Commissioner Tagliabue Interview with Dave Goldberg, Associated Press
Tuesday, April 13

I remember, years ago, you were asked why you wanted to be Commissioner and you said it was something that would be fun.  Has it been fun?

Yes, it’s been fun.  I think I said at the time that it wasn’t fun and games necessarily but it was fun because it was rewarding and challenging and it was building and improving something that was already great.  That’s fun.

In talking to people, your legacy seems to be a transition from Pete to you that was pretty smooth in terms that it went from needing a PR man to a lawyer, and your legacy seems to be the labor peace.  Everybody talks about it and even the owners who aren’t your greatest fans say labor peace is your legacy.  It took you from ‘89 to ‘93 to get it, but just describe your thinking and how you went about ensuring that since ‘93 nothing has really happened.

When I appeared before the league during the search process, I told them we had to do some things radically different in the player area to get something done with the Players Association.  When I took over in November ‘89, we were in court.  We got a favorable court decision right after I took over I think. ‘91 was the litigation, late ‘92 we got the deal done.

I think there are a lot of things.  I think it was the fact that the Players Association in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s came into existence.  It was uncertain about its role, but it was focused on dismantling the past.  At some point you had to get more focused on building the present and the future.  Certainly that had not been done in the ‘80s with the 57-day strike in 1982 and replacement games in 1987, so it’s pretty obvious that you couldn’t continue on the course that you were on.  So the question becomes, “How do you change it?” And we changed it.

A lot of it seems to be your relationship with Gene. 

I think that’s really overblown.  You don’t change the structure as radically as we changed it by having a good relationship with somebody.  The first ten times I met the guy was cross-examining him in the courtroom so what’s that got to do with the relationship?  It has to do with ideas.  It has to do with a willingness to change.  It has to do with a willingness to embrace a totally new concept which people had fought for most of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which was some notion of free agency that was meaningful with some other system that would be support as competitive balance.  It doesn’t have to do with the relationship.  The relationship is the result of the ideas, not the other way around.

How much of it was the process within the league?  Pete seemed helpless in the sense that, if you talked to Gene, the only two people on the six-member committee that they could talk to were Dan Rooney and Well Mara. 

But they removed Rozelle from labor relations.  The owners moved him from labor relations beginning in 1972 when they set up the Management Council.

As I gather, you insisted that part of your deal was to get control of labor relations.

I thought it was critical that the Commissioner be in charge of labor relations and one of the things that I accomplished and we all accomplished together was liquidating the old Management Council with the consent of the old Management Council, which took some lengthy discussions with Hugh Culverhouse to accomplish since he was the chair of the old Management Council, which was the Management Council in which the Commissioner had no role. And substituting for that, the membership in November of 1990 created a Management Council which was appointed by the Commissioner, which the Commissioner effectively chaired, and which the Commissioner’s senior executive was designated as the chairman of the committee.  And that became Harold Henderson.  Those were major changes that we got done in 1990 but it took the vote of the membership to do it, to liquidate the old structure and substitute a new structure. 

When you talk about the vote of the membership, it gets me to another subject.   You are essentially the CEO of a multibillion dollar corporation but it’s made up of 32 multimillion dollar corporations. Your board is essentially those CEO’s, some of whom are very headstrong, some who have their own ideas of how to do things.  How do you deal with them?

That’s really a very unique aspect of modern sports and especially the NFL given the scale of our operations and given the competitiveness of our teams on the field.  It’s a unique line of strong individuals and a strong partnership structure.  You deal with it because you start with a strong partnership structure.  If you didn’t have a strong partnership structure you couldn’t deal with it, which is the experience in some other sports. But the partnership structure is the league control of television, the equal sharing of television revenue and many other elements that we’ve added, including the league subsidizing stadium construction in the big markets, the Internet network, and most recently, satellite radio.  All of those elements of structure are what enables you to deal with the collective group of owners.

The league you have now is totally different, not the league so much, but technology, i.e. Internet, television.  How far ahead of the curve do you have to be in those things? When you started, how ahead of the curve were you in looking at that kind of stuff?

I looked recently at the remarks I made in front of the owners in October 1989 in the search process and I noticed that two things that I said were that the league had to be heavily engaged in building stadiums and the league would have to have its own television production company. So I guess that I was about 15 years ahead of the curve on the last one.  But I think that to me two things are basic.  First of all, in terms of the smoothness of the transition, I had worked so extensively with Pete and had such a deep understanding of the league that I think that helped enormously in the transition.  I think that the PR man versus the lawyer, it’s mostly irrelevant.  No one is born a CEO or a Commissioner.  You start someplace else and then you eventually get to be whatever you are.  But where you start is pretty irrelevant to where you end.  People start as a counterman in a grocery store and end up as the CEO of the biggest retailer in America. 

I think that over the years two things emerged that Rozelle and I had in common.  The number one thing we talked about a lot was the love of sports and great athletic competition.  In his case, it started with USF basketball when he was the SID at USF.  It included California football at the time.  And one of his early businesses before he became the Rams’ GM was marketing the Olympics in ‘56.  And secondly, a recognition that team is more important than individual in the context of the league.  That it’s more about “we” than it is about “I.”  We had those two things in common. 

Then a lot of things remain the same in terms of what other key areas you have to focus on -- the game, television, Players Association, stadiums.  But there’s been a tremendous amount of change in the last 15 years, starting with the situation with the Players Association, as I said, in the ‘70s and ‘80s when they were mostly trying to dismantle the past and now they’re building a future.  In terms of media, technology is one aspect of change, but the scale of media coverage is the most significant thing.  The fact that you have mega-media companies that are in multiple platforms of distribution.  In the past, in the ‘70s and 80s you had one platform of distribution that was relevant to the NFL. That was broadcast television.  Then ESPN emerged with 8 games in ‘87.  But now you have not only all those platforms, but they’re all owned by a small group of companies.  That’s a huge change.  That’s the biggest change of all, the fact that our television partners going forward are not only in broadcast television, with FOX, they’re in cable with FOX Regional, they’re in satellite with DirecTV.  Others like Disney are in broadcast cable, Internet and so forth. 

When it comes to the game, I think the biggest change is the system.  Once you accept free agency, even if there is a cap, then the process of building and maintaining a team becomes more competitive and tougher than what it was before. It’s not easy to keep a team together unless you get the right players.  Once you no longer have a lifelong hold on a player, that’s a totally different aspect of building and maintaining a strong team, which is what George Young always talked about.

Pete was the guy, or it was somebody else in that era, who coined “on any given Sunday.”  And yet during his era you really had dynasties.  Now you have “on any given season.” You just go back through the late 90’s since Denver won two in a row, and you’ve got a New England “dynasty,” but in the year they didn’t win the Super Bowl, they didn’t make the playoffs, which can happen to anybody.

I think “on any given Sunday” was correct.  There were always upsets and there was always tremendous competition.  Maybe now it’s “in any given season.”  It’s broader than “on any given Sunday.”  A team built for three or four years can turn a corner, or a team with a new coach and key new players can suddenly turn a corner.  So it’s really “in any given season” rather than “on any given Sunday.”

How much did your Washington experience help you?  It is ultimately a political job, managing your 32 owners, dealing with networks.  How much did Washington help you?

Not as much as growing up in schoolyards in Jersey City.  Growing up in schoolyards in Jersey City, playing every sport under the sun from early in the morning till late at night was more important than being a lawyer in Washington.  You get a love of sports, you get a few street smarts, you know what’s going on and you know who to trust, who your friends are, who’s not, you know how to deal with people, you know how to persuade, you know how to keep peace. The first thing you had to do in Jersey City was have a fistfight to get on the court.  They used to lock the gates and some people were able to come in and some people weren’t.  So it’s not exactly a tea party.  Growing up in that environment, competing hard, getting a basketball scholarship to Georgetown, then competing not only athletically but academically, getting an academic scholarship to law school … Where your roots are, where you started and how you deal with life are more important than where you end up.

How do you view the next few years?  How long are you going to go?  How far past 65, if at all?

I’ll be going past 65, that’s for sure at this point.  I don’t have a timetable or a deadline.  We’ve got some top priorities coming up in the next 12-24 months.  Television and CBA are among them, some new stadiums in some critical cities like San Francisco, San Diego, and the whole state of California, as well as Indianapolis, Minnesota, and so forth.  So we’ve got a lot of priorities.  We’re operating in a very difficult environment. I think everybody is right now, with international security issues, terrorism issues hanging over our society.  So I think there are a lot of challenges ahead and it will continue to be exciting to deal with them.  Hopefully we can deal with the next number of years as well as we’ve dealt with the first 15.

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