Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports

Chapter 8: Al Davis, Pete Rozelle, and Franchise Free Agency

ALßDAVIS ßPETEßROZELLE ßANDßFRANCHISEß FREEßAGENCY It’s praising myself, but I’ve done more than anyone else by all the things I’ve done. Yeah, I’ve lived my dream, but I thought I would live my dream. But you’ve got to go get it. You’ve got to fight for it, and you’ve got to dominate. al davis Squabbling in public will eventually ruin football; there’s no doubt it’s hurting us already. pete rozelle ฀  • • • previous page When the NFL refused Al Davis’ request to relocate the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, Davis sued under the federal antitrust laws. ap Photo / Nick Ut Maybe there is something about the water in Brooklyn. Al Davis, Walter O’Malley, and Art Modell all spent their formative years in the City of Churches. They are best known in the professional sports world as idiosyncratic entrepreneurs who moved their franchises and, in the process, broke the hearts of millions of sports fans. While fans mostly focus on player free agency—when players move from one club to another—these three owners perfected “franchise free agency”—when clubs pick up and move to a more profitable city. O’Malley inflicted the deepest wound, abandoning the ancestral home of baseball’s Dodgers for golden Southern California in 1957. (He also induced Charles Stoneham to move his New York Giants to San Francisco.) TheDodgerswerenotthefirstclubtogowest—theNationalFootballLeague champion Rams had relocated to Los Angeles in 1946, after eight years in Cleveland. The Dodgers, however, had been an integral part of Brooklyn for almost seventy years. More than a half century later, disdain for O’Malley remains virulent in the borough. Born in Brooklyn in 1925, Art Modell became a major figure in the business of professional football. In 1961, Modell outmaneuvered longtime head coach Paul Brown to take control of the Cleveland Browns, the team that had replaced the Rams in that northeast Ohio metropolis. Frustrated by the state of Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a depressing facility sometimes referred to as the “mistake on the lake,” Modell moved the beloved franchise to Baltimore in 1996, filling the void created when Robert Irsay departed with his Colts in 1984. Modell was vilified in Cleveland for his “treasonous” act. (Eight years later, one blogger referred to him as a “bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, corporate whore of a fraud.”) Modell acknowledged publicly that his legacy might have been “tarnished by the move.” His erstwhile Browns would be renamed the Baltimore Ravens, after the National Football League ruled that Modell did not own the uniform colors or the name of the Browns. Four years after Modell’s move, the nfl placed an expansion franchise in Cleveland and named them the Browns. Davis, Rozelle, and Franchise Free Agency • • • 137 And then there was Al Davis, the aggressive, moody wanderer raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who was always in search of the most lucrative hundred yards of dirt and grass for his football Raiders. Born on the Fourth of July, 1929, Davis valued his independence, but strove his entire life to gain the respect he felt he deserved. His Raiders became a dominating force in America’s new national game, and Davis himself became a symbol of America’s new personality—restless, belligerent, enterprising, and quarrelsome. In Oakland, Davis became frustrated with the inability (or perhaps unwillingness ) of Alameda County to improve the Oakland Coliseum to his liking. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Coliseum, having lost its main tenant, the Los Angeles Rams, to a newer stadium down the freeway in suburban Anaheim, bid Davis to relocate from the East Bay for the 1980 season. It offered him a $15 million low-interest loan for stadium improvements that would pay for ninety-nine new luxury boxes, plus a personal $4 million “relocation fee” for the owner. Davis agreed, but the National Football League owners voted 22–0 against the move and refused to schedule any games against the Raiders—if those games would be held in Los Angeles. Ironically , the motion to deny Davis the right to relocate was made by Art Modell , then the consummate nfl insider and, sixteen years later, a franchise free agent himself. Faced with the economic power of the owners (who voted as much against Al Davis as a person as against his proposed relocation ), Davis stayed in Oakland for another year. At the close of that season...