Pete Rozelle

Related Biography: NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue

Like his predecessor as NFL commissioner, Paul Tagliabue's boyhood passion was basketball and not football. After he was sidelined by a ligament tear in his sophomore year at Georgetown, he began spending more time on academics, leading him eventually into a career in law. It was as a lawyer that Tagliabue first came into close contact with the NFL.

He was born Paul John Tagliabue in Jersey City, New Jersey, on November 24, 1940, the third of four sons born into a working-class family with roots in Italy. As a boy, he excelled in both academics and sports, playing three sports at his Jersey City high school. It was his prowess at basketball, however, that eventually won him a scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Georgetown, he studied law at New York University. He began his career as a law clerk in the U.S. Claims Court in 1965. In 1969 he joined Covington & Burling, where he gradually took on more and more of the firm's NFL account. In the 1980s, Tagliabue became a managing partner at the firm and was made its lead lawyer on NFL matters. The decade saw an explosion of litigation involving the NFL, during which Tagliabue became a close adviser to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle.

Ironically, the flood of litigation that brought Tagliabue closer to the NFL and Rozelle are believed to have played a large part in Rozelle's decision to retire from the league in 1989. Tagliabue was tapped as Rozelle's successor. Of Tagliabue's qualifications for the job, Minnesota Viking President Mike Lynn told the St. Paul Pioneer Press: "He's a forward-thinking man. He's a man of ideas who can take us into the next century."

Tagliabue and his wife, Chandler, whom he married in 1965, live in New York City, which is also home to the headquarters of the NFL. The couple has two children, Drew and Emily.