On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CT, America changed forever. While waving to crowds from the back seat of his midnight-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental as his motorcade wove through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, John F. Kennedy was shot. Within an hour, the country was processing the awful news: The 35th president of the United States was dead.
Like every other American, the NFL’s 37-year-old commissioner was in shock. But Pete Rozelle, a former Rams GM who had been on the job for nearly four years, also had a decision to make, and he knew what to do. He picked up a phone at NFL headquarters in New York City and called Pierre Salinger, a friend from their days as classmates at the University of San Francisco and Kennedy’s press secretary.
Somehow, Rozelle reached Salinger at the Honolulu Airport. In less than 48 hours, the NFL was scheduled to play a full slate of seven games. What should the commissioner do?
Salinger told Rozelle that the president would have wanted the games to go on. So they did.
The backlash was swift. The media was outraged that the NFL would play on as the country mourned. (The rival AFL had canceled its schedule for that weekend. Meanwhile, the NBA and NHL played that weekend, and many college football games went on, too.) Even some NFL owners disagreed with Rozelle, including the Eagles’ Frank McNamee, who didn’t attend his team’s home game against Washington. Cleveland’s Art Modell was also against the decision, especially because the Cowboys—the nation turned against Dallas and its institutions in the aftermath of the assassination—were coming to his city.
Rozelle’s decision stuck with him for decades. Publicly, he was contrite. (Thirty years later he called it the “worst decision I ever made.”) Privately, the commissioner felt differently. “He was embarrassed by the negative publicity and attention that the league got for playing the games,” says Joe Browne, an NFL executive who worked for the league in various capacities from 1965 to 2016 and was a longtime Rozelle confidant. “People forget that all kinds of sporting activities and entertainment continued that weekend. . . . He believed down deep that he did the right thing.”
Indeed, the decision to go on with the games hardly dampened the NFL’s rapid 1960s evolution into a sports and cultural behemoth. But 38 years later, Rozelle’s angst colored another dilemma faced by his successor, Paul Tagliabue, as he walked from his New York City apartment to the NFL offices on Park Avenue, looking skyward at the smoke emanating from the fallen World Trade Center.
