Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Oh yeah, famously the stacked scheduling, he would do it with dominoes on his kitchen table. Rozelle's like, no, this is not going to work. We're going to move league headquarters to New York, to Manhattan, first to Rockefeller Center and then to Park Avenue where the league is to this day. We need to be right there next to the television industry, next to the media industry. And just as important next to the advertising industry, these are relationships. We going to cultivate with Madison Avenue. After he moves the headquarters to New York, Rozelle contracts the Elias Sports Bureau, which did professional statistics for Major League Baseball. The NFL up to this point didn't have professional statistics arms that would distribute game stats and box scores out to all the newspapers across the country. The only way anybody's going to write about us and give us space on the sports page is if we make their job easy and put the stats right in their hands every day. Speaking of writing about the NFL and publishing, the other thing that Rozelle knows is, especially with a game like the NFL, which is a weekly drama, it's not just about like baseball with getting the daily box scores in the newspaper. You also going to create human stories and arcs and mythology around the game. He intentionally cultivates a tight relationship with Time Inc. and specifically Sports Illustrated. Over the course of the sixties, Sports Illustrated really becomes the major advocate for the new modern game of the NFL. So much so that in 1963, just three short years later, Sports Illustrated names Pete Rozelle at Sportsman of the Year, the first ever non-athlete that it had ever named Sportsman of the Year. Think about that, the commissioner of the league being named Sportsman of the Year. That is just a huge mindset shift.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.