Tagliabue Is Quick to Set Agenda as New NFL Chief

Newly elected NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue Friday outlined some of the tasks that will command his immediate attention when he officially takes over for Pete Rozelle Nov. 5.

The network television contracts with the league expire after this season, so Tagliabue said he will meet late next week with Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, chairman of the television committee, to begin discussions.

Also next week, Tagliabue plans to meet with members of the Management Council, the league’s negotiating arm, to discuss new ideas for attempting to reach a collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association.

“Those are two areas that deserve immediate attention and two areas that will get immediate attention,” Tagliabue said.

His first full day as commissioner began just after midnight, when former President Ronald Reagan called from Japan. The morning after his election in Cleveland was spent talking to owners, well-wishers and football writers.

Tagliabue said as far as he is concerned the deliberations that led to three meetings and 12 ballots and that kept Pete Rozelle in office 220 days after he retired are past history. He said the owners who supported Jim Finks, his main opponent for the job, called to tell him “bygones have to be bygones.”

Tagliabue, 48, a Georgetown alumnus and senior partner with the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, said, “There were arguments at times, and they were painful at times, but they had a very good value.”

Tagliabue said he feels no particular debt to the group of 11 owners who blocked Finks’s election in Chicago in July, then rallied behind Tagliabue’s candidacy. “As far as I’m concerned, the Chicago 11 refers to Mike Singletary and the rest of the Chicago Bears’ defense,” he said.

Tagliabue talked Friday about where he stands on collective bargaining, expansion, a possible restructuring of the league offices and minority involvement, on the field and in the executive suites. He said he told the owners in Cleveland Thursday that, “One of my priorities will be getting more Art Shells into the NFL.”

Shell became the NFL’s first black head coach in modern history three weeks ago when Al Davis made him coach of the Los Angeles Raiders. “I’ve already made this clear to them,” Tagliabue said. “Art Shell’s initial weeks have shown he can energize the Raiders. Minority ownership is also an area for the NFL to be a leader. There are minority business people out there who are successful, who have an interest in sports.”

Tagliabue made reference to the Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association, which just became the only professional sports franchise run by blacks, and cited Dave Bing, a Washingtonian whose Bing Steel Inc. made $42 million in 1987, as the type of black businessman the NFL ought to aggressively pursue, either when expansion comes or when a club is being sold.

Tagliabue said he may ask owners to go out and identify potential minority businessmen, and said, “There are more formal ways of doing it; (finding) those who have the means to do it, the interest and ability to run a club well.”

He said he talked for two hours recently with Willie Davis, the Green Bay Packers Hall-of-Famer, who was one of the four finalists for commissioner. “Obviously Willie Davis commanded a lot of respect in this process or he wouldn’t have come that far.”

On the topic of expansion, Tagliabue said much the same thing Rozelle said, that a collective bargaining agreement (the league has been without one since September 1987) must precede expansion.

“It would be very important to have a good agreement with the (players’) union,” he said. “Then you can think about expanding by whatever number of teams. Then you can go to prospective cities and owners and say, ‘This (contract) is the basis on which we operate.’ I think it was very important for pro basketball to get their collective bargaining agreement, to solve some of the franchise problems of existing teams and then go into expansion.”

Tagliabue, asked about cities that have lost franchises, said, “Oakland, St. Louis, Baltimore in particular” had proved they could be great NFL cities, and that expansion would “weigh in the favor” of those cities.

No expansion committee would be appointed, he said, until after a labor contract is reached.

On that subject, Tagliabue said: “I think there are new ways (of negotiating) and I’m not saying I’ve invented them. I think a lot of new ideas will come forth. I think the lawsuit has been an impediment to that. It has eliminated the prospects of fruitful collective bargaining. We need to be open to new ideas.” Tagliabue said he hopes the case never goes to court.

On a possible restructuring of the league, including the naming of conference presidents and an executive in charge of football operations, Tagliabue said: “There can be some restructuring and some improvement, as there can be in any organization. I want to wait and see what Booz, Allen, Hamilton (hired by the league to study its organizational structure) says, and I want to wait and see what owners say. I have some ideas but I think it would really be premature to tell you what they are until I’ve spoken to a broad group of people in the league.”

Asked why he wanted to become commissioner, Tagliabue said, “I said (in an interview in Dallas) it would be fun to continue a great sports tradition. It’s a league where the sport has become a form of civic passion, where people hang out the windows of skyscrapers to watch the players come home after they’ve won a Super Bowl. That has become something special in America, and it’s on its way to becoming something special in Europe and Japan. So that’s why I said it would be fun to continue this great tradition.

“Do I think it’s going to be a bed of roses? No. It would be foolish, naive optimism to think there won’t be problems. There will be problems. There will be some tough problems. Tough negotiations. But I still think it will be fun.”