TIME 100: Pete Rozelle

* TIME 100: Pete Rozelle


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In retrospect, the whole thing looks like an outrageous violation of old-fashioned American free-market principles. But in 1966 virtually no one but Rozelle was thinking of pro sports as a seriously big business. The notion of pro football's "bargaining power" was patently absurd. Having formed his cartel, however, Rozelle managed it in much the same way the Japanese zaibatsu manage their cartels — with a view to market share (read: global domination).

He understood, somewhat ironically, that the key to attracting fans was fierce competition on the field, and that the key to fierce competition was every team's having roughly the same amount of money to spend on players. To that end Rozelle persuaded NFL owners — two dozen raving megalomaniacs — to share their television spoils equally. While there still remains a discrepancy between the richest franchise (Dallas) and the poorest (Indianapolis), the difference is a fraction of that in other pro sports.

Probably it helped that unlike so many would-be power brokers, Rozelle did not look like a man who wished to wield power. Of course the gifts required to pull this off aren't the ones normally associated with empire building. They are to a large extent the gifts of a diplomat. Diplomat in this case is another word for a man with a talent for dealing with megalomaniacs. Each year that Rozelle presided over the NFL, another owner published his autobiography explaining how he was the visionary behind the rise of pro football. Each year Rozelle laughed and let him enjoy his press. Rozelle seems to have been the sort of spectral tycoon who took his satisfaction in managing other people without their knowing it.

Looking back, one can see that Rozelle's career was built on his talent for 1) persuading rich men who were unfamiliar with not having everything they wanted to take less than they deserved and 2) preventing full-scale revolt the minute the stakes became high. The subsequent endless pressures on Rozelle are familiar to anyone who has ever built a successful cartel — and cartels by and large fail. A member is more inclined to cheat the group the more successfully the group drives up his price. When Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys cut a side deal with Pepsi to become the official drink of Texas Stadium, thus violating at least the spirit of the lucrative agreement the NFL had cut with Coca-Cola, he was playing the same game as the renegade Libyan oil industry.

By today's standards, Rozelle was vastly undercompensated, given the wealth he created for the NFL's owners. He was a special case: the business giant who didn't lust for financial fortune and overt personal dominance. But if the measure of business success is the creation of new enterprise, then Rozelle was one of the greats. Once, late in his career, after it was clear what he had accomplished, Rozelle was asked by a reporter if he had an ego. Pete Rozelle replied that if you took all the egos in pro sports — the players', the coaches', the owners' — and averaged them out, his ego was just above the average. It might have been true, but no one ever knew it. That was his genius.

Michael Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker and Trail Fever

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Jan. 17, 1972 Dec. 8, 1975 Jan. 25, 1982

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