Paul Tagliabue, who led the NFL for 17 prosperous years, dies at 84
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN and KEN BELSON
Paul Tagliabue, who presided over an era of labor peace, soaring revenues and expansion for the National Football League in his 17 years as commissioner while facing rising concerns over a lack of minority hiring, the effects of concussions and the use of drugs, died on Sunday at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was 84.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Emily Rockefeller, who added that he had also had Parkinson’s disease.
Tagliabue succeeded Pete Rozelle in November 1989 after having spent 20 years as the league’s outside legal counsel, working mostly on antitrust cases but advising on many other issues as well.
He moved quickly on two fronts: the NFL’s troubled labor relations and the impending renewal of its network television contracts.
The league had been hit with a pair of players’ strikes in the 1980s and had resorted to fielding “replacement” players in the early part of the 1987 season, when talks on a new collective bargaining agreement collapsed. The regulars returned without a new contract and still lacked one when Tagliabue became commissioner.
He took a direct role in negotiations with the players’ union, something Rozelle had left largely to the club owners’ Management Council, which was dominated by hard-line owners who opposed free agency, like Hugh Culverhouse of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But Tagliabue built bridges with the players’ leader, Gene Upshaw, which led to a landmark agreement in 1993 granting players free agency after several years in the league while giving management a salary cap limiting each team’s total payroll.
With labor peace achieved, Tagliabue and the NFL reached deals with ABC, CBS, NBC, TNT, ESPN and Fox that brought $4.4 billion in TV rights fees, far outstripping the network revenue earned by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association at the time.
“A lot of deals are negotiated with other people,” Sean McManus, then the president of CBS News and Sports, told The New York Times in March 2006, when Tagliabue announced plans to retire. “But you always knew the man making the final decision was Paul Tagliabue.”
NFL teams also prospered with ambitious marketing ventures and the construction of new stadiums that yielded new revenue from naming rights and luxury suites.
Four expansion franchises joined the league during Tagliabue’s tenure — the Carolina Panthers; the Jacksonville Jaguars; a new Cleveland Browns team, successor to the original Browns, who had moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens; and the Houston Texans, added as the 32nd franchise in 2002.
But Tagliabue also had to deal with a chaotic realignment when the original Browns franchise, a cherished institution in Cleveland, left Ohio. Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest media market, lost both its teams in 1995. The Rams moved to St. Louis and the Raiders went back to Oakland, California, their original home. The Houston Oilers went to Tennessee, becoming the Titans.
Tagliabue, though, saved another franchise. After Hurricane Katrina drove the New Orleans Saints from their battered city in 2005, the team played some of its home games in San Antonio and it appeared it might relocate there permanently. But Tagliabue forced its owner, Tom Benson, to keep the team in New Orleans.
When Tagliabue was elected commissioner, he said one of his major priorities would be to secure more minority-group head coaches, “to get more Art Shells in the National Football League,” a reference to the league’s only Black head coach at the time (with the Los Angeles Raiders) and the second in league history.
After Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri, two civil rights lawyers, threatened to sue the league for discriminating against coaches of color, Tagliabue created a committee on minority hiring that adopted a rule, named after Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, requiring teams to conduct at least one good-faith interview with a minority candidate when seeking a new coach — a mandate later extended to the hiring process for general managers and other top coaches.
In 1991, acting on Tagliabue’s recommendation, NFL owners voted to move the 1993 Super Bowl out of the Phoenix area after an Arizona referendum rejected marking the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a state holiday. (The game was shifted to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Arizona voters approved the holiday in 1992, and the state hosted the Super Bowl in 1996.)
Perhaps the biggest stain on Tagliabue’s tenure was his handling of players’ safety.
For years, Tagliabue and the owners denied there were any lasting risks from concussions. At a panel discussion in 1994, when reporters were beginning to ask questions about players in cognitive decline, Tagliabue called worries about concussions “one of those pack-journalism issues.” Years later, he apologized for the remark.
Tagliabue created a committee to study brain trauma in 1994, but the group consistently minimized evidence from scientists and physicians that repeated blows to the head could have long-term effects. Many players thought to have sustained concussions in a game were still being allowed to return during the same game, a practice the league’s committee maintained was safe.
It wasn’t until December 2009, after Tagliabue retired, that the NFL announced it would support research by its most vocal critics and conceded publicly that concussions could have lasting consequences.
In May 2006, Sylvia Mackey, the wife of the Baltimore Colts’ Hall of Fame tight end and former players’ union president John Mackey, wrote to Tagliabue, telling of her husband’s decline with dementia and the financial ruin faced by her family and those of other former players similarly stricken. (John Mackey died in 2011 at 69.)
The NFL and its players’ union responded by creating the 88 Plan — named for Mackey’s number and implemented in 2007, Roger Goodell’s first full year as commissioner. The initiative initially provided up to $88,000 a year, a sum that has vastly increased, for treatment of former players with disorders including dementia, ALS and Parkinson’s disease.
Tagliabue was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2020 as a contributor to the game. But the league’s failure to acknowledge the consequences of concussions during his tenure sowed the seeds of years of confrontations with retired players, thousands of whom sued the league for fraud and negligence for hiding the dangers of head hits. This resulted in a settlement that has cost the NFL more than $1.5 billion in payouts, a sum that has continued to rise.
Tagliabue was also involved in initiatives aimed to address drug abuse among players. The NFL had begun testing for drug use in 1987 under Rozelle. Acting in coordination with the players’ union, the league started suspending violators in 1989 upon their first positive steroid test, and it instituted a year-round random testing program that expanded its list of banned substances during Tagliabue’s tenure.
Tagliabue also responded to difficulties faced by female sportswriters.
He fined Sam Wyche, the Cincinnati Bengals’ head coach, nearly $28,000, a week’s pay, for barring a female reporter from the team’s locker room after a game in Seattle. A few weeks before that, Lisa Olson, a reporter for The Boston Herald, said she had been sexually harassed by three players in the New England Patriots’ locker room. The players were fined by the league.
Paul John Tagliabue was born Nov. 24, 1940, in Jersey City, New Jersey, one of four sons of Charles and May (Parmigiani) Tagliabue. His mother worked as a seamstress. His father owned a construction company, but the family lived modestly in a rowhouse whose upper story they rented out.
“My early interest in pro football involved the Giants-Browns rivalry,” he once said. “Charlie Conerly, Kyle Rote, Otto Graham, Marion Motley.” He was also an avid fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
At 6 feet 5 inches, he was an outstanding basketball player at St. Michael’s High School in Union City, New Jersey, and he became Georgetown University’s No. 2 career rebounder and the team captain in his senior season, 1961-62.
But other pursuits beckoned.
“By my junior year, my love for basketball was losing out to my love for the library,” Tagliabue told Georgetown students in a 2006 speech. “I was more interested in debating communism and democracy with the political science faculty than in shooting baskets.”
He graduated from New York University School of Law in 1965, worked as a policy analyst at the Pentagon, and then joined the law firm of Covington & Burling, which had long been advising the NFL, and took on dozens of cases for it.
Rozelle, who had a background in public relations, had gained acclaim for pro football’s ascent to what became the No. 1 sport in America during his 29 years as commissioner. In contrast, Tagliabue, a corporate lawyer, may have seemed uncomfortable at times in dealing with the news media.
“Authoritative and confident in daily life, he had a tendency to look stiff and a bit goofy in front of TV cameras, his conservative suits and oversized tortoiseshell glasses hiding an athlete’s physique, and his legalistic answers at times obscuring deep convictions,” Michael MacCambridge wrote in “America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation” (2004).
It had taken club owners seven months to choose Tagliabue as commissioner over Jim Finks, then the general manager of the Saints. But by the time Tagliabue retired after the selection of Goodell as his successor in August 2006, the league was enjoying unparalleled financial success.
Tagliabue returned to Covington & Burling. In 2012, he was named by Goodell to handle appeals of suspensions he handed out to four Saints players who purportedly had been offered money by members of the coaching staff for hits that knocked opponents from games. Tagliabue found that a bounty system did exist but overturned the penalties on the players, citing “broad organizational misconduct” by management.
In addition to his daughter, Tagliabue is survived by his wife of 60 years, Chandler (Minter) Tagliabue (known as Chan); a son, Andrew; his brothers John, Charles and Robert; and three grandchildren.
Tagliabue faced many tough issues as a lawyer and NFL commissioner, but long before that he had toughened himself on another front — basketball.
As a youth, he put cellophane tape on his fingertips to keep them from cracking during workouts in cold weather.
When he was elected NFL commissioner, his younger brother, John, the Warsaw bureau chief for the Times, told the paper how Paul used to prepare himself for defense and rebounding by banging his elbows against a wall and how he repeatedly stood on tiptoe to strengthen his calf muscles.
“It used to drive our mother crazy,” John recalled.