Rozelle Read online

  changed the way they dealt with that mission.

  These were young men in a hurry. They had been ripped sum-

  marily out of the mainstream of the educational process. Some of

  them had been to places their geography books forgot. Some of

  them had seen things that once viewed would change their lives

  forever. Now they were back in school. They were not the kind of

  freshmen whom sweet varsity Sue used to dream about.

  On the plus side, the colleges saw a sudden glut of tuition money

  generated by the gi Bill. Schools like usf were particularly affected.

  20

  In the Beginning

  Building space had always been at a premium for urban campuses.

  Suddenly, patchwork fields of surplus army Quonset huts became

  America’s new halls of ivy.

  Populated with mature students, dreaming of the kind of phys-

  ical and academic expansion that never before seemed possible,

  usf followed the route so many others of its type undertook. It

  was determined to generate new attention and prestige through

  athletic success.

  Newell was already ensconced as the basketball coach. He was

  joined by Kuharich, a terrific recruiter of football talent. He would

  prove it eventually as the head coach at Notre Dame and with the

  Cards and Eagles in the nfl. Newell was so successful he would

  eventually jump to the University of California at Berkley. They

  were Rozelle’s first master mentors.

  So, this is the way it was, therefore, when Rozelle and De Long

  arrived on the usf campus, fresh from the minor league glories of

  Compton jc that, as De Long explained, “we were young enough to

  have secretly thought we were responsible for.” The year was 1948.

  It was a time of infinite hope and excitement all across America.

  Within the span of that first year, two things happened that

  convinced Rozelle that there was a very special and personal thrill

  when people suddenly sat up and took notice of you. And the unlike-

  liest early example came from the usf soccer team, who won and

  won in total secrecy.

  Then Rozelle found the Prince. Well, there was some debate

  as to whether he was actually a prince. Rozelle thought he was.

  De Long told me he was not as sure. But he was, indeed, wearing

  tribal robes when Rozelle found him waiting tables in the cam-

  pus dining hall. Things being what they were with usf soccer, if

  you were trying to promote it and one of your players said he was

  a prince and you thought people would like to see a prince play

  soccer, then you didn’t stop to ask him to let you see the royal

  birthstone.

  Rozelle and De Long hit the office mimeograph machine so

  hard it’s a wonder it didn’t explode. By the time they had a full

  In the Beginning

  21

  head of steam going, the prince had become a daily item in all the Bay Area papers.

  “Well,” Rozelle told me, “the truth is that we were pretty darn

  good. The school thought so, and it went out and rented Kezar

  Stadium. We had never drawn a crowd over, say, five hundred until

  then, but we worked like hell. We played Temple there, and we

  drew ten thousand people. It was then that I realized, if you sold

  it to the media properly, people would come.”

  At the same time, the city of San Francisco awakened one morn-

  ing to discover it had a basketball team. It may have been the

  first time the town paid any attention to that game since Hank

  Luisetti— credited with invention of the running one- hand shot—

  led Stanford past Long Island University before a crowd of more

  than seventeen thousand at Madison Square Garden.

  But now it discovered— through the dedicated efforts of Pete

  Rozelle and Myron De Long— that basketball was, indeed, alive

  and well and very much worth watching in the City by the Bay. It

  was not the kind of team the school would offer the city later when

  Bill Russell would arrive, but it would do very nicely.

  Led by a big, strong kid named Don Lofgran, who later would

  have a brief whirl at pro basketball, and a pint- size guard named

  Rene Herrerias, the Dons would move on to New York City and

  win the National Invitational Tournament (nit) at Madison Square

  Garden. Rozelle made sure that the nation’s media capital knew

  who they were even before they were invited.

  In fact, what he did helped them get invited. They would fin-

  ish the year at 25- 5 under Newell, but long before that he got

  the attention of Madison Square Garden’s key officials. Rozelle

  launched what De Long referred to as his “Mutt and Jeff cam-

  paign,” sending out pictures of six- foot- five Lofgran with his left

  arm extended horizontally well above the top of the five- foot- six

  Herrerias’s head. He named the duo after a pair of popular comic

  strip heroes who had a similar height difference. Newspapers every-

  where picked up the photo.

  It was a beginning, and as the ball began to roll, Rozelle sensed

  22

  In the Beginning

  that something even bigger was surely going to happen. Actually, it was already in motion across town at San Francisco Junior

  College.

  A local kid named Ollie Matson was a 9.6 sprinter and the best

  power runner Kuharich had ever seen. Earlier as a high school kid,

  he had competed in the national 400- meter trials for the Olympics.

  Four years later he would qualify for the Games in Helsinki and

  win two medals. The staff was shocked when Kuharich suddenly

  announced that Matson was coming to usf. De Long remembered:

  It happened so fast we couldn’t believe it. We used to play poker with Newell and Pete Woolpert, his assistant, and some of the football

  coaches, and all they talked about was Matson.

  Football recruiting was almost impossible here because we were

  up against all those California glamour schools getting the real good

  kids. How do you compete for Saturday’s heroes with Stanford and

  Cal Berkley and further down the coast with usc and ucla [Univer-

  sity of California at Los Angeles]? We were an urban school with

  no league affiliation on top of that, and we had trouble just putting

  together a schedule.

  Getting Matson really stoked Pete’s imagination. He said, “If he

  comes here, this place is suddenly going to be crawling with guys who

  can actually play the game.”

  Rozelle demonstrated there was a touch of the prophet within

  him. As soon as Matson set foot on campus, it seemed like an army

  of huge young men in search of educational enlightenment and

  football fame flooded the campus. Their high school reputations

  were spectacular, and the names fall off the tongue like the ros-

  ter of a college football Valhalla. They included future all- pros

  such as Dick Stanfel, Bob St. Clair, Gino Marchetti, Ed Brown,

  Red Stephens, Ralph Thomas, Roy Barni, and Joe Scudero. And,

  of course, Ollie Matson.

  Kuharich had a football team and a half in the making. And

  Rozelle realized the future was his— but with a set of incredible

  problems to overcome. He was promoting a t
eam that he was sure

  In the Beginning

  23

  would bid for national attention, but it was a squad with no home field of its own and no schedule that could make any money.

  The West Coast teams, with the exception of Loyola of Los

  Angeles, which was in the same bind, wouldn’t dream of risking

  their prestige against a football team like usf. It was De Long’s

  recollection that Rozelle’s efforts to overcome those handicaps

  nearly drove him bananas. “He would do almost anything to get

  usf into the newspaper— any newspaper. Studying was never a

  big deal with either of us, so we’d be sitting around the room at

  night, and suddenly he’d say, ‘Why don’t we go over to the office

  and do a special story on that third- string tackle from Hammond,

  Indiana, so we can send it to his hometown paper?’ So we would

  go over to that drafty old army barracks that was our office, and

  I’d write it and he’d look at it and make me rewrite it. I mean, he

  just never stopped.”

  In 1951 the Dons came east to play Fordham University. Ford-

  ham was no longer the Fordham of Sleepy Jim Crowley and Eddie

  Danowski and Vince Lombardi. But it was a prestigious name, and,

  more important to Rozelle, this was New York City, the commu-

  nications capital of the world. He had seen firsthand what it had

  meant to usf when it came to town for the nit a few years earlier.

  Now he was pounding on the doors of every newspaper in town,

  knowing he had a quality product to sell.

  So what if the game would be played in a battered old relic called

  Triborough Stadium, a facility as vital to Manhattan as, say, the

  Burma Road was to Boston? Reporters would be there— reporters

  from all over the Great Megalopolis. They would get to see Ollie

  Matson, and Rozelle was sure their response would be staggering.

  A crowd mercifully announced at fifteen thousand found its

  way to the crumbling old ballpark. People who knew the level of

  Fordham football at that time insisted that half of them were actu-

  ally confused motorists seeking directions to the George Wash-

  ington Bridge.

  But with a little help from Mr. Matson, the secret was out.

  usf could play virtually any other college team in the country if

  24

  In the Beginning

  they had the guts to schedule the Dons. Matson took the opening kickoff and ran it back 94 yards. In the fourth quarter with

  the game tied at 19– 19, Matson took another kickoff and ran it

  back 90 yards to win it.

  Afterward, an erudite sportswriter from the New York Herald Tribune named Harold Rosenthal wrote, “For once a college press agent told a reporter the truth about one of his school’s football

  players. Pete Rozelle promised earlier in the week that Ollie Mat-

  son would prove he is special and yesterday he did.” It was the

  first time Pete Rozelle’s name had ever appeared in a New York

  newspaper.

  The Dons went undefeated that year. Matson scored twenty-

  one touchdowns and gained 1,556 yards. Among the team’s vic-

  tims were the San Diego Naval Training Center, Santa Clara, and

  Loyola of Los Angeles, the “other team” the big boys would not

  play because of its quarterback, Don Klosterman, later a scout,

  general manager, and close friend of Rozelle.

  Loyola was relegated to the same lower tier as usf. Klosterman

  was so versatile he could embarrass all of the neighboring big

  boys if they agreed to play Loyola. The same was true of usf, and

  its talented roster neighbors like Cal, Stanford, and Santa Clara

  refused to schedule them.

  But down in Stockton, California, the College of the Pacific,

  once a Rose Bowl team, smelled money. A full house for Pacific’s

  games was rare. It saw the value in a David versus Goliath game.

  When it agreed to play usf, more than forty thousand people

  sardined into the local ballpark to see the “mystery” Dons take

  on what was then the College (late to become University) of the

  Pacific, the most prestigious foe a usf football team had ever

  faced. Also in the crowd that day was the Orange Bowl selec-

  tion committee.

  Rozelle, his propaganda machine, and Kuharich’s players were

  on the verge of a miracle. The Dons were awesome that day. They

  rolled to a shockingly easy 47– 14 victory. Rozelle went out and

  bought suntan lotion, and, look out, Miami, the Dons are ready.

  In the Beginning

  25

  All they had to do was wait for the bid. They were all dressed up but, as it turned out, with no place to go. They turned down the

  bid when the Orange Bowl insisted that two players— Matson and

  Burl Tolar (later hired by Rozelle as an nfl on- field official)— stay home. They were African Americans, and the committee didn’t

  want them anywhere near the segregated Orange Bowl.

  They were denied their ultimate moment in the spotlight. But

  eight members of that team were later chosen in the upcoming

  nfl draft. The pros had noticed them despite their unbelievable

  triumphs without a home field or a major league schedule.

  Rozelle had successfully mounted a brilliant publicity cam-

  paign with an incredible sense of purpose. “We had worked like

  hell,” De Long said.

  We had this ancient typewriter and this mimeograph machine that

  weighed a ton, and we would lug them to the top of Kezar for our

  home games. We were among the first to provide play- by- play for

  our writers. We never stopped planning.

  His big scene was the eight- piece band he put together to play

  “Goodnight, Irene” after each touchdown while the student body

  waved white handkerchiefs at the other stands. But what I really know

  is that he wanted to feel that he had been able to help create his All-American— take a kid at a little school like this and make him more

  important than stars at Notre Dame or usc.

  From the moment that Matson first showed up here, Pete worked

  day and night on him. He once told me, “Don’t laugh. He is going to

  be my All- America.” He played it that way whenever he got the chance.

  Matson was a great runner in the Olympics later on. Pete must

  have read that story about Jim Thorpe going to a meet and the

  other coach blowing up and yelling, “You mean your school has a

  two- man team?” and Thorpe said, “No, the other guy is the man-

  ager.” “Well, Pete, so he tried it with Matson. He entered him in

  the Fresno relays as the usf track team, and he wasn’t lying because

  usf didn’t have a track team. Ollie was it and Pete paid the entry

  money, and Ollie went out and won his events.”

  26

  In the Beginning

  They were exciting times. Rozelle was a regular visitor to Bay Area newspapers, and he often recalled those times as golden.

  He acquired his first car, a battered old Plymouth, but dating

  was hardly a formalized thing. There was very little of a social

  life except for the nightly hearts games that De Long recalled

  as “pure aggression. We played for very little money and a lot of

  blood. The cursing and the table pounding were rather intense.

  One ni
ght we pushed our next- door neighbor, Father Houk, to

  the limit of Christian tolerance. He knocked softly on the door

  and said ‘Gentlemen, I really hate to say this, but I think your lan-

  guage is getting a bit vivacious.’”

  And then there was the day Rozelle picked up the office phone.

  Newell was on the other end. He had a handkerchief over the hand-

  set, and the conversation went like this:

  “You have a praaayer name Wirree Wong?”

  “Yes, sir. We have a player named Willie Wong. Who are you?”

  “Yesss. I am Mr. Woo of China Press. People of Chinatown

  demand you say why Wirree Wong no praaay in games.”

  “Well, sir, he’s only five- foot- five and . . .”

  “Wirree Wong no praaay because he Chinese.”

  “Oh, no, sir. Nothing like that. Our coach, Mr. Kuharich, would

  never . . .”

  “Then why he no praaay? You tell big rie.”

  It was Newell, with a handkerchief over the phone’s speaker.

  He had Rozelle squirming for a half hour.

  For De Long, it was a time of self- discovery. For Rozelle, it was

  something very different, another set of emotional landmarks on

  the road map that was taking him to what he was meant to do. But

  even as the two grew closer in understanding each other, they were

  drifting toward their separate destinies. According to De Long,

  “I never really wanted journalism, and he wanted to be the sports

  editor of the LA Times. I wanted a career in education. It was time for me to move in that direction. And Pete, well, he was perfect

  for what he finally became.”

  In the Beginning

  27

  2

  Moving On

  Where the hell is Van Brocklin?

  —Pete Rozelle, the day he showed the Rams who was the boss

  When you work for [Pete Rozelle], you start to think like him.

  —Bill Granholm, who worked for him with the Rams and the nfl

  Suddenly, like a senior- prom orchid a week after the dance, the

  golden days at usf were simply a season whose time had passed.

  At the close of the 1951 football campaign, it became clear to the

  school’s administration that a nomadic odyssey in search of wind-

  mills might be fine for Don Quixote, but it sure played hell with

  a small college’s athletic budget.

  Artistically, the Dons were hoisted on the petard of their own

  excellence. To schedule major opponents, they had to prove they