ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, December 7, 1996 TAG: 9612090061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
HE LINKED FOOTBALL with television, creating Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl and bringing TV sports contracts into 10 figures.
Pete Rozelle, the father of the Super Bowl who put the NFL on TV just about everywhere and transformed the way Americans spend Sunday afternoons, died Friday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 70.
Rozelle died from brain cancer at his home. He had undergone surgery for brain cancer in December 1993.
``He'll forever be remembered as the standard by which all sports executives are judged,'' New York Giants owner Wellington Mara said. ``He did more for professional football and the NFL than any other sports executive has done.''
As perhaps the premier commissioner of all sports, Rozelle led the National Football League for nearly three decades before retiring unexpectedly in 1989, helping it survive bidding wars with three rival leagues and three player strikes.
He shepherded the league from 12 teams to 28, turned it into a Sunday obsession and guided it to the pre-eminent position it still holds today - the nation's No.1 spectator sport.
Rozelle did it by linking the game with television, creating Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl, which blossomed into America's most-watched sporting event.
It was, on the one hand, a financial coup, bringing a league that got $75,000 from Dumont television for its title game in 1951 into one of the wealthiest sports entities. The current television contract, for which Rozelle set the groundwork, gets $1.58 billion for four years from Fox alone, more than 2,000 times what Rozelle got in his first contract with CBS in 1962.
It was Rozelle who brought sports into 10 figures when he negotiated a landmark five-year, $2.1 billion contract with television's three major networks in 1982. Then he expanded the NFL's TV exposure to cable, selling a Sunday night series to ESPN as part of the next contract in 1986.
But his biggest contribution may have been introducing revenue-sharing in pro football 30 years before it created havoc in other sports. Doing so allowed teams in minor markets such as Green Bay, Wis., to equally share TV revenues - the biggest part of the NFL pie - with teams in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
But Rozelle's impact was as much social as it was financial, changing the nation's leisure habits and imprinting the game on the nation's lifestyle.
In 1969, he came up with the idea of Monday Night Football, now the nation's longest-running sports series and sold it to Roone Arledge, then the president of ABC Sports.
Such was his impact that he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985, a unique honor, because such selections almost always are made after a candidate's retirement.
Not bad for a public relations man who was a longshot choice to end an acrimonious deadlock as the NFL owners sought a successor for Bert Bell, who had died in office.He was elected the league's sixth commissioner on Jan. 26, 1960, at the age of 33. He was the compromise choice on the 23rd ballot.
Rozelle arrived about the same time as the rival American Football League, a development that created a war for players and television ratings.
By 1966, the two warring leagues, weary of the battle for player talent, merged, creating a single professional football league with Rozelle as commissioner. The merger also produced a world championship game, which would eventually come to be known as the Super Bowl.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Rozelleby CNB