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A lthough he was frequently compared favorably with major league baseball’s legendary commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis—“Bell was the second and last of the czars,” Lyall Smith wrote in the Detroit Free Press—Bert disdained the term czar. “I do not wish to behave like a czar,” he would say when he periodically stormed out of owners’ meetings totally frustrated by their unwillingness to accept his direction.“But unless you permit me to save the game by running it my own way, I will give it back to you.” “Actually I think he got my uncle John to write that into the NFL Constitution that he was the sole arbiter of everything,” Bell’s son Upton explained. “A lot of the league’s bylaws were written by John C. Bell. I remember club owners often telling me, ‘The great thing about Bert is we don’t have to think anymore. He thinks for us.’” Bell didn’t mind doing the thinking for the owners, but he disdained the squabbling that went on at the league meeting, especially when news of the quarreling got out to the press. “When they bicker, they tend to imply that he—czar Bell—is the stooge of one rival owner or the other,” John Lardner once wrote in Newsweek. “Practically every week, de Benneville said, the public gets the impression that he makes his home in the hip pocket of one of his employers. In bad weeks he is accused of belonging body and soul to as many as three magnates , and to spend all his time representing their interests against the rights and interests of the others. “‘Let us all hang together, or we will hang separately,’ said de Benneville Bell, in effect. He never spoke a truer word.” The commissioner preferred conducting league meetings in his hometown . First of all, he hated to fly and didn’t like to travel unless it was absolutely necessary. And, as Upton recalls, he also wanted the sessions to be short as possible. 31. The Commissioner’s Working Style 224 • Chapter 31 “My father would say, ‘We’re going to have them in Philadelphia because we’re not coming here for everybody to be screwing around. Get the meetings done and you go home or go out with your girlfriends or do what you want.’” Ed Kiely remembers that Bell would frequently entertain the league’s 10 or 12 beat writers in his hotel suite. “He’d have a bar and a couple of bottles of whiskey, some beer and maybe a few sandwiches,” explained the former Pittsburgh Steelers public relations director, who recalls Bell’s assistant Joe Labrum counting the bottles of liquor to make sure the full containers didn’t slip out the door. “The writers would come in and ask a lot of questions and everything. Then he’d get tired and he’d go in and sleep for a couple of hours. Then he’d come back out again and start talking to them. It was the funniest thing you ever saw in your life. My old friend Joe King, of the New York World Telegram, one time didn’t like the sandwiches and went out and got a roasted chicken from a butcher shop. He brought it in and had his own party.” “League meetings were always a scream,” said Baltimore sportswriter John Steadman in an interview with NFL Films. “Bert would be going through the halls, the pressroom area, and the executive area where the leagues were going to meet. He’d say, ‘Who wants chicken sandwiches? Who wants chocolate ice cream? Order what you want, boys,’ meaning the press. ‘It’s all on the Eagles. They made all the money this year.’” “The league loved Bert Bell for that,” explained Jim Gallagher of the Philadelphia Eagles.There were only a half-dozen writers waiting outside— guys from the AP, UP, and the Philly and New York papers, maybe. Bert would always stop the meeting and go outside to chat with them. He knew their deadlines. He never hid anything and sometimes would go off-therecord to make sure that they were informed. He was always very honest with the media, always anxious to fill the boys in.” “The sportswriters always had a poker game going at the league meetings ,” recalled Art Daley of the Green Bay Press Gazette. “During breaks, Bert would come out and kibitz with us. He’d walk around the poker table, look at our...

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