SUPER BOWL XXI : THE NFL OWNERS : THE AFC 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.

BUD ADAMS, Houston Oilers

Texas oilman K.S. (Bud) Adams Jr. has taken two jolts lately that he wasn’t really counting on and that he hasn’t enjoyed very much:

--There have been five straight losing years for the NFL team he owns, the Houston Oilers, who in that period have only won 16 of 73 games.

--At the same time, a lot of Texas oil wells have been capped or plugged, meaning that Adams’ empire isn’t what it used to be, though it is still more secure than most.

The oil bust of the 1980s forced two former fellow owners--Clint Murchison and John Mecom of Dallas and New Orleans--out of football. And they aren’t unique. Many others are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

As a bitter Texan said, oil millionaires once prayed: “Stay alive till ‘85!” Now it’s: “Chapter 11 in ‘87!”

In Houston, though, Bud Adams escaped the worst. He is still one of the NFL’s 10 richest men, with a net worth, as estimated by Forbes magazine, of $150 million.

He has hung in by shrewdly shifting much of his attention from oil to ranching, banking, real estate, auto sales, aircraft charters and even art galleries.

Early one recent morning, he was at one of his ranches near Houston, where he carefully watched an experiment that may soon revolutionize American cattle breeding.

“What we’re doing here is breeding longhorns to salers,” he said. “A saler is a light French (cow). If successful, we’ll be taking 25% of the fat content out of our cattle. Nutritionists will love us.”

The new breed is called longlears. Said Adams: “Eat a longlear steak and live 25% longer.”

The sole owner of the conglomerate known as Adams Resources, he is a 64-year-old, full-faced Texan who looks as if he might be the best pool player in the whole darn town of El Paso.

But he was born in Bartlesville, Okla., where his father was a star basketball player on the old AAU league team known as the Phillips Oilers.

That was in the industrial era of big league sports, when the Chicago Bears were known as the Decatur Staleys. For years, AAU basketball was bigger than the NBA or even, in some places, the NFL.

Even so, to make a living, his father, known as Boots Adams, had to work 8-to-5 shifts in a Phillips warehouse between games.

Bud grew up with a sister and five half-brothers as Boots progressed in the oil business until, at 37, he became president of Phillips 66. Thus he could, and did, send Bud to Culver Military Academy in Indiana and then to Menlo College in California, where he played on a champion rugby team.

Settling down at Kansas, where Boots had played basketball, Bud lettered in football and became the biggest Sigma Chi man in the 48 states.

He and his wife, Nancy, who live in Houston, are the parents of three, and grandparents of four. The family’s first-born sons are named Kenneth S. Adams I, II, III and IV.

Adams II, that’s Bud, was an American Football League founder. The AFL’s first press conference was held in his Houston office in 1958, when Lamar Hunt flew in and announced: “The names of the six other owners will be forthcoming.”

Says Adams: “That was news to me. Lamar didn’t even have one other guy forthcoming. But eventually, he did get them.”

Adams’ teams won the first two AFL titles in 1960-61 while averaging losses of more than $500,000. A few years later, they proudly doubled this to $1 million before NBC took over the AFL’s TV contract and saved the league.

Or as Adams said: “NBC saved my tail.”

His club is worth about $75 million now.

“That’s now, “ he says. “There were years when I couldn’t get anybody to put in 75 cents.” ART MODELL, Cleveland Browns

According to the individuals who run the clubs, the NFL’s most respected owner is Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns.

Modell, they say, makes it a point to get along with representatives of the league’s many cliques and factions. He can be tough, but he plays fair. In a sense, they say, Modell is the NFL.

Fifty-four years ago, he couldn’t have asked for more--he certainly couldn’t have expected that much--on the day that he decided to spend his life in sports.

He was then 7 years old.

Born in New York, living in Brooklyn, he’d heard about the Dodgers for years--for two or three years, anyway. And he was finally old enough, he thought, to see his first ballgame. So he walked the six miles from home to Ebbets Field.

The thing that surprised him, when he got inside and sat down, was that the baseball season was over. The team that ran out from the dugout was a football team, also called the Dodgers. They just did win an exciting NFL game from the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“I was hooked,” Modell recalls. “For the next 15 years, all I wanted to be was Father Lumpkin.”

Roy (Father) Lumpkin was a 1930s quarterback and defensive back who played football without a helmet. But he was too good for Modell to imitate.

“The helmet was no problem,” Modell says. “I learned to live without a helmet. I just couldn’t throw the damn ball straight.”

This left him with just one thing to do. “I had to save up until I could buy a team,” he said.

Conscientiously, he saved for years, and in 1961, at 36, took over the Browns.

In a Park Avenue elevator today, you might take him for a graying TV executive, a smooth one. There’s nothing about Art Modell that suggests anything but a successful, urbane executive. But he hasn’t forgotten that, at 16, he had to leave school for the shipyards to help his sisters support their widowed mother.

During the Depression, his father, a wine company executive, went bankrupt. He died soon after.

In his 20s, Art Modell was a television producer doing daytime shows for ABC. By his early 30s, he had his own advertising agency, where he got the stake that put him in the NFL.

His wife, Pat, is a former actress. They have two adopted sons.

All his adult life, Modell has been asking, or has been asked, how much is an NFL club worth?

“I can’t remember when they didn’t seem too expensive,” he says.

Consider:

--Fifty years ago, Walter O’Malley tried to talk Branch Rickey out of buying the NFL’s Brooklyn franchise because it cost too much: $600.

--Three years ago, there were those who thought that Bum Bright and his friends paid too much for the Dallas Cowboys: $80 million.

--In 1961, Modell thought he was paying too much for the Browns: $3.93 million. He put it up, though, for the same reason that Rickey and Bright put up. Some people want ocean-going sailboats, some want football teams.

Actually, in 1961, Modell could only afford to make a down payment for the Cleveland franchise. Basically, his team has paid for itself--out of the millions that have materialized like magic in gate receipts and TV revenues. Essentially, the only thing Modell had that mattered was vision.

But why Cleveland?

“Because Cleveland was there,” he said. “I’d never been to Cleveland in my life. That was the (NFL) team that was for sale.”

Paul Brown, the Browns’ coach when Modell bought in, could have made the same deal Modell made. He didn’t, they fought, and soon parted.

Modell proved to be more willing than Brown to risk his last dollar on his judgment that pro football was the wave of the future. Thus the legacy of Father Lumpkin.

As a memento of all the years that he has been on the hook, Modell still holds a bloc of 60 New York Giants’ season tickets. After all, the game has been his life since age 7. ART ROONEY, Pittsburgh Steelers

Art Rooney, 86, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 54 years, has succeeded the late George Halas as pro football’s grand old guy.

Everybody seems to like Art Rooney. He is first of all a gentleman. And he knows how to meet a friend more than halfway.

There was, for instance, the day in 1968 when he and the NFL’s other owners reached a bitter impasse. A merger had been voted--but to even up the leagues, three NFL teams would have to join the AFL teams. Through days of wrangling, no owner budged.

Finally, Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced that he would keep the meeting in session until 1990, if necessary, to get three volunteers, whereupon Rooney got up and said: “Well, hell, I’ll go.”

Instantly, Cleveland’s Art Modell said: “If Rooney goes, I go.”

And from the back of the room, Baltimore’s Carroll Rosenbloom said: “Make it three.”

The most serious rift in modern NFL history had been aborted--thanks to a Pittsburgh guy.

Rooney’s first 40 years in the NFL were conceivably the most amazing in sports history. From 1933 until 1972, his team never finished better than second, never won so much as a single division title.

Then, practically overnight, he became the biggest winner in league history when the Steelers won four Super Bowls in six years.

Personally, however, Rooney never changed, though he did get a little older. He remains the grandpa everyone would like to have. His hair is still bushy, white and rumpled, his business suit black and rumpled, his manner reserved but friendly.

When Rooney was born on Jan. 27, 1901, in nearby Coultersville, one corner of his mouth was shaped in a perfect little circle as a parking place for the cigars in his future. He denies this, of course--but it’s still there.

He didn’t smoke a cigar that first day, perhaps, but, like George Burns, he hasn’t missed many days since. There’s a humidor on his desk at Three Rivers Stadium, and he’s into it all day long.

Son of an Irish saloon keeper, Rooney was born into a family of eight. One brother was a priest.

Another brother, Jim, a politician, was in the state legislature for many years. Asked one time for his position on the Monroe Doctrine, Jim said: “If the boys are for it, I’m for it.”

In Pittsburgh’s old First Ward, the site of Three Rivers Stadium, Art Rooney has lived in the same house for more than 50 years. It’s in an oasis of elegant old homes in the midst of an inner-city ghetto.

The Rooney place is a three-story, 12-room Victorian house with four white columns fronting North Lincoln Avenue.

There, a five-minute walk from the stadium, he and his late wife, Kathleen, raised five sons. Dan and Artie have been associated with Art in running the Steelers. The younger sons operate Rooney’s three race tracks in New York, Vermont and Florida.

He also breeds thoroughbreds at his farm in Maryland. A lifelong horse player, Rooney originally bought the Steelers with $2,500 in race track winnings. That’s the legend, anyway.

Though he denies this, too, mildly, he says: “For 35 or 40 years, I did go to the track every day.”

Although no man spans the whole history of the 67-year-old NFL anymore--Halas was the last--Rooney goes back into the mists of football history as far as anyone, including Halas, who was an NFL organizer in 1921.

That year, when the NFL was struggling in mostly Midwestern pastures, Rooney coached and played on his own team, a Pittsburgh semipro team he organized himself after graduating from Duquesne. He had played halfback at Duquesne.

Then, in 1933, “They took our semipros into the NFL,” Rooney said.

In that era, he went to Mass every day, then to the office, and then, in season, to football practice. He still does. Asked what he does at the office every day these days, he said: “I sit around and look wise.”

In season, Rooney also sees two football games each Sunday.

“I leave Three Rivers Stadium with two minutes to play, and run to my car,” he said. “They bring it to the gate (with) orders to keep the motor running. I hear the end of my game in the car, and I’m home in two minutes. The TV doubleheader game starts at 4:05 (in Pittsburgh), and I haven’t missed a kickoff yet.”

Or much of anything else. JOHN SAWYER, Cincinnati Bengals

There’s a saying in pro football that only one NFL club owner could be hurt in a hailstorm.

He is John Sawyer of the Cincinnati Bengals, the only farmer in this fascinating little circle.

To be sure, Sawyer is a multimillionaire farmer. He owns not one but six farms. He also carries the genes of a business man. His father was at one time the U.S. secretary of commerce.

But, by cracky, Sawyer’s soybeans were attacked by a man-killing hailstorm not long ago.

He had flown one of his planes to New York and, from a hotel window, was admiring the gridlock below when interrupted by a phone call.

“They told me that half our crops had been wiped out in 20 minutes,” Sawyer said. “That’s 5,000 acres--devastated at one stroke.”

He rushed right home. “But I couldn’t do a thing to help,” he said. “All I could do was look, and that wasn’t much fun.”

Happily for the Sawyer Co., that kind of trouble hasn’t come often. And so in 1968, Sawyer had what it took to take control of the Bengals.

“This is the last business in the world I ever expected to be in,” Sawyer says. “I never gave football a thought until the morning our company veterinarian walked in and said he wanted to get me together with a guy named Paul Brown.”

The veterinarian is Dr. Bill Hackett, a former All-American lineman who played for Brown at Ohio State. Brown, the almost legendary former coach of the Cleveland Browns, was then organizing the Bengals and told Hackett that he was looking for investors.

Which is one way to make a fortune in football.

The AFL charged Sawyer $7 million for the franchise. He kept about half the stock, selling the rest to Brown and other investors. Today, the Bengals are worth $70 million or so. In other words, they’ve appreciated 1,000% in less than 20 years.

“And financially, we’ve never had a losing season,” Sawyer said. “I give all the credit to Paul Brown. He’s made all this possible.”

Sawyer is a slim, youngish-looking Cincinnati native. He was No. 4 in a family of three boys and two girls. A Princeton graduate, he is 61. Divorced, he has four daughters and three grandsons.

He is one of the NFL’s few silent owners, having given Brown full authority to run everything. This makes Brown the heavy, and Sawyer a happy bystander.

At a recent Bengal training camp, nobody enjoyed the scene more than Sawyer when Brown felt it necessary to nail down their exact relationship.

Inviting Sawyer to a team meeting, Brown waited until the players were seated, then said: “Stand up, John.”

When the owner obediently rose, Brown said: “Sit down, John.”

As Sawyer sat, Brown fixed an eye on the help and said: “On this club, gentlemen, I’m the last word.”

Later, laughing, Sawyer told a reporter: “They got the message.”

Sawyer is a jogger who spends 5% of his working time with the Bengals, 95% with the farms. His company operates more than 20 big Midwestern farms, of which Sawyer still owns four in Ohio.

He has other land holdings in Montana, Wyoming, Mississippi and elsewhere.

It was after he graduated from Princeton that he first tried his father’s profession, the law, one summer, then his aunt’s, farming. He liked that better--the sunup-to-sundown plowing and all the rest.

“Some guys like to feed hogs, some guys like to read law,” he said. “I like to feed hogs.”

He also likes to make football trips. He rides with the Bengals to every game.

Put it all together--the hog trips and the pigskin trips--and, says Sawyer: “It’s a perfect life.”