The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 84

1 0 Part HI Thursday, March 19, 1981 CogAnflcUg fames a Ram Era Ends Jack Teele (Resigns Teele does not rule out returning to pro football but would seek a change of responsibilities. "I'd like to become more active in personnel. Scouting, drafting those things have always fascinated me. I did a lot of that for Dan. I didn't do any with Carroll or Georgia.

I believe in the draft as the way to win and perpetuate winning in the league. Don Klosterman has done a super job of getting extra draft choices (for the Rams)." He thinks football's free agency rules are too restrictive, "but I hope it doesn't take the radical form that baseball has. Fans identify with players and they have favorites. If you don't have continuity, it's like choosing up sides on a vacant lot. How can you root for that? "I think the fans want front offices to match wits in scouting, drafting and trading, just as they want competition on the field.

Then it's a fair fight." Teele says he has had less serious proposals this week "that maybe I should become Vince Ferragamo's agent. Everybody else has been." Ferragamo could do worse. Teele: "I'd tell him to sign a two-year contract and Please sec TEELE, Page 13 "Until three months ago I thought I'd re- Ys -cJ tire with the "13 Rams. I've only had two zjrjf jobs in 31 years." Jack Teele 1 i ORANGE COUNTY FOR 2 YEARS GREAT kind to me." he says. "Both did some awfully nice things for me that I'll never forget.

"Dan left me $20,000 to help me educate my children in college. Carroll sent Marilyn and me to Europe for 10 days, at his expense. Dan gave me a three-year revolving contract, so when Carroll took over I had three years to prove myself. That was Dan's plan. "I believe at the time of his death I was perhaps as strong a confidante of Carroll's in the Rams' business as any person.

I felt very close to him." Teele recalls how surprised he was when Rosenbloom assigned him virtually fulltime to pursue the Anaheim project. "He turned to me and said, 'You think you can do it without screwing it The stories roll out freely and endlessly. Teele recalls his first week on the job when he accompanied Hirsch on a speaking engagement, an experience he calls "a great lesson in humility." Hirsch advised Teele to introduce him with a joke: "Elroy will tell you everything he knows about football. It won't take long." Hirsch got up and said, "I'll tell 'em everything we both know, Jack. It won't take any longer." In the late '60s, when Teele was running the club, the Fearsome Foursome decided to wear white shoes.

Teele, observing at practice one day, said, "Geez, four guys in white shoes and everybody else in black shoes. That's ridiculous." Publicist Jerry Wilcox said, "Well, you're the boss. Go out and tell 'em to take off those white shoes." Teele: "A good leader delegates authority. You tell 'em." When Prothro was coach and the Rams practiced in Long Beach, near Teele's home, Prothro used to join the Teeles for dinner and to watch the Monday night game every week. Teele: "If the game was good he'd stay to the end, then go back and work until 1 o'clock in the morning.

But if it was boring he'd fall asleep on the davenport. My daughters would bring their boyfriends in to watch the great coach sleep." SUPPORT IN RETURN OUR OFFER of TIIAIJKS up IU By RICH ROBERTS.7W Staff Writer When Jack Teele went to work for the Rams, the quarterback was Bill Wade, who earned about $20,000 a year tops. A 50-yard line seat at the time cost five bucks. That was three owners, six head coaches, umpteen quarterbacks and 21 years ago. an era of great transition in pro football that, for Teele.

came to an end last week when he resigned as vice president, administration the club's longest standing front office executive. Although the terse announcement implied he had been fired, continuing Georgia Frontiere's purge of employees who had been close to stepson Steve Rosen -bloom, Teele states emphatically, "That's inaccurate totally inaccurate." Rosenbloom was fired. Dick Steinberg, the former director of player personnel, didn't have his contract renewed. Teele quit. It has been suggested that Teele's decision was at least precipitated by the major role Georgia's new husband Dominic is now taking in team affairs.

Teele admits that may have been a factor, although it was "not any one thing. There was never pressure from Mr. or Mrs. Frontiere to quit. At least I didn't feel any.

"It was said that I was summoned to the house (the Frontiere's Bel Air home) last week. I haven't been to the house in three weeks. "Dominic was down at Rams Park (in Anaheim) and we did talk, and we talked about the Rams' future policy and some organization decisions, most of which I agreed with and some of which I didn't agree with. "But I wouldn't call those or our resulting talks anything like the straw that broke the camel's back. He never said.

'Well, if you don't like 'em, I said it (the parting) was amiable, and I don't lie." But the talks with Frontiere might have firmed up a move Teele had been contemplating since the end of last season, especially when certain departures from Ram policy were discussed. Could he have lived with them? "Maybe one or two of 'em, no," he says, "but there's no guarantee they were going to happen. Yeah, I could have lived with 'em, but I might have been a bit more bored. That's all I want to say on that." Teele, a former sportswriter covering the Rams for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, was hired as the Rams' director of public relations in 1960 at the same time Pete Rozelle resigned as general manager of the club to become commissioner of the National Football League. "So I can always remember how long Pete's been commissioner," Teele says.

There were 145 applicants for the job. Teele was not among them, but he was asked to apply, anyway. When the health of the late owner Dan Reeves failed and Rozelle's successor, Elroy Hirsch, left to become athletic director at the University of Wisconsin, Teele became in effect the chief operating officer of the franchise, without title, under interim president Bill Barnes. A few years later when Carroll Rosenbloom took over, Teele reverted to administrative duties, leading to his key role as the Rams liaison man in the move to Anaheim. He describes that project as "at once the most exciting part of all my years with the Rams and maybe a key part in my making a decision to leave.

All of a sudden it was over and we were in there. "I didn't notice it during the season, but when the sea- EVERY COVER IS DISCOUNTED i 'CX son was over I was doing things I felt I could do with my left hand. It was back to normalcy, and normalcy was kind of boring routine things like writing bid letters to the hotels, the airlines, doing the preseason contracts with the other teams, the training camp contracts with Fullerton, the fans writing about seat improvements and answering all of those. "There's a great variety in the business, but I've done all of those things for so long that I felt a mild dissatisfaction. "I remembered when I hired Tommy Prothro (as head coach) in 71.

After he'd been there a couple of days he was all enthusiastic and excited and he said, 'You know, Jack, everybody ought to change jobs now and again. It rejuvenates I thought about that." Some might call it a "mid-life crisis." Teele: "Maybe so. I'm not sure. Until three months ago I always thought I'd retire with the Rams. As an adult I've had only two jobs in 31 years.

When you work for someone as long as I worked for the Rams there's great security involved. "But my children are grown. I'm at 50 right now. If I was ever going to do it, this seemed like the time, and now having done it, I'm excited as heck." Teele won't be seen around the employment offices. In three days out of work he received serious offers to talk about positions with four other organizations, three in sports including the NFL.

"Let's just say I'm going to be OK for awhile and I'll have the time to be selective and maybe even take a little time off before I make a decision," he says. Although it is believed he received a good settlement on terminating his contract with the Rams, he has no plans to retire or take a world cruise. "Hell, no. I want to take a week or two and go up to (former Ram coach) Hamp Pool's ranch near Yosemite chop some wood, catch some trout. And then I'd like to take a one-week trip somewhere with my wife Marilyn maybe Hawaii and then come back and go to work." Teele had two tickets to Hawaii for the current NFL meetings before he resigned.

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