Interference (19 page)

Rozelle and the NFL responded to Kennedy's demands at the NFL owners meeting in St. Louis on May 22, 1963, by creating a new arm of the NFL: NFL Security. Previously, such investigations had been handled informally under both Bert Bell and Rozelle. Specifically under Bell, the NFL had established a loose-knit network of private investigators around the country.

Selected to head NFL Security and streamline the NFL security network was fifty-three-year-old Captain James Hamilton, a tall, well-built man who was the chief of the Organized Crime Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. A police officer for twenty-six years, Hamilton was to serve as the liaison among the NFL headquarters, various law-enforcement agencies, and the private investigators hired by the NFL in each of the cities where professional football was played.

“It's largely a preventive measure,” Rozelle told reporters. “He [Hamilton] will also be available for consultation by the players.” Using the Detroit Lions as an example of how Hamilton would be used, Rozelle said that if there were rumors that players would be on a bus with known gamblers, “a trip like that will have to be checked out and clarified.” He added that if NFL Security had existed the previous year, the entire NFL gambling scandal probably would not have occurred.

Hamilton had been recommended by Bob Kennedy and
Los
Angeles Times
ace crime reporter Jack Tobin, who each cited Hamilton's contributions to the Senate Rackets Committee. Hamilton had also received high praise for his investigations of the underworld from the Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime in California, which had worked in concert with the Kefauver Committee.
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15 Football and Hollywood

IN MAY 1963, AFTER archrival Clint Murchison had verbally threatened to run him out of Dallas, Lamar Hunt moved his Dallas Texans to Kansas City, where the team became the Kansas City Chiefs. Soon after, Hunt proposed a world championship game between the winners of the NFL and the AFL. The NFL laughed off the proposal.

That same year, Harry Wismer, who had filed for bankruptcy, sold his New York Titans for $1 million to a five-man investment group headed by David A. “Sonny” Werblin, who was also a director of Monmouth Park Jockey Club in Oceanport, New Jersey.
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Werblin immediately renamed his team the New York Jets.

Werblin was a top executive of MCA, Inc., a major entertainment conglomerate and the most powerful force in the motion picture industry. MCA (Music Corporation of America) was the parent company of Universal Pictures, Universal Television, and Decca Records (which later became MCA Records). MCA executives, including Werblin, had maintained close personal and business ties with Chicago mob attorney Sidney Korshak who represented the underworld's interests in Hollywood.

The Brooklyn-born Werblin was a short but ruggedly good-looking former Rutgers football player. He had studied journalism and worked as a copyboy for
The New York Times
. At MCA, he started with a part-time job, working as an errand boy for Billy Goodheart, who, along with Jules Stein, had founded MCA in
1924. Goodheart referred to Werblin as Sonny boy, and the nickname Sonny stuck. Werblin also became the band boy for Guy Lombardo's orchestra, which MCA represented. Werblin moved up quickly within the company and, just prior to World War II, replaced Goodheart as the head of MCA's New York office. A close friend of Carroll Rosenbloom, Werblin had snatched up former Baltimore Colts head coach Weeb Ewbank for the Jets in April 1963 after Rosenbloom had fired him because of a 7-7 1962 season.

Ewbank told me, “The only problem with Carroll was that he thought money could buy everything. Because we didn't win another championship, he got antsy. He was a good friend of the Kennedys, and he thought youth was the thing.” Rosenbloom replaced Ewbank as head coach with Detroit Lions defensive coach Don Shula, who was only thirty-three and had played under Ewbank at Cleveland and Baltimore.

In January 1964, the AFL celebrated the signing of a $36 million-, five-year television package with NBC, which guaranteed the long-term success of the new league. Each AFL team received nearly $900,000 a year from the deal. Prior AFL contracts had been negotiated by MCA, which had enjoyed a sweetheart relationship with NBC.

The association was so cozy that it had earlier become a target of a federal investigation during the Justice Department's 1962 antitrust probe of MCA. Werblin, who handled MCA's television sales, was a close friend of Robert Kintner, who was the president of NBC at the time of the 1964 negotiations with the AFL.

In one document, the Justice Department described NBC as a “captive market for MCA's television shows,” primarily because of the relationship between Werblin and NBC's Sarnoff family and Kintner.
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Carroll Rosenbloom confirmed that Werblin's clout with NBC won the day for the AFL. “Sonny Werblin pulled a coup,” Rosenbloom said. “He [was] a top man for the Music Corporation of America and very close to [Robert] Sarnoff of NBC. All Sonny had to do was say, ‘Look, I want a television contract for the AFL' and he would get it. NBC agreed to pay that league $36 million over five years. That was about $900,000 a year per club.”
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As the 1964 AFL television deal was being negotiated with NBC, Rosenbloom, who lived next door to Werblin on Ocean
Highway in Golden Beach, Florida, became the sole owner of the Baltimore Colts by buying out his two partners on January 20. One of them, Zanvyl Kreiger, told Alan Greenberg and Mike Goodman of
The Los Angeles Times
, “He [Rosenbloom] took advantage of me. There isn't any question he let us have it with both barrels right between the eyes. He gave us the sob story … He pleaded that he wanted the team for his [son]. The day after we signed the contract, I saw the headlines that the [multi] million [dollar] CBS contract [for television rights to NFL games] had been announced. We knew nothing.” Rosenbloom paid his partners $11 million for their shares of the Colts.

During the summer of 1965, the Atlanta Falcons and the Miami Dolphins were each given franchises in the NFL and the AFL, respectively. Insurance executive Rankin M. Smith was the new owner of the Falcons for $8.5 million; entertainer Danny Thomas and Minneapolis attorney Joe Robbie became the Dolphins' owners. They bought the team for $7.5 million.

Smith had worked his way up through the family-owned business, Life Insurance Company of Georgia, starting as a filing clerk and becoming senior vice president at the time he bought the Falcons. He later became president and chairman of the board.
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Upon entering the league, Smith immediately aroused controversy when he attempted to depreciate and deduct his players' contracts—which he viewed as capital investments—on his income-tax returns. In the past, an owner depreciated only tangible items such as the players' equipment. The IRS quickly denied the deductions. However, Smith appealed and won in federal court, which approved the depreciation of his Falcons. “The court recognizes that there is a value to the players,” Smith said after the decision.

Another innovator took control of the Miami Dolphins. Lifelong Democrat Joe Robbie of the Dolphins grew up in South Dakota, where he served as a representative to the state legislature along with Republican Joe Foss, the future AFL commissioner. Foss and Robbie were longtime friends and had attended the University of South Dakota together. Robbie ran for Congress twice but lost and ran once and lost as a candidate for governor. Soon after his defeat, Robbie moved his law practice to Minneapolis.

Robbie met Danny Thomas while serving as a member of the
board of directors of Thomas's St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Robbie was responsible for bringing Thomas into the football deal. Robbie was the president and managing general partner.
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Selected as the Dolphins' first coach was George Wilson, the former head coach of the Detroit Lions during the 1963 gambling scandal. Wilson had left the Lions in 1964.

Robbie was the poorest owner in the NFL and had never made over $30,000 in a single year from his law practice. His thrifty ways incited Bud Adams of the Houston Oilers to charge that he was “running a multimillion-dollar-a-year business like a fruit stand.” In the end, Robbie would have the last laugh; his players would become the highest paid in the NFL.

On January 2, 1965, Sonny Werblin of the New York Jets announced that he had paid $427,000, mostly in bonus money, for a three-year $25,000-a-year contract with Alabama quarterback Joe Namath. The Jets of the AFL had outbid the St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL for the rights to Namath. At the time that Namath signed the contract, Werblin found him a roommate, Joe Hirsch, who wrote a betting and inside information column. Namath wrote in his autobiography, “I met Joe at his place of business, the race track. No, he doesn't book bets; at least, he's never booked any of my bets. Joe writes for the
Morning Telegraph
, which is read by known gamblers. We met because Mr. Werblin, who was then president of the Jets, suggested that Joe, an old friend of his, look me up and show me around.”
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Werblin's signing of Namath—promoting the “star system” he had learned while with MCA and all the publicity it produced—helped guarantee the Jets' future success. Because of the tremendous amount of publicity generated by the Namath deal, the Jets sold nearly three thousand season tickets within a week of the announcement. Further, the big-money deal completely changed the face of professional football forever. Even though the grunt in the NFL trenches was still making a yeoman's wages, the public's perception of player salaries would never be the same.

In April 1966, as the war between the NFL and the AFL reached its height with bids for college draft picks forcing skyrocketing salaries and bonuses, AFL commissioner Joe Foss resigned and was immediately replaced by thirty-six-year-old
interim chief Allen M. Davis, the head coach and general manager of the Oakland Raiders. The appointment of street fighter Davis signaled that the AFL was taking off the gloves.

Davis was Brooklyn-raised and the son of a children's clothing manufacturer. He was an athlete and loved all sports, particularly football. Upon graduation from college in 1950, Davis coached at New York's Adelphi College. He then served in the military, coaching football at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

In June 1954, at age twenty-four, Davis became an unpaid, expenses-only scout for Carroll Rosenbloom and the Baltimore Colts. He served the next two years as line coach at the Citadel, where he worked under General Mark Clark, the president of the college. From 1957 to 1959, after his success at the Citadel, he coached at the University of Southern California. Davis headed up the defensive unit in his final year but developed problems with the NCAA over his aggressive recruiting practices. USC's head coach, Don Clark, resigned in the midst of the NCAA's sanctions against the university. Davis was passed over as the new head coach; instead, the job went to John McKay, who didn't ask Davis to remain with the team. In 1960, Davis signed as an assistant coach for Sid Gillman and the new Los Angeles Chargers of the AFL.

When Davis, only thirty-three years old, accepted the job as head coach of the Oakland Raiders in January 1963, he took over a team that was 9-33 over its three-year history in the AFL. A genius in football strategy, Davis turned the Raiders around to 10-4 in his first season.

According to legend, Davis and Pete Rozelle had met, by telephone, back in 1953 while Rozelle was with the Los Angeles Rams and Davis was head coach at Fort Belvoir. Rozelle was scouting talent and said in one report, “I developed a phone relationship with Al, calling him to ask about players in his team. He said he wanted to be paid for any information, and for delivering players to the Rams.” Davis, who acknowledged receiving money from the Rams for some scouting work, replied, “It's possible, but [Rozelle] was just a PR man.”

In mid-May 1966, during his four-month tenure as AFL commissioner, Davis opposed the merger of the two leagues. He declared war on the NFL after the New York Giants signed Pete Gogolak, the Buffalo Bills' soccer-style kicking star, as a free agent. The Gogolak contract signaled the beginning of the high-priced raids on veteran players between the two leagues and
almost scuttled the growing goodwill between them. And the stratospheric salaries being paid to the players were threatening the fundamental financial structure of professional football. In 1966 alone, the two leagues spent $7 million for their draft choices, including $1 million for two players: Donny Anderson and Jim Grabowski, who received $600,000 and $400,000, respectively, from the Green Bay Packers.

Davis recalled in a 1980 deposition that after the Gogolak deal, “[o]ur entire focus shifted from the progressive atmosphere of the American Football League into an all-out confrontation with the National Football League …” Davis's declaration of war made everyone in both leagues take pause. The relentless Davis was known to take no prisoners.

On June 8, 1966, with the money war hurting both leagues and field marshal Davis readying his blitzkrieg, Rozelle announced that the teams of the NFL and the AFL had agreed to merge—a move Rosenbloom and Werblin had been plotting for nearly three years. The deal was made between Tex Schramm, general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, and Lamar Hunt during a now-famous meeting in April 1966 in the airport lobby of Love Field near Dallas. Hunt had delayed his flight to Houston so that he could discuss the matter with Schramm. The two men, through a convincing series of talks with others in their respective leagues, brought about another meeting.

“In 1966,” Rosenbloom later recalled, “owners of the two leagues [had] spent $7 million to sign draft choices. This could not go on. The AFL resumed negotiations [with the NFL owners]. This time there were Hunt, Wilson, and Sullivan. With me were Modell and Tex Schramm. Pete Rozelle acted as arbitrator. Late in the evening we came to an agreement. All nine AFL teams would come into our League, making twenty-six [after two more teams were added].”
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