A Foolish Optimist : Tagliabue Gets Ready to Rule Over the NFL’s House of Uncommons

Here’s a trivia question that you may want to ask the next time you’re in Milan, Italy.

What does the police department there have in common with the National Football League?

The answer is Tagliabues.

Milan’s chief of police and the NFL’s new commissioner are both Tagliabues.

Of course that has only been true lately.

Until a week ago, when the NFL elected him on the 12th ballot, Paul Tagliabue was a Washington-based attorney who did a lot of work for the league.

He was a Washington Redskin fan, too--unlike his numerous kinsmen on the Lombardian plain of northern Italy.

There, the original Tagliabues were apparently hard-working village butchers. In the Italian language, Tagliabue comes from a word for “cut the steer,” or butcher.

The commissioner-elect has also made 12-hour workdays a habit. But with that, the parallel ends. He’s one Tagliabue who would never let a fall weekend go by without a helping or two of football.

At a Redskin game in Washington last month, he and his wife, Chandler, whom he calls Chan, arrived early on an Indian summer Sunday, sat in their usual seats all afternoon--unrecognized by anyone else--and then sped home, beating the traffic.

Some daylight remained, and they didn’t want to waste it. They are runners. For the better part of an hour, after changing into shorts and running shoes, Paul and Chan ran along the Potomac as the sun set behind the river near their home. Then they called it a day.

“The best of both worlds,” Tagliabue--that’s Tag-lee-uh-boo--said at his law office recently. “An NFL game, and a good run.”

He has been a sports spectator and participant--basketball, tennis and good runs--as long as he can remember, although at 6 feet 5, usually dressed conservatively, usually wearing glasses, he could pass for a lanky, tenured history professor.

Either that or a dark-haired, reed-thin old basketball player.

His bearing is that of a former athlete who has made it a point to take care of himself.

And at 48, he said, he feels as fit and vigorous as he was in his basketball days at Georgetown University a quarter century ago.

Which is a good thing indeed.

For the job he is moving into floored his predecessor.

At 63, Pete Rozelle wouldn’t take it anymore, at any price. In his third decade as commissioner, Rozelle decided to resign last spring with two years left on a contract worth an annual $1 million.

“I could see that the job was wearing him down,” said Tagliabue, who has been Rozelle’s friend and associate for 20 years.

The thing that got to Rozelle was his increasing inability to solve league problems. He handled them with ease, as tough as they’ve been from the start, until the last few years, when the arrival of a new set of imperious club owners brought complications.

What leads Tagliabue to think that he can restore order in such an unruly house when Rozelle couldn’t?

“I’m a foolish optimist,” he said, grinning slightly.

“I am more optimistic than (Rozelle) is--now,” he added, more soberly. “And I am younger.

“I’m looking forward with great interest to the challenge. I suppose I feel much the same challenge that he saw when he started.”

A RAFT OF KIN

The challenge is one that would make most any Tagliabue tingle. In recent centuries, this has been a family of proud, skilled stonemasons.

There were Tagliabues among the craftsmen who helped build New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine many years ago. Other Tagliabue stonemasons had a hand in the construction of the city’s famous Lincoln tunnel.

But nothing is forever. In the last three generations, the local branch of the family has gone from stonemason to commissioner.

And it was basketball, basically, that did it.

“I would never have gone to college if I hadn’t had a basketball scholarship,” Tagliabue said. “My father’s attitude was, you work days and get your education at night.”

Half a century ago, his father began the move away from stonemasonry when he became a small building contractor in Jersey City, N.J., where he established his family in a tall, narrow old house in a row of nearly identical houses.

“We had the ground floor,” the commissioner-elect said. “My grandmother lived upstairs.”

A college friend, Lamar Alexander, who visited Tagliabue there when he was at New York University Law School, remembers: “It was a comfortable, warmly furnished place, with a big friendly Italian family. There was always a lot of family around.”

The gang included four tall Tagliabue boys, Paul, his two older brothers and baby John.

Talking about the early years, Paul Tagliabue recalls that virtually his only interest was sports--playground games, high school games, college games; football, basketball, track--until his sophomore year at Georgetown.

Early that season, jumping for a rebound, he collided with an opponent and came down awkwardly, clutching his knee. It was a ligament tear, his first serious injury.

With nothing else to do for several weeks, Tagliabue discovered the world of academics. Of scholars and books.

“We hadn’t been challenged in high school,” he said. “It was easy to get good grades there. But now I realized that there was more to life than sports. It changed me completely.

“I played a lot of basketball after I came back, setting the (school rebound record) and all that, but I was never really the same man. I think it was the knee injury that led to my law career.”

And by extension, it was his law career that set up his NFL career.

Never has a football commissioner owed more to a basketball knee.

A LOT OF ENERGY

At the Tagliabue residence on a recent Thursday morning, Paul was asleep when Chan got up at 5:30 and headed for her 6 o’clock aerobics class at the YMCA. She either runs or does aerobics every morning at that hour.

When she got home, he was gone.

Later, when she came home from her office at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church--where she is the director of stewardship and development, a full-time job--he was still at his office downtown.

They’re an active family. Do they ever have dinner together?

“Yes, if I want to have dinner at 9,” Chan Tagliabue said.

Her friends and business associates all use the same three words when describing her: bright, attractive and small. She is more than a foot shorter than her husband.

She is also a good companion and vibrant, exhibiting much of her husband’s energy. She easily manages a job, a big house and a household with a 17-year-old daughter and either a 20-year-old son or, if he’s overseas, an exchange student from France, Finland or somewhere.

During a 1986 NFL trial that kept the commissioner-elect in New York, it was his wife who single-handedly moved the whole family into their new house.

“I think anyone would be proud of that,” she said.

Georgia-born and bred, Chan, a small-town merchant’s daughter, still speaks with a trace of accent. “I only realize it when I hear myself on a tape,” she said at her office, which is as cluttered as her husband’s.

She added that she is of British, French and Irish descent, “among other things.”

A former roommate said: “Chan doesn’t know what she is. She’s a real American.”

The Tagliabues’ life style will change greatly in New York.

For one thing, Chan has already handed in her resignation at the church, where she has been a fund raiser for 10 years.

She expects, however, to continue as a social activist. A former board member of the Washington chapter of Planned Parenthood, she has also logged many years in volunteer church work. Other interests are a book club and an investment club.

“I can’t see myself just sitting around at New York luncheons,” she said.

In the commissioner-elect’s new Manhattan office, one thing will go on as always, Chan predicted.

“Paul loves his (12-hour) work days,” she said.

He agreed. And, smiling, he commented, “I’ve already told (NFL publicist) Joe Browne to alert the (staff) that I’ll be there at 7:30.”

For many years, he has also worked Saturday mornings from 8 or 9 until 1. And in football’s off-season, he comes in Sundays, too, if he’s due to be on the road that week.

“You get a lot of reading and thinking done on weekends,” he said. “No phones.”

Is Rozelle’s successor a workaholic?

“Ask my wife about that,” Tagliabue said. “She’s always telling our children that I’m not a workaholic, that I just do a lot of work.”

Said Chan: “Paul is not capable of not working hard. A workaholic is an escapist, and Paul is definitely not an escapist. He’s simply committed to doing a good job. His standards are very high.”

A LOT OF FAITH

In his hard-working recent past, the commissioner-elect missed some of his children’s growing up.

And that has led some of their friends and acquaintances to draw comparisons between Tagliabue and possibly his best friend, Lamar Alexander, the president of the University of Tennessee and author of the 1988 bestseller, “Six Months Off.”

Describing his disruptive personal life in the years when he was governor of Tennessee, Alexander recalled that on the few occasions when he was home for dinner, he and his wife, Honey, sat at opposite ends of a long table, with their four children in between.

But nobody looked at him, the governor mourned. From months and years of habit, all four sat with their heads turned toward Honey.

That jolted Alexander into taking six months off, which he spent getting reacquainted with his family.

Noting that Alexander and Tagliabue have been friends and work hounds since law school, an Alexander aide mused: “Should Tagliabue be taking six months off before taking on the NFL?”

Chan Tagliabue doesn’t see any reason for that.

“He’s a good husband and father,” she said. “He involves himself with all of us, with everything.

“The thing that sets Paul apart from some men (at home) is that he’s so much there when he’s there.”

Theirs is an inter-faith marriage. In stately Milledgeville, Ga., the antebellum capital of the state, Chan, a graduate of Georgia College, grew up in the Southern Presbyterian church.

In New Jersey, Paul was born into a Catholic family, and from grade school through Georgetown attended Catholic institutions.

During their Washington years, however, the Tagliabues have been active in an Episcopal church, St. Columba’s--”by mutual agreement,” Chan said.

They were attracted, she added, “by St. Columba’s outstanding children’s program.”

She speaks proudly of her two children.

“They’re pampered, I’m afraid,” their mother said. “But they don’t behave like they’re pampered.

“Emily is very capable. She’s a well-adjusted, hard-working young woman (who will finish high school in Bethesda, Md., this year before moving to New York).

“Drew (an Amherst junior) has been interested in foreign lands and languages since he was 7, when we first took him to Europe. He’s in Japan this year.”

In time, Drew will also re-connect with the family in New York, where, the commissioner-elect said, they will rent or buy a Manhattan apartment.

“Paul wants to walk to work,” Chan said.

They are keeping their Bethesda home, a rambling, one-level California-style residence with five bedrooms and a broad glass wall along the back overlooking a small Maryland forest.

It’s a home that the whole family seems to enjoy, and they will continue to spend some of their weekends there.

“New York is an easy commute,” the new commissioner said. “We usually fly up and take the train back. It’s a three-hour train ride. Just right.”

THE HISTORIAN

Napoleon was a slight favorite at Waterloo in 1815, but lost anyway, and the history of modern Europe begins with a continental congress that was called immediately afterward to divide the spoils: the Congress of Vienna.

Modern Europe was shaped and divided at that conference--which predated the unification of Italy by about 50 years, but got the attention of the Italian people, anyhow.

Is someone asking, “Who cares?”

Well, the commissioner-elect cares. That’s the kind of stuff that Tagliabue likes to read about. And when he travels, he likes to visit the areas where, for example, the Polish people have repeatedly struggled for independence, or where Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82) labored to unify Italy.

“Garibaldi was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln,” Tagliabue said.

What about the Congress of Vienna?

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t too successful,” he said.

The subject came up one day when Tagliabue remarked that his wife likes to read fiction but that he prefers nonfiction.

His area of interest is Europe in the century between the Congress of Vienna and World War I.

“An absolutely fascinating period,” he said of the time and place that shook up the Tagliabues, many of whom migrated to America.

Before traveling anywhere, Tagliabue reads everything he can get his hands on relative to what he’ll be seeing. And when traveling, he likes to tell his wife and children about it.

One day last summer, driving through Poland, he saw a landmark, pulled up, and began a discourse on the Solidarity movement.

As his wife remembers, it was daughter Emily who decided that it was time to deflate him a little.

“Oh, dear, this is a deep one,” Emily sighed.

Said son Drew: “It’s so deep that we’ll need a ladder to get down to it.”

Chan remembers that on a trip to the Grand Canyon 10 years ago, Paul delivered a geology lecture so detailed that it could have served as the first chapter in a James Michener book.

In the middle of it, Emily interrupted him. Then only 7, she said: “Excuse me, Daddy, but is there a point to all this?”

Although there’s always a point, as he sees it, his family likes to tease him, and Tagliabue doesn’t seem to mind.

“He has the healthiest ego, for a man, of all the people I’ve ever met,” his wife said. “He never feels threatened, he likes women, and he’s tolerant of viewpoints. Anyone can challenge him.”

THE COMPETITOR

At the same time, Tagliabue is as competitive as the most hostile defensive lineman.

One of his old law school roommates, Ross Sandler, now the director of the New York City Department of Transportation, remembers a pickup basketball game that he played against Tagliabue’s team one night in a church basement.

Racing in to get a rebound, the future commissioner elbowed Sandler, who fell heavily to the floor.

Getting up, Sandler complained: “Hey, this is only a fun game.”

Said Tagliabue: “It’s a game.”

He had sharpened his elbows, in the first place, by deliberately banging them into a wall at his old home in New Jersey, scarring the concrete.

“I’ve seen the wall myself,” said another old roommate, Gov. Alexander.

The other side of Tagliabue as a basketball player is that he was apparently selfless, a Magic Johnson sort for his time.

Charles Rossotti, who played basketball with him at Georgetown, recalls that Tagliabue was everyone’s favorite rebounder.

“He dealt the ball off to all of us,” said Rossotti, a computer company executive who later worked with Tagliabue at the Pentagon in their Defense Department days in the 1960s.

“After a rebound, Tag was the last guy to score himself unless there was no other play. We voted him captain, naturally--unanimously.”

It was when Rozelle decided to retire last spring that he was asked for the quality his successor would need most.

“Patience,” Rozelle replied.

If that’s it, they’ve got the right man, Chan Tagliabue said.

“I can remember only once in all the time I’ve known him that Paul lost his patience,” she said.

“That night, we’d been shopping at Sears, and when he went to put the packages in the car, he pinched his finger in the door. Usually you can’t tell when he’s in pain, but this time he gritted his teeth and let out a yip, so we knew he’d been hurt rather badly.

“But I didn’t know how bad until he turned around, lifted his foot, and suddenly kicked the car. Kicked it hard--and hurt his toe.

“It was kind of funny, I have to admit, watching him hop around holding his pinched finger, and trying to get a hand on his bad toe.”

The toe still bothers him. It’s a constant reminder that impulsiveness doesn’t pay.

“Let me tell you that Paul heartily dislikes only one kind of person,” his wife said. “He doesn’t like pretentious people.”

So his brother, John, who put in three years as a Trappist monk novice before turning to journalism, thought he’d better call Paul Tuesday from Warsaw, where he is a New York Times correspondent.

“You think you’re a big shot now,” John said. “But in the larger scheme of things, you’re not. Tonight, I am having dinner with the new ambassador to Czechoslovakia.”

“Congratulations,” said Paul, impressed. “Who’s that?”

“Shirley Temple,” John said.

BACKGROUND

Paul Tagliabue, the NFL’s new commissioner, was elected only after a bloc of new owners decided not to accept Jim Finks, the preferred candidate of the old-guard owners. The Young Turks settled on Tagliabue and stuck with him until the old guard finally backed down last week.