Rozelle by Jerry Izenberg & Pete Rozelle

Author:Jerry Izenberg & Pete Rozelle [Izenberg, Jerry & Rozelle, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, History
Goodreads: 21945039
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

a solution that fitted its obvious needs.

To complicate an acceptable solution even further, the afl itself

was split over its future identity. Lamar Hunt thought it would be

nice to somehow retain the old gang’s identity. Virtually all of the

rest of the rebel group wanted the other side to ship them three

viable teams from the nfl social set.

As for the old- guard nfl, it didn’t want to get, give, or get up

off of anything. As always in a league- wide difference of opinion,

Rozelle cranked up his pr machine and took his case to a friendly

audience. With the media in the room, he held a press conference

in Dallas, a city with an old- guard franchise and the residential

homes of Schramm and Hunt, his merger point men. “There are

156

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certain areas of difficulty about switching leagues or conferences,”

he said, leaving the assembled media to test the waters. “For exam-

ple, would Cleveland with an 80,000- seat stadium want to play in

the same division as Denver with far less seating?”

And from the back of the room, in a voice calculated to shat-

ter all the windows in the Dallas Mercantile Building, Art Mod-

ell could be clearly heard saying, “Over my dead body.”

They met twice and failed to make progress. Then it came

down to May and the spring meeting in New York. Now the unre-

solved makeup of the new realigned National Football League had

dumped even more problems on Rozelle’s plate. The urgency of

both television networks’ need to make plans, coupled with the

need for a 1970 league schedule and the need for sanity, decided

Rozelle. They would settle this thing now or pitch tents along the

Hudson River and not leave until they did. Without a solution, he

told his confidants, nobody was going anywhere.

At the previous meeting in March they had battled, they had

huffed, they had puffed, and nobody had achieved a damned thing.

The truth of that matter and the mechanics of the solution had

been put forth by, of all people, Al Davis. Then a minority part-

ner but knowing he could eventually become the majority leader

of the Raiders, Davis put aside rancor, profanity, and his man-

in- black pose and turned to the reasoning power of a visual aid.

Stepping to a blackboard, he wrote the names of all ten afl

franchises on one side and all existing nfl franchises on the other.

Then he drew a vertical line between them. Then he spoke. “If

you take three teams from the right side and move them to join

the ten teams on the left side, there is an excellent chance that you

will wind up with two thirteen- team leagues. And if you don’t,

what will I tell my little boy if he sees sixteen teams in one league

and only ten in the other?”

It was first grade arithmetic and the ultimate solution, but nobody

on the right side was killed or herniated trying to drag his fran-

chise over to the left. They adjourned to think it over.

Bringing in the Sheaves

157

“I was thinking when we adjourned,” Rozelle would later tell me, “that we had to find the least disruptive move.

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