Rozelle Read online

  discontent boiling beneath the surface in what appeared to be this

  100- yard Eden. Some of it was personal. Some of it was regional.

  Together they produced a nine- day emotional tug- of- war that

  was part filibuster, part stubborn anger, part tunnel vision, and

  total confusion.

  The most obvious clash of personalities was between the two

  most powerful personalities in the league— pioneering owner

  George Halas of the Bears, whose entire agenda was geared toward

  expanding the number of franchises from twelve to fourteen, and

  George Preston Marshall, whose Redskins owned the entire coun-

  try south of the Mason- Dixon line and who would fight like hell

  to keep his radio and television monopolies intact inside his pri-

  vate Cornpone Curtain.

  George Halas had always been a visionary. As player, coach, and

  owner of the Bears, he had stood in the rain and the snow outside

  Northwestern Stadium in the 1930s, passing out flyers that read: “If

  you liked today’s college game then come see the Bears play profes-

  sional football tomorrow at Wrigley Field.” Now it was 1960, and a

  new threat called the American Football League was about to start

  play. Halas sought to cut it down to what he considered appropriate

  size by competing with it for the Dallas market with a new team.

  44 The Accidental Coronation

  He was a ferocious advocate of expansion. He had already secretly selected an oil millionaire named Clint Murchison to run the Dallas franchise when it was activated. He didn’t care who got to be

  commissioner. His powerful personality had handled every com-

  missioner the league ever had. He believed he would handle this

  one as well. At the moment he was more interested in not anger-

  ing any of the lodge brothers while he lined up expansion votes.

  On the other side was George Preston Marshall, the man who

  owned the Washington Redskins. He and Halas were bitter rivals

  on and off the field. A consummate showman, Marshall created

  the nationally famous Redskins marching band, complete with

  feathered war bonnets.

  His team originally first played in Boston and was known as

  the Braves. He had once hired a Native American named Lone

  Star Dietz as his coach and had a theatrical makeup artist deco-

  rate the players’ faces with “war paint.” But it rained so hard that

  day that the makeup ran down their faces and into their eyes, and

  the players revolted.

  When he moved the team to Washington, he launched his radio

  network into every corner of the South, as far as Florida and Texas.

  He did the same when television came along. Today, their battle

  hymn ends with the words “fight on for old dc.” But back then the

  phrase Marshall used was “fight on for old Dixie.” He viewed the

  possibility of inserting a new southern team in Dallas as a threat

  to his revenue stream. Consequently, he wanted an “old guard”

  commissioner who would respect his team’s “divine right” to own

  the South. Austin Gunsel was his candidate.

  Both men came to the Kenilworth Hotel meetings with sepa-

  rate but equally strong agendas. Halas would vote neither for nor

  against any candidate for commissioner for fear of impeding his

  expansion plan. Marshall would vote for Gunsel simply to keep

  the status quo alive, feeling Gunsel could be an ally.

  Meanwhile, a small but vocal coterie out of the West— the 49ers,

  the Rams, and the Chicago Cardinals— nominated Marshall Leahy,

  the 49ers’ in- house counsel, who pledged to move the league head-

  The Accidental Coronation

  45

  quarters from Philadelphia to San Francisco. This was a critical campaign promise to the western owners. They felt everything

  was weighted toward their eastern counterparts, including the

  schedule making by Bell’s office. Leahy’s most powerful supporters

  included the Packers, the Rams, the 49ers, the Browns, the Car-

  dinals, and the Lions. As a gesture toward finding league unity,

  the Giants joined them.

  On the first ballot the rest of the owners— Washington, Bal-

  timore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh— stuck with Gunsel. But

  George Halas stunned them all and proved that this was going to

  be far more complex that any of the other owners realized. The

  Bears voted second, following Baltimore. When the roll was called,

  Halas calmly wiped his glasses, leaned forward, stuck out his rock

  of a chin, and, with fiery determination punctuating each word,

  intoned, “The Chicago Bears pass.”

  Before this nine- day marathon would run its course, Halas would

  pass on all twenty- three ballots for commissioner. It was as though

  a voice in the back roads of his mind was chanting, “You guys can

  pick the commissioner. I can handle whoever it is, just as I always

  did. Just get me a team in Dallas.” With Halas, still a very pow-

  erful voice in league meetings, in a self- imposed exile, the bat-

  tle lines were drawn. The first ballot tally read: Leahy seven . . .

  Gunsel four . . . one abstention.

  On the second ballot Leahy picked up a vote from Pittsburgh’s

  Art Rooney, giving him eight. Again, Halas did not vote. On the

  third go- round, Gunsel got just two votes. On the fifth three

  Gunsel votes shifted to a new nominee, Edwin Anderson, general

  manager of the Detroit Lions. Why Anderson got them, much

  less why he was nominated, nobody seems to even remember. In

  any event the stalemate held until the sixth ballot.

  It was then that Carroll Rosenbloom acted like, well, Carroll

  Rosenbloom. Of all the egos gathered in that meeting room, Rosen-

  bloom could have given six points to any of them and still won by

  two touchdowns. His was an ego based on the business accom-

  plishments that built his personal textile fortune.

  46

  The Accidental Coronation

  When Bert Bell approached him about buying the Baltimore franchise in 1953, his immediate response was that he viewed

  the nfl (compared to Major League Baseball) as a nickel- and-

  dime league. “I don’t have the time to spend on it,” he said. Bell

  responded, “Look, I’ve got a guy who can do it for you. I’ll send

  him down there, and you won’t have to be bothered.”

  Bell had been an assistant coach at the University of Pennsylvania

  when Rosenbloom played halfback there in 1927 and 1928. They

  had become friends. It didn’t hurt that the man he sent to “help

  out” was one of the greatest athletes Penn had ever produced. Don

  Kellett was a nine- letter man in football, basketball, and baseball

  and even went on to play a year with the Boston Red Sox. Rosen-

  bloom knew who he was and made him the general manager.

  The Colts became winners under Kellett as gm. They won the

  first sudden- death championship game ever played in the nfl in

  1958 and won the title again in 1959. Around the league Kellett

  was extremely popular. And around Baltimore he was elevated to

  the role of municipal icon. He had become the spirit of the Colts.

  He and not the owner got the credit for the two titles. Those

/>   who knew Rosenbloom best understood that what Kellett had

  achieved flew in the very face of what had always been Carroll

  Rosenbloom’s immutable law. More than a few of Carroll’s friends

  knew that however unintentional it was, Kellett had broken Car-

  roll’s rock- solid dictum: “Nobody upstages the boss.”

  This may well explain the sudden impulse the unpredictable

  Rosenbloom followed just before the sixth ballot at the Kenilworth.

  He placed Kellett’s name in nomination. There are two schools of

  thought on why he did it. The first was the notion that should Kel-

  lett win, he would have a friend in the commissioner’s office. The

  second, and most plausible to those who knew Rosenbloom, was

  that he didn’t want to share Baltimore’s adoration with anyone. He

  wanted it all and would get it with Kellett out of the local picture.

  On the twentieth ballot it was down to Leahy (seven votes), Kel-

  lett (four), and Halas still abstained. Then Rosenbloom switched

  again, pulling all the Kellett votes with him as they moved back

  The Accidental Coronation

  47

  to Gunsel. Why did Rosenbloom switch? “Probably,” said Ernie Accorsi, who knew Carroll well, was a respected general manager

  with the Browns and the Giants, and was once the Colts’ pr direc-

  tor, “because he wanted to prove he could. You had to know Car-

  roll to understand that theory.”

  Meanwhile, Rams owner Dan Reeves remained loyal to Leahy.

  As he had explained to his young general manager, Pete Rozelle,

  five ballots earlier, “I know him. I respect him, and I gave my word.

  I will continue to cast our vote for him.”

  Rozelle was not surprised. He knew Reeves well. If Reeves was

  a Leahy man, it was good enough for him. He watched the power

  plays with interest but no actual voice.

  But one man could watch it no longer. Paul Brown had voted

  for Leahy all along, but he had begun to find the bickering against

  his nature. To him, it seemed to tell the public that the men who

  controlled the only game of its kind in America looked very much

  as though they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

  This should have surprised nobody if they remembered the

  way his Browns, a power in the now defunct All- America Con-

  ference, prized professionalism. When merged into the nfl just

  ten years earlier, his Browns battered the defending champion

  Eagles in their very first game. Afterward, he had interrupted his

  team’s postgame celebration to tell his players before he allowed

  the dressing- room doors to be opened, “Remember who you are

  and what you represent. Act like you’ve been here before.”

  The longer this debate wore on, the less professional Brown

  felt he and his colleagues had begun to look. He was caught cen-

  ter stage in a road- show version of the theater of the absurd, and it angered and frustrated him. So he was more than a little receptive

  when Reeves accosted him after the deadlocked voters broke for

  dinner. He knew Reeves was a Leahy man, but he listened: “This

  will never end if we don’t do something. I think you need to nomi-

  nate Pete as a compromise. I will not vote against Leahy, but if you

  put Pete up, I promise I will leave the room and not vote at all.”

  Brown immediately sought out Wellington Mara and asked him

  48

  The Accidental Coronation

  to help electioneer. Shrewdly, he took what appeared to be Rozelle’s biggest weakness— his youth— and turned it into his strength.

  First, he pointed out to Mara that while the voting blocs had fro-

  zen into polar opposites, nobody in the entire room considered

  Rozelle an enemy. He might have added that was probably because

  hardly any of them knew who the hell he was. Fortunately, he did

  not, or they might have been stuck in Miami counting votes until

  the swallows returned to Capistrano. Then as a faith builder he

  pointed out that it was the popular Bell who had engineered Pete’s

  hiring as the Rams’ gm.

  Mara, eager to end this marathon, agreed and immediately

  recruited Art Rooney, who relied on his son Dan for critical advice

  in this case because the son knew Rozelle and the father did not.

  Tired and wanting the ordeal to end, Rooney took his son’s endorse-

  ment and immediately signed on.

  With these powerful allies in his pocket, Brown then played a

  brilliant hole card. Without telling Mara, he enlisted Rosenbloom.

  “I want you to nominate this fellow so we can get the hell out of

  here,” he said. By declining to mention Mara and Rooney’s inten-

  tion, he let Carroll jump to his own conclusions. It was the perfect

  maneuver. Rosenbloom could play the hero. It wasn’t until more

  than twenty years later that he confided to me on the patio of his

  Beverly Hills home that he had since experienced a total change

  of heart: “It was a mistake I shouldn’t have made. He [Rozelle]

  thinks he is an emperor in that Park Avenue palace of his, and I

  plan to stop him. I voted for him back then only because I thought

  he was just another harmless ass- kisser.”

  But back then Rosenbloom was eager to step back into the spot-

  light with his nomination. He had voted against Leahy because

  “nobody had even asked me on his behalf, and I am, after all, an

  owner in this league.” He had decided to vote for Gunsel until he

  could figure out what he wanted. Next came his failed ploy with

  Kellett. But now he could leave for dinner, believing that Brown

  had crafted a solution for him as a hero sent straight from 100-

  yard heaven.

  The Accidental Coronation

  49

  Reassured by Reeves’s promise of neutrality, Brown met Mara and headed for Rozelle’s hotel room. “I just looked at them,” Rozelle

  later recalled. “Here I am, thirty- three years old, and I’m making

  twenty- five grand a year, and I figure this will be it for the rest of my life. Suddenly, they lay this on me.”

  Brown told him not to answer but to think it over. “Have dinner

  with your boss [Reeves] and see what he thinks.” The dinner that

  followed was even more ludicrous in Rozelle’s eyes. Reeves spent

  two hours telling him why he had to take the job. “Of course,”

  Reeves said, as he picked up the check, “I can’t vote for you.”

  In the final session Rosenbloom made his nomination speech,

  and Rozelle was elected by a needed two- thirds vote of eight to

  one, with three abstentions. Reeves walked out before the vote,

  as planned, and the Bears and the Lions abstained. San Francisco

  cast the lone vote for Leahy.

  They called in the media, and Rozelle, who had been hibernating

  in the bathroom, washing his hands each time a reporter came in,

  held them up and said to the assembled pencils, tape recorders, and

  cameras, “As you know, already, I come to this job with clean hands.”

  At the same time, a continent away, the telephone rang in Myron

  De Long’s house. It was a classmate from usf, telling him about

  Rozelle’s election. “I heard it on the radio and then half an hour

  later, a mutual classmate from usf
called to tell me. The first thing

  he said was ‘It figures, doesn’t it? I mean, we always knew he was

  headed to the top of something.’ Personally, I don’t think it sur-

  prised any of the Lynwood or usf group,” De Long said, looking

  back. “We lived together at usf. I was in on the romance that led

  to his first marriage. As close as we were, I can never recall him

  talking to me about a personal goal. What I always felt was that

  if he had one, he’d reach it.”

  The men who owned the National Football League didn’t even

  think of Rozelle as the combination of Halas (the football maven),

  Marshall (entertainment genius), and Moses (the parter of a sea

  50

  The Accidental Coronation

  of red ink) necessary to keep them artistically and economically afloat— all of which he would become. At the time they weren’t

  even sure what they wanted. But Rozelle, the reluctant candidate,

  knew what they needed once he became the commissioner. Time

  and again he would surprise them, to the point that they eventu-

  ally rarely questioned his wisdom.

  Years later, Rozelle told me something else about the long night

  following his election. Long after the voting and long after the

  exhausted palace guard had staggered off to bed, he and Reeves sat

  alone in a hotel room, drinking and recalling memories of their

  shared past with the Rams and the uncertain future of the young

  man now in charge. “I’m going to move the league office out of

  Philadelphia and to New York the first chance I get,” Rozelle said.

  “It’s the media capital of the world, and we need the media.”

  Reeves agreed. They talked for a long time. And then, just as the

  first shaft of light from the Florida dawn began to slant through

  the window, Reeves cleared his throat, looked over at the new

  commissioner, and said as mentor to student:

  Look, Pete, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a

  total California kid . . . a product of a different kind of culture. New York, well, New York is different. There are things you really need to know if you are going to move the league office to New York.

  Don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t want to embarrass you, but

  you have to know the lifestyle there is different. It’s not at all like California. How you dress is important there. You need to buy a hat

  immediately. Only the most important people would dare go with-