Laying Down Law in NFL

NEW YORK —  The place is called “the cage,” and the lanky first-year New York University law student would soon find out why.

He had come for a friendly game of three-on-three, a bit of pickup basketball on the legendary asphalt courts at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street in Manhattan. Instead, he was guarded by a guy who fouled him hard, shoved him into the chain-link fence, and answered every complaint with an unapologetic: “Hey, that’s how we play in New York.”

Finally, the 6-foot-5 future lawyer could tolerate no more. He told a teammate to get the ball near the rim, then leaped for the rebound and clobbered the bully on the way down. A swift elbow to the nose was all it took to crumple the thug.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the tall kid said, leaning over the bloodied heap. “Forgive me.”

Paul Tagliabue has always known how to get his point across.

In his 15 years as NFL commissioner, Tagliabue, 63, has shown the toughness he developed as the son of a Jersey City contractor and a center on Georgetown’s basketball team. His firm hand has guided the league through a period of growth, prosperity and labor peace.

Unlike his personable predecessor, the late Pete Rozelle, Tagliabue comes across as wooden and aloof. But close friends and colleagues say he’s remarkably introspective and nostalgic, and, no matter where he is, the smartest person in the room.

And when pushed, Tagliabue pushes back. He did it on the basketball court. He did it last year with ESPN, getting the network to dump “Playmakers” after one season, even though it had strong ratings and made millions of dollars. He was relentless in negotiations in 2001 when game officials went on strike before they buckled to his demands. He has helped reshape the skylines of more than a dozen U.S. cities with new NFL stadiums.

Many say Tagliabue’s most impressive accomplishment is ably running a league of multimillionaires and billionaire owners, each of whom is used to getting his way.

“There’s quite a bit to the job,” Pittsburgh Steeler owner Dan Rooney said. “You first try to solve things intelligently and with some decorum and try to talk things out. Sometimes people don’t take no for an answer. We’re not the easiest guys in the world.”

Even so, the decision to offer Tagliabue a three-year contract extension was a no-brainer. The owners did that this spring by a rare unanimous vote, and Tagliabue recently agreed to the terms of a deal that runs through May 2008.

“We were saying as a united group that we very much appreciate the leadership he’s brought to the league, and we’d like it to continue,” New England Patriot owner Robert Kraft said.

Since Tagliabue succeeded Rozelle in 1989, the NFL is the only major professional sports league that has not been hit with a work stoppage by players. The two strikes near the end of Rozelle’s 29-year career as commissioner made his last decade his worst. Rozelle was almost helpless to stop the 1982 and ’87 strikes because he was subordinate to owner-run committees in several key areas, including labor. When he took over as commissioner, Tagliabue persuaded owners to give him the power Rozelle had lacked.

Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist said achieving peace with the NFL Players Assn. was Tagliabue’s most significant accomplishment, and he praised the league’s current efforts to extend the collective-bargaining agreement, even though it doesn’t expire until 2007.

“The NFL makes sure there’s smooth sailing,” Zimbalist said. “It’s the right way to approach corporate sponsors, and the right way to approach your fans.”

Rozelle also had to deal with all types of litigation, especially in his last years as commissioner. Tagliabue, who began his NFL career as a league lawyer in the early 1970s, has, for the most part, been fortunate enough to stay out of court. The only significant legal skirmish has been with the Oakland Raiders over the rights to the Los Angeles market.

In the Tagliabue era, 21 of the 32 teams have built new stadiums or renovated old ones. The most glaring shortfall in his tenure is that L.A., the nation’s second-largest market, has been without an NFL team since 1995. The league seems to be serious about changing that, although it’s not clear whether the recent dealings with groups from the Coliseum, Carson and Pasadena will produce meaningful results.

Tagliabue said in May that the league planned to select one of the three sites by next spring, in hopes of having a team in L.A. for the 2008 season.

The L.A. situation is only one of several pressing issues on the commissioner’s agenda. Among them are renegotiating the television contracts, which expire after the 2005 season; further development of the NFL Network, and promoting the game overseas, particularly in Asia.

During a recent interview, Tagliabue was asked about speculation that the next round of TV negotiations would produce only a modest increase in revenue, not the staggering spike of years past.

“Talk is talk,” he said. “Talk is not reality. On TV, part of the challenge is revenue, but the bigger part of the challenge for me and the committee is continuing to have the broadest distribution and the widest audience in terms of fan access to the game, which is broadcast television. It will be a big landmark if we can stay dominant on broadcast television, which is the way it’s been for 40 years, since the early ‘60s....

“Revenue growth is not the only criterion going forward because I think we can ensure the long-term health of our sport very effectively if we can keep the mass number of games on broadcast television. That’s just as important right now as double-digit revenue growth.”

He said there could be some tweaking of the “Monday Night Football” format, such as scheduling two Monday games and picking the better one to televise nationally.

“We could start out with a single game on Monday night in the schedule and go to two games scheduled on Monday night later in the season, when the uncertainties are bigger,” he said. “So there would be a lot of ways to do it. That’s a priority, and it’s also a priority for Sunday night as well.”

There has been speculation that Tagliabue will retire after the television and union agreements are negotiated. He has not disclosed his plans. But the pressure of the job is undeniable.

“Having seen him in the line of fire,” Kraft said, “just running an NFL meeting for two or three days, dealing with the issues and processing it, it’s like going on a treadmill at very high speed with the incline always getting steeper and steeper. It’s got to be mentally exhausting. But it’s also probably intellectually stimulating. You have to be in top form at all times.”

Even if it means throwing elbows.

Big T’s Kid

Charles Tagliabue was a big man with a booming laugh, a hard-working stonemason who took over the family business as a teenager after his father fell off a stepladder, fractured his skull and died. Charles’ four sons -- Charles, Robert, Paul and John -- learned early in life not to complain to their father about being bored.

“If you were outside doing nothing, my father would come out with a half-dozen brooms and tell everyone to sweep the street,” Paul said. “We’d sweep the street for an hour or so. You never said no to my father.”

Charles Tagliabue had a very good sense of humor, though. Once, he hung potatoes and onions from a neighbor’s barren apple tree, then rushed over with the news that the tree had at long last produced fruit.

“We used to call Mr. Tagliabue ‘Big T’,” recalled Nick Langone, Paul’s best boyhood friend. “He was a wise man who’d listen very intently to an argument. If he was on the verge of losing a debate, he’d call everyone chowderheads. Some of his words of wisdom were from the Jackie Gleason era.”

Among Big T’s favorite pieces of advice to his sons: “Don’t work like a donkey pulling a cart. Use your head.”

They heeded those words. Charles became a vice president of Lipton Tea. Robert took over his father’s business, then worked as a superintendent for a larger construction company. John, who lives in Paris, is a longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times. And Paul is among the most powerful figures in sports, a man atop an empire that generates about $5 billion a year in revenue.

The Tagliabues lived on Columbia Avenue in Jersey City in a small brick home their father had restored before marrying their mother, Mary. There were two beds for four boys. Charles and Robert slept upstairs, Paul and John downstairs.

All were athletic, but Paul was the best basketball player, a wiry kid who grew eight inches to 6-4 in 1 1/2 years after elementary school.

The neighborhood games were every bit as rough as those at “the cage,” and Tagliabue would play straight through the winter months, taping his fingers to keep his skin from cracking in the bitter cold.

“I remember people who got the stuffing kicked out of them when they tried to get in the schoolyard and they weren’t allowed in,” Tagliabue said. “They’d lay in the street bleeding. They weren’t on the right side of the people enforcing the rules. I remember one guy, there was a suspicion he’d steal other people’s balls and blame it on other people. So if he tried to get into the schoolyard, more often than not he had a problem.”

To toughen his elbows, Tagliabue banged them against the concrete walls in the basement. As a senior at St. Michael’s High in Union City, N.J., he had about 50 scholarship offers to play college basketball, including one from defending national champion North Carolina. He thought he might become a Tar Heel and visited Chapel Hill for a weekend. His father had other ideas.

“My father did not want me to go that far out of the New York area,” he said. “Washington was at the end of his radar screen. He didn’t want me to go to Notre Dame or North Carolina.”

So Tagliabue accepted an offer from Georgetown, where he became team captain as a senior and finished with an average of nine rebounds a game, better than future Hoya stars Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo. Tagliabue likes to joke that the school retired his No. 33, only mentioning as an aside that Patrick Ewing also wore that number for the Hoyas.

As good as he was on the basketball court, though, Tagliabue was better in the classroom. He was awarded NYU law school’s prestigious Root-Tilden scholarship and was editor of the law review.

“He was a leader,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Tagliabue’s roommate at law school. “There are some people, you say, ‘I admire him, but I wouldn’t want to spend an hour with him.’ This is someone you’d want to spend a week with.”

And they spent many weeks together. After their second year of law school, Tagliabue and Alexander were recruited to work at a firm in Los Angeles. Instead of flying west, they cashed in their plane tickets, rented a red convertible and drove across the country.

“We thought we were hot stuff,” Alexander said with a laugh, confiding that their coast-to-coast trip was predictably tame, consisting mainly of stops at relatives’ homes.

After receiving his law degree in 1965 then working a year as a law clerk in federal court in Washington, Tagliabue was hired by the Department of Defense as a policy analyst on European and North Atlantic affairs. When he resigned three years later to begin private practice, he was awarded the department’s highest civilian honor, the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal, for his studies on “the demonstrative use of nuclear weapons and on nuclear consultation with the [United States’] allies.”

He moved on to Covington & Burling, among the most prestigious and powerful law firms in Washington, and stayed there for 20 years, eventually becoming a senior partner.

Shortly after he’d joined the firm, Tagliabue was assigned to the NFL account, and eventually became one of Rozelle’s closest advisors. It was a bumpy period for the league, which had to contend with antitrust lawsuits brought by the NFLPA and the U.S. Football League.

In 1989, when Rozelle retired, Tagliabue took over. He was selected over Jim Finks, the popular general manager of the New Orleans Saints and the choice of many of the league’s old guard. Those owners who favored Tagliabue reasoned that the league needed a businessman, not a football man, at the helm -- especially considering that a significant number of teams were losing money in 1988. And few people, if any, knew the inner workings of the league better than Tagliabue.

“During Pete’s last 10 or 15 years as commissioner, he’d always say, ‘Let’s check with Paul,’ before our office made any big decisions,” said Joe Browne, an NFL senior vice president. “With Paul as our commissioner, it saved us that extra step. We’re more efficient, and our phone bill is less.”

‘Not Just a Suit’

Tagliabue has made hundreds of speeches as commissioner, but he recently had difficulty getting through one of them. It was at a private ceremony in April. He and five other Americans were presented Ellis Island Family Heritage awards for their contributions to the American Experience.

The others were film director Martin Scorsese, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, architect I.M. Pei, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Harold Varmus, and the late Notre Dame football coach, Knute Rockne.

More than once during his brief talk, Tagliabue had to stop to regain his composure and wipe his eyes. For a man known for being stoic, especially in public situations, it was a highly unusual display. He was most emotional when discussing his younger brother, John, who in 1989 was nearly killed while covering the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

John Tagliabue was a Warsaw-based correspondent for the New York Times at the time, and had traveled to Romania, where fierce fighting had broken out between revolutionaries and loyalists of deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

One night, bullets riddled Tagliabue’s car, one of them piercing the door and ripping through his back. He needed seven operations and was hospitalized for almost a year.

Paul and his wife, Chan, were on a skiing vacation in Colorado with their children, Drew and Emily, when they heard the news. For Paul, the memory is still fresh.

“We got a phone call around 6 in the morning from the New York Times, saying he’d been shot and was in a hospital in western Romania in critical condition,” Tagliabue said in an interview after the ceremony.

“For the next five days, he was in a hospital in the middle of the civil war. There were people dying all around him because they didn’t have facilities to take care of all the wounded people, including him.... We were helpless.”

Drew said that only sharpened his father’s focus on family. He called his father “sort of a nexus” who brings everyone in the family closer together, despite his impossibly hectic schedule.

“He’s very involved in nurturing those connections,” Drew said, “whether it be our relatives in Italy -- we still have cousins in northern Italy that we’re in touch with -- or in the United States.”

That people might be surprised to learn someone so outwardly rigid as Tagliabue has a human side doesn’t bother his son.

“He’s not just a suit,” Drew said. “Anyone who knows him understands that.”

Seen through the eyes of his younger brother, Tagliabue is so much more than a skilled attorney who has steered the NFL through an unparalleled era of success.

“I knew him when he was a skinny little kid, 10 years old, playing basketball,” John Tagliabue said. “To see him now, just to think of the negotiating skills he must have, dealing with all those owners, a cantankerous bunch, and balancing that with the interests of the players. I have tremendous admiration for him.

“I think of the skinny little kid I used to hang out with. It’s mind-boggling.”

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League of Their Own

Top men of the National Football League (* denotes the title of NFL president):

*--* DATE NFL COMMISSIONER 1920 Jim Thorpe * 1921-39 Joe Carr * 1939-41 Carl Stock * 1941-46 Elmer Layden 1946-59 Bert Bell 1960-89 Pete Rozelle 1989-Present Paul Tagliabue

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* Note: NFL treasurer Austin Gunsel served as president in the office of commissioner after the death of Bell (Oct. 11, 1959) until the election of Rozelle (Jan. 26, 1960).