Paul Tagliabue has a way of looking at a big picture and neatly editing it down to its most essential parts. It’s a character attribute his many admirers are quick to mention, and it’s a trait that exhibits itself quickly in a conversation with the former commissioner of the National Football League. For example, ask [...]

In 1972, Bill France Jr. was handed the reins to the family business after decades of learning how to drive it. Known as Bill Jr. even after his father passed away in 1992, he took the business Bill Sr. had created and elevated it to unprecedented heights no one, except perhaps Bill Jr., could have [...]

For nearly 40 years, George M. Steinbrenner, late owner of the New York Yankees, was the very definition of the passionate owner who would do whatever it took to field a winning team. He also was one of the first owners to grasp that TV-related revenues could be important to a bottom line and could [...]

No entity has had more of an impact on American sports broadcasting than the National Football League, and no single figure was more important to that league than Pete Rozelle. Commissioner of the NFL from 1960 to “89, Rozelle presided over the changes that made the NFL the nation’s premier professional sports organization and gave [...]

Val Pinchbeck was as instrumental in the growth of the National Football League as any commissioner. As the NFL’s vice president of broadcasting, Pinchbeck spent four decades smoothing relationships between the increasingly powerful NFL and its growing number of broadcast partners, while quietly solving the league’s scheduling puzzle with expertise unmatched by man or machine. [...]

The only modern-era professional player to become commissioner of his own sport, Deane Beman brought a unique perspective to the office that forever changed the PGA Tour. Named the Tour’s second commissioner in 1974 — at age 35 — Beman maintained the sport’s traditions while infusing it with a financial savvy that made the PGA [...]