Rozelle Was Super Man for the NFL

Some years ago, when he retired, I wrote of Pete Rozelle:

“The Super Bowl is his monument. It exists because of Pete Rozelle. He built it from scratch. Michelangelo had his David, Da Vinci, his Mona Lisa--and Rozelle, his Super Bowl.”

A little overblown, perhaps. But not all that much.

Pete Rozelle defined the position of commissioner. Baseball should have one like him. Basketball does.

I also wrote of Pete Rozelle: “This is the supreme Organization Man. Madison Avenue times two. As a PR man, he is without equal. He could have made Castro President of the U.S.

“His great strength lay in appearing to compromise without really doing so. He made everybody feel is if he was their best friend. He understood public relations as few did in our generation.

“Few people remember that the first Super Bowl was almost a disaster. It fell 30,000 short of selling out as it was, but it might have been much worse if Rozelle hadn’t come to town, rolled up his sleeves and put it on Page One and the 11 o’clock news.

“The World Series was the great American hype when the Super Bowl came along. That, or a heavyweight championship fight. A ‘Bowl’ game was the Rose. Or the Orange. Basketball was hopeful but rudderless and unfocused. It used to have to play doubleheaders with the Globetrotters to attract crowds. But Pete made Super Sunday into the single biggest sports event of the year. Not since Dempsey-Tunney had the whole nation come to a halt around a single sports event.”

It’s impossible to fix exactly Pete’s impact on his game. As I noted, it was a kind of cult game before he came along. People liked it kind of the way they developed a fondness for escargots--or old silent movies. Pete, so to speak, took it out of the art houses and onto Broadway. He hooked up with television the way no one had before or since. The old commissioner, Bert Bell, whom he replaced, had sort of worked out of his back pocket. He ran the game the way you might run a cockfight. Pete put the business on Park Avenue. Literally. That was the NFL office address in Pete’s years.

Pete had television eating out of his hand. He got the idea for “Monday Night Football”--NFL in prime time--and didn’t let go of it till he sold it to Roone Arledge at ABC and there wasn’t a bar in America that didn’t have it on. Pro football became an American tribal rite.

Pete knew he had the product. And he didn’t let it go cheaply. But he did it all with an urbanity that offended no one.

The only time he locked horns with any of his people was when he tried to stop Al Davis from moving his Oakland Raiders to L.A. It was a forlorn battle. Pete was actually on the side of the angels--Oakland had supported the Raiders lavishly. But, while large areas of professional sports are outside the Constitution, the right to move a business, any business, from one location to another was not negotiable. In its history, the NFL had moved from Boston to Washington (the Redskins), Chicago to St. Louis (Cardinals), Cleveland to Los Angeles (Rams). And, the Rams had just finished moving to Anaheim with impunity. Pete was tilting at windmills.

Pete never held grudges. He considered that a waste of time. And energy. He also knew that, in this business, today’s enemy was tomorrow’s ally.

Pete handled Capitol Hill as deftly as he did Madison Avenue. He had to get the leagues’ merger OK’d and large elements of antitrust law overlooked before he could even think of a Super Bowl, revenue-sharing and the other refinements that made his administration one of the most successful in sports history.

I have known Pete Rozelle, man and boy commissioner, since he was a young PR person, first with the Rams, then with Qantas Airlines, then back to the Rams. I was a young magazine reporter then, and, when he was on his second stint with the Rams, he picked me up one night in New York to go to dinner with then-Ram owner Dan Reeves and his family. I even remember the name of the restaurant--the Iroquois. The dinner became contentious. With Dan, it often could. As we got home, I asked Pete if he didn’t think football was too shot through with outsize egos to prevail. Pete smiled. “Nah,” he said, “everything responds to sweet reasonableness.”

Death, as it must to all men, came to Alvin “Pete” Rozelle this week. There isn’t a game, there isn’t a man in it who doesn’t owe him a debt of gratitude. He never threw or ran for a touchdown, kicked a field goal or intercepted a pass. On the field, that is. In the league offices he regularly did all three. He did it without ever losing his temper, doing an end zone dance, gloating, whining, complaining or being vindictive. If football really wants a role model, they have one in Pete Rozelle.