925, Halas offered Mara the New York franchise in his league for $2,500. Some football historians have maintained it was actually $500.

In the mid-’20s, the NFL always seemed to be one game away from the coroner. Franchises jumped around from cities like Dayton, Pottstown and Columbus. But both Halas and Mara believed that one player could save the league--Red Grange.

Halas outbid Mara for Grange, but Mara managed to have the final game of the 1925 season, between the Bears and the Giants, scheduled for New York’s Polo Grounds. A big New York crowd to see the Galloping Ghost, he believed, would go a long way toward making his club, and the league, solvent.

A crowd estimated at 70,000 watched the Bears beat the Giants, 19-7 that day, Dec. 6, 1925. Grange scored a touchdown on an interception runback.

The league’s owners, meeting that off-season, agreed that attendance at that New York game proved their brave venture could succeed in America’s big cities, given sufficient publicity and big-name college players.

Today, no one sells tickets like the New York Giants. The cutoff point on Giant season tickets in their 76,891-seat stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., is 70,000, highest in the NFL.

In the last two decades, when the Giants were generally not producing winning teams, fan support never wavered.

“The Yankees, the Jets, the Mets, they lost people when their teams went bad,” Wellington Mara once told the New York Times. “We never did.”

And what about today? If the Giants win, a double Lombardi Trophy presentation to Wellington and Tim?

Hmmm.