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 5:45 p.m. PST at his home. He had undergone surgery for brain cancer in December 1993.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 preeminent 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 only in 1951 into one of the wealthiest sports entities in the world. 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 like Green Bay 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.
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.
Rozelle first thought of it in 1969, a year before the merger with the AFL was about to take place.
Because the NFL had an agreement not to televise on Friday night or Saturday in competition with high school and college football, he decided Monday night would be the obvious time to showcase a single game nationally.
First he arranged for trial Monday night games in Cleveland and they got high ratings locally.
Then he went to CBS and NBC, the two networks who were televising the league, but they turned it down.