Pete Rozelle

Sports Executive

  • Born: March 1, 1926
  • Birthplace: South Gate, California
  • Died: December 6, 1996
  • Place of death: Rancho Santa Fe, California

American sports administrator

Through media deals that brought professional football to television, Rozelle transformed how the game is played, managed, and even sold to fans, making football the most profitable sporting enterprise in the United States. Also, he was instrumental in merging two competing leagues to form the modern National Football League.

Areas of achievement Sports, business and industry, communications

Early Life

Pete Rozelle (roh-ZEHL) was born Alvin Ray Rozelle into a middle-class family in Southern California. He was an excellent athlete at Compton High School, playing tennis, baseball, and basketball. He expressed neither skill nor interest in football, however, the sport that he would help to revolutionize. Upon graduating from high school in 1944, he was drafted by the U.S. Navy and served eighteen months in the Pacific. After being discharged from the Navy in 1946, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend college, where he would make the connections that led to his career as an administrator of the National Football League (NFL).

Rozelle enrolled at Compton Junior College (now Compton Community College) near his hometown. That same year the Cleveland Rams of the NFL moved to Los Angeles and used the football field at Compton as a practice site. While covering the Rams for the school newspaper, Rozelle met Maxwell Stiles, the public relations (PR) director for the Rams, who hired Rozelle as his assistant. Rozelle was now in the door of professional football.

In 1948, Rozelle left Los Angeles to finish his degree at the University of San Francisco, where he worked part-time as the university’s athletic news director. After graduating, Tex Schramm, general manager of the Rams, hired Rozelle as PR director, a job he held until 1955, when he went to work for P. K. Macker, a PR firm. A year later, Melbourne, Australia, hosted the Summer Olympic Games, and several Australian athletes and companies hired the Macker firm to represent them during the Games. Rozelle gained valuable experience in the business side of sports and learned perhaps the most important lesson for sports as an industry: that sports could generate huge amounts of wealth.

Also in the mid-1950’s, the Los Angeles Rams were having management troubles. Conflicts between the majority owner Dan Reeves and two minority owners led Schramm to resign as general manager. Bert Bell, NFL commissioner, asked Schramm for suggestions for his replacement. Schramm recommended Rozelle, remembering his organizational skills and public relations savvy when he worked for the Rams. Bell offered Rozelle the job, and despite some reservations, Rozelle accepted the position in 1957. He soon sorted out the personality conflicts in the Rams organization, an ability that earned him respect within the NFL.

In 1959, Bell died unexpectedly, leaving Austin Gunsel as the interim commissioner. In 1960, the NFL owners met at their annual meeting to find a permanent commissioner. Gunsel was initially the front-runner but was not a football insider. (Gunsel had been an administrator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, brought in by the NFL to clean up the league’s image after a scandal involving alleged gambling.) Furthermore, Gunsel did not have the support of many franchise owners. After ten days and twenty-three ballots, the owners still did not have a commissioner. Dan Reeves, owner of the Rams, nominated Rozelle for the position. The thirty-three-year-old Rozelle received the majority of votes necessary to become the sixth commissioner of the NFL.

Life’s Work

Upon becoming commissioner, Rozelle faced three great challenges. First, the owners of the NFL franchises held most of the decision-making powers. They often made choices based upon their own self-interests and not in the interest of the NFL. Rozelle was determined to end the practice by placing most power in the hands of the commissioner. Second, America’s entertainment interests were changing. Television had emerged as the dominant form of entertainment, but the NFL lagged behind in embracing the potential of television to create and keep fans and to generate considerable income. Third, the NFL had direct competition. When Rozelle became commissioner in 1960, the NFL had twelve teams, located mostly in the northwestern part of the country. When the NFL refused to place franchises in booming Western cities such as Dallas, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, disgruntled potential owners formed a rival league, the American Football League (AFL) in 1960. The AFL attracted huge crowds in their respective cities and challenged the NFL by competing for the top college players and by enticing NFL players with offers of higher salaries. The competition for talent drove up player salaries, cutting into the profitability of both leagues.

Rozelle tackled the first problem by using the threat of the AFL to persuade NFL owners to give him broad powers to run the league. In return, Rozelle promised to protect the profitability of the league and the owners’ individual franchises. Rozelle dealt with the second issue by embracing the potential of television to feed the interest of existing fans and entice new fans to the sport. Utilizing his public relations skills, Rozelle marketed the NFL as never before, earning new fans and ensuring the profitability of NFL franchises through more lucrative deals for the rights to televise NFL games. In 1962, Rozelle signed a two-year deal that gave the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) the exclusive right to broadcast NFL games. CBS paid $9.3 million, which Rozelle, over the objection of large-market owners in New York and Chicago, distributed equally to all franchises in the NFL. The boost in revenue ensured the profitability of all franchises, as Rozelle promised, and improved the level of competition in the NFL by granting small-market franchises like Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio, the resources to sign better players.

Television revenues continued to climb throughout Rozelle’s tenure as commissioner, as networks and cable television tried to outbid each other for NFL broadcast rights. In 1977, the NFL received $69 million for exclusive broadcasting rights, with the price climbing to $494 million in 1986. Recognizing that more televised games meant more revenue, Rozelle expanded the NFL schedule beyond its traditional Sunday afternoon games. In 1970, he sold broadcasting rights to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), creating Monday Night Football, an immensely popular program on ABC for the next twenty-five years.

The AFL proved a more difficult problem, however. Playing a faster, more up-tempo game in cities that did not have competition from the NFL, the AFL enjoyed huge popularity. The one common ground between the AFL and NFL was their concern about the high price both leagues paid for players. Since both leagues competed for the same talent, player salaries had increased dramatically, limiting the profitability of both leagues. In 1966, Schramm, now general manager of the AFL’s Dallas Cowboys, began secret negotiations with Rozelle to merge the two leagues into a single entity. The negotiations lasted for two months. In June, 1966, a deal was announced that the two leagues would formally merge by 1970. The combined league would retain the name of the National Football League, but two conferences within the NFL would be formed: the original NFL teams would make up the National Football Conference and the former AFL teams would form the American Football Conference. The champions of each respective conference would then meet to determine the NFL champion.

Rozelle would remain on the job as the commissioner of the newly merged league. The new championship game, christened the Super Bowl and first played in 1967, provided the media-conscious Rozelle with another opportunity to market football. The Super Bowl remains one of the most-watched annual events on television.

Rozelle continued to oversee the expansion of football, in terms of both profitability and popularity, throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. After twenty-nine years as commissioner, Rozelle retired in 1989 and moved back to Southern California. He died of brain cancer in December, 1996, at the age of seventy.

Significance

When Rozelle became commissioner in 1960, the NFL had twelve teams that generated only relatively minor profits in their limited markets. When he retired in 1989, the NFL had twenty-eight teams and the league generated $2.1 billion in revenue. The Super Bowl had become an annual media event watched around the world, and the popularity of football had surpassed baseball, America’s traditional pastime.

Although the latter years of Rozelle’s tenure were marked by labor problems among franchise owners and players, he left the NFL in much better shape than he found it. In fact, he created the modern NFL, and the way he shaped it was used as the model for all sports leagues.

Bibliography

Coenen, Craig R. From Sandlots to the Super Bowl: The National Football League, 1920-1967. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Comprehensive, scholarly study of the first forty-seven years of NFL history, including the NFL’s war with the AFL and the eventual merger of the two leagues.

Fortunato, John. Commissioner: The Legacy of Pete Rozelle. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade, 2006. Contrary to this book’s title, this book is a history of Rozelle’s work as NFL commissioner and less a study of the post-Rozelle era of the NFL. A good general history of Rozelle’s battles and accomplishments as commissioner.

Jozsa, Frank P., Jr., and John J. Guthrie, Jr. Relocating Teams and Expanding Leagues in Professional Sports: How the Major Leagues Respond to Market Conditions. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1999. Uses demographic and economic data to discuss the business side of sports in the United States from 1950 through 2000.

Oriard, Michael. Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. A look at the marketing and selling the branding of the NFL, which was Rozelle’s legacy. Considers how the league, its players, and teams are managed as commodities and “sold” to the viewing public.

Patton, Phil. Razzle Dazzle: The Curious Marriage of Television and Professional Football. Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1984. Interesting, easy-to-read chronicle of television, football, and the people involved in the development of the two enterprises.

Rader, Benjamin G. In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. New York: Free Press, 1984. An excellent cultural history of how televised sports became so popular in America. Rozelle’s role in the process is not the primary emphasis of the book, but the chapters dealing with Rozelle demonstrate how Rozelle saw the potential of television and harnessed it for the good of the NFL.

Yost, Mark. Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps: How the NFL Became the Most Successful Sports League in History. Chicago: Kaplan, 2006. Most of the book covers the period of Rozelle’s tenure as commissioner and describes his efforts to boost the profitability of the league and franchises. The later chapters describe events after Rozelle’s retirement.

1941-1970: January 29, 1963: Professional Football Names First Inductees to the Pro Football Hall of Fame; June 8, 1966: NFL-AFL Merger Creates a Sports-Industry Giant; January 15, 1967: National Football League Holds Its First Super Bowl.