Bio

Alvin Ray 'Pete' Rozelle was born March 1, 1926, in South Gate, California. During his high school years in Compton High, Rozelle played basketball and tennis and served as sports editor of the school's paper. He also worked weekends at the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper. Later, he joined the U.S. Navy during the World War II. Then, in 1946 he enrolled at Compton Junior College and returned to the world of sports as the collegees athletic news director and earned $50 a month as the schoolls sports information director. He also worked part-time for the Los Angeles Rams football teamms publicity department.

Rozelle transferred from Compton to the University of San Francisco, where he worked as a publicist for the college football team. He remained at the University after graduation, serving as athletic news director and assistant director of the school's sports programs. In 1952, his old employer Tex Schramm offered him the job of publicity director for the Los Angeles Rams, and he began his life's work of building American professional football into the country's most popular spectator sport. He later became the General Manager of the Rams.

Rozelle became the Commissioner of the National Football League at the age of 33. When he assumed the post in January 1960, there were a dozen teams in the league, playing poorly attended gamessmostly un-televised. Some of the owners had individually negotiated broadcast rights for their teams' games, but the franchises in smaller markets languished in unprofitable obscurity. Team owners were wary of expanding the league, fearful they would saturate the market. 

Rozelle succeeded in adding two franchises to the league in his first year, blocking AFL expansion in those markets, but he believed the future of the game lay in expanding its national television audience. He moved the NFL offices from Philadelphia to New York, home of the three major television networks and began aggressively pursuing broadcast deals. His ability to mediate the squabbles of contentious franchise owners won him the respect of the national sports press, and he was selected as 1963 "Sportsman of the Year" by Sports Illustrated magazine. 

Rozelle undertook the most difficult challenge of his career, negotiating a merger of the AFL and the NFL, two rival leagues. A merger of the leagues was agreed to in 1966, with Pete Rozelle serving as Commissioner of the combined organization, he persuaded the team owners to abide by a single draft process that would allow the lowest-ranked teams the first choice of newly available college players. This raised the overall standard of play throughout the league, drawing increased attendance for all teams, and a rapidly increasing television viewership. 

The 1960s were years of explosive growth for professional football, as Rozelle presided over the introduction of a postseason championship game, the Super Bowl. Although the first Super Bowl game, in January 1967, was played to a nearly half-empty stadium, Rozelle arranged for the game to be broadcast simultaneously on both NBC and CBS, forcing two networks to compete in promoting their coverage of the event. Within a few years, the annual game had become a national institution: the most-watched television event of the year. With the growing popularity of televised football on Sunday afternoons, Rozelle engineered the introduction in 1970 of Monday Night Football, a weekly television event that has become a wintertime obsession for many Americans, and is the longest-running, non-news program on prime-time television. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985. 

A greater threat to the NFL arose in 1987, when the players' union struck in mid-season. After losing a week of games, Rozelle made the difficult decision to bring in replacement players. He kept the season running for another three weeks until the players and the owners came to terms. When his contract with the league expired two years later, Rozelle stepped down as Commissioner. In nearly three decades at the helm, he had seen the league grow to 28 teams. Regular season football games now routinely draw larger television audiences than the playoff games of other sports. 

For the last seven years of his life, Pete continued to advise the NFL from his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California. He succumbed to a brain tumor at the age of 70. In his lifetime, Pete Rozelle's contribution to the growth of the NFL went nearly unnoticed, but with the passing of the years, it has become more and more apparent that he did more than anyone to develop professional football into the powerful force in American popular culture that we know today. In 2000,Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. 

This biography is taken from American Academy of Achievement. (March 20, 2008). Pete Rozelle Biography: Pro Football Hall of Fame. Retrieve from 
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/roz0bio-1