Pete Rozelle did not postpone a slate of games after the JFK assassination.
The November 24th, 1963 New York Giants-St. Louis Cardinals game at Yankee Stadium probably should have been postponed. It was two days after the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, John Kennedy, and the National Football League’s Golden Boy, the Commissioner Pete Rozelle, decided the NFL should play a full slate of games that day. The rival American Football League cancelled all of its weekend games. Other leagues such as the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League played limited schedules. Some college football games were played but the NFL was beginning its ascent into becoming the biggest sport in America and Rozelle had to make a decision.
He got a hold of Pierre Salinger, an old college classmate at the University of San Francisco, who was Kennedy’s press secretary. Salinger told Rozelle that the president would have wanted the games to go on. It was Rozelle’s first major mistake as NFL Commissioner. Rozelle had enriched his 14 owners by getting the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 passed, a bill Kennedy signed into law that allowed the NFL to sell its 14 teams as one to an American TV network without violating the antitrust law. He knew how to sell the NFL and his network partner CBS was only too pleased to help out. In the 1980s, Rozelle’s star began to wane with the Al Davis antitrust suit that Davis won which allowed his franchise to move from Oakland to Los Angeles, the 1982 NFL strike, the 1986 USFL-NFL antitrust lawsuit which the United States Football League won but lost in compensation and the 1987 NFL labor strife which resulted in replacement games. He also could not get more TV money. Rozelle, when he got to know reporters if asked, would tell them the decision to let the games go on was his biggest mistake of his tenure as Commissioner which lasted from 1960 through 1989.
There were more than 62,000 people at Yankee Stadium who witnessed St. Louis beating the Giants. People flocked to NFL games that Sunday in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and in Milwaukee to watch the hometown Green Bay Packers. There were big crowds in Cleveland and in Los Angeles. CBS continued its news coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the killing of his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. It was Rozelle’s biggest fumble in his fourth year as NFL Commissioner. But people turned out in New York to watch the Giants and tune out the news of the day. The Giants loss that day probably didn’t matter all that much. The Giants would go onto lose to the Chicago Bears in the 1963 championship game.
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Pete Rozelle and this reporter in 1986.
