NEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Paul Tagliabue, who helped bring labor peace and riches to the NFL during his 17 years as commissioner but was criticized for not taking stronger action on concussions, died Sunday from heart failure. He was 84.<\/p>\n
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tagliabue\u2019s family informed the league of his death in Chevy Chase, Md.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue, who had developed Parkinson\u2019s disease, was commissioner after Pete Rozelle from 1989 to 2006. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of a special centennial class in 2020. Current Commissioner Roger Goodell succeeded Tagliabue.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaul was the ultimate steward of the game \u2014 tall in stature, humble in presence and decisive in his loyalty to the NFL,\u201d Goodell said in a statement. \u201cI am forever grateful and proud to have Paul as my friend and mentor. I cherished the innumerable hours we spent together where he helped shape me as an executive but also as a man, husband and father.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tagliabue oversaw a myriad of new stadiums and negotiated television contracts that added billions of dollars to the league\u2019s bank account. Under him, there were no labor stoppages.<\/p>\n
During his time, Los Angeles lost two teams and Cleveland another, migrating to Baltimore before being replaced by an expansion franchise.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue implemented a policy on substance abuse that was considered the strongest in all major sports. He also established the \u201cRooney Rule,\u201d in which all teams with coaching vacancies must interview minority candidates. It has since been expanded to include front office and league executive positions.<\/p>\n
When he took office in 1989, the NFL had just gotten its first Black head coach of the modern era. By the time Tagliabue stepped down in 2006, there were seven minority head coaches in the league.<\/p>\n
In one of his pivotal moments, Tagliabue called off NFL games the weekend after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was one of the few times the public compared him favorably to Rozelle, who proceeded with the games the Sunday after John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. A key presidential aide had advised Rozelle that the NFL should play, a decision that was one of the commissioner\u2019s great regrets.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue certainly had his detractors, notably over concussions. The issue has plagued the NFL for decades, though team owners had a major role in the lack of progress in dealing with head trauma.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Tagliabue apologized for remarks he made decades ago about concussions in football, acknowledging he didn\u2019t have the proper data at the time in 1994. He called concussions \u201cone of those pack-journalism issues\u201d and contended the number of concussions \u201cis relatively small; the problem is the journalist issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously,\u201d he said on Talk of Fame Network, \u201cI do regret those remarks. Looking back, it was not sensible language to use to express my thoughts at the time. My language was intemperate, and it led to serious misunderstanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy intention at the time was to make a point which could have been made fairly simply: that there was a need for better data. There was a need for more reliable information about concussions and uniformity in terms of how they were being defined in terms of severity.\u201d<\/p>\n
While concussion recognition, research and treatment lagged for much of Tagliabue\u2019s tenure, his work on the labor front was exemplary.<\/p>\n
As one of his first decisions, Tagliabue reached out to the players\u2019 union, then run by Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Fame player and former star for Al Davis\u2019 Raiders. Tagliabue had insisted he be directly involved in all labor negotiations, basically rendering useless the Management Council of club executives that had handled such duties for nearly two decades.<\/p>\n
It was a wise decision.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Paul was named commissioner after that seven-month search in 1989, that\u2019s when the league got back on track,\u201d said Joe Browne, who spent 50 years as an NFL executive and was a confidant of Rozelle and Tagliabue.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaul had insisted during his negotiations for the position that final control over matters such as labor and all commercial business dealings had to rest in the commissioner\u2019s office. The owners agreed and that was a large step forward toward the tremendous rebound we had as a league \u2014 an expanded league \u2014 in the \u201990s and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tagliabue forged a solid relationship with Upshaw. In breaking with the contentious dealings between the league and the NFL Players Assn., Tagliabue and Upshaw kept negotiations respectful and centered on what would benefit both sides. Compromise was key, Upshaw always said \u2014 although the union often was criticized for being too accommodating.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue had been the NFL\u2019s Washington lawyer, a partner in the prestigious firm of Covington and Burling. He was chosen as commissioner in October 1989 over New Orleans general manager Jim Finks after a bitter fight highlighting the differences between the NFL\u2019s old guard and newer owners.<\/p>\n
Yet during his reign as commissioner, which ended in the spring of 2006 after pushing through a highly contested labor agreement, he managed to unite those divided owners and, in fact, relied more on the old-timers who supported him than on Jerry Jones and many of the younger owners.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in Jersey City, N. J. He was the 6-foot-5 captain of the basketball team at Georgetown and graduated in 1962 as one of the school\u2019s leading rebounders at the time \u2014 his career average later listed just below that of Patrick Ewing. He was president of his class and a Rhodes scholar finalist. Three years later, he graduated from NYU Law School and subsequently worked as a lawyer in the Defense Department before joining Covington & Burling.<\/p>\n
He eventually took over the NFL account, establishing a close relationship with Rozelle and other NFL officials during a series of legal actions in the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n
Tagliabue was reserved by nature and it sometimes led to coolness with the media, which had embraced Rozelle, an affable former public relations man. Even after he left office, Tagliabue did not measure up in that regard with Goodell, who began his NFL career in the public relations department.<\/p>\n
But after 9\/11, Tagliabue showed a different side, particularly toward league employees who had lost loved ones in the attacks. He accompanied Ed Tighe, an NFL Management Council lawyer whose wife died that day, to Mass at St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, a few blocks from the NFL office.<\/p>\n
Art Shell, a Hall of Fame player, became the NFL\u2019s first modern-day Black head coach with the Raiders. He got to see Tagliabue up close and thought him utterly suited for his job.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter my coaching career was over, I had the privilege of working directly with Paul in the league office,\u201d Shell said, \u201cHis philosophy on almost every issue was, \u2018If it\u2019s broke, fix it. And if it\u2019s not broke, fix it anyway.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cHe always challenged us to find better ways of doing things. Paul never lost sight of his responsibility to do what was right for the game. He was the perfect choice as NFL commissioner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tagliabue is survived by his wife Chandler, son Drew, and daughter Emily.<\/p>\n
Wilner and Maaddi write for the Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Paul Tagliabue, who helped bring labor peace and riches to the NFL during his 17 years as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[30133,30137,9747,423,30135,48,52,51,30136,10572,47,50,49,30131,346,30132,30134,9442,30130,427,315],"class_list":["post-45868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-concussion","tag-covington","tag-decade","tag-game","tag-gene-upshaw","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-labor-negotiation","tag-league","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-nfl-commissioner","tag-office","tag-paul-tagliabue","tag-pete-rozelle","tag-player","tag-tagliabue","tag-team","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}