Rozelle Read online

  louder. Reeves and Pauley hardly ever spoke to each other in a

  civil tone. Schramm was sick of being caught in the middle. He

  left to go to cbs, which was developing its sports television divi-

  sion, and later, after Rozelle had become commissioner, he would

  leave cbs and be the guiding force behind the newly minted Dal-

  las Cowboys.

  In any event with Schramm gone, tensions increased in Los

  Angeles, and all hell broke loose when Levy, the third stockholder,

  jumped sides and formed an alliance with Pauley. There had been

  a tense meeting in New York’s Scandia restaurant at which some-

  where between the entrée and coffee, Reeves lost his director-

  ship of the team. Now, the day- to- day operation was in jeopardy.

  Bert Bell, the nfl’s commissioner, understood that a smooth

  operation was necessary in Los Angeles— one of the league’s three

  glamour franchises. The other two were New York and Chicago,

  both of which were solid anchors. Left with no choice, Bell stepped

  directly into the battle.

  He did not know much about Rozelle, but he did recognize his

  skill as a diplomat. He knew Pete had already worked with Reeves

  and that Pauley had no objection to him. In fact, because of his ear-

  lier tenure in Los Angeles, virtually all the front- office staff knew and liked him. With the exception of Sid Gillman, the latest in a

  long line of Rams coaches, Rozelle had worked with all of them.

  Ray Rozelle remembered getting a telephone call shortly after

  his son met with Bell: “I think it was on a Monday,” he said. “He

  called down here to Lynwood and told me that Bell had offered

  him a job, but he wasn’t even going to consider it. He knew about

  the Reeves- Pauley feud, and he knew that Bell had the muscle to

  force Pete on them as a compromise for two reasons. First, both

  of them liked him, and, second, each knew that to keep the sta-

  tus quo would destroy the value of the franchise. I told him,” Ray

  Rozelle explained, “‘Well, you make pretty good money up there

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  Moving On

  with Macker, but you are going to learn that it isn’t how much you make but how much you have at the end of the year.’”

  This was a strangely incisive insight into the lifestyle required

  of a high- powered press agent. It may have been so incisive that

  Rozelle stood back and took a different look at himself. “I don’t

  think I would ever tell him what to do,” Ray Rozelle said, “because

  he was then in a position to make a lot of money off Macker’s cli-

  ents. He had a big- money deal and Macker’s clients had a lot of

  money, and you know there’s an old saying that you can’t be around

  money without some of it rubbing off. Friday night of that same

  week he called and told me he was going to go back to the Rams.”

  The result was not necessarily the economic thinking of his

  father. The son was thinking in other terms. He saw a sudden twist

  in direction that could take him to a spot he had wanted all along.

  He was, after all, the product of a Southern California home and

  a Southern California attitude.

  But first he needed guarantees. He explained to Bell that he

  didn’t see how this could work if he had to bounce back and forth

  between Pauley and Reeves like a ping- pong ball. It was obvious

  that whatever Reeves wanted, Pauley didn’t, and whatever Pauley

  wanted, Reeves would fight. Against that backdrop and the need

  for a cool head running this important franchise, Bell assured

  Rozelle that he alone would have the final say, and as commis-

  sioner he would back him firmly in those situations.

  So Pete Rozelle at age twenty- nine signed a four- year contract

  for twenty- five thousand dollars per year to run one of the most

  glamorous franchises in the history of professional football. He

  was given total control. Once again a unique and unexpected set

  of circumstances began to shape the kid from Lynwood. Had the

  franchise been Green Bay, Detroit, or the then Chicago Cardi-

  nals, he might have been just another general manager or— more

  probably— eventually would have returned to Macker. But the

  opportunity with the Rams was golden because the organization

  contained some viable employees who would make a contribu-

  tion to Rozelle’s education. He would go out and hire even more.

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  37

  In Bill John, the Rams’ business manager, Rozelle was to have firsthand contact with a man who knew the business side of pro

  football as well as anyone in the league. He inherited a woman

  named Kay Lang, who long before the advent of either women’s lib

  or quota hiring was to prove herself so adept at her job that Sch-

  ramm would hire her to run the ticket operation when he moved

  from television to the Dallas Cowboys.

  Then there was a pr man named Bert Rose, who would later

  land in various jobs with various expansion teams at Rozelle’s urg-

  ing. The loyalty that Pete expected of him was born and nurtured

  in Los Angeles. Granholm taught Rozelle so much that later when

  he became commissioner, he brought him in as a special admin-

  istrative assistant.

  Among this group in Los Angeles he also found Ed Kotal, a man

  rarely written about even today, but who, in a very real sense, was

  a kind of godfather to the modern scouting system. It was Kotal,

  who long before Rozelle had become general manager, had dis-

  covered Grambling College, a small all- black school in Louisi-

  ana’s red- clay country. He had visited Grambling— the only scout

  to visit any all- black school in those days— for four straight years, and he nurtured a relationship with the coach, Eddie Robinson,

  and college president, Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones.

  The payoff would be the signing of an incredible football player

  named Paul “Tank” Younger, the first pro player to come out of

  an all- black school. No other franchise and no other scout even

  thought about that potential talent pool. But the Rams and Kotal

  (for the base pay of six thousand dollars) landed a remarkable ath-

  lete. He would make all- pro on offense as a running back and, a

  year later, all- pro defense as a linebacker.

  Kotal remained a Ram under Rozelle’s tenure, and it is not

  stretching things to say his breaking the no- black- school play-

  ers taboo was not lost on the new general manager. The lesson

  about race stayed with him long after he became the league’s com-

  missioner. He believed— and proved it— that to eliminate a man

  because of race was absurd.

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  Moving On

  As commissioner he hired the first African American on- field official, Burl Tolar, who had been a key member of Pete’s usf Dons,

  and Buddy Young, the first in the nfl’s front office.

  But in Sid Gillman Rozelle, for the first time, would be com-

  ing into daily contact with a strong, willful man whose profes-

  sional background was superb and who was very much determined

  to make his own decisions about everything. In their first train-

  ing camp together, the area of who decide
d what was delineated

  in forceful terms by the neophyte general manager. It happened

  on the most trivial of battlefields. For years the Rams had earned

  national attention from, of all things, their helmets.

  When the club moved west from Cleveland, it had a running

  back from Utah named Fred Gehrke. He played only four mostly

  unremarkable seasons for them, but he left a legacy that impacted

  every team that played pro football from that time forward.

  He was also a commercial artist in the off- season, and in 1948 he

  convinced Reeves that it would be great if he painted the helmets in

  the kind of dramatic fashion that had never before been seen in foot-

  ball. He created a look that stunned everyone. It was a blue helmet

  with gold trim, but the trim, about which he told nobody, was a pair

  of yellow Rams horns— one on each side of the helmet. “You can

  laugh if you want,” said Mark Duncan, a Rozelle loyalist later hired

  by Pete as the nfl’s supervisor of officials, “but when I was an assistant coach with the 49ers, we used to hate those helmets. We would

  go down to that big Coliseum where they were the glamour team.

  We would psych ourselves up, but then they would come pounding

  out of that tunnel and onto the field while we watched them. They

  were big and the sunlight used to pick up those Rams horns, and I

  swear the more we looked at them, the more they started to look

  like the real thing. It was a gimmick and it worked, because in our

  minds they seemed to give the Rams an extra fierceness.”

  Gehrke’s creation made the Rams the first team to have insig-

  nias on their helmets and was the forerunner of today’s nfl decals,

  but in their time the helmets were absolutely startling. No other

  team decorated its helmets until much later.

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  39

  In Rozelle’s first season as gm the “Gehrke helmets” were the same as they had always been. The sporting goods firm with which

  the Rams dealt expected to be turning them out forever. “But

  Gilman had a friend in the sporting goods business,” Granholm

  recalled,

  and he had discussed the possibility of landing the Rams account with

  him. The guy went out and made several demonstration models. I

  remember one of them was blue with white stripes. Anyway, one day

  I saw Gilman coming out of his room at Redlands on his way to the

  practice field with the new helmets under his arm.

  I was sure he had discussed them with Rozelle, and I was equally

  sure Rozelle decided to keep the ones they still use today. Now, foot-

  ball players are very funny, and I know because I was an equipment

  manager. I don’t doubt that if Gilman had casually let them have a

  look, some of them would have told Rozelle they wanted them.

  Well, I saw Sid step out of the room with the helmets, and I saw

  Pete coming out of his room, and he was gaining on Sid with every

  step. Then I saw the two of them talking, but I couldn’t hear them.

  The next thing I know, Gillman is going back inside the building,

  and he comes out three minutes later without the helmets. I never

  saw them again.

  Clearly, in matters both large and small, there was no doubt who

  was going to be the gm on this club. The three seasons in which

  he held that job were hardly artistic successes. The first, in 1957,

  the club went 6- 6. The volatile Van Brocklin and equally opin-

  ionated Gilman were suing for divorce.

  The 1958 team made a run at the title, but the team they were

  chasing was the Lions, with Bobby Layne. Their 8- 4 record wasn’t

  good enough. The following season they fell far, finishing 2- 10.

  But it is worth noting that before the season began, Rozelle swung

  a trade that was one of the most daring in nfl history. He got his

  old usf All- America Ollie Matson from the Cardinals for eight—

  count ’em, eight— players. Matson became a Hall of Famer.

  At the end of that terrible season, Gillman and his staff quit.

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  Moving On

  Interestingly, Rozelle and Gillman respected each other profes-sionally, but otherwise for years there was little warmth between

  them. Gillman wound up in the American Football League and

  in 1963 won the league title by routing the Pats, 51– 7. He imme-

  diately wired Rozelle, suggesting his Chargers play the nfl cham-

  pions. When Rozelle ignored the request, Gillman, who is Jewish,

  wired him, “Even Pope John forgave the Jews.” Rozelle responded,

  “Yes, but it took 2,000 years.”

  Certainly, Rozelle’s won- lost results as the Rams’ gm were hardly

  spectacular. So how do you evaluate Rozelle’s tenure as the Rams’

  gm? Well, you evaluate them not from the wins and losses but rather

  the way he solved the team’s financial problems and its vendetta at

  the top. Bitter and tense as the Reeves- Pauley war was, he never

  let it get out of hand at a time when it could have ruined the fran-

  chise. “I think in a way it was the making of Pete as an adminis-

  trator and a forceful man,” Granholm insisted.

  He couldn’t, after all, ask either owner for an opinion unless he wanted opposite viewpoints. So he just went on, did what he felt was right,

  and made it stick afterward. Another thing he learned was how to

  delegate authority. He couldn’t (and didn’t try to) coach the foot-

  ball team. He knew that wasn’t his job. But he had good ticket peo-

  ple, good press relations people, good administrative people. He let

  them do what they were hired to do, and if they couldn’t, well, then

  and only then he would step in and handle it. He was the same way

  as commissioner.

  He had the knack of learning without letting you know it. I think in

  a way that was always one of his strongest points. He does his home-

  work, and you don’t realize he’s done it until you have to debate him.

  I never saw him with a briefcase. I never saw him with notes. But

  I have rarely seen him without an answer. When you work for him,

  you do not go to him often because you start to think like him. Like

  him, you learn not to paint yourself into a corner.

  Now, without knowing it, Rozelle was about to stand at the big-

  gest crossroads of his life. Without the Rams job he would not have

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  been ready. Looking back after he became commissioner— a job he did not seek— Myron De Long put the qualities that brought

  him to the top in clear perspective: “Everything he did really pre-

  pared him for what he finally became. The journalism background

  gave him a sense of order. The usf thing taught him to impro-

  vise. I don’t know much about the gm year, but I think the time

  he spent with Macker gave him a totally different look at life. I

  think it enabled him to bring a dimension to the job of commis-

  sioner that accounted for the way he could be equally at home deal-

  ing with owners, television people, and the United States Senate.”

  He would soon need each of those skills. The biggest challenge

  of his life was rushing toward him.

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  Moving On

  3

  The Accide
ntal Coronation

  All government is founded on compromise.

  —Edmund Burke, “The Thirteen Resolutions” (1775)

  I voted for him back then only because I thought he was just another

  harmless ass- kisser.

  —Carroll Rosenbloom, fifteen years after Rozelle became

  commissioner

  Bert Bell was gone, dead of a heart attack the year before. They

  had lost the last point man of the old guard. It had been Bell, who

  had gone from player to team founder (Eagles) to nfl commis-

  sioner, who had taken the league through the challenges of a major

  gambling scandal, survived the economic threat of the upstart All-

  America Conference, and protected their stadium ticket sales by

  pulling the television plug on home games that weren’t sold out.

  Eight years before his death, with that one explosive scandal

  in mind, Bell had hired a former Federal Bureau of Investigation

  (fbi) agent named Austin Gunsel as a watchdog for the league’s

  integrity. Gunsel was promoted to treasurer, and when the com-

  missioner died, the twelve owners had made him their interim

  choice for commissioner.

  It was assumed that when the owners met in January 1960 at the

  historic Kenilworth Hotel in Miami Beach, the job would become

  permanent. Hard by the Atlantic Ocean, the Kenilworth was a

  beautiful site. It had more than its share of history.

  It was the resort that Arthur Godfrey made famous and later

  owned. It was also the only resort within the city limits that for

  43

  years had a sign that read: “This Is a Restricted Hotel. No Jews or Dogs allowed.” The sign was long gone when the nfl assembled there for nine days of fumbling and bumbling that acciden-

  tally created the history that changed the course of all sports in

  America forever.

  Almost by sheer luck they elected a leader who taught every

  sports group how to use television, how to lobby the most pow-

  erful lawmakers in the world, how to make friends and allies of

  what had been an only casually interested media, and how to set

  the pace for every innovation that followed anywhere in Ameri-

  ca’s professional sports.

  But amazingly, when the owners of the twelve nfl franchises

  assembled in Florida on January 26, 1960, nobody in the general

  public even suspected that there was an unsettling undercurrent of