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America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation ReviewMichael MacCambridge has produced a volume of research and analysis worthy of any historical bookshelf. Let the reader beware: the author is nothing but faithful to his title. This is not a nostalgic romp with the Decatur Staleys, nor a highlight reel in words. Rather, MacCambridge traces and assesses how the corporate NFL has managed itself from its humble pre-World War II status to a position today of sports preeminence.
For starters, the author does not think much of pro football before 1945. Pro football was a confederation of teams, all of which were north and east of a line between Chicago and Washington. The owners were a club unto themselves, mostly Catholic and educated by nuns. Their greatest gifts to the game, in MacCambridge's view, are that they did not muck it up too much and they elected Bert Bell to serve as commissioner after the war. Bell was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier--his selection smacks of cronyism as much as anything--but in his humble, gracious way, Bell served the game as well as the owners. He was the first commissioner who sensed an obligation to protect the game itself.
He was challenged quickly enough by another major figure in this work, Paul Brown, and a new league taking shape, the All America Football Conference. The AAFC enjoyed a brief flare of success in the late 1940's, with franchises in glamour cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. On the field, however, the premiere team was Cleveland, where Brown invented the model of modern coaching management. Cleveland and its imitators in the AAFC were simply too good to go away. Bell decided to pick the franchises he wanted and add them to the NFL fraternity. By 1950 the NFL was coast to coast and the enemy had been destroyed.
With Bell's sudden death in 1959, the NFL owners closeted for eleven days, and when the white smoke poured from football's Sistine Chapel, there on the balcony stood the longest of long shots, the Rams General Manager Pete Rozelle, 33. If there is a hero in this book it is Rozelle. He, too, was tested from the start, by a number of millionaires from across the country, in particular the south, clamoring for league expansion and new franchises.
In truth, the old guard did not want expansion, but unlike baseball with its antitrust exemption, the NFL under Rozelle was indeed vulnerable to a charge of cabalistic behavior. Rozelle could not play dumb as Bell had. There were too many suitors now, at least a dozen. As these prospective new owners gravitated toward a new American League, Rozelle tried to slow the momentum by the early 1960's addition of Dallas, Minnesota, and Atlanta franchises to the NFL. In hindsight, Rozelle might have done better to appease Lamar Hunt, the driving force behind the new AFL.
The titanic battle of the two leagues ended in 1966, with secret negotiations between Rozelle and Hunt [and not Al Davis, the actual AFL commissioner, who would get his pound of flesh from Rozelle] prompted by bidding wars for top draft choices and then established league stars. MacCambridge observes that negotiating conference alignments was as difficult as selling merger itself. Who of the old guard would go to the AFC?
What made this entire enterprise workable, in the final analysis, was Roselle's management of television. Beginning in the 1960's Rozelle negotiated a series of network contracts that ensured many healthy benefits: national coverage [to feed enthusiasm of local fans], the much beloved "double-header game" at 4 PM, and most importantly, equal division of TV revenue among all teams. In addition, MacCambridge gives considerable attention to Rozelle's cultivation of Ed and Steve Sabol's NFL films production as an invaluable marketing tool of the league.
MacCambridge is the first author of my experience to explain the significance of the USFL's suit against the NFL and its potential to destroy the league. The USFL, a pleasant little league that enjoyed its workable niche in the springtime sports world, decided to go head to head with the NFL in the fall, and filed its now-famous antitrust suit. Rozelle's first instinct was to settle, but he and the owners were dissuaded by the brilliant attorney Paul Tagliabue. Tagliabue understood that a non-defense by the NFL would make the league vulnerable to suits from any sandlot league claiming to be shut out of the national TV market and demanding admission to the NFL.
The USFL trial completely exhausted Rozelle, who resigned after a three decade tenure. His replacement in 1989, the steely Tagliabue, would find his tenure filled with home-grown problems. Player conduct, an absence of minority executives and coaches, unforeseen difficulties with the new league salary cap, and even a bare breasted Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco would occupy his first fifteen years. But his biggest challenge came from the owners themselves over an issue considered anathema forty years before: franchise jumping. Los Angeles to Oakland, Los Angeles to St. Louis, Cleveland to Baltimore, and Houston's melancholic relocation to Vanderbilt University--this was a trend that would alienate the heart of the league's success, fan identification, not to mention a repudiation of the founding credo, "the good of the league." Clearly, Tagliabue did not enjoy the power of a 1970 Rozelle, but the author notes that the commissioner was not Bud Selig, either. His compromise of restoring expansion franchises to Cleveland and Houston was better than nothing. And Tagliabue may have gotten help from an unexpected source: wholesale taxpayer opposition to publicly funded football stadiums, which would of necessity put a damper on owner enthusiasms.
In the final analysis, MacCambridge believes that the NFL is still the healthiest of all professional sports in the United States in terms of fan base and business practices. This work contains an exhaustive bibliography that will probably send the reader off in several directions--at least till the season starts.
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