Goodell was a man on a (com)mission
''So I wrote letters to all the NFL teams -- there were 28 then; this is before e-mail -- and I told them I was looking for an internship, pretty much anything,'' he says. ''I was 22, and all I'd ever wanted to do was work in the commissioner's office.''
Goodell, a solid athlete who captained the football, basketball and baseball teams as a senior at Bronxville (N.Y.) High School, had just graduated from Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh.
His whole life, the way he explains it, had been focused on getting into NFL administration, sort of the way young people nowadays want to be the best karaoke singer on the planet.
And what did the NFL and its member units think of young Roger's passion?
The take-a-hike letters came at a furious pace.
''I got rejected by everybody,'' Goodell says. ''More than once because I kept sending letters. I sent letters to [then-commissioner] Pete Rozelle himself, to NFL Properties, to the management council, even to other sports, to baseball, the NBA. The rejection letters kept coming -- the number of which was enormous -- but I kept firing.''
Eventually, he took a job in the steel industry, doing ''executive training'' at a mill in Aliquippa, Pa., hometown of Tony Dorsett and Mike Ditka.
His fascination with the NFL never waned, never flickered, even with molten sparks flying around him.
''I loved Pete Rozelle. I read everything I could on the NFL. Of course, I'd never met Rozelle, and this was all done from afar. But I had set my sights on the league office, and that was that.''
Don Weiss, an assistant to Rozelle, wrote Pete's personal rejection letter after Rozelle had shuffled him Goodell's request with the words ''Please handle'' scrawled in the margin.
''I got a letter from Weiss, and he said if I was in New York, maybe I could stop by for an interview,'' Goodell says. ''I called him immediately -- this was before caller ID -- and said, 'I'm in New York.' I jumped in my little Honda, and eight hours later I was there.''
The rest, which culminated in longtime commissioner Paul Tagliabue's retirement announcement last July and Goodell being voted to the position by the team owners in August, is history.
In between came 24 years of learning on the job and great joy.
''I'm the most fortunate guy in the world,'' Goodell says.
Will he do this commissioner gig for 17 years, like Tags? Or 19 years like the legendary Rozelle? Or even the 13 years of Bert Bell, who died in office, opening the way for Rozelle?
Goodell laughs hard.
In case you wondered, Goodell, who was married at a church in Lake Forest, just a short walk from the Bears' old Halas Hall, is not much like lawyer Tagliabue.
They are fast friends, but Paul, the litigator, always seemed like he was reading from a brief.
Goodell, who will be introduced to the global football media Friday at the Miami Convention Center at the annual commissioner's news conference, is more like the cheerful guy you chat with on a long bus ride.
He's quick to point out that there's ''no better time in the NFL than Super Bowl time,'' and that SB XLI, his first as emperor, features ''a tremendous matchup'' of the Bears and Colts, ''with great coaches and great teams,'' equaling ''great entertainment.''
Yes, you reply, it's nice not to have stinkers involved.
''We don't have any stinkers, Rick,'' he says.
T
This year it's Cirque du Soleil for pregame, Billy Joel for the national anthem and wee purple Prince for the halftime show.
Not too risky, but a guy who once changed his name to a symbol could be a potential problem.
''I try to stay away from selecting entertainment,'' Goodell says. ''I mean, my favorite movie is 'The Sound of Music.'''
Lord. Are we talking Julie Andrews soon?
''I'm a little hipper than that,'' Goodell says with a chuckle. ''The thing is, we want the artists to understand what we're trying to accomplish, which is to bring the world together around an event. We don't want to hamper their creativity, but this is supposed to be great entertainment. That's how it's become a national holiday.''
Not officially declared, of course.
But will Chicago be a ghost town come Sunday afternoon, or what?
Goodell had the willies before that slap-trash Houston halftime show.
''It was disturbing to me before the event,'' he says. ''We had spent a lot of time with [Jacnd Timberlake], and their show didn't have a real message. It didn't strike an emotion that was positive. I had my head down before the event.''
He has heard that Prince ''understands.''
The NFL learned a lesson after the 2004 ''wardrobe malfunction.''
''We learned this lesson,'' Goodell says. ''When it's your brand, you don't turn it over to somebody else.''
That brand will be different with a new commissioner, one who was active early in minority hiring -- paving the way for Bears equipment manager Tony Medlin back in 1987, by the way -- and a man not taken to big words, pretense or filibusters.
The sometimes acid-tongued Tagliabue -- ''He could dismiss with the best of them,'' Goodell says with a laugh -- turned his Super Bowl news conferences into something resembling a State of the Union address.
''It's a press conference,'' Goodell says. ''I'm not going to give a talk. I'm jumping right in for the questions.''
He'll get hammered a bit. Comes with the territory.
But his answer to that earlier question, about how long he'll rule, was this: ''I can't imagine doing anything else.''
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