Rozelle Read online

  out one up there.

  On the day he moved the operation to New York, he bought a

  hat, handed it to his secretary Thelma, and said, “Hold on to this

  for me.” She did for about thirty years. He never wore it.

  Clearly, the lord high everything of professional football both

  started and finished as very much his own man.

  The Accidental Coronation

  51

  4

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  I never thought of a career like this. What I really wanted to be was the sports editor of the Los Angeles Times.

  —Pete Rozelle on his boyhood dream

  No son of a bitch who steals my song is going to get into my league.

  —George Preston Marshall on his opposition to a new team in Dallas

  They were still in Miami. They had agreed on the wunderkind of

  Los Angeles as a compromise choice for commissioner. He had yet

  to set foot in the league office, but the morning after his selection, he chaired the final agenda item of the Miami meeting— the fate

  of a proposed expansion team in Dallas and one to follow a year

  later in Minneapolis— St. Paul. They needed a unanimous vote,

  and the battle still matched the two old street fighters, George

  Halas in Chicago and George Preston Marshall in Washington.

  Halas was an unlikely choice to spearhead the attack to bring

  the league into the future; a player- coach- owner of the team that

  moved from Decatur, Illinois, to Chicago in 1921, Halas was as old

  school as the single wing. Yet, ironically, at the end of the 1959 season, the “old” Halas had actually forced pro football into a major

  geographical shift. The Chicago Cardinals, his cross- town rivals,

  were nearly bankrupt, and their South Side location at Comiskey

  Park, where attendance was sparse, didn’t help the situation. Wal-

  ter Wolfner, their owner, had come up with a brilliant solution.

  He would move the team to the far more comfortable venue of

  Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium, just north of Chicago.

  “Like hell you will,” Halas told him and then forwarded to Bert

  52

  Bell a document signed by Halas and by the previous Cardinals owner that agreed the Cardinals would never play north of Madison Street and the Bears would not play south of it. Bell sided with

  Halas, and later in 1960 Wolfner moved the Cards to St. Louis

  and gave the league a brand- new territory.

  With the afl soon to play with a Dallas team as a charter mem-

  ber, you would think that Marshall, the entertainment maven of

  the league, would be on board with Halas’s plan. But while Mar-

  shall, selling an excursion train for away games in New York and

  Philadelphia as a kind of hotel on rails and with his 110- piece

  marching band, was all for innovation, his economic philosophy

  was “not on my block.”

  In sports as in business, economics always trumps the aesthetic.

  His was the only professional team in all the South. He owned

  Dixie radio rights, tv rights, and fan loyalties all throughout the

  Cornpone Curtain.

  Rozelle who knew that harmony was the reason Halas never cast

  a single vote in the bitter election for commissioner that week and

  understood that he could not afford to make an enemy of either of

  the two most powerful owners in the league. The only nfl fran-

  chise for which Rozelle had ever worked, the Los Angeles Rams,

  was, itself, the product of territorial expansion. Unlike a number

  of his owners, he was not blind to the coming challenge of the

  embryonic America Football League.

  But he made no attempt to flex his brand- new muscles during

  his first day in office. If these two had a fight, he knew he could

  play the role of King Solomon and take the ultimate bow after

  they took the blows.

  He believed that a new day was coming to this league, and its

  beginning ought to be the fruits of the Halas plan to put a team in

  Dallas, where the afl already had one ready to play, and in Minne-

  apolis— St. Paul, which was set for the afl but not signed, sealed,

  and delivered. In truth he was already thinking about a way to steal

  that city for the nfl before it jumped off the afl drawing board.

  Halas was an able advocate, much to Rozelle’s delight, because

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  53

  the future general manager of his planned Texas franchise was there in the Kenilworth Hotel that week and highly visible. His

  name was Tex Schramm, and he was the guy for whom Rozelle

  had once worked.

  The newly minted commissioner wanted a team in Dallas, and

  he wanted his old friend to control it. But Schramm had nothing

  to do with Marshall’s anger. It was Clint Murchison, the oilman

  and potential owner, who enraged Marshall, and it was his loss

  of his Redskins monopoly throughout the South that fueled him.

  And then there was “the song.” “Hail to the Redskins” was Mar-

  shall’s battle hymn. He unveiled it in 1938, the year after Marshall

  moved the club from Boston to Washington. According to the

  credits the music was written by a society bandleader and band-

  master of the Skins’ marching band named Barney Breeskin, with

  words by a former showgirl and movie ingenue named Corrine

  Griffith, who was married to Marshall. The tune sounds strangely

  like the opening bars of an old hymn, “Yes, Jesus Loves Me,” but

  nobody challenged Barney. The original lyrics, in the best tradi-

  tion of 1930s racism, included, “Scalp ’em, swamp ’em— We will

  take ’em big score / Read ’em, weep ’em, touchdown!— We want

  heap more!”

  When Corrine divorced George she wanted the rights to the

  song. According to the late Washington Star columnist Mo Sie-

  gel, “Corrine got the rights in the settlement. Breeskin had never

  gotten paid the original price of one hundred dollars. Murchison

  secretly bought the song from Breeskin for twenty- five hundred

  dollars and threatened an injunction against its playing by the

  Redskins marching band and any other musical group perform-

  ing at Redskin games.”

  Everyone around the league relished Marshall’s discomfort, and

  everyone except Marshall agreed that Murchison had a world- class

  sense of humor. You do not make fun of the big chief in Washing-

  ton, threaten to ban his war hymn from being played in his own

  stadium, and expect him to forget or forgive.

  Just before the Dallas expansion vote, Halas had demanded to

  54 The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  know why Marshall was opposed to opening up that franchise, and, according to Siegel, Marshall shot back, “No son of a bitch

  who steals my song is going to get into my league.”

  Halas, impressed by Murchison’s ability to find the soft spot

  on Marshall’s chin, laughed and then negotiated the release of

  the Redskin “anthem” with Murchison. Marshall, who loved his

  song and delighted in leading his Redskin marching band and

  an army of dc fans up Eighth Avenue to the Polo Grounds when

  they played the Giants, swallowed hard and voted for expansion.

  Rozelle, now in control, took a very Rozelle- like approach. He

&
nbsp; watched and listened, as he always did, and later in the day when

  Joe Foss, the afl commissioner, threatened a lawsuit because the

  afl had already announced its plan to put a team in Dallas, Rozelle

  made his first public announcement as commissioner: “They moved

  into our territory in New York and Los Angeles and San Fran-

  cisco. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to move into Dallas? We will

  do just that.” His fire was intended as a wake- up call to his constituents. The owners had elected a fellow they thought could keep

  the seat warm until they figured out what to do with it. With that

  pronouncement— like it or not, and some did not— it was clear that

  the lodge brothers had gotten a leader, not a follower.

  When they finally left Miami and headed home, it was not

  without a serious amount of uneasiness. They had turned over

  the future of their business to a man whom most of them knew

  less about than their team equipment managers. He was their

  employee, and, for the most part, they were strong, willful men

  who did not believe that the future was very complicated. Their

  reluctant choice of commissioner reflected the thoughts of Car-

  roll Rosenbloom, who explained later that “I just wanted to get

  the goddamn thing over with.”

  With the major exception of Halas, they looked at the afl as

  though it were the last mosquito of summer, an irritant at worst

  that they would dispatch as they had always historically prevailed

  over other gate crashers in the past. But Rozelle clearly understood

  the threat. He would deal with it in more detail at the right time,

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  55

  but with approval for Dallas and the Twin Cities out of the way, he was ready to deal with more immediate issues on his agenda.

  Just as he and Reeves had discussed on the night of his election,

  it was imperative to anchor the league’s operations in New York.

  Bell had pioneered the league’s television policy— away games on

  local air and home games blacked out when all the seats weren’t

  filled. It was a start. Rozelle would take television, and with refinements that nobody had even imagined, he would turn it into the

  cash cow that would fund the nfl’s march toward national own-

  ership of Sunday afternoon.

  In the past the commissioners of all leagues had set up shop in

  their hometowns as a matter of pure convenience. For that reason

  Bell’s headquarters were anchored in Bala Cynwyd, a suburb of

  Philadelphia. He was the overseer of twelve teams (as compared to

  thirty- two today), and, using a large checkerboard as a visual aid,

  he drew up their schedules on his dining room table. He had also

  been firm in various controversial stands. Compared with commis-

  sioners of other leagues, he was by far the most progressive. But

  pro football’s idea of progress until Rozelle came along was mea-

  sured in yards. Rozelle’s plans called for movement in light- years.

  Just two years earlier the greatest bonus in the league’s history

  had been dumped in its lap, and nobody even remotely understood

  it, much less knew what to do with it, until Rozelle came along.

  The championship game of 1958 between the Baltimore Colts and

  the New York Giants tiptoed up to the collective psyche of Amer-

  ica’s sports fans as simply the end of another season. But once on

  center stage, it brought a new kind of drama to what was its largest

  national audience ever. More than forty- five million people watched

  it. There would have been hundreds of thousands more, but the

  stadium did not sell out and under the “blackout rule” nobody in

  the Great Megalopolis without a ticket got to see it. But the rest

  of America, through what had previously been the underutilized

  red eye of television, did.

  Second— and of far more importance— it was the first sudden-

  death title game in league history. Consequently, it generated the

  56

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  greatest media attention the nfl had ever had— for a couple of weeks. Then it went back to business as usual, at a time when cities without franchises barely covered professional football.

  This was unacceptable to Rozelle and symptomatic of what he

  saw as the league’s biggest immediate obstacle. Each week Bert

  Bell’s office had sent out a single release (most of which ended in

  garbage pails in various newspaper offices) about who would play

  where that week, starting times, and the league standings. Reading

  one of them was about as exciting as spending an evening watch-

  ing a fly crawl up a drape.

  That was publicity pre- Rozelle style in the collective mind of

  Bert Bell and the team owners. Actually, Rozelle had put together

  a far better local pr team back with the Rams. With that in mind,

  he couldn’t move the nfl out of its isolated mom- and- pop head-

  quarters fast enough. For starters he took the entire operation up

  to Manhattan and a small suite of offices located in Rockefeller

  Center with a staff of just seven people. Today the nfl has roughly

  eleven hundred employees in offices in Manhattan, Los Angeles,

  and Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

  The times they were, indeed, a- changing. In January John

  Fitzgerald Kennedy, the youngest president in history, would

  breathe new optimism into America with his inauguration speech

  when he challenged a nation looking for direction.

  It was contagious. Within that decade Americans would walk

  on the moon, and the gross national product would double. For

  Pete Rozelle, both an organizational and a marketing genius, 100-

  yard nation building would begin within the walls of the tiny new

  suite of offices that the league would outgrow two years before

  the decade would end.

  The meteoric growth of his past would provide the prologue

  to his future. He knew the message of the impact of that marvel-

  ous overtime game in Yankee Stadium two years before he rose to

  power. In its simplest form it was: “To love us they have to know us.”

  It was a lesson that first took root in his arsenal back at usf when

  he discovered the soccer- playing Prince’s story and lured ten thou-

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  57

  sand people to a game that should have drawn only a couple of hundred. Now he would make the nfl story so compelling that

  the interest generated by that overtime title game would flower

  into America’s autumn passion.

  Before he left the battlefield in 1989, he spread the gospel of

  who and what the nfl was across the face of the continent, includ-

  ing exhibition games in Mexico and Canada, preseason games to

  be played in Tokyo and London. Under his guidance the league

  would expand to twenty- six franchises. And by the end of his first

  decade in office, he would take the nfl and the afl in his hands

  and shape them into one league with liberty, justice, and guar-

  anteed serious profits for all. He would win the most expensive

  and dramatic interleague war in the history of American sports.

  But before that day he would need an army that could act and

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sp; think as he did. If he couldn’t inherit it, he would create it. Why

  not? Without realizing it, he had been recruiting one much of

  his adult life. From the Rams he brought Bert Rose out of his old

  pr department and Bill Granholm, the equipment manager, who,

  when with the Rams, started to think as Rozelle did and developed

  skills that would leave the locker room behind. Granholm would

  become the most important nuts- and- bolts guy in his headquarters.

  And, of course, there was one of his most key hires, a woman

  named Thelma Elkjer, who worked for both Tex Schramm and

  Rozelle in the Rams office. She declined Schramm’s offer to come

  east when he left for cbs. But she saw something in Rozelle that

  others in the organization seemed to see. She agreed to work for

  him in New York. Schramm always said he couldn’t understand

  why she spurned him for Pete.

  Thelma was his executive secretary on the nfl’s table of orga-

  nization. That didn’t even begin to tell it. She was the gatekeeper

  to both Rozelle’s inner sanctum and his telephone. If you didn’t

  get by her, you might as well have been standing downstairs on

  the street with nowhere to go.

  She was also confidante, mentor, role model, and friend to Anne

  Marie, Rozelle’s daughter from a failed marriage of whom he had

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  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  full custody. It can be said without fear of contradiction that Elkjer’s role in that matter made him a better commissioner because I have

  never known a man who took being a single father more seriously.

  From the Denver Broncos he plucked an assistant coach named

  Mark Duncan, who became his supervisor of officials. Later,

  when the afl was merged, he added Mickey Herskowitz and Val

  Pinchbeck from its publicity staff. To plan for the future after

  the merger, he created the jobs of assistant to each league pres-

  ident, which was simply a Rozelle- regimented training ground

  for the future. Among those recruits were Ernie Accorsi, a Balti-

  more Colts pr guy who became general manager both in Cleve-

  land and with the Giants; Al Ward, a Dallas Cowboys pr guy;

  and Jan Van Duser, from the Vikings. Like winners of fellow-

  ships, they came to Rozelle Tech, studied under him, and ulti-

  mately went off to other franchises, preaching the Rozelle Way.