Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Giants give Wellington Mara a 36-0 send-off, but is the NFL pioneer's greatest legacy in peril?
Oct 31, 2005 | Wellington Mara, who reportedly attended Mass every day, believed that he was going to a better place when he died. The longtime owner of the New York Giants succumbed to cancer Tuesday at the age of 89.
If he was right, he must have spent Sunday watching his emotional and inspired team thump Washington 36-0 and thinking, "Why'd I wait so long?"
But maybe he should have waited a little longer. The greatest element of his legacy is in danger of being weakened by team owners who weren't even born when Mara's bookmaker father bought the team for $2,500 in 1925 -- that sounds like a pittance but accounting for inflation it's more than $27,000! -- and put his son to work as a ballboy.
A small group of owners led by Jerry Jones of Dallas and Daniel Snyder of Washington want to pull back from revenue sharing in the next collective bargaining agreement. Nobody's talking about backing away from sharing TV money equally, but the group of owners of high-revenue teams -- the others are the Houston Texans, New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles -- want to keep more of the fruits of their own marketing efforts.
To borrow a metaphor from another sport, these guys were born at first-and-goal, and they think they drove down the field.
The tributes to Mara in the last week have almost all mentioned his crucial role in the single most important decision in the history of the NFL, the agreement by owners in the 1960s to evenly split all revenues from a single, national television contract.
If you didn't know better you'd think, listening to the tributes, that Mara, the owner of a successful team in the largest market, with the biggest local TV contract, paradoxically came up with the idea of revenue sharing.
In fact, the owners fell into fairly predictable camps when Pete Rozzelle became commissioner in 1960 and began pushing hard for the idea, which was borrowed from maverick baseball men Bill Veeck and Branch Rickey.
Small-market owners wanted to share revenue, while owners of the big-market or more successful teams -- the Giants, Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams, along with the on-field powerhouse Baltimore Colts -- didn't want to lose the financial advantage they'd built up.
In his excellent history of the NFL rise, "America's Game," Michael MacCambridge writes that Mara had to be persuaded to support revenue sharing by his brother and co-owner, Jack, who had in turn been persuaded by Vince Lombardi, the Giants' former offensive coordinator who had become the coach of the team in the league's then-and-now smallest market, the Green Bay Packers.
What the Packers made in television revenue, the Giants could lose between the sofa cushions and not even know it.
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