Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport

1 The Creation of the Modern NFL in the 1960s

1 THE CREATION OF THE MODERN NFL IN THE 1960S Professional football became Americans’ favorite spectator sport in the 1960s. It was a decade of great players (as is every decade): Johnny Unitas and Sonny Jurgensen, Lenny Moore and Gayle Sayers, Deacon Jones and Dick Butkus, John Mackey and Raymond Berry. Nearly the entire starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers—Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Boyd Dowler, Max McGee, Jerry Kramer, Fuzzy Thurston, Jim Ringo, Forrest Gregg, Ron Kramer, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, Ray Nitschke, Herb Adderley, Willie Wood—became household names. Without question, the greatest of them all was Jim Brown, one of the nfl’s few truly transcendent players from any era. In just nine seasons Brown rushed for 12,312 yards, averaging 5.2 yards per carry and leading the league eight times. He was Rookie of the Year, then league mvp four times; he played in nine Pro Bowls and missed not a single game—then walked away after the 1965 season, at age 30, still in his prime but with nothing left to prove. Few stars in any sport have been so unfettered by their own stardom. Among other interests, Brown embraced his role as a black man in a barely integrated sport, as few African American professional athletes of his generation did, at a time when such actions provoked more anger and resentment than respect. On the field, Brown was an astonishing fusion of speed, power, and agility, but no one player, no matter how good, can guarantee championships in pro football. Brown and Cleveland were perennial runners-up,a winning just one title, in 1964, an interruption in the run of the Green Bay Packers through the 1960s. a. In Brown’s other eight seasons, Cleveland won two conference titles but lost the THE CREATION OF THE MODERN NFL IN THE 1960S 11 Starr and Hornung notwithstanding, the Packers above all meant Vince Lombardi. No coach in nfl history so impressed his own personality on his team as did Lombardi with the Packers. In December 1962, when Lombardi appeared on the cover of Time magazine, he also became the first noncollegiate coach to transcend the narrow world of football’s X’s and O’s to become a truly national figure. Over the 1960s, Lombardi emerged as the face and the spirit not just of the National Football League but also of a vanishing America under assault from civil rights and antiwar protestors, and a counterculture that celebrated everything ‘‘traditional’’ football feared and despised. The counterculture prevailed, of course, absorbed into the middle-class mainstream, but the nfl did more than just survive the upheaval. It thrived, in part by absorbing its own countercultural force in the person of Joe Namath— as potent an icon of the nfl as it headed into the 1970s as Lombardi had been in the 1960s. Lombardi and Namath were the polar icons of the nfl’s cultural transformation, but the master architect of the modern nfl, the man who laid the foundations on which all of this played out, was Pete Rozelle. Pete Alvin ‘‘Pete’’ Rozelle, as the press invariably identified him (with his actual middle name, Ray, sometimes inserted as well), was no one’s first choice in early 1960 to succeed Bert Bell as commissioner after Bell died suddenly of a heart attack the previous October. On January 26 Rozelle was elected on the twenty-third ballot, breaking an impasse between an old guard of owners who wanted Austin Gunsel, the compliant interim commissioner, and the new blood who wanted Marshall Leahy, an attorney for the San Francisco 49ers. Gunsel and Leahy became footnotes in nfl history; Rozelle became the most influential commissioner in pro sports since baseball’s Kennesaw Mountain Landis banned eight Chicago ‘‘Black Sox’’ in 1921. Rozelle had been the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams and, before that, the club’s director of public relations. Early in his tenure as commissioner, he established the league’s first pr department, and he hired as his top executives men with backgrounds in public relations or the newspaper business. Rozelle remained essentially a pr guy for nearly 30 years as commissioner, though with much steel and shrewdness beneath the ‘‘a√able’’ demeanor repeatedly mentioned by sportswriters.∞ championship, finished second four times, and third twice. In the ‘‘old days,’’ of course, only conference champions had a shot at the title. ‘‘Wild cards’’ were for unserious poker players. [3.149.230...