Carroll Rosenbloom: An Old-Fashioned NFL Owner
CARROLL ROSENBLOOM was an NFL owner whose teams won 66% of their games. He was a shrewd, fearless, intense, strong-willed and superstitious man who could be generous or nasty. He was a good friend to have but an awful enemy, and there were large parts of himself and his plans which he didn’t allow anyone else to know.
Carroll was born in Baltimore in 1907, one of nine children of Solomon Rosenbloom, who’d started a denim manufacturing company around 1895. Carroll grew up on Hollins Street in Baltimore, and went to City College High School, and to the University of Pennsylvania, where he played halfback for Penn in 1927 and ’28 and was good enough and hungry enough at football to stick in the memory of his backfield coach, Bert Bell.
But the young Carroll wasn’t trying to make a career in football; like a good son, he returned to Baltimore and went to work for his father in the denim business. When Solomon Rosenbloom died in 1942, he left control of the business to Carroll, not to any of his older brothers, some of whom resented this.
Carroll stepped over his brothers, and charged ahead. He’d obtained lucrative government contracts for Civilian Conservation Corps workers during the Great Depression. Now he got lucrative government contracts for military uniforms in World War Two. He aggressively bought out rival denim firms. By 1950, the first, second and third largest denim producers in America were part of Carroll Rosenbloom’s company, or of companies controlled by him. He had 7,000 employees.
He diversified until his business interests were quite varied. Journalists who did some digging learned that he controlled something called the Philadelphia & Reading Corporation and was the largest stockholder in something else called Universal Controls. He kept the names of these companies deliberately vague.
Any attempts to get Carroll to explain how he did business were met with a wary silence, a burst of profanity or a quick exit. He claimed his moves in business were instinctive. What he was proud of learning was how to cook, crab soup especially. He was happy to share crab soup with a journalist if the guy would cut out the nosy questions about business.
The first edition of the Baltimore Colts had been launched with fanfare in 1947 — and died in 1950. NFL commissioner Bert Bell and the other team owners in the league wanted to make sure, if the NFL put a second pro football franchise in Baltimore, that the team would succeed. Bert Bell came to Rosenbloom and convinced him to buy the team and support pro football.
But Carroll Rosenbloom was not at all like the eager beaver owners who would come into the league in later decades — men who were realizing a lifelong dream, happily throwing in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in order to join a very exclusive club whose success or failure would define them.
Rosenbloom was skeptical of pro football as a business, and cranky about having to spend $13,000 to buy the Colts franchise. At first, he refused to let himself be defined or judged by how well his football team did on the field, or by how the league did financially.
But soon, he was addicted to watching the Colts play, and wanted desperately for them to win each Sunday. Before a Colts game, he had three superstitious routines he felt he had to observe: to pat the head of his star quarterback Johnny Unitas; to take a piece of adhesive tape from his defensive back Lenny Lyles, and to circle the field with his brilliant young coach Don Shula.
During Colts games, Rosenbloom had sweaty palms, and smoked three packs of cigarettes. One pack was to help him absorb the disasters lurking when the Colts had the ball; a second pack was to help him endure the agonizing deficiencies of the Colts defense. The third pack was to comfort and distract him at halftime. The Colts won most of their games, many of them handily. Observers wondered how many packs of cigarettes Rosenbloom would have consumed if the Colts had ever gone 4–10. When the Colts did lose, he cried.
He sometimes said ‘I’m not like these other rich owners who want a yacht or a castle. All I want is 30 NFL titles.’
He told everyone he was looking after the interests of the Baltimore Colts, not necessarily the NFL as a whole, and he squabbled with Bert Bell, whose job it was to keep every franchise in the league strong. Bell thought it was essential for the growth of the league to be dead set against gambling, but Rosenbloom liked to gamble, big money sometimes, and no one was going to tell him he couldn’t gamble on pro football.
Similarly, Bert Bell felt obliged to remind Carroll not to publicly rip the referees who officiated Colts games. Any public charge of incompetence, Bell would remind Carroll, hurts the NFL brand.
To which Rosenbloom would reply, ‘I’ll say whatever the hell I want!’
When the NFL owners met, he posed as a lone wolf, hard to predict, playing hunches, unconcerned by how his actions looked to the other owners. Rosenbloom was the one who suggested hiring Pete Rozelle as the new NFL commissioner, replacing Bert Bell, and Rosenbloom also helped broker the NFL-AFL merger. Both of these were landmarks in the growth and success of the NFL. Still, when NFL owners asked him to listen to them, or to join a committee working on a knotty problem, Rosenbloom’s classic answer was: ‘I don’t have the time.’
He tried hard to hold down the salaries of his star players. In 1964, when Johnny Unitas asked for a $90,000 contract, the Colts general manager warned Unitas, “Carroll will jump out of an airplane when I tell him that.”
Unitas said, ‘Then get him a parachute.’
Though proud of Pete Rozelle’s work for the league, Rosenbloom still feuded with him. Rosenbloom enjoyed and cultivated his feuds; they seemed to give him energy. He feuded with the sports press, especially John Steadman, the dean of Baltimore sportswriters.
After the 1968 season, the Colts went to the Super Bowl the heavy favorite over the AFL upstart New York Jets. But the Jets beat the Colts 16–7 in one of the great upsets in sports history. It was traumatic for many of the Colts players. They were playing not just for their team but for a whole league, for the idea that the NFL was a sharply better league than the AFL — and this defeat dramatically changed that thinking.
This Super Bowl defeat was also traumatic for Carroll Rosenbloom, and permanently changed his view of Colts head coach Don Shula. The raucous post-game “victory party” Rosenbloom had planned became a painful evening of downcast eyes and hushed voices. Rosenbloom had offices in New York, he often lived out of a suite in the Navarro Hotel in New York, and many of his business friends in New York ribbed him no end about losing the Super Bowl to the New York Jets.
He lost some respect for Coach Shula. ‘Some genius,’ Rosenbloom would mutter. Shula, who knew he was a very good coach, and had been voted NFL Coach of the Year in both 1964 and 1968, was annoyed by the way Rosenbloom was treating him.
In the 1969 season, the Colts went 8–5–1, and missed the playoffs. The idea spread that they were an aging team, well past their prime. Rosenbloom was visibly angry about the Colts record. After the season, he left for a long vacation in Asia.
Meanwhile, in Miami, a go-getter named Joe Robbie was determined to make his Miami Dolphins an NFL power. To do that, he needed a first-rate head coach. Around the NFL, it was common knowledge that Carroll Rosenbloom had soured on Don Shula in Baltimore. So Joe Robbie asked someone who knew Don Shula to find out if Shula might like to come to Miami as head coach with not only a handsome salary but also a piece of the team.
Shula knew NFL franchise prices were rising sharply and he called Joe Robbie and said he might be very interested in such a deal. Robbie asked Shula to get permission from the Colts to talk to Robbie about coaching the Dolphins. Shula called the Colts offices, asked for Carroll Rosenbloom and got Carroll’s son Steve on the line. In those days, long before cell phones, being in Asia meant being more or less unreachable. And Rosenbloom enjoyed being elusive.
It couldn’t have been easy being the son of Carroll Rosenbloom. Carroll didn’t give Steve enough to do, and maybe Steve liked the idea of making an important decision without consulting the old man. For whatever reason, Steve Rosenbloom gave Shula permission to go work for Joe Robbie in Miami, Robbie hired Shula as the Dolphins head coach and gave Shula a piece of the team, and Shula coached brilliantly and led the Dolphins to several Super Bowl titles and a perfect 17–0 season.
Carroll Rosenbloom came home from Asia, and was royally pissed to learn that Don Shula had flown the coop. When Rosenbloom accused Joe Robbie of tampering, Robbie blew up and said Rosenbloom’s own son had given Robbie permission!
Rosenbloom retorted, ‘Steve doesn’t have that kind of authority!’
NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle stepped in and ruled that Shula could stay in Miami, but that Robbie had indeed tampered and the Dolphins would lose a first-round draft pick to the Colts. Robbie, who had plans to build the Dolphins through the draft, was furious with Rozelle. How, he asked, could Shula have permission to talk to him, but he not have permission to talk to Shula?
Both Robbie and Shula thought Rosenbloom had been a jerk about the whole thing. Rosenbloom thought Shula was an ingrate and Robbie a sleazy upstart. All three were stubborn, ambitious men with big egos, and none of this was ever resolved, and no one ever apologized.
Carroll Rosenbloom was not crazy about the support he was getting in Baltimore. He wanted a stadium better suited for football than Memorial Stadium, and he wanted the stadium filled, not just for regular season games but for the preseason, too.
He expected all Baltimore citizens to be as passionate about the Colts as he was, and was furious that Baltimore taxpayers weren’t eager to foot the bill for improvements to Memorial Stadium. Rosenbloom was one of the first owners in any sport to see the commercial potential of “luxury boxes” that could be sold to high-rollers for huge amounts.
In 1972, Rosenbloom made his most audacious move. He traded the whole Colts franchise for the Los Angeles Rams franchise, and got a team in a bigger market, with better weather. He traded his beloved Colts for the Los Angeles Rams, and gave the Colts to a new owner, Robert Irsay.
Rosenbloom’s Rams won seven straight division titles, and Bob Irsay’s Colts didn’t win a playoff game for 23 years.
Carroll Rosenbloom met a bad end. One mid-afternoon in 1979, he was found drowned, in a swimsuit, about 150 yards out to sea, off the coast of Golden Beach, Florida. Rosenbloom was 72 years old, a poor swimmer whose children said he rarely went to the beach alone — and never swam alone.
Steve Rosenbloom always wondered if maybe his father had been abducted and drowned by a hit man, his body left to float out to sea in the riptides off Golden Beach. Or murdered by a mob guy at a swimming pool, and his body carried to the beach and dumped in the surf. Steve knew it would be just like his dad to lose a lot of money gambling and then tell a muscle guy to get lost. Steve said of the drowning, “If he went out alone that day, he was breaking the habit of a lifetime.”
One man claimed to have heard Rosenbloom off shore, crying for help and said he’d tried to rescue him. This would-be rescuer was a foreign-born man named Tanguay; but reporters who inquired about Tanguay were told by the police that he spoke little English, and didn’t wish to talk to the press. So the hugely accomplished life of Carroll Rosenbloom ended not only in tragedy but in a fair degree of mystery.