ROZELLE, EX-NFL HEAD, DIES.

Byline: William N. Wallace The New York Times

Pete Rozelle, the commissioner who presided over the changes that made the National Football League the premier professional sports organization over the past four decades, died at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., on Friday. He was 70.

The cause was brain cancer. Rozelle had a benign brain tumor removed in December 1993.

During Rozelle's nearly 30 years as commissioner - which spanned the terms of eight U.S. presidents - he oversaw a merger that more than doubled the size of the league, obtained the most lucrative television contract in sports, established Monday night games and introduced revenue-sharing among the teams.

On his watch, the NFL rose to unprecedented heights of popularity, so much so that it surpassed baseball as the national pastime in the eyes of its followers. It also enjoyed huge economic success, attracting escalating television contracts, marketing income and expansion fees.

And his monument to the sport was the Super Bowl.

Soon after the first championship matchup between the well-established NFL and the upstart American Football League in 1967, the game became one of the most watched television programs, garnering ever-higher rights' fees from the networks and escalating prices for tickets, of which there were never enough.

Indeed, when he surprised his employers - the owners of NFL teams - by announcing his retirement March 23, 1989, Rozelle said the strongest reflection of his tenure was not the merger with the AFL in 1966 or the expansion from 12 to 28 teams. He instead named the annual January game.

``The most fun thing was watching the development of the Super Bowl because the game is what it's all about,'' he said then. ``I really felt a high at every Super Bowl with all the glitz and the spectacular halftime shows.''

When Rozelle retired later that year, nine of the 10 television programs with the largest audiences in history had been Super Bowls, with No. 1 being the 127 million viewers for Super Bowl XX, between the Chicago Bears and New England Patriots, in 1986.

In addition, four polls taken between 1978 and 1985 declared that pro football was America's favorite sport by ever-increasing margins over baseball.

Rozelle was also consistent in naming the decision he most regretted making as commissioner: playing NFL games on Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, two days after President Kennedy was assassinated. He called the decision a mistake even though he had sought advice from Pierre Salinger, the president's press secretary and a friend from Rozelle's days at the University of San Francisco.

His 29-year term as the leader of the NFL came in two parts, the first beginning with his unlikely election on Jan. 26, 1960, at age 33, and including unbounded success for the league and his CEO-like control of it, along with his reputation as the most skilled head of any pro sports league.

The second part of his reign, beginning in the mid-1970s, was less satisfying, with years of turmoil and litigation that led to his resignation.

Alvin Ray Rozelle, nicknamed Pete at the age of 5 by an uncle, was born March 1, 1926, in Los Angeles and grew up in the suburb of Compton. He went to Compton Junior College and, late in World War II, served on a Navy coastal tanker that, he said, never went far from San Pedro.

Sports were always an interest, if not a passion. He sometimes mentioned that Duke Snider, a high school teammate and later a Hall of Fame baseball player for the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles, had knocked out his two front teeth in a basketball practice.

He obtained work as the sports information director at the University of San Francisco, at a salary of $250 a month, when its football and basketball teams were nationally prominent.

An advance trip before a football game with Fordham at the Randalls Island Stadium in 1951, brought Rozelle to New York for the first time. He was impressed. ``The big time,'' he later said.

Los Angeles was next, as the public relations director of the Rams, the NFL team. After a brief interlude in public relations with a San Francisco firm, he returned to the Rams as general manager.

Bert Bell, who had been a respected NFL commissioner since 1946, died suddenly while attending a Philadelphia Eagles game in October 1959. At a meeting to elect a successor the following January at the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami Beach, the owners of the 12 teams ended a nine-day deadlock by choosing Rozelle, a compromise candidate, on the 23rd ballot.

Rozelle, representing the Rams, had been told to leave the room during the last voting but not to go far. He went to the men's room where, he said, he washed his hands when anyone came in. ``I must have washed my hands 50 times.'' Later, when he was addressing the owners as the league's new commissioner, he said, ``I can honestly say I come to you with clean hands.''

The new commissioner immediately moved the headquarters from Bell's Philadelphia to New York and commenced a courtship of television that soon had far-reaching results.

The first of Rozelle's several fruitful petitions to Congress brought about legislation legalizing single-network television contracts for professional sports leagues. CBS signed up early in 1961 for an annual fee of $4.65 million to televise the 98 regular-season games. The last such pact of his era, among the three networks in 1987, returned $420 million annually. Such growth affected the value of team franchises which, in Rozelle's time, went up in transfer deals from $2 million to $80 million.

By initiating the team sharing of the revenues from television and such later innovations as NFL Films and NFL Properties, or contributions to other firsts like NFL Alumni, NFL Charities and the NFL Hall of Fame, Rozelle put in place the all-for-one, one-for-all concept among the franchises.

He was hardly responsible for the emerging technology of pervasive television. But he did direct its orderly growth with pro foLotball through the eras of blackouts of local teams, Sunday doubleheaders, the Monday night game beginning in 1970, and extended playoffs with wild-card teams.

His first landmark, however, had to do with people, not the television gold. In 1962, he fined George Halas, a league founder and the owner-coach of the Chicago Bears, for abusing field officials. Halas accepted the fine with some grace and thereafter was one of his strongest supporters.

And because Rozelle was so shocked by the college basketball gambling scandals of 1951, he set up a security program that was far more advanced than any other known in sports. In 1963, he fined and suspended two star players, Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions, for placing bets on NFL games. He said it was one of the toughest decisions he ever made.

But this commissioner had no relief in his attempts to resolve division-of-money issues between the owners and the players union that became heated in the 1970s. The so-called Rozelle rule, which required a team signing a free-agent to compensate the player's former team with another player or draft choices to be decided by the commissioner, was declared illegal in a suit brought by John Mackey and other players that eventually cost the league $13.65 million in damages.

In an earlier blow, his policy of ``league think'' - his mantra promoting unselfishness among the franchises - was undermined by Al Davis, the maverick owner of the Raiders, in a 1983 court case that cost the NFL about $50 million.

At the end of that season the Raiders, new to Los Angeles, won the Super Bowl and Rozelle presented the traditional trophy to Davis with his congratulations in the customary locker room ceremony on national television.

``That was Pete's finest moment,'' said Ed Sabol, the NFL Films founder. ``He never flinched, while Al never looked him back in the eyes.''

Rozelle is survived by his wife, Carrie; a daughter, Anne Marie, and two grandchildren.

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Photo

Photo: (color) Pete Rozelle