An hour with Paul Tagliabue

from the dole institute of politics at the university of kansas k pr presents an hour with former commissioner of the national football league paul tightly ado i'm kay macintyre when you think about sports you probably don't think about the dole institute of politics but a new speaker series at the door seeks to connect the two to look at the bigger picture where globalization and leadership can be found in the world of sports former nfl commissioner paul ted radio is the inaugural speaker in this new series on november two thousand and five the commissioner it's great to have you here tonight thank you very much for joining us from port to start tonight by getting funnier to me a little bit of context talk a little bit about your career it that started the law or and then carried out in the nfl how about progress being commissioner well i guess i got into

really into law by accident and i got into the nfl by accident which is one of the things i always tell young people don't try to program to life because you probably sell yourself short run it in the rising college i started out as a physics and math major fairly quickly to stay safe fermi award feinstein so i moved a political science and from there i moved into the role that i was you know when the pentagon for three years working on nuclear weapons policy and things like that and i joined by law firm in nineteen sixty nine and the lady my arrival of the farm by about a month and as a result i want to work for the nfl instead of another point which was in a much less visible part of our economy still rolls of those things were accidents or you know they were

they were consequences that were really interesting from the decisions i was making or others are making and i really do want to emphasize to two young people until everybody that i think that especially today with the pace of change our society and being so fast and the future of being so hard to anticipate just get a lot of experience and get a lot of experience with different organizations read as much as you can and when things happened because things will happen that you never dreamed about the china program yourself you know be sure that we're you can eventually enough or your roles with the nfl lawyer lead counsel legal counsel for straight guy started out you know as a young lawyer working with much more senior people in nineteen sixty nine on nfl matters and john amos learned at some point that the first thing i ever worked on

was a research project that was going to support the authority of the commission or to suspend him from the game if he didn't sell his bar in new york a bachelors three and this was about ten years after irs commissioner and joe had become a pretty good friend and then he learned this from somebody and he said damn it if i knew what you had done when you were a lawyer and i've been your friend and i did a lot of things you know for a lot of clients i mean at one point i was representing the ear of corn growers of america and not just doing a wide range of different things which as i said before i think is extremely important in the league i initially a lot of litigation i was i was a trial lawyer then i moved to then start to do some of the work with federal agencies like the federal communications commission on television and media matters then i ended up doing a lot of advisory work so i was always trying to reinvent my row and get a broad experience and a lot of hate office i think it was the breath of the spring is the un to select the commissioner of the nfl

is really the most popular sports league in america you talk a little bit about the business model why it works so well why associate consistently successful and has done what johnson basically eclipsed all other pro sport well i think you start with two things really want to see the the roots of the game in american history one of the great perks of the other right now scott the real all americans is a book about a game between the carlisle indian institute in carlisle pennsylvania against west point and this game featured two great halfbacks one was jim thorpe a little indian an indian ashley and the other was dwight eisenhower who was a halfback at west point and that was the end of the story which i shouldn't tell you this issue can read the book the crimean institute beat west point and it's a fabulous story about the early roots of football the time jump forward to the post world war two obviously college football high school football tremendous institutions in

the united states and the nfl is nothing in the early fifties compared to college football where there's a federal statute actually still on the books yes in nineteen sixty one or which says that basically the nfl could not play games on friday night or on saturday between early september and mid december that's to protect in effect have to recognize the place of high school football coach or a poet in our society we have that thing that will run television first appeared in sports and let's start with baseball in late forties early fifties series on television they can't afford to live in the late fifties and early sixties the owners and the nfl made a decision no other leaders over may day they've decided that the league controls all of the television and we would make all of the regular season television arrangements the league would make the schedule for television decide which teams would appear wearing and most important role or revenue

would be shared equally among all the teams and that's been the key that's why you have the green bay packers the kansas city chiefs the buffalo bills the jacksonville jaguars as a recent expansion team that's why those teams not only exists that are competitive and you know in the other sports if you don't have the big market teams in the playoffs in the championship series the audience diminishes dramatically that was the case this year with tampa and in baseball and the nfl some of the biggest audiences ever four championship games and the super bowl of them small market teams because they get people exposure during the season and exposure is really based on their it's not based on the size of the market so it's that business model of exposure being based on merit on a national basis unequal sharing of the revenue today every team gets about thirty million dollars from the league four billion dollars plus it's distributed to the teams and the other salary cap system we have now that is the underpinning of old tires being paid in the

aggregate preaching about the same for that that supports the competitiveness of the game on the field so it's a business model that's evolved over the last five decades and seems to work for doping seems to be a big problem in some sports or you think of pro cycling you think of baseball we're talking this afternoon when you drop by about senator mitchell in and he doesn't seem to have been that much of a problem and football why is that well i could have been a problem i mean the one liza anabolic steroids came along and now they're other performance enhancing substances human growth hormone and others when they came along in the seventies and eighties our athletes were tempted to use them honestly to try to get better in some cases the line between what's legitimate was illegitimate because you know not all that clear clear but in the case of anabolic steroids home to

the scientists and the physicians who knew about and said it was not only artificially enhancing the talent of the athlete but creating serious risks later in life and sometimes currently to use these things and we were able in the nfl my predecessor pete rozelle started i was able to bring him to a conclusion in nineteen ninety we were able to share information with the players and their leadership approved a union could convince them an effect that's anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances were a football players might say by analogy to what you know coal dust is coal miners or whatever of occupational hazard he might find in other walks of life and they viewed it as a hatter and not as an attraction to also viewed it as unfair because you might have missed howell than i do with you you might be willing to risk of

adverse health effects of steroids and then you might become bigger and stronger than i am artificially and they just the players felt that they did not want a small group of players using artificial substances that in effect put pressure on everybody to use artificial substances and run those health risks so that was a consensus builder generally so many other sports early became a civil liberties issue and only recently got resolved are you are you traveled extensively really go in the time since she positions commission of the nfl well i decided i was going to move on it wasn't a retired i just wanted something differently but my wife and i have felt that we have been to many many sporting events in seventeen years that i was commissioner sometimes three or four football games and we can actually

do that you know if you start with a game of kind of college campus on saturday and go to nfl games on sunday in an nfl game on monday i never got tired of all the lead out of the out there close to the fans and the msc was going on for yourself you can sit behind a desk and let someone else that was going on in seattle or sandy you work as a city for that matter so we are we have we get a lot of business travel separately myself and with my wife so since i step down we decided we would do a lot of travel internationally especially in asia because you know you can do lots of reasons why you should pay attention to asia is one of them is that two of those countries that forty percent of the people in the world and so to understand what's going on in china and india is clearly going to be important to everybody so we go to india china prices in the last eighteen months and then to china three times we've been to more exotic places like tom we've been to japan to leave two three times welcome our israel we're going next week to

australia singapore and i just try to really understand what is going on for ourselves and see whether all things you read about other parts of the world war exaggerated or underestimated i think oh i think a lot of the west that's the united states and europe really doesn't understand how dramatic are the changes in asia and how motivated and skilled people are and i think it's a big challenge for our nation to speak to the effects they use witness firsthand that many saw an nfl has to have globalization in the world are generally speaking but also in terms of sports rights there's very hard to you know you could see that some sports we're going to a ready go well really had a global footprint it's become even more global as they've opened up the movement players all over the world so you have different tiers of weeks in the competition the world cup is phenomenal with athletes all over you see it happening in the

nba great talent coming in third of its key arming others from europe europe asia so in some sports which are easy to play and then our local support for the participants you're already seeing tremendous globalization i think all sports will only attract sports and that would include american football will have it young people are anxious to play and fans anxious to watch over time that it will take more time for some than others but i've been in china with the nfl players are you know if you flip the clinics we ran a federal police in beijing won joe shanghai and i've been with parents and school teachers in those cities watching on chinese kids play of american the first thing you think of when you see them flying is barry sanders was there about his size justice they're just assassin just as elusive so i think he'll have you know athletes from all over the world as the

low strings playing all of the major sports and to me it's just a microcosm of what's going on with talent family where everyone is going to be competing in the areas in which they are professionals could be medicine could be sciences could be teaching we can understand how europe very strong believer in higher education wise that speech first into tonight why is that so important to as the war becomes more globalized well you know i think initially resisted we've talked to tell you that ten years ago they looked at the opening of the economies in china and india as a as a low wage low cost challenge of those societies were not as developed as ours to have the standard of living of hours they still don't sell in many cases there was no new jobs were being gamed in those societies producing several things and i we were losing

jobs to simple production process is that is no longer the case more and more companies are finding that the best scientists are outside the united states so i know the head of the big technology companies who told me recently that in the areas where they a new phd candidates there is no phd candidate in any university carry an american passport they are all non us passport graduate students so some places are doing better than others but i think the bottom line is that an order to lead in order to be in a position of leadership in the next century even have to have more and more skills at higher levels in order to continue to deal with this incredible technological revolution that's taken place in genetics in information technology the internet and cellular area so

he really needed not only study about awards highlighting the high value added skills is what you're called in the business world and i think the american university system is still recognized around the world as the best but we go more competition today than we did five or ten years ago is would be a lot more of georgetown are on the border we have to report wife are still on the board really got my attention if you look out ten years from when i went on the board two thousand sixty two thousand fifteen the number of young people eligible and are universities in the united states will be about twenty twenty to twenty four million i think the eu is a symbol of similar number in japan it's about ten million in china's about a hundred million in india's hundred and twenty five million when i speak to high school and high school kids i start up airtime on one thing we have a great nation and we will continue to be great if we work with you but i understand that three hundred million people here and there are

six thousand million other people in the world can compete with you and to be as good as you are not they're not necessarily better but has to be as good as you are that's the big challenge every year for years athletes for my wife wants me to translate six thousand and six billion for years top athletes gather from countries all around the world of the olympics and i know you were at the most recent olympics and now in china speak a little bit about your experience there but also talk to the broader subject and how sports can serve as a way to build connections between nations and peoples yeah you know this is a complicated one and it and there was a written opinions and it's one of these areas where if you're trying to get elected you could say my friends have different opinions than angry with my friends but i it i'm not that it really heartless a lot of people would say to me as you know in the last year and why the hell you going to the olympics in beijing aren't you aren't you

acknowledging or condoning in some way their human rights record to condone in fact they don't have freedom of religion end of conclusion i reached was they stand up to a great degree history i think we can learn a lot you know i think history teaches us a lot more if it's such a risk but i think the biggest thing that people really know china conversely was this is a nation which for the last two or three hundred years has became endangered because of humiliation by the colonial powers and others and what they are now going through and what the olympics was for the people in china was getting beyond being second class getting beyond being subservient and being the best and that was manifested in their attitude toward winning the gold and yes you have to deal with the human rights issues

but then you have to deal with religious freedom issues but i think that you know if those have to be dealt with in a professional way between diplomats between universities that are open up exchange programs and religious studies in philosophy which is happening increasingly and that on the athletics i this thing that struck me is that is what i said before that athletic competition and the olympics is as you note perkins and your coaches here with no it's young people can be invested in something that they've been working on since they were five six seven eight ten years old when you look at michael phelps and watch him you watch tv it's about honest competition but it's also about a competing and being the best which sets an example of what we should be a medicine science and all these other walks of life you know the thing i would say about the olympics in beijing was that there was a young tremendous feeling of sportsmanship

you know so before the olympics there was a lot of concern it would be anti japanese riots of japanese athletes won gold medals it was not about that was genuine sportsmanship an attitude of fairness and we also had a chance to my wife and i to go into the earthquake stricken area of china during the olympics we flew over there for two days and met with a lot of students you were at universities that were destroyed because of the earthquake and some of those are now in new york studying at the state university in which is why we were there but more carbon that the outpouring of humanity and support within china of for that crisis was was i think something that the chinese have not seen in a long time and i think it's a positive positive statement about other societies evolve and so i think there was the lessons you can learn from the olympics and then they go way beyond the olympics on espn

this is kind of personal question but you are they're not destroyed and you get to interact with people in beijing and is curious is to your thoughts are a couple of episodes for the chinese were criticized for the young woman saying odd but they had another one not saying out from because that the child was a lot more attractive when they're there is the issue the chinese gymnast or the chinese having a little trouble adapting to kind of the transparency that we have in our society and almost everyday basis that are you know on a sinking and that's the entertainment business there so i'm sure that people that the sink and anthems in the super bowl i haven't checked the right to either different kinds of lives at this gets yelled the second calories you know but if you are putting on a mass entertainment program in a stadium he might not rely on the microphone isn't the building to get the right sound so you might do things that enhanced the entertainment so you know i

don't take genesis of the issue i think that the fowl specify the ages of athletes morales was alleged that's a much more serious issue but i do think the broader point you make is violent but they do have trouble dealing with transparency in china and across the world it's not part of their tradition and the euro is at an event in new york recently were there were church us scholars on china and chinese scholars and david i think you have to understand that says might take you have to understand that there's a speech in trying to manage that we have which is three hundred million plus it's hard enough for us to manage three hundred million plus there's a lot of diversity of opinion we learned that last year they get a billion three hundred million to manage end and they don't have the standard of living that we have we have our

issues in terms of gaps between wealthy and poor but the issues they half know you can say well they brought upon themselves but this generation of leaders this generation of young people could bring upon themselves but the complexity of managing a billion three hundred million people in the society there were some of them are living right here and others were doing in rural china where they're you know if you could believe the condition that's a complicated facts so i don't make excuses but the one thing i've learned in my life is that until you put yourself in the other person's shoes and look at life or whatever the other person this you haven't looked at fairly i mean that's close to union negotiation that goes to the television contract negotiations and that goes to comment on what's going on in in mexico or china any place else put yourself

in someone else's shoes and then figure out how you see the world from that perspective then start the conversation over enough people do that and china india and other parts of the world and they have to do with us to talk a little bit in a broad sense about how globalization now is manifesting itself in sports now it's you know it's really odd mention a few mr stuart suggestive though i think is the best example of the us forces have really become global but let's look at baseball it's really quite extraordinary the number of japanese players who are leaders in a leading in the major leagues leading teams of the panic in the world series but in the other sports is just an explosion just in the last year we were in india in february and just by coincidence they were announcing in india a new national cricket league professional cricket league the game and a lot about cricket but

i do know the game can last for days they had modified the game to make it into a three hour match they were announcing billion dollar television contracts there were announcing eight teams in the big cities with franchisees approaching two hundred million dollars for each team but most important role last month i was in london and there's the indian cricket league and sony entertainment television talking about bringing in all the great cricket players an england and all of a sudden you know in twelve to try for months there's a feeling in the global world of cricket venue will be the center of gravity in an england will no longer be xero gravity soccer it's the same you know if i'm in them the brits have great scenes in ties and retains the players on those teams are from all over the world so it is it is changing and of course a television technology we have today enables people wherever they are in the world of follow either they're seeing their national team and their favorite

team or their favorite has made and even in the nfl you know we have a young man who plays for the new york giants matthias askew and ochre his grandfather was the first prime minister of uganda and he was assassinated by a deal means gm means forces that's a long way from where the nfl was in terms of the sources of his players four years ago he had from that part of the world and he's not alone i was the human ear of the other giants players only plays you know one of the first ones here question a coy with achieve so the players are coming from all parts of the world as they're great athletes and they're not necessarily applying flexible in their own villages but when they get here really get to europe and have a chance to play are from football they're playing and then they bring it back home so so it is really transforming the game built ourselves not the last question i pushed very hard in europe and i have ideas about early in mexico who had

ideas about the canadian lead in the mexican league and the europe we playing a championship game i still think it'll happen at some point but the coaches didn't like the coaches didn't like to send their players to play in europe and we had japanese players playing in europe mexican players playing in europe european players we had a linebacker on the redskins who played his only football before play the redskins was in more say in france so a lot of that was happening and it but i want to see bill parcells when he was coaching the jetsons has a simple question coach why are you so opposed to sending players to play in europe and this spring leaked and he looked at me said you're a smart guy and you know you tell me so yes your smart voice you should know that as a question will you tell me the unseasonable football coach football coaches wanna send their office and see the players here are now more on the sale through the window of a biosphere i can say well it doesn't make sense to me as a coach i said

you're not a coach you're commissioner nisha one year ago he's right and if i don't send my prayers irrigation finding sunni militias chinese defined as divisive because it will be a global talent org and we will be the greatest game and fifty years that was his perspective and so you have those kinds of you know institutional biases to the status quo and you just have to deal with them but it's the reality in terms of what's happening we mentioned soccer mr mishra stalkers probably is arguably the biggest sport in the world and we have hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of kids in the us who play soccer every year and yes soccer can't seem to catch on as a parolee what are watchers analysis of the job counselor north american soccer league july sixteen nineteen eighties datsun that the delisting from advice that i've talked to at a charity

commissioner don garber used to work for work for the nfl and i know very well you know i think it's a couple of things first it's the entrenched told that other sports have in our society so a lot of the interest in sport is intergenerational it's like a kid who cruise mother and your father has played the game the boy or the girl as the parents play the game but his grandparents play the game console and so forth so it's an intergenerational thing sold to get multi generations you don't have fancy have young athletes who then go into other things how that's one of the things another thing i always felt it just tell us are completely so that with some other nfl owners three other nfl owners on major league teams in england including manchester united which may be the greatest sports franchise rosenman a family tampa bay buccaneers and the owner of the new england patriots as a soccer game in the ring and so i've told that

one of the problems is that they have made the sport to democratic with a small d says a political incident with the same political statement and what i mean by that is this they sell it to young people on the base that everyone you do it in one of the things that appeals about sports and that tracks spectators the sport is that not everybody can do it holly and joe phrase that fortified was watched by a billion people supposedly on television the reason was about five billion people point to people willing to do what they did you know and a lot of only a few people can do it billions of a watch that's that's the reality of spectator sport there are only a few people could do with michael jordan team won one of my crotch michael jordan that you can persuade the public that everyone can do it is to say that there's no different than jogging how they expected negative spectators poured all watched joggers

along the joggers you know but not on the large a jogger so if you make it too much of a democratic support with a small d it's not gonna be a great spectator sport so i think that's an issue for them but when you get the greatest athletes the whirling beckerman pele and others over the generations you know that it's not an easy sport that's a different thing but to some degree they are their own worst enemy that really promote the third thing is television the way television has evolved you know twenty years ago people said we're going to move from ten channels of two hundred channels in every sport to be on television but the opposite happened as we move from ten channels two thousand channels the only ones that get on television are the ones that already have a mass audience college football nfl major league baseball even the nba and the nhl have a tough time on television cause there's so many channels the audience is split so many ways and soccer's got a problem breaking into television series fear the audience

is so fragmented they can't rise above nine hundred and ninety nine other channels are still lots of things but i think eventually it's going to be there for that event that comes back you about to be in a talent and once you have soccer players who were as good in that sport is michael jordan or joe montana and then then then you break through in some way shape or form and they're getting my period stores turn their example around a little bit on every poll that i have that i'd seen in the last few years professional football celluloid the number one sport in the united states and yet it really hasn't taken root that much outside the united states was that well i think it is grey and here because it has had tremendous access to a lot of famous athletes it has attracted great athletes

to the game and so we have we're a big developed a piece of the world with because of our quality of life or you know disposable income a lot of other things we have a disproportionate opportunities participate in competitive athletics and in college football nfl football have benefited from that great talent pool but you know you come back to if you're if you're drawing from for years for a hundred million people in the end of three to four billion people are trying to place and try to do something will you will you will always be at the top you know i don't see how the answer to that is yes so so i think that's right you have to grow the sport the difficulties of growing us ports are are many it's a tough sport violence and some societies when we reach it we say weekend violence out of the game other societies you football is a violent game chuck no use to

draw a fine distinction between violent he always said that basketball was the context or boxing was a violent sport of football was a collision sport he never used the word violence for those shuttle so there's that element of the character of the sport and then there's the cost and the complexity of the game and when you go to places like china and india to get forty kids over here and forty kids over there in a lot of expensive equipment five hundred yards of grass that haven't played game gets complicated so so if it will take a lot of time i will say this it's little known but it's true that some of the best others outside the united states or in japan have had calls for poll in japan since the nineteen thirties with college leagues in japan they have cost championship game in japan among japanese universities and some of the best athletes football players we had seen we the nfl is suing the game outside of north america japanese players and you have

some really really amazed to see on the enemy's player with a cowboy is not going so like my comedy was always feel because of football's american game and eleven the plate as having lives they seek coaches use to tell me that and i would say within the first people who play football were born in italy or poland they were thai immigrants in polish immigrants german immigrants in pennsylvania without a warrant and they didn't come over on the mayflower so and they were telling kids and german kids and palestinians find this sport so it can be played by people who live in the chances of yours has as professional sports become the globalizing were sucking into united states because i'm assuming our salary scales outside soccer are vastly ire or sucking talent from other nations how's that affecting their domestic sports leagues well we'll say when china started festival in which way the

talent goes so far you know the talents been coming here as though the payrolls that you've talked about and soccer and it's it's not necessarily the case a lot of the talents been moving out of the more developed countries in europe and in other parts of the world so i think it'll likely to be two things about three things we are with how well you get paid and what kind of competition are you competing interest top athletes will compete against other top athletes of the quality and the competition would be a big thing and on the third strike to be the quality of the fan experience because thats lisa part of the feminist prison the quality of the society so i think there will be a massive global movement but it's gonna be in lots of different directions as these societies grow and as with as they're able to offer us a satirical for athletes today

i was at a conference about five years ago and it wasn't talk chinese entrepreneur who have built a huge business in the united states and he was asked a question by tom brokaw if you're coming out of university in china today would you start your business in the us as it did twenty years ago you started in china and his answer was me tell you why i came to the us i came because of education i came because of access to capital i came because of access to markets and i came because it was a free society we have three of those four in china now are universities access to capital access to markets and we're making progress toward the ferrets which is a free society as people around the world started looking at the calculus in that way i think the global thought tells communal directions our leadership whether it's in politics or

business are in big towns fortunately course tough decisions and it's there's one in particular lambastes he about well you were commissioned he chose to play games after the initial invasion of gulf war one but chose after nine one one not play the games can you just kind of explain how you made those decisions in a new console it came out or actually love illicit the president goes back to baseball i believe that's the case that president roosevelt first major league baseball to continue playing in the nineteen forty two season of the pearl harbor that's the president and so sports continued during the second world war and they were shelves of their former selves the nfl was a relatively minor enterprise at the time and certain

teams were consolidated you know during the second world war we had an nfl team people switch was pennsylvania's team was a consolidation of the steelers and the eagles upset obviously have that experience or two where professional sports continue to play when we got there the first of three or oh it was thirty end of the season and jack kemp was in the cabinet of the time and he you know he had been an outstanding player with the buffalo bills and other nfl teams and i didn't ask him to do it but he was in a meeting which in the white house i believe where general schwarzkopf was in attendance and he was the commander in chief of the time and jackass charles rosen of how do you feel the washing clothes or some paper had written editorials saying we should not playoff games of the nation was going to warm and when the postman or someone else

most of these people want to watch the super bowl on television with her and it doesn't so you know forget about it is not an issue we'll play the games and i had a nephew who was then in a rack at that time that was unknown to the iraqis he was in iraq and i sent him some uniforms and he says that he and his fellow marines played the first of the book that i did the first game on super bowl sunday was called the standard bull in southern iraq and that super bowl sunday and miami won and i was completely different to us today it was the kind of band the assumptions that had prevailed for centuries about warfare and civility in the lines between civilians in militaries that girls were being

obliterated by an adversary and now you know the idea of taking a civilian airlines and making them into nestle's was so far out half a set of assumptions that we can go back to the benefit of insurance and maybe we made the wrong assumptions goes towards them violent and there've been lots of situations of war where civilians were their demise is part of a combat but it was such a startling departure and there was a wife civilian life was so great i just felt that there was no way that you could be true to the people of america and play so we didn't play took the week off and i think it was important at the players and it was far more important to the public and then everyone else can watch that this measure what was the toughest decision and without the toughest decision here at the mike or what was the toughest decision i've had to make as commissioner of the nfl wild other tough because they go way beyond the game you know nine eleven

if you had to as a citizen and not just as the commission for paul katrina hit you as a citizen and not just as good as the person who's responsible for the new orleans saints so you're saying as a death of a player and we had some deaths of players play and practice in things like that those things hits you the hardest of the hardest to deal with and then with the clinic in the case and was in south carolina privacy that as yourself have we done all the things we should be doing it to avoid those kinds of events i think when it comes to the game itself the toughest thing is this a deal with the team that wants to move and leave its fan base like the browns leaving cleveland over three hours leaving houston or the yale team's leading other cities where they have been for a long time and how that it rips into the community as those teams and then we had to all of it which was you know because laughter which were part of a broader they had gone in the nablus

another cleveland wants to go there so you've got it took a community that never got over its own scars now taking someone else's theme so you had a piece of litigation lots of promotion those are the toughest problems serious half and i think we made a little progress what we did was get ahead of the curve and build more stadiums because of the underlying problem in each of those situations is that it changes it as inadequate stadium and baseball ahead of us building stadiums in a lot of cities and the nfl teams were in serious competitive disadvantage is still promise to anticipate a not not allowed to happen but when it does happen was a lot of sleepless nights when i start with our first question i thought you liked to come up and now please do ask that question no filibustering no commentary mr chris drummond and jerry walker i'm curious about your relationship with gene upshaw certainly the

family relationships in football were pretty unprecedented as compared to other professional sports and also in the business world so how did you make that their work as well as you did i didn't think about it and then i thought about it a lot how to make it work for almost twenty years but in comes a wire word i didn't think about it until he died this person and what i realized was that we had started out as adversaries in the eighties i was representing only that terry higgins then the union i cross examine human trials we have been adversaries for a decade and at the time i became commissioner he was to let the players association we've both come to the realization that in a weekly that like donkeys and life in her hands together or we could actually human beings just solve the problem so we decided to try to solve the problem and so then you fear it that

it took us about three years of conversation that comes back to what i said before when you get to put yourself in the other person's shoes though i put myself in his shoes of lima the head of a group of professional athletes what is it that are looking for and gene was very good at putting himself on the other side of the time because he played the game for so long he knew wouldn't talk to have high quality football so he could put himself in your shoes are my shoes i could put myself in his shoes and we were able to figure out a way to solve the problem which is to have free agency but have been subject to a salary cap and you have the kind of the best of both worlds so were the better eyesight it you know after his their sister some i think i figured out that for the past twenty years that he could tell when it was walker why don't you think that's exist in other sports like baseball in our part of the problem as they have an opinion not cancel each other for ten years you don't realize is about a way of doing

things as to a lot of the years of life and the other and i'm always saddened to genes credit as a great player who continue to have some of his closest friends on the other side approaches building his closest friend our show he really did understand why the owners won some of the things that they want and then and what kinds of a salary cap they would have to have so that they'd john elway were drying them there for his whole career which is an important sign so we had a salary cap we had quite a bit of free agency but with rare exceptions the dan marino's in the john always been moved at the prime of their career that's a complicated thing to try to structure that he understood that you know i said i think that we did we we finally we reach an agreement was really important competitive balance and someone but not excessive movement lhasa revenue

growth and sour apple your crossover chains and want to agree on those goals and you can figure out how to get there but we really had agree on a set of goals lawyers that they ingested over time i had its problems and had to cancel the season baseball so as a structure that they like a baseball mitt as it doesn't seem to work for some parts of the country next question please issue in women's awesome humanity on would there have been a lot of fines have them by the nfl and a lot of penalties mother of freezes well i'm for your excess of celebrations and i you know is that the floor to severe house is warning if you feel the nfl has now become a little bit too strict on that and if there is anything that you might do differently

no i don't think so it's a sort of a continual of what we've had for many many years during a seasonal employers don't want my sinn fein and the lines that are being drawn are sometimes tough for the player on the field to who abide by a hundred percent of the time but the risk of injury with stereotypes it's so great not only the players being hit for the players doing hitting that you know if either getting bigger but my guess would be and if you looked at the files as a percentage of saudi getting smaller so you know if you went back fifteen years were probably finding people ten thousand dollars and they're now finding some people fifty thousand dollars but their salaries have gone from one thousand to ten million so they're paying less and fifteen there were ten so so so the findings are not even getting bigger but if you're only twenty four year old twenty four years though that doesn't impress you

fifty thousand dollars or three hundred thousand dollars so i don't think that i think the league is doing the right thing in a lot of tanks and criticism lets in the middle of the season has gone by tiny bit different worry next question please sir i had occasion to read your article and the yale law journal he wrote a few years ago and two items one person on one no football related are you glad that you didn't get that the walker job for just as white as you said earlier from the time you were an nfl commissioner a second one is the nfl seems to do a better job of this waiting college players from jumping and to me professionally as opposed to the

nba and other sports and which can be seen in college basketball have some affect how we have the nfl able to get away with that or what's the difference between add another professional sports relative to college students are not completing a college education one is legal and won his athletic a federal court ruled in the early seventies that the nba could not keep the could not have an age will fall and so the mta was forced from the early seventies to let players come in at a high school by a federal court ruling the nfl was never knew and we never we always said that we're different and we're going to do it our way and then we eventually won a case in the supreme court actually about eight ten years ago we said that our rule was collectively bargained and as the collectively bargained rule one of the rules that we have the three you have to be at a high school for three years before you come into the

nfl so that's a legal difference and now the nba has been able to re negotiate and they do have some kind of new age limitation now from afghanistan point i sank it's the character of the game very few people have been able to have ever been seen as able to come out of high school play in the nfl herschel walker if there's anyone that you know if you talk to fatah people say obviously an athlete you could have too i still playing anecdotally herschel walker is mentioned by most people but the track record is such that most athletes allow most of the players know that you're not going to be successful the likelihood is that you will not be successful if you don't have some additional experience like two three four years of college football experience or experience in the canadian football league recently sacha not to succeed in the nfl nfl players association also did a study some years ago which was very interesting and showed that the

longer a player had played in college the longer he had a career in the nfl and it also showed that there are players who have that there was a correlation between the players who had degrees college degrees and length of service an encounter of power and over the course of a career which says something about the complexity of the game and the fact that they would do things intuitively and wisely is a big part of being a professional football player mr mike sha na my thoughts are at the situation over the summer and went online publication another again i you know you can't have any thoughts on that other intelligent rational and i was reading about it in the newspaper much less in meetings again those are the kinds of things that i use that to pay attention to the not paying you to pay attention to that you don't pay attention

mr commissioner of our friend a great pointed out that while we're chatting this afternoon that the most watched presidential debate in history was the nineteen eighty reagan carter debate over to believe that you said eighty million viewers watched the two thousand at super but goldman was watched by ninety seven million viewers well what does that say about our society other than that was very popular prices do things for those are problems its intentions or a pulse but also you know i think it also says that employers is entertainment and the primary way of saying that entertainment is on television unless you happen to be one of the eighty thousand people lucky enough to pay a hundred miles to go see the game whereas politics you can get you can get your information in lots of different ways other than television and you can

inform yourself over a long period of time as we have seen now maybe it's too long a period of time the way the primaries stretched out covered with the general election campaign so that says something about the patio area sports pundit wrote a respected it's probably a little bit of an unfair comparison this is a one day event again something that last for years now it's also the culmination of the year so you know sibyl roles like election day so i guess for me the real measure would be can we get ninety seven percent ninety seven million as of the total population for you get that number of people will know mr alexander who you know and i know he taught a course at the kennedy school money every was the governor of tennessee before was elected to the senate and his course included an effort to develop in a primary

election model for a fourth presidential election that was based on the nfl schedule because of his experience when he was running into things and all had a similar experience was that the first few primaries tend to have a disproportionate impact so omar as always struck by the fact that you could lose the first three or four games in the nfl but you were still guaranteed the opportunity to protest unpaid for twelve more weeks before you go down semi finals so he and i actually had a very interesting day with some very bright at the kennedy school at harvard china think of a primary election system that would keep everybody even for minimum of sixteen primaries equivalent of sixteen nfl games and what you could do in terms of competitive balance of revenue sharing we didn't come up with any answers but i do think it's a good prop for political

scientists them in the primary pre primary issue in voter participation rate is and i hope that when you figure that out they will come back and share that with us you have others that was so fascinating that recall for globalization in sports program so thank you very much for being a former commissioner of the national football league and he's been speaking with bill lacy director of the dole institute of politics at the university of kansas who picked up a new speaker syria that the doctor on leadership globalization and sports i'm kate mcintyre k pr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas