TIME 100: Pete Rozelle

* TIME 100: Pete Rozelle


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The football league Rozelle inherited in 1960 was a fragmented collection of 12 franchises, each run more or less as a stand-alone business. The squabbling owners faced serious competition from the newly formed American Football League, bankrolled by one of the richest men in America, Lamar Hunt. Rozelle's first trick, one that Rockefeller would have admired, was to put an end to the unprofitable competition. In 1962 he traveled to Washington and persuaded Congress to grant the NFL the first of two exemptions to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The exemption enabled Rozelle to fold the two leagues into a single, albeit fragmented, business.

Rozelle's next big move was to weld the owners of the new, expanded league into a cartel. This too required an exemption from the antitrust laws, which Congress granted in 1966. One morning the three major television networks woke up and found not a collection of individual teams competing with one another to sell their broadcast rights, but a single entity with a growing sense of its value.

The result, as we now know, was wonderful new bargaining power. The new revenues went into promoting the game and grabbing an ever greater slice of the entertainment business. "When the networks put up as much money as they did for the rights, they felt they had to promote the game," says NFL spokesman Joe Browne. "And by promoting the game, the game grew." Back in 1960, when the 33-year-old Rozelle accepted the job as NFL commissioner, the combined revenues of the NFL and the franchises were less than $20 million. The NFL this year projects combined revenues of nearly $4 billion. Similarly, the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings were each sold for about $1 million in Rozelle's rookie year. The newest NFL franchise, in Cleveland, was auctioned for $530 million last year.

In his eulogy of Rozelle in January 1997, Arledge said that a president of a sports division negotiating with Pete Rozelle and the NFL had "about as much clout as the Dalai Lama has dealing with the Chinese army." What he failed to mention was that Rozelle had created the army.

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

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