Rubino: How CBS exec, NFL player stepped up after JFK death

It was a no-brainer, long before the term came into vogue.

Of course you cancel professional football games scheduled to be played 48 hours after the president of the United States has been assassinated.

Well, you do if you're Joe Foss, World War II fighter pilot awarded the Medal of Honor and, in 1963, commissioner of the American Football League. And you don't think twice about your league's television contract with ABC.

On Nov. 22, 1963, a Friday, John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the fourth presidential assassination in United States history, and the first in 62 years. The event was a cataclysmic shock, instantly and in some ways forever traumatizing a nation, and only those not yet alive at the time might think that statement is an exaggeration.

But if you're Pete Rozelle, the 37-year-old NFL commissioner with a mostly public relations background, the show must go on, and to rationalize your decision you issue the following statement: "It has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy. Football was Mr. Kennedy's game. He thrived on competition."

Even with 50 years of hindsight, that statement comes off as disingenuous at best and offers a shuddering, alternative meaning to the term "no-brainer," as in one who is missing common sense, if not a moral compass.

To be fair, and for what it's worth, Rozelle, who died in 1996, had conferred with and received the backing of Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger. And in the following decades, Rozelle was quick to express regret over his decision to allow the NFL's seven games to be played on Nov. 24, 1963. However, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, with no shortage of commemorative analysis, Rozelle, even posthumously, must come under fire once again.

But this isn't merely yet another shot at the former NFL commissioner. This is also meant to heap retrospective praise on a television network executive who made an unusual decision, especially for a corporate chieftain, to place news judgment over sports entertainment and profits.

The corporate executive was CBS president Frank Stanton, whose network had recently renewed an exclusive and lucrative contract to televise NFL games. As Rozelle was announcing that the games would be played, Stanton ordered all CBS programming, including that Sunday's NFL games, be replaced by continued assassination news coverage without commercial interruptions until after the slain president's burial on Monday. And that would seem to pose a variation on an intriguing question: If pro football games are played but nobody watches, do they count?

Except plenty of people did watch the games of Nov. 24, 1963, just not on TV. All seven NFL teams that hosted games played on the Sunday after the JFK assassination drew crowds approximate with their average home attendance, including 62,992 at Yankee Stadium for the New York Giants-St. Louis Cardinals game.

At Franklin Field in Philadelphia, the Eagles drew 60,671 for their game against the Washington Redskins, a huge turnout especially considering both teams were deep into terrible seasons and both had lobbied Rozelle to postpone the game out of respect for the nation and the slain president.

And in the Philadelphia locker room, a noble gesture was taking shape.

Behind the leadership of Pete Retzlaff, the Eagles' All-Pro tight end and president of the NFL players association, each Philadelphia player agreed to contribute $50 to the family of Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit, who had been shot to death, allegedly by the suspected assassin of Kennedy, soon after the president had been killed. Tippit, 39, supported his wife and three children on his police salary of less than $6,000 a year and two part-time jobs. Fifty bucks might not sound like much today, but this was 1963, when pro football salaries for the most part weren't all that different from those of average American workers.

It only seems appropriate to discuss the Kennedy assassination as its 50th anniversary nears. And if you're a pro football fan, the discussion has to include NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle's

monumentally insensitive decision to play the games as scheduled, just two days after the tragedy.

But it might be time to add to and enrich the discussion, making sure to mention the responsible, sensitive, stand-up leadership of CBS president Frank Stanton and NFL union leader Pete Retzlaff and his 1963 Philadelphia Eagles teammates.