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Bio
Alvin Ray 'Pete' Rozelle was born March 1, 1926, in South
Gate, California. During his high school years in Compton High,
Rozelle played basketball and tennis and served as sports editor of
the school's paper. He also worked weekends at the Long Beach Press
Telegram newspaper. Later, he joined the U.S. Navy during the World
War II. Then, in 1946 he enrolled at Compton Junior College and
returned to the world of sports as the collegees athletic news
director and earned $50 a month as the schoolls sports information
director. He also worked part-time for the Los Angeles Rams
football teamms publicity department.
Rozelle transferred from Compton to the University of San
Francisco, where he worked as a publicist for the college football
team. He remained at the University after graduation, serving as
athletic news director and assistant director of the school's
sports programs. In 1952, his old employer Tex Schramm offered him
the job of publicity director for the Los Angeles Rams, and he
began his life's work of building American professional football
into the country's most popular spectator sport. He later became
the General Manager of the Rams.
Rozelle became the Commissioner of the National Football
League at the age of 33. When he assumed the post in January 1960,
there were a dozen teams in the league, playing poorly attended
gamessmostly un-televised. Some of the owners had individually
negotiated broadcast rights for their teams' games, but the
franchises in smaller markets languished in unprofitable obscurity.
Team owners were wary of expanding the league, fearful they would
saturate the market.
Rozelle succeeded in adding two franchises to the league in
his first year, blocking AFL expansion in those markets, but he
believed the future of the game lay in expanding its national
television audience. He moved the NFL offices from Philadelphia to
New York, home of the three major television networks and began
aggressively pursuing broadcast deals. His ability to mediate the
squabbles of contentious franchise owners won him the respect of
the national sports press, and he was selected as 1963 "Sportsman
of the Year" by Sports Illustrated magazine.
Rozelle undertook the most difficult challenge of his
career, negotiating a merger of the AFL and the NFL, two rival
leagues. A merger of the leagues was agreed to in 1966, with Pete
Rozelle serving as Commissioner of the combined organization, he
persuaded the team owners to abide by a single draft process that
would allow the lowest-ranked teams the first choice of newly
available college players. This raised the overall standard of play
throughout the league, drawing increased attendance for all teams,
and a rapidly increasing television viewership.
The 1960s were years of explosive growth for professional
football, as Rozelle presided over the introduction of a postseason
championship game, the Super Bowl. Although the first Super Bowl
game, in January 1967, was played to a nearly half-empty stadium,
Rozelle arranged for the game to be broadcast simultaneously on
both NBC and CBS, forcing two networks to compete in promoting
their coverage of the event. Within a few years, the annual game
had become a national institution: the most-watched television
event of the year. With the growing popularity of televised
football on Sunday afternoons, Rozelle engineered the introduction
in 1970 of Monday Night Football, a weekly television event that
has become a wintertime obsession for many Americans, and is the
longest-running, non-news program on prime-time television. He was
inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in
1985.
A greater threat to the NFL arose in 1987, when the players'
union struck in mid-season. After losing a week of games, Rozelle
made the difficult decision to bring in replacement players. He
kept the season running for another three weeks until the players
and the owners came to terms. When his contract with the league
expired two years later, Rozelle stepped down as Commissioner. In
nearly three decades at the helm, he had seen the league grow to 28
teams. Regular season football games now routinely draw larger
television audiences than the playoff games of other
sports.
For the last seven years of his life, Pete continued to
advise the NFL from his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California. He
succumbed to a brain tumor at the age of 70. In his lifetime, Pete
Rozelle's contribution to the growth of the NFL went nearly
unnoticed, but with the passing of the years, it has become more
and more apparent that he did more than anyone to develop
professional football into the powerful force in American popular
culture that we know today. In 2000,Time magazine named him one of
the 100 most important people of the 20th century.
This biography is taken from American Academy of
Achievement. (March 20, 2008). Pete Rozelle Biography: Pro Football
Hall of Fame. Retrieve from
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/roz0bio-1