Statuesque Andy Dolich

The Chronicle's outstanding baseball writer John Shea recently wrote a piece on the L.A. Dodgers' honoring Jackie Robinson with a statue that will be created and erected outside Dodger Stadium. It made me think about sports venues in the Bay Area, and which teams are winning the Battle of the Bronze.

A few years ago, during the heyday of Harbaugh, KNBR's Gary Radnich -- the sports-talk Cuisinart of Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld and Don Cornelius -- took up the topic on his show with a position that there should be a three-statue limit for any team's building. For the Niners he proposed Joe Montana, Bill Walsh and Eddie DeBartolo. What ensued was the perfect mix of sports-talk logic and lunacy. On-air colleagues, 49er Faithful and many callers were in vehement disagreement with Radnich's three-statue rule. They lobbied for Steve Young, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig, Bob St. Clair, John Brodie, John Taylor and every other 49er in the Football Hall of Fame. One delusional caller suggested that Wendell Tyler would be a worthy model for his own likeness.

Let's fast-forward and take a look at who is currently cast in bronze in front of our local stadiums and arenas.

AT&T: Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Orlando
     Cepeda -- Giants get gold for their bronzes

Candlestick: None, but how about a bronze plaque with "There Used

     to Be a Ballpark Here" as sung by Frank Sinatra and "I Left My Heart

     in San Francisco" by Tony Bennett

O.Co Coliseum: none

Oracle Arena: none

SAP Pavilion: none

Stanford Stadium: none

Avaya Stadium: none

Sleep Train Arena: none

Cal's Memorial Stadium: none

Stanford-Maples: Hank Luisetti

Cal-Haas Pavilion: Pete Newell

If Michelangelo, Rodin or Giacometti wanted to slap some clay around in the Bay Area sports world, whom would you want cast in larger-than-life bronze as you walk into your favorite venue?

I'm sure the local franchises would like to hear what you have to say. Remember, there is a cornucopia of construction occurring in Northern California. We have Levi's, Avya in the Siliconia. The Warriors' new hoop palace in Mission Bay and a new King's Castle in Sacramento. The combined construction costs are over $3 billion, not including what may happen with the Raiders and A's. If you are a team owner, why not spend a few extra bucks for some heroic icons to grace the team's new home?

This is my list:

As far as Levi's Stadium goes, I'm putting Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Bill Walsh and Eddie DeBartolo at the entrances.

SAP Pavilion: Carcharodon Carcharias, which in English is "great white shark." Just think about the photo ops.

Oracle: The one and only Al Attles, who has been the symbol of class, professionalism and success for the Warriors franchise since 1969. I'd also start working on a Curry bronze for future use at their hoops palace in Mission Bay.

O.co Coliseum

Raiders: Al Davis

A's: Walter Haas and Charlie Finley, the yin and yang of world championship winning -- one with class, one with crass.

Special recognition to Bill Graham for the tunes of our lives and Days on the Green.

No shortage of Amazing A's and Silver and Black Raiders for the list of player and coach nominees.

Cal and Stanford stadiums: Statues of a male and female student athlete.

Avaya Stadium: A giant seismograph.

King's Castle in Sacramento: Mayor Kevin Johnson, the ultimate point guard in keeping the team in town and building the new arena.

In an area that can celebrate sculptures of a crouching spider, a science-fiction rocket and a humongous bow and arrow, surely we can erect statues at our stadiums and arenas that pay homage to the legendary exploits of our sporting heroes.

Longtime sports executive Andy Dolich has more than three decades of experience in the professional sports industry, mostly spent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This includes stints in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL. He operates his consulting business, Dolich & Associates, in Los Altos. 

Jerry Izenberg's new book is especially timely.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle (right) presents the Super Bowl trophy to longtime nemesis Al Davis (left), after Super Bowl XV in New Orleans, 1981.

Rozelle:  A Biography Dave Newhouse

It's not a name you hear often anymore, but it's not a name you easily forget, because professional football wouldn't be the same without it.

Pete Rozelle.

Nobody did more to make pro football the nation's No. 1 sport than Rozelle, who wasn't only the National Football League's greatest commissioner, but the greatest commissioner in any sport.

This past Super Bowl had the largest television audience ever, which can be credited to the innovations that Rozelle brought to the NFL as its commissioner between 1960 and 1989. He singlehandedly transformed a struggling league by introducing revenue and television profit sharing.

He further guided the NFL's fantastic growth by putting every game on television, while personally introducing MondayNight Football. He oversaw the merger of two leagues, he took a firm stance on gambling, and there wouldn't be a Super Bowl without his fingerprints either.

If you have forgotten his impact or aren't sure of its magnitude, then you could use a refresher course. And there's a recently published book with the complete story: Rozelle: A Biography, written by the only man who could have done it justice, Jerry Izenberg.

Izenberg requested and received permission from Rozelle 30 years ago to write his book, an ongoing process that continued past Rozelle's death from brain cancer in 1996 until the book was published by the University of Nebraska Press late last year.

Izenberg, 84, was the perfect choice to write this book. He covered his first NFL game in 1955, when Rozelle was working in marketing in San Francisco before returning to the Los Angeles Rams as its new general manager. Izenberg became a highly respected sports columnist at the Newark Star-Ledger, which he now serves as sports columnist emeritus from his desert home in Nevada.

Former National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern wrote the foreword for this book. How impactful was Rozelle's commissionership? "Baseball is America's pastime," noted Stern. "Basketball is America's game. But Pete Rozelle made football America's passion."

Rozelle's story begins in 1926 in Lynwood, Calif. Izenberg has created a modern history book on the NFL, with thorough research and richly written prose that's Runyanesque.

While growing up in a blue-collar home, Rozelle discovered journalism in high school. His friends noticed his keen intellect, intense concentration and serious manner -- the makings of a commissioner. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Compton Junior College and then the University of San Francisco, where he got into sports publicity at just the right time, with both the NIT basketball champion and an undefeated football team on campus.

He joined the Rams' publicity department after college, and later became the team's general manager at 29. After NFL Commissioner Bert Bell died, Rozelle hardly was the first choice to replace him. It took 20 ballots before he was even nominated. Then, at 33 ballots, he was hired, basically, because the nominating process ordeal had worn out the league's owners.

But the owners discovered they had a leader who was a visionary, not a puppet, and someone who ruled with a hammer. He suspended two star players, Green Bay's Paul Hornung and Detroit's Alex Karras, for one season for betting on games. And he made the iconic Packers coach Vince Lombardi fly from Green Bay to New York before telling him about Hornung's suspension. Rozelle also made Joe Namath give up his partnership in Bachelors III, a New York nightclub that was a gathering spot for gamblers.

Rozelle made one early error in judgment, failing to postpone the NFL's weekend games after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. (The American Football League decided not to play that same weekend.) Rozelle admitted years later he had made the wrong decision.

However, after the two leagues merged on the field in 1970, Rozelle encountered his worst nightmare: Al Davis, the Oakland Raiders owner and former AFL commissioner who had sought Rozelle's job and was rejected. Here were two opposites: the charming, sophisticated, boardroom-smart Rozelle, and the disarming, calculating, street-smart Davis. And, oh, how they clashed.

Davis challenged Rozelle's authority at every opportunity, filing several lawsuits against the league. A frustrated but controlled Rozelle called Davis a "charming rogue." In the early 1980s, Davis went against a 22-0 (with five abstentions) vote against him and moved his team from Oakland to Los Angeles.

That was the first time Rozelle felt his authority slipping away. He weathered another storm in the '80s: the short-lived United States Football League. Then a third storm arose when the NFL Management Council, which dealt with labor issues, no longer chose to consult with him.

The former boy wonder wore down on the job. And there were problems at home. His first wife was an alcoholic, which led to their divorce and Rozelle's gaining full custody of their only child, a daughter. He then became the perfect single father, but remarried into a family of four children, a situation that brought new problems, including the death of a stepson.

After resigning as commissioner, Rozelle returned to California. Though he was a chain smoker, it was brain cancer that took his life at 70, seven years after he had retired. He was replaced by his legal counsel, Paul Tagliabue, who in turn was replaced by Roger Goodell, whose hammer is much softer than Rozelle's, judging by the leniency of his $43-million-a-year commissionership.

It's a different century from the one in which Rozelle ruled, but how effective would he be if he were commissioner today?

"I'm not sure, because of the change in ownerships," Izenberg said recently in a phone interview. "We have so many bottom-line owners now, who don't know a football from an egg, and it's all money, money, money.

"If Pete were commissioner ... he was always a step ahead. Only it wasn't to make money, but to keep the game on top of the world. It was Rozelle who planted the seeds of playing games in Europe."

The NFL now has Deflategate and the dual suspensions of Ray Rice, for knocking out the woman who later became his wife, and Adrian Peterson, for whipping his young son with a switch. Goodell initially suspended Rice for two games -- then indefinitely -- after "discovering" a tape of the incident that had been around for months. Peterson was forced to sit out the entire 2014 season.

"How do you handle the Ray Rice situation?" Izenberg asked. "You say, 'This is what I'm going to do,' the same thing Rozelle did with Lombardi. You go right to the threat. Goodell has enough security people to invade Cuba, and he couldn't find the [Rice] tape? Rozelle found the FBI report [on Hornung and Karras] without one security person."

So Rozelle would have the same firm hand today that he had, excluding Davis, 35 years ago?

"He would have, or he would leave," Izenberg said.
  

Retired Oakland Tribune columnist Dave Newhouse will have two new books

published this year: Founding 49ers: The Dark Days Before the Dynasty, due out in late August, and an as yet untitled Hoosiers-like basketball book,

due out mid-fall.

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