Rozelle Read online

  belonged. But after proving it, the big- money schools were dou-

  bly sure they didn’t want to play them. If they had to lose— and

  the Dons of 1951 proved they could beat anyone— it wasn’t going

  to be to a team with no stadium and no national tradition.

  Rozelle had battled Cal- Berkley, Stanford, and the nfl 49ers for

  space in the local papers. He got the space, but with rare excep-

  tion the attraction could not draw enough customers. The rent at

  Kezar Stadium was becoming too heavy a burden.

  To the South other independents such as rival Loyola were begin-

  ning to feel the same strain. And around the country a large num-

  ber of Catholic colleges were of the mind that if big- time sports

  were key to more prestige and income, economics and common

  sense dictated the same thing could be done with basketball for

  28

  the price of ten sets of colored underwear, two hoops, and none of the staggeringly expensive equipment that football required.

  Despite the fact it was coming off a perfect nine- game sea-

  son, usf bowed to the inevitable. It announced it would no lon-

  ger field a football team. Not that the old gang would have held

  together much longer anyway. Rozelle wanted to create his own

  All- America, and Ollie Matson completed the task for him as a

  bon voyage gift. Clearly, it was time for him to move on.

  Shorn of his team, Kuharich accepted an offer to coach the nfl’s

  Cardinals, then based in Chicago. Ollie Matson would be his first

  pick in the college draft. Newell, who had built the structure for a

  basketball program of national prominence, would leave the team

  intact for his assistant Phil Woolpert (he of the late- night card

  games with Rozelle and De Long) and surface as one of Ameri-

  ca’s most successful coaches at the University of California, just

  across the bay. Myron De Long, the fellow traveler from Lyn-

  wood, would leave the “toy department” forever, forsaking the

  mimeograph machine and the typewriter for a teaching career of

  more than three decades.

  And Pete Rozelle? Well, once again he would surface in the

  right place at the right time and, as De Long always said, would

  “know exactly what to do with the chance.”

  This time the trail led south, back to the edge of Lynwood,

  where it had all begun. Tex Maule, an erudite football guy who,

  later at Sports Illustrated, would chronicle much of Rozelle’s public life, had resigned as public relations director of the Los Ange-

  les Rams.

  These were the same Rams for whom Rozelle and De Long as

  young student hustlers had produced preseason programs when

  the team trained in Compton. Tex Schramm, the general manger

  (gm) who was impressed with young Rozelle back then, was still

  the general manager. Once again it was as though fate had tiptoed

  in on tennis shoes and tapped Rozelle on the shoulder. Schramm

  hired him.

  And, in typical Rozelle fashion, it was the right team in the right

  Moving On

  29

  town at the right time. No other football team and no other job could have presented him with such a spectacular opportunity to

  prepare himself for the future. The Rams were famous for that.

  Over the years a steady stream of front- office personnel would

  learn under owner Dan Reeves, whose Rams organizations should

  have charged tuition for the way they schooled their executives.

  Bill Granholm had come to the franchise in 1949 as equipment

  manager. He was out of the University of Wisconsin locker room

  by way of a massive slice of overreaching known as the Chicago

  Rockets. They were a brief cog in an abortive palace revolution

  called the All- America Football Conference. Like most of their

  sister franchises and the league itself, all that remains of their existence is a line of agate type in an old record book.

  With the financially undernourished Rockets, a man learned to

  make do with what he had, which was almost nothing. Granholm

  was amazed at the abundant options for success open to an equip-

  ment manager with the Rams. “I was the equipment manager, but,

  hell, football wasn’t the kind of business it is today,” he explained.

  “When the season ended all the equipment went into a warehouse,

  but you were still getting paid, so you worked. I worked in the box

  office, accounting, scouting. I moved around every year. It was that

  way with all of us.” The pattern was set long before Pete came.

  “The thing was you couldn’t go to Dan and bargain for more

  money,” Granholm told me, “because somebody had offered you

  a better job. If the job was really better, he’d advise you to take it and then help you get it if necessary. A lot of guys came out of that

  office and went to better jobs because of it, and the last thing each

  of them did as a Ram employee was to raid the ‘closet.’”

  “The closet” held every printed form the Rams ever used. It

  had expense vouchers, scouting forms, ticket forms— you name

  it. And everyone who left that office figured, “What the hell, I’m

  not going to find anything half as efficient where I’m going, so I

  might as well take some samples along.” “I’ve seen those forms in a

  lot of strange cities,” Granholm said. “You cannot possibly under-

  estimate the impact the Rams had on Pete Rozelle.”

  30

  Moving On

  What if it had been the Bears, where in order to requisition a dozen of anything he would have had to have had George Halas’s

  signature a dozen times, or with the Giants, where the we- are-

  one- family syndrome of seniority was more prized than young

  ideas, or the Browns, where acquisition was whatever Paul Brown

  said it was and you damned well better not forget it?

  Put handcuffs on a young, active mind with real drive, and you

  risk sending the mind in search of another career. But the Rams

  followed none of those procedures. They had moved from Cleve-

  land in 1946, and with the exception of the business manager, Bill

  John, all the new recruits were California born and bred. John had

  made the move from Cleveland with Reeves, and even he was in

  his thirties.

  The corporate structure of the team would also figure heav-

  ily in Rozelle’s future. Reeves, whose money came from the sale

  of the Reeves Grocery Chain to A&P for eleven million dollars,

  had bought the team in 1941 for one hundred thousand dollars,

  along with a junior partner named Fred Levy. Five years later he

  moved it to Los Angeles and found himself in the middle of a bat-

  tle of diminishing returns.

  From the very beginning he believed that the Los Angeles area,

  properly worked, could be a gold mine, but the gap between the

  wish and the deed became a serious problem. After all, this was a

  college football town, and usc and ucla had it all. He had to bat-

  tle them for space in the newspapers and customers in the same

  stadium they used on Saturdays.

  To complicate matters, the All- America Football Conference

  was still breathing and had put a team of its own, the Los Ange-

  les Dons, into the ci
ty. As a sea of red ink threatened to drown the

  franchise, Reeves sought a lifeline by bringing in a money man

  named Ed Pauley, who had made his fortune in the oil business.

  It was about to be as tacky an alliance as the marriage between

  Anne Boleyn and Henry the VIII. Daily closed- door battles

  between them were a way of life by the time Rozelle arrived as

  the new press agent.

  Moving On

  31

  This was 1952, and the Rams were coming off a World Championship season. When they assembled at Redlands University for

  preseason training, Rozelle looked forward to meeting the press on

  team picture day. The Rams had instituted this ritual long before

  Rozelle arrived. Players even received little booklets when they

  checked in each year, advising them of the importance of coop-

  erating with the press. But ironically, on picture day, Rozelle sud-

  denly faced his first challenge in the job— and it was as big a one

  as he would get.

  The team was gifted with two marvelously talented quarter-

  backs. The first and local hero was Bob Waterfield, who had been

  an All- America in nearby Westwood at ucla. He could run and

  punt and throw, and he could even place kick. Sharing the quar-

  terback duties was Norm Van Brocklin, a fanatical competitor with

  a cannon of a throwing arm and a hair- trigger temper.

  Photo day turned out to be especially hot, a Death Valley kind

  of heat. Rozelle, looking tan and cool and relaxed as usual, strolled

  over to a group of photographers. Naturally, each photographer

  who had braved the noonday sun wanted a separate shot of his own

  of the two quarterbacks. “Certainly,” said the young press agent.

  “Here’s Waterfield and here’s . . . here’s . . . here’s . . . Where the hell is Van Brocklin?”

  Van Brocklin had simply walked off the field. The place to

  which he had walked was the locker room showers. Well, where

  did you expect a smart prima donna of a quarterback to go on

  such a day? The sauna?

  Among all the legends generated by newsmen about the per-

  sonality quirks of America’s Sunday heroes, the saga of Norm Van

  Brocklin’s temper gets a high and legitimate call. When harassed

  by an unblocked lineman in those days before players wore those

  birdcage- type face masks, the Dutchman, as he was called, often

  put things back in perspective by firing the football directly into

  the lineman’s unprotected face.

  The heat of the practice field at Redlands University in July did

  not figure to ease the fires deep within the Dutchman.

  32

  Moving On

  “Where the hell is he?” Rozelle asked the players.

  “In the shower,” they eagerly responded.

  “I never did find out exactly what was said,” Granholm told me,

  “but in less than three minutes Van Brocklin was back in uniform,

  having his picture taken. I won’t claim he said ‘Cheese,’ but he

  damned well was out there with the rest of them.”

  The Rams failed to get into the title game that season, but they

  got a hell of a lot of pictures in the Southern California newspapers.

  If there was any significance to the two years Rozelle spent

  as the Rams’ press agent, it was that he had come to pro foot-

  ball with a forward- thinking organization, that he had made no

  front- office enemies despite the white- hot feud between Reeves

  and Pauley, and that without knowing it he had laid the ground-

  work for a much larger step.

  But despite the respect he earned, the truth is that he was grow-

  ing bored. The challenge was no longer a challenge. At usf there

  had been the drive to earn the school recognition, but here every-

  body knew the Rams. They were California’s glamour team. As

  in the past, he enjoyed his relationship with sportswriters, but the

  sense of urgency was missing. He knew he was becoming restless.

  “We went to preseason camp in 1954,” Granholm remembered,

  “and, for me, it was like any other camp. I mean, hell, it was fun,

  and I was just glad to be there. But one night we are out having a

  drink, and I remember that all of a sudden he tells me he wouldn’t

  be surprised if before long he decided to give up this job. Now I

  don’t know if I can really explain this, but this was a real shocker

  to me. I mean, it was like I suddenly found a traitor. I mean, we

  were a small group and a young group, and we were having fun

  and it was like it was going to be you, me, Dan, and the Rams.”

  The resignation of a publicity man attracts little attention. As

  quietly as he had come, he was gone. In 1955 Pete Rozelle returned

  to San Francisco. He never dreamed that within two years, he

  would return to the Rams.

  In every relationship, all the way from his miniature golf outings

  with friends in junior high on up to the selling of the usf Dons,

  Moving On

  33

  Pete Rozelle had always been the leader. Triggered by a lot of trial and a few errors, he had managed to shape himself in the direction he wanted. Now for the first time, he was to meet someone

  who would do the shaping for him. And when the business side

  of their relationship was finished, it would add the last dimension

  necessary to catapult him into what would become a meteoric rise.

  Back in 1949 when the usf basketball team had come east to

  the nit in the Garden, Pete Newell had taken his publicity man

  out to dinner. They were joined by a man named Ken Macker. At

  the time Macker owned an advertising agency based in San Fran-

  cisco. Its primary account was Trans World Airlines. They imme-

  diately hit it off.

  If Macker hadn’t been as good as he was at what he did, they

  probably would have spent a great deal of time together, but the

  high- priced accounts Macker serviced called for personal atten-

  tion in many places, and he was constantly on the road.

  Meanwhile, Rozelle forgot Macker. At the time Pete was

  immersed in the making of his All- America (Ollie Matson), the

  challenges of usf athletics, and his own personal life. He had just

  married Jane Coupe, an artist from Chicago whom he had met

  while he was in the navy.

  But about a week after usf dropped football, Macker called to

  offer him a job. Rozelle chose the Rams instead. Two years later

  Macker called again. Impressed with the money he offered and

  Macker’s charisma and bored with the redundancy that marked

  his job, Rozelle accepted.

  The offer came about because a man named Andre Soriano

  had hired Macker to promote Philippine Airlines, which was still

  in its postwar infancy. The account never became a big thing for

  Macker, but it enabled him to hire Rozelle and expand his agency.

  “Sometimes,” Rozelle told me in his Park Avenue offices, “I do

  wonder what really might have happened to me if I had stayed with

  Ken. A couple of years later he bought the English- language paper

  in Manila and took over as publisher. That might have opened all

  kinds of intriguing possibilities.”

  34

  Moving On

  With Macker
Rozelle was thrust into an entirely different side of public relations, far removed from the time when a successful

  day’s work was measured by a mention of usf in Prescott Sulli-

  van’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  When Pete joined him Macker was representing the City of

  Victoria, Australia. The country had landed the 1956 Olympics,

  and using his Victoria contacts Macker landed the right to repre-

  sent Qantas Airlines, the official carrier for the Games.

  It wasn’t football, but it was a challenge requiring the same inge-

  nuity he had developed during his usf days. He was in the forefront

  of developing the Qantas campaign, and he needed some part- time

  help that was familiar with sports. He instinctively returned to the

  “Lynwood connection.” Myron De Long was back on his team.

  “I wasn’t all that serious about it,” De Long recalled, “because I

  had already picked my real direction in life. But it was good money

  and I needed it, and I always had enjoyed working for Pete. Well, we

  felt that Qantas needed a symbol. You know, some kind of charac-

  ter that we could make stand for Australia the moment you saw it.

  And, of course, Pete did it. He chose the koala bear, and I think it’s still featured in their commercials more than twenty years later.”

  Suddenly, De Long was in a position to see Pete as he had never

  before seen him. It was a far cry from the hearts games next to

  Father Houk’s room. “When he worked for Macker,” De Long

  said, “part of his job was to wine and dine celebrities who were

  connected with Macker’s accounts. So he would be out all night

  and going pretty good, and he might get home at 3:00 a.m. He

  would be back at his desk 8:00 a.m. His energy was as much a fac-

  tor in his success as his creativity. The incredible thing was that I

  can never remember him being sick or complaining he was tired.

  I think he learned a lot from Macker.”

  “It was,” Rozelle confirmed, “a very close relationship. I think

  in my personal life one of the hardest things I ever had to do was

  to leave that job. I know it took a lot of thinking. I didn’t want to

  leave the job, and I didn’t want to leave the town. I have always

  had a fondness for San Francisco.”

  Moving On

  35

  But the Rams called on him again, and his return to the team was hardly accomplished under ordinary circumstances. Halfway down the state, echoes of the old war drums were growing