Rozelle Read online

  From the Associated Press came Don Weiss, a key lieutenant.

  Jim Heffernan, later head of pr, was a Philadelphia beat writer.

  At one point every league official in a policy- making position

  was a former public relations expert, and the others in key jobs

  had to been trained to think like Rozelle. “He brought them in,

  trained them, and then shipped them out to play key roles around

  the league,” Accorsi says.

  He had an ability to attract good people and make them feel wanted

  and important. I think each of us would have sacrificed our own

  careers for him if he’d wanted that, but he didn’t.

  I remember we had this meeting . . . Weiss, Pinchbeck, Harold

  Rosenthal, myself, and a few others. We are sitting around this big

  table. He wanted our opinion about something. He asked each one of

  us, and he sat there and listened. Then he said, “I want you to know

  I really appreciate your input. Now, here is what we’re gonna do.”

  Well, none of us had even thought of the plan he came up with.

  So we’re leaving the room, and I said to Rosenthal, who used to write

  for the Herald Tribune and who knew Pete as far back as his usf days,

  “How the hell did he come up with that when none of us had a clue?”

  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  59

  And he laughed and said, “Because, Ernesto, he is smarter than the rest of us.”

  Hell, he was smarter than anyone else we knew. But he never made

  you feel that way. What he did was to listen . . . always listen. . . . Sometimes at owner meetings he would stop and say he wanted to take a

  straw vote on some issue, and I knew that was because he wanted to

  make sure when they took the real vote he would win and also because

  that would tell him which owners he had to work on.

  He hired and shaped the greatest pr staff and the greatest admin-

  istrative staff any sports general ever had. But in the beginning

  there was the man Rozelle always referred to as “my offensive and

  defensive coordinator.” His name was Jim Kensil, and for sixteen

  years he was the commissioner’s alter ego. In 1961 Kensil, who

  was a jack of all trades in the Associated Press sports department,

  also wrote a Sunday column on sports and television called “The

  Sports Dial.” On this particular day he had scheduled an inter-

  view with Rozelle to discuss what plans he had for the league and

  expanded television. It was, indeed, an interview. What Kensil did

  not know was that after the first five minutes, it was Rozelle who

  was doing the interviewing. By the time they finished he stunned

  Kensil by offering him a job.

  From Pete’s top public relations guy, he rose to the title of the

  nfl’s executive director. His hiring freed Rozelle to spend more

  time getting to know his way around the halls of Congress. It

  was there that he would score his first major victory. He needed

  congressional approval for a plan so simple it would revolution-

  ize the revenue stream that television’s sleeping giant could pro-

  vide his product.

  As a visionary Rozelle surpassed P. T. Barnum, but unlike Bar-

  num he always sold reality, not illusion. He looked at the haphaz-

  ard business model with which the league’s individual owners had

  sold their television rights. Each team controlled its own destiny

  in that area. None of them knew what their rights were worth, and

  a few of them couldn’t even sell them. Who, for example, would

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  The Boy Wonder Takes Center Stage

  put up big money to televise the Green Bay Packers with their tiny stadium and their limited television territory?

  He conceived of a package where everyone would make money;

  everyone would sell their games, because everyone would sell out

  of the same store to the same retailer. As always marked his style,

  he knew how to identify and recruit just the key allies to serve as

  the point men to make it possible. The men he needed to sell the

  other owners on the plan were Jack Mara and Wellington Mara,

  who owned and ran the New York Football Giants. “When Pete

  approached me,” Wellington Mara told me,

  individually we were making more money off television, little as it

  was, than anybody else. After all, we were the only game in New York.

  And New York was the key city in any sport.

  Still, it was a gamble. But what he was saying was that it was good

  for the league, and Jack and I always felt we had to consider that

  because the league was more important than any one team. Without

  the league what did we have? If other franchises were in trouble, then so were we. This was our philosophy, no matter what the issue was.

  The brothers Mara immediately spread the gospel of tv as

  Rozelle preached it. There were no holdouts. Now all he had to do

  was get Congress to grant a limited exemption from the antitrust

  laws. He lobbied hard, establishing relationships with senior con-

  gressmen and senators that would benefit the nfl for years to come.

  Once again that groundwork was helped by Rozelle’s time at

  usf. The city- side reporter for whom he always left football tick-

  ets had his own meteoric rise after both of them left the City by

  the Bay. He was now John F. Kennedy’s press secretary. For years,

  when asked if Pierre Salinger helped the new commissioner get the

  votes and urged the president to sign the bill, Rozelle would con-

  sistently reply, “Not really.” Perhaps. But as your mother used to

  say when asked about the benefits of chicken soup for head colds,

  “It might not help, but it couldn’t hurt.”

  Kennedy signed the exemption into law and changed the way

  all professional and even college leagues would eventually operate.

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  61

  5

  How Do You Tel Vince?

  You are made to feel special when you are very young. . . . And it’s often hard not to start believing it.

  —Frank Tripucka, former Notre Dame and Denver Broncos

  quarterback

  Then we found this bar, and [Vince and I] sat there and we talked . . . and we drank scotch . . . We drank scotch for four hours.

  —Pete Rozelle after he told Lombardi he planned to suspend Paul

  Hornung from the nfl

  It was 1963, and in his heart the commissioner knew he ought

  to be concentrating on the challenge of the American Football

  League. It was three years now since the ragtag “Don Quixotes”

  of that other league had staggered off the drawing board and onto

  America’s sports pages. They lacked both adequate playing fields

  and liquid capital. Newspapermen favorable to the old- guard nfl

  referred to the embryonic league’s contests as aerial volleyball

  matches, a reference to both the lack of finesse and an incredibly

  limited view of defense.

  But they were still alive, with their own abc television con-

  tract. Now the head- to- head war was about to move into a new

  and ugly phase, one closer to home. When a group of shrewd

  sports- oriented businessmen had picked up the bankrupt New York

  Titans afl franchise for the price of its debts— a mere one million
r />   dollars— Rozelle knew the afl was moving into a new phase. The

  new group was led by David Sonny Werblin, a show- business and

  sports entrepreneur, whose Music Corporation of America’s (mca)

  62

  clients had included Guy Lombardo, Frank Sinatra, and Ronald Reagan. In addition, his television contacts (he had Wagon Train

  and Bonanza at numbers one and two in national popularity at the same time) made his new team, the Jets, a formidable problem for

  the hometown Giants.

  It was April 1963, and Rozelle knew he should have been think-

  ing about Werblin and the mounting legal costs of the interleague

  battle. He should have been thinking about the college draft and

  what share of the precocious heroes of America’s fumble factories

  would sign with his league. He should have been thinking about

  expansion and the moves he needed to make.

  But “should have” and “could have” are very different animals.

  “Could have” had become impossible with the impact of a well- kept

  secret with which Pete Rozelle secretly grappled. He had known

  for some time that the sort of problem that terrifies every commis-

  sioner, every owner, every college president with a big- time athletic team and every coach, was dangerously hanging over his world.

  And he knew that it had to be dealt with swiftly and decisively

  to preserve the nfl’s integrity. Without integrity, the nfl could

  have no product.

  This is a country where gambling has always been a fever in the

  national blood. I remember as far back as when I was a kid in New

  Jersey, you could dial we 6- 1212, and a recorded voice would tell

  you that this was a report from the National Weather Service and

  that there was a 20 percent chance of rain. In what other country

  on the planet did the national government make book on April

  showers?

  We are a country of gamblers. We always have been and always

  will be. This is no secret. Just think back to Yeoman Pete Rozelle’s

  Army— Notre Dame caper as an amateur bookmaker aboard the

  uss Gardoqui.

  We are also a country that will make an icon out of a young

  man who can throw a football sixty yards, hit a baseball four hun-

  How Do You Tell Vince?

  63

  dred feet, or dunk a basketball from a half- mile above the hoop.

  That adoration can have a profound impact on how such gifted

  athletes view themselves.

  I grew up with a great quarterback named Frank Tripucka who

  was an All- America under Frank Leahy at Notre Dame, an all-

  league quarterback in the Canadian Football League, and the first

  quarterback of the afl’s Denver Broncos. One day after he retired

  we were discussing how hard it can be for young athletes to keep

  themselves in perspective when the boys become men. “You are

  made to feel special when you are very young,” he explained, and

  he knew because he had been there.

  Newspaper guys write terrific things about you. Boosters want to

  give you things in college. Later when you are a pro, hometown fans

  reach for your restaurant tabs. They all tell you how special you are.

  And it’s often hard not to start believing it. For those who do, the

  rules become something for someone else to respect.

  When I was a pro, I knew one thing. Let someone buy you drinks

  long enough, and he will probably want a favor. That favor could be

  anything from going to a friend’s wedding or . . . well . . . The way

  you avoid that is to eat and drink only with your teammates on the

  road, and then nobody can put you in a compromising position of

  any kind.

  With the growth of football betting in America, an intrigu-

  ing new form of merchandizing by bookmakers posed an escape

  route to players who wanted to have things both ways. It was called

  the point spread and established what the winning margin had to

  be to win a bet if you took the favorite. By keeping a team under

  that margin and still winning, a player could say and believe, as

  a New York University basketball point- shaver said to me after a

  major 1961 scandal, “Well, nobody got hurt except the bookies.”

  Now the briber did not have to get a player to lose a game. All he

  had to do was make sure his team did not cover the spread. With

  that possibility it didn’t have to be a fact for rumors to cast doubt

  on the game’s integrity. Proof positive that the betters believed

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  How Do You Tell Vince?

  this to be true came with the myriad of telephone calls they placed to the nfl switchboard on Monday mornings after some placekicker had missed a thirty- yard field goal and impacted the spread.

  Rozelle knew all of this. And he knew that to permit a player

  to gamble at all was to flirt with disaster. He understood how eas-

  ily gambling debts or free drugs for players in the fast lane could

  threaten the honesty of his games. He knew how it had happened

  before and how the fix had materialized in big, bold headlines

  about scores of college basketball games, hundreds of prizefights,

  and, yes, even once in the National Football League.

  He never met bookmaker Alvin Paris, a man short in stature

  but huge in negative impact on the nfl. But he knew all about the

  impact he had on the sport in 1946. Paris had been the kingpin

  that made Bert Bell’s worst nightmare a reality. He also became

  the very real ghost of things that could happen again if the lesson

  were ignored. Ever since pro football’s mill- town days, people had

  bet on football. It was more an exercise in chauvinism than greed.

  Because gambling had always been there and because there never

  was a confirmed shred of evidence that the nfl’s games were any-

  thing but honest, the league paid little attention to what the man

  on the street did to back his loyalties.

  World War II had been over for a year. The boys came marching

  home. New cars rolled off the assembly line. A bright, new day

  was here, and with it a return to a form of normalcy long forgot-

  ten. The Giants and the Bears, two of the most bitter rivals in pro

  football, had earned their way into the title game. In the euphoria

  of a postwar rush back to the future, 58,346 football fans would

  pack the Polo Grounds.

  It was then before the 1946 championship game that Alvin Paris,

  a man who left no other major mark on society, brought pro foot-

  ball face- to- face with its first horrifying moment of truth. That

  would be on Sunday. But only after all hell broke loose on Saturday.

  Bert Bell, the commissioner, had always been uneasy about what

  How Do You Tell Vince?

  65

  could happen with a gambler determined enough and a couple of players venal enough. Paris planned to broker that marriage.

  Shortly after three on that Saturday, Mayor William O’Dwyer

  called Tim Mara, who owned the Giants. “Something has hap-

  pened, Tim, and you and Steve [Owen, the Giants’ coach] should

  know about it.”

  Thus, with no warning, began the longest day in the life of

  Tim Mara, a former legal bookmaker in the pre- tote- board days

  and a pioneer in the nf
l’s stepchild era. He had seen his team rise

  from the bottom to the top. He loved all things New York, and

  his Football Giants certainly were. As his cab took him to Gra-

  cie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, he had no way of knowing he

  was on the threshold of the twenty- four cruelest hours of his life.

  Arthur Wallender, the city police commissioner, was already

  there. As Mara and Owen listened, he explained that Merle Hapes,

  the Giants’ starting fullback, admitted he had been bribed by Paris

  to fix the game. Hapes also claimed that teammate and tailback

  Frank Filchock had also been approached. Each, Hapes insisted,

  would get twenty- five hundred dollars, and, additionally, Paris

  would bet one thousand dollars for each of them on the prop-

  osition that the Bears would win by more than (remember the

  point- spread school of betting) ten points. Filchock denied his

  involvement. Bell agreed to let Filchock play, pending his own

  investigation, but Hapes was immediately suspended for not report-

  ing a bribe attempt.

  The Sunday papers were filled with the story. As the Giants

  clattered down the ancient stairs that led from clubhouse to field

  the next day, Filchock was greeted with thunderous boos. He had

  lied to Mara and Owen. Only he and Paris and Hapes knew that.

  But the crowd was publicly commenting on the possible lack of

  integrity of the game they were just coming to understand and

  love. It was a barometer as to how quickly the public would believe

  the slightest taint of scandal.

  In an effort to redeem himself, Filchock played the best game

  of his life— even after he broke his nose. The Bears won. Then

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  How Do You Tell Vince?

  Filchock confessed that he, too, had been offered money. Bell moved swiftly. He suspended both men. Neither ever played another game

  of football in the United States.

  History remembers only the bribe attempt and not the final score.

  The gravity of that was not lost on Rozelle, who was a keen stu-

  dent of history. And there was something else. Two years before

  Rozelle became commissioner, the Colts had beaten the Giants in

  a sudden- death overtime title game. It was the game that vaulted

  pro football on its path to establishing itself as the new number-

  one sport in America. But it was also a game that fed into that myth

  of suspicion with which the commissioner now had to grapple.