THE SEARCH : Number of Candidates Growing as NFL Looks for a Commissioner

After considering more than 65 candidates for commissioner earlier this summer, National Football League club owners are now interviewing still others.

They are declining to name names, but many of the original candidates are still on the list.

This week’s developments, through Thursday:

--Some of the leading figures in corporate America have been, or will be, contacted at the request of Heidrick and Struggles, the New York search firm employed by the NFL at a cost of $200,000.

Candidates include the top people at six national companies--J. William Grimes of Hallmark Cards, Michael P. Mallardi of ABC, Robert C. Wright of NBC, Alexander S. Kroll of Young & Rubicam; William D. Smithburg of Quaker Oats, and John H. Bryan of Sara Lee--plus Hall of Famer Roger Staubach, now a Dallas businessman, and Harvey Schiller, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.

--Jim Finks, general manager of the New Orleans Saints, remains at the top of what is still a long list of candidates to succeed Pete Rozelle, who announced his retirement last spring.

--A Sacramento report that U.S. District Judge Raul A. Ramirez has been added to the list drew this comment from Lamar Hunt, president of the Kansas City Chiefs and co-chairman of both the original search committee, which has been superseded, and the new one: “I never heard (Ramirez’s) name before I saw it in the paper.”

--As a result of the NFL’s widely publicized, so-far futile search, a number of new candidates have been suggested. Said Hunt: “We went back to all the clubs and asked them to submit any new names they had. The list is (longer now).”

--The Heidrick and Struggles firm, which is still working with the league, was chosen because of its success in finding chief executives or company presidents for these among other concerns: Apple Computer, John Sculley; the American Stock Exchange, Kenneth Leibler; CBS, Thomas Wyman; RCA, Robert Frederick; United Air Lines, Stephen M. Wolf, and Pabst Brewing, William E. Smith Jr., plus three sports executives: Big Ten Commissioner James Delaney, National League President William White, and former baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

--A principal difference between the recent searches for baseball and football commissioners is that the leagues specified different qualifications.

Before baseball’s club owners chose Ueberroth, they told Heidrick and Struggles to find a candidate who could cope with their two most pressing problems: loss of national popularity, particularly as reflected in television exposure, and loss of money.

Two of Ueberroth’s principal achievements were in these areas. He improved baseball’s TV contracts and helped improve the clubs’ profit-loss position.

The NFL, by contrast, didn’t identify problem areas. Instead, the original search committee detailed the characteristics required--integrity, leadership and interpersonal skills, management and communications skills and stature, plus two that have become controversial: football knowledge and skill in negotiating with players and television.

The committee put a heavy emphasis on football background and negotiating skills, sources said. And it is this that has led to the present rupture in the league.

It knocked out every candidate but Finks, prompting the league’s newer club owners--those who bought franchises in the last 12 or 15 years--to rebel against the NFL’s old guard.

The newer owners are demanding that the league consider distinguished non-football executives as well as those who, like Finks, have mainly a football background. Finks got 16 of the necessary 19 votes last month when there were 11 abstentions.

“Heidrick and Struggles had submitted the names of 58 qualified candidates,” one owner said. “And all 58 were eliminated for one reason only--they had never negotiated with an NFL player.

“Well, that is preposterous. Naturally they hadn’t. How is the head of General Electric going to negotiate with a linebacker?

“How does player negotiating figure anyway? That was never Pete Rozelle’s long suit.”

Rozelle, asked if he considered football knowledge an essential to his position, said: “The guy should either have it or be a quick study.”

Said an owner: “You can count on one thing from Heidrick and Struggles. Everybody they pick for a chief executive is a quick study.”

Those they recommended highly to the NFL were Franklin Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation; James Henderson, president of Cummins Engine Co.; lawyer Paul Curran, and Turner broadcasting executive Robert J. Wussler, plus Grimes, Mallardi, Wright, Kroll, Smithburg, Bryan, Schiller and an unnamed 45-year-old publicist.

--The fight between the old guard and the newer club owners widened this week with a dispute between committee co-chairman Wellington Mara, president of the New York Giants, and Miami lawyer Hugh Culverhouse Jr., legal counsel to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team owned by his father.

In an angry exchange of memoranda and letters, they faxed their messages to the 26 other clubs.

Culverhouse first charged that Mara had set up a New York meeting last month with Finks and two potential deputy commissioners, Los Angeles businessman Willie Davis and a New Jersey public administrator, Robert Mulcahy.

On Monday, Mara replied: “No meeting for such a purpose was ever held in my presence or to my knowledge. . . . It . . . is an untruth.”

On Tuesday, Culverhouse wrote the Giants’ owner: “I stand by my memorandum.”

In a further letter to Mara Thursday, Culverhouse referred to a July 23 newspaper interview with writer Dave Klein of the Newark Star Ledger in which Mara was quoted as saying: “Once we (the original search committee) decided that Finks was the man we would recommend, we asked (Davis and Mulcahy), without a promise of a job, without mention of anything like deputy commissioner roles, to meet with us and Finks. . . . “

Two meetings were held, “the first for about an hour and a half, the second for four hours,” Mara was quoted as saying, adding that no jobs were offered. “Hiring deputies would have been entirely at Finks’ discretion.”

Then Culverhouse asked Mara: “Why did you have these three meet for 5 1/2 hours? Why did you not arrange for Finks to meet with . . . the other candidates? . . . Be honest with your fellow owners.”

Mara and Culverhouse were unavailable Thursday, but the representative of a new-era ownership said: “The search committee had no league mandate to restructure the league with deputy commissioners.

“The (idea) was never mentioned at a league meeting. Heidrick and Struggles were never told about it. The committee just went off on its own.”

Its objective, a source said, was eventually to replace Finks, 62, with either Davis, 55, or Mulcahy, 52, depending on their performances as deputies.

“In other words, the committee was choosing our next two commissioners for us,” an owner said. “Thanks a lot.”