Rozelle Read online

  was wrong. There were more worlds left to conquer for him than

  either of us knew. There would be more head- knocking with Al

  Davis . . . major labor troubles . . . and, of course, the United

  States Football League (usfl) lawsuit. I think the latter wore him

  down the most.

  As a syndicated columnist I had continued to write about the man,

  the workings of his inner sanctum, and the trials and perils of the

  nfl. But in 1977 I began to do serious research for a book I knew

  I would one day write.

  That was the year I told Pete what I planned to do, and he said

  he’d rather I didn’t. He wanted to keep his private world private. I

  reminded him that whether he wanted it or not, somebody would

  write one, and then, as we sat in his office, I told him, “It’s going

  to happen, but the truth is that nobody who would write one really

  knows who you are. At the bottom, I sure as hell don’t. Give me

  the names of the people nobody knows . . . the people I should

  interview beyond the obvious football names . . . the people who

  shaped you. I want to start with them.”

  A week later Kensil called me with the message that Pete had

  thought about it and he would do it. We were to meet in his office.

  After that meeting I set out to find another Pete Rozelle to fill in

  the blanks on the public one I already knew.

  4

  Prologue

  For openers I got to interview people who have since passed away and without those meetings would never have been on the

  record about Rozelle. That side of it began as though I were try-

  ing to unravel a mystery. The football people I knew were already

  part of my work. They were easy.

  But finding the past that became the prologue that would shape

  him into the dominant sports administrator of our time was not.

  The key to understanding that for me was light- years from the Sun-

  day world in which Rozelle was king. I found it in the lush vine-

  yard country of Sonoma, California, from a man named Myron

  De Long, who shared a critical slice of that past with him.

  De Long and Rozelle grew up together in Lynwood, a suburb of

  Los Angeles. They went to the same schools, played on the same

  teams, and dated the same girls. They each went off to World War

  II, met again afterward, founded something called the Compton

  Junior College (jc) News Bureau, and later finished their educa-

  tions at the University of San Francisco (usf), where they worked

  in the Athletic Department.

  When De Long became an educator and Rozelle became foot-

  ball’s leader with the golden touch, they remained friends. As

  Rozelle moved from one opportunity to the next— always on an

  upward path— most saw his growth as the residue of incredible

  luck. But De Long understood what Branch Rickey meant when

  he said, “Luck is the residue of design.”

  All along De Long felt that Rozelle was destined for something

  special. He explained it to me like this: “I’ve had a lot of people

  tell me that all his life Pete happened to be in the right place at

  the right time. That would seem to indicate that most of which

  happened to him happened out of sheer luck. That could be true

  except for one thing. Every time . . . and I mean every time it happened . . . he knew exactly what to do. I mean, every time he was

  ready every step of the way. That wasn’t luck. That was Pete.” It

  was the stuff of which giant footprints were made.

  David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Asso-

  ciation, knew exactly where the quality De Long spoke of led

  Prologue

  5

  Rozelle. “Baseball is America’s pastime,” he told me when discussing Pete. “Basketball is America’s game. But Pete Rozelle made

  football America’s passion.”

  If you doubt that, then find me the president who would dare

  schedule a national television address to coincide with the kickoff

  on Super Bowl Sunday.

  6

  Prologue

  1

  In the Beginning

  Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.

  —Alexander Pope

  Now that I think of it, I can honestly say that we never once discussed his personal goals. He had a lot of friends, but to my knowledge he never had a confidant.

  —Myron De Long, longtime boyhood friend

  What Pete Rozelle was was the product of a classic, traditional

  small- town American upbringing. If there hadn’t been a Lyn-

  wood, California, Norman Rockwell would have invented it. It

  was virtually an all- white town, an insular place that was home

  first to hardscrabble farmers and later known as one of America’s

  first suburbs— just nine miles southwest of Los Angeles and home

  to more than a few workers at the Alcoa plant in nearby Vernon.

  Across the line that was Alameda Street lay the crazy- quilt

  sprawl of Watts, even then an Afro- American enclave. Lives on

  either side of that line rarely mingled back then.

  Looking through the prism of history, Lynwood was not just a

  dot on the expanding map of California. It was a kind of movie-

  lot definition of small- town America. The Lynwood of the 1930s

  and 1940s was Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and Mickey Rooney in Love Finds Andy Hardy.

  And why not? According to Bill Cunningham, a contemporary

  of Rozelle who served for years on the town’s parks and recreation

  commission, Lynwood “may have been the place where the idea

  of the drive- in restaurant was born. We had one on Long Beach

  7

  Boulevard,” he says, and you get the idea that teenage Pete and his buddies went there as much for the carhops as the burgers.

  “Growing up in Lynwood was a lot of simple but terrific things,”

  the late Myron De Long once told me. Theirs was a friendship that

  lasted beyond Lynwood and beyond the University of San Fran-

  cisco, where they later worked in the sports information department.

  De Long was the perfect source to reconstruct the way it was for

  the two of them and their friends in a Lynwood boyhood. When

  I met him it was in his home in the Sonoma wine country, where

  he had become a respected educator.

  Remarking on the difference between their Lynwood days and

  the way it had become for that whole generation, he said, “The

  kids, they grow up too fast now, get sophisticated too soon. They’ve

  got all the answers right away— they think. The world has to be

  boxed and organized for them. They have never had the pure fun

  of just being young.”

  In reaching into the back roads of his mind to re- create the way

  it was and what they shared during those years, he had the recall

  of a man who knows who he was and what that did for him and

  his friends. He did not let the calendar deceive him. Steve Owen,

  the old New York Football Giants coach, used to say that the

  more years a player is retired, the faster he thinks he used to run.

  But Myron De Long still clearly saw the way it was. I asked him

  what Lynwood was to him and Pete, and the answer came right

  on the money.

  Lynwood was a man named Bill Schlie
baum [years later hired by

  Pete as an nfl official] who ran the playground and coached Duke

  Snider [later a great Dodgers center fielder] in three sports but who

  always had the time to shoot free throws for Cokes with you. You

  hung around in the summer and you got up a touch football game

  or you played some tennis, and in between Schliebaum had us hop-

  ping in the school yard.

  It was date nights at the Arden Theater with the malt shop next

  door. Girls were just something that were there. You would date them,

  8

  In the Beginning

  but then you switched the next time out. You knew you were supposed to take them somewhere, so you did it. But it was never a big deal.

  What Duke Snider did for our high school teams in Compton

  was a big deal for us, and when Pete, who worked part- time for the

  Long Beach newspaper, wrote about Duke and we got to read it in

  the paper, that was a big deal. You know, in high school they played

  on the same basketball team. And the biggest days of the fall were

  about running home after school to hear about the World Series on

  the radio. Now that was the biggest deal of all.

  And amazing as it sounds, I can’t recall ever seeing one of us— any

  one of us— hit somebody. Fights? It was something that just never

  happened.

  De Long also remembered that a mutual friend named Louie

  Joseph had an older brother who had a car. “He would drive us

  into Los Angeles to the magical attraction of Gittleson’s Twin

  Links, which to us was the Augusta National of miniature golf

  courses.” There, among the tiny windmills and the metal chutes,

  they would battle for a quarter a man, winner take all. “You won’t

  believe the way Pete could concentrate. We would stand behind

  him and jump up and down and yell, but we could never psyche

  him out in those matches. The thing is I never met a competitor

  so intense as he was. Even in college he played hearts as though

  it were life and death.”

  When they were in high school, oratorical contests were a big

  thing in Southern California. What made them an even bigger

  attraction was the fact that you could get time off from school to

  prepare. There was that and the monetary prize that the Amer-

  ican Legion gave to the top three finishers. “Just about the time

  a big one was coming up, a bunch of us tried to get him to go ice

  skating,” De Long recalled.

  That was a big thing to most of our bunch, but I doubt that Pete had

  ever even been on ice skates until that day. He didn’t want to come

  because he was working on his speech, and I guess you could say we

  actually kidnapped him.

  In the Beginning

  9

  Anyway, he gets to the rink, and we helped him around a few times, and then we put him on the end of a whip. Then somebody

  said, “Okay, turn him loose. He’s on his own.”

  So he staggers off, and the next thing you know, there’s this tre-

  mendous crash, and he goes down face- first and there’s blood all over the ice. So now we get him home, and his mother is really furious at

  us. Then she wipes the blood off his face and sees there’s a tooth missing. For a minute I thought she was really going to kill us.

  That was on Friday, and the contest was on Sunday. His folks took

  him to the dentist, and they got him a false tooth. Now he goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and starts to practice his speech,

  and he sounds like Donald Duck. His dad said he practiced all night

  and all day Saturday.

  And darned if he didn’t go to the auditorium on Sunday and com-

  pete. He didn’t win, but it shows you how determined he was about

  anything and everything he ever wanted to do.

  Determination and commitment. It didn’t happen by accident.

  Decades later when he was interviewed at the National Academy

  of Achievement, he spoke extensively about his father’s influence:

  He did so much with what he had. He never went to college more or

  less because of the Depression. My dad had a great influence on me,

  particularly later, because I was so impressed with what he did with

  his life. He was already a young man during the Depression, and he

  had this local grocery store and before that, when I was very young,

  we had an earthquake— 1932— while he was the manager of another

  store. He went down there during the after- shock and he couldn’t

  believe how bad it was.

  Everything was shattered. He swept the Rinso and Oxydol together;

  sold it as Earthquake Soap. It was as though it were almost against his religion to waste anything. My mother and father made do with what

  they had and I’m not quite sure how they did it but, tough as it was

  for them, they gave my brother and me a genuine middle class home.

  They never made a big deal over money in front of us but we knew

  they were struggling and I have to say that my father, just through

  10

  In the Beginning

  his example, gave me a terrific sense of work ethic as an obligation without ever lecturing.

  The Rozelle home was at 3705 Agnes Avenue, and they moved

  into it after two previous rental homes. When they made the move

  into their version of the Lynwood American dream, Pete was five

  years old. It was the only boyhood home he remembered.

  “I am,” his father, Ray Rozelle, told me when I visited him there,

  “the longest continual resident of Lynwood, and since I don’t feel

  like going anywhere, I guess I’ll hold that title a little longer.”

  He shared a lot of photos with me. They were yellowed by the

  passage of time, and as he spoke his vivid memories made it clear

  how important it was to him and his wife to create a family envi-

  ronment even in the toughest of times.

  If you had to characterize Ray and Hazel, who had passed away in

  1972 before I met him, you’d have to say they were part of a tough,

  proud slice of America that looked the Great Depression in the

  eye, went crashing to the canvas, and struggled to their feet before

  somebody could run over and give them a mandatory eight count.

  In 1919 Ray Rozelle came out of the U.S. Navy and hustled

  for a job as a machinist. Then he met Hazel Healey, whose par-

  ents had come west from Illinois four years earlier, virtually at the

  start of America’s California- or- Bust migration. A year after that

  they were married. Eventually, they gambled their small savings

  on a neighborhood grocery store they called the Pacific Market.

  Pete was born in 1926 and a younger brother, Dick, in 1929. That

  was the same year that America made a sharp economic U- turn.

  The Depression slammed across the face of America. Suddenly,

  Ray and Hazel were struggling to save their store. Ray told me:

  I guess anybody who was around at that time recalls the way it was.

  The big crash hit. We tried to survive. What money I had, I put in

  three different banks. Nobody had much, and there wasn’t much you

  could do if you were in the grocery business except to give credit to

  the people who needed it, and there were so many of them . . . too

  many of them.

  In the Beginning

&n
bsp; 11

  Well, you know how it was. I just gave too much credit. Then two of the three banks we had the money in went bust, and then fdr

  closed the third one when he shut them all down in 1932. I was work-

  ing every night until after eight or nine, so I didn’t get to spend much time with my boys in those days.

  On top of that we had a terrible earthquake that destroyed half the

  town that same year. We managed to hang on until ’39, and then I just

  saw there wasn’t any way, so I went over to Alcoa and I was twenty-

  six years with them until I retired.

  It is a fact of life of the Depression generation that the economic

  problems of the parents shaped the sons. The Rozelles, like many

  other parents in what then was a basically farming community,

  clung to the belief that none of this might have happened if they

  had been able to get more formal education. The academic com-

  petition among that generation’s children, therefore, was intense

  all across the country.

  Because there was no money in their homes, all of them hustled

  and studied and then hustled some more. Pete and his friends all

  mowed lawns and delivered groceries, but when he entered Comp-

  ton High School, something happened that changed his life for-

  ever. He discovered journalism. A blend of circumstances and

  motivation turned him into an incredible part- time bread win-

  ner. It also gave him a sense of the power of communication that

  was so much a part of the incredible success he would eventually

  become. “Once he started doing work for the Long Beach Press-

  Telegram,” Ray Rozelle recalled, “he always had money. There were times he could have maybe four hundred dollars in his drawer. Of

  course, part of that was because he never seemed to spend much.

  Living in Lynwood didn’t require that.”

  But on the eve of Pete’s scheduled matriculation at Compton

  High (Lynwood was still too small to have its own high school),

  Ray and Hazel made a decision that had a profound impact on his

  life. The principal of his elementary school had proposed to move

  him up an entire grade because of his gifted academic record.

  12

  In the Beginning

  Pete was athletic but undersized. The Rozelles wondered if his academic achievements might surpass his social life and his maturing. They were concerned that there might be a social gap between

  him and his classmates.