It’s Finally Over--NFL Names Boss : Pro Football: After four months of infighting, the league selects Paul Tagliabue as its seventh commissioner.

CLEVELAND — A steamroller rumbled through this city shortly before dawn Thursday, leveling the National Football League’s old guard and flattening Jim Finks, the Establishment candidate for commissioner.

Marching right behind was NFL lawyer Paul Tagliabue, who, shortly afterward, was voted into office as the league’s seventh commissioner in 70 years. He succeeds Pete Rozelle.

The new and old commissioners are old friends and longtime associates. There won’t be much change of NFL policy or direction in Tagliabue’s five-year stewardship as the adopted candidate of the league’s younger and newer club owners--who were at the wheel of the Cleveland steamroller.

A band of determined men, they stood firm through four months of fighting against the older owners. And when it was inevitable Thursday that one side or the other would have to give up, it was the old guard that blinked.

The new man got right to the heart of the problem.

“I want the talk to be about the right guard and left guard, not the old guard and new guard,” Tagliabue, 48, said after flying to Cleveland from his home in Bethesda, Md., to accept the NFL’s mandate.

“I don’t know if this (rupture) is more serious than the one between the AFL (American Football League) and NFL in the 1960s. And since then, these (owners) have been working well in a single league.

“I don’t see a split here. I don’t expect it to produce (voting) blocs.”

An NFL lawyer for the last 20 years, Tagliabue--he pronounces it Tag-lee-uh-boo--is a 6-foot-5 former Georgetown basketball captain who now plays tennis.

As thin as ever, he comes across as serious, somewhat stiff of manner, somewhat distant, but apparently competent and fluent.

He was asked how he liked being a compromise candidate, behind Finks, who was the front-runner all summer.

“I’m succeeding a compromise candidate,” Tagliabue said. “If I’m as successful as Rozelle was, I’ll be glad to be called a compromise candidate.”

On the last ballot in Cleveland Thursday, well before noon, Tagliabue didn’t get the votes of everybody, but he got those that mattered--the votes of all five members of a novel new committee that was appointed late Wednesday night to unanimously recommend him or Finks.

The ordaining of this committee, which was picked by Rozelle, was the clever negotiating stroke that broke the back of the group that Tagliabue refuses to call the old guard.

Although three NFL veterans were on the committee--Wellington Mara of the New York Giants, Art Modell of Cleveland and Dan Rooney of Pittsburgh--all supported Tagliabue in the final reckoning.

And when that happened, most of the other members of their faction fell into line.

Rozelle tried to get a unanimous vote for his friend of many years, but Washington owner Jack Kent Cooke and others wouldn’t go for Tagliabue.

After Rozelle and NFL counsel Jay Moyer computed the votes, they decided to keep the exact count to themselves.

Tagliabue might not want to admit it but the power in one of the nation’s most popular sports leagues has passed to a half dozen resolute new owners who didn’t want him, either, at first--as recently as six or eight weeks ago.

What they wanted, and had asked for, was a businessman such as themselves--a businessman with vision, as they often said.

Thus after Tagliabue’s election, a leader of the new power group, Mike Lynn of the Minnesota Vikings, was asked what happened to his visionary.

Lynn dodged the question, but an owner standing next to him couldn’t suppress a broad smile.

That was Mara, whose candidate, Finks, was clobbered in the hunt for a businessman of vision.

If a rose is still a rose, regardless, the NFL’s old guard is still the old guard, which also was finally clobbered simply because the new owners decided to get behind Tagliabue as the only candidate who could stop Finks.

A former NFL quarterback, Finks, the general manager of the New Orleans Saints, had only one flaw: The owners who have known him best and longest viewed him as the most qualified candidate.

At the very end, Finks was offered the presidency of the league, an office in which he would have had limited duties under Tagliabue.

“Of course I declined,” Finks said from New Orleans.

Tagliabue said he was disappointed to lose him, but said that Finks called to offer congratulations and to pledge his 100% support.

“I told him I was really looking for 110%,” said the new commissioner, who has been a Redskin fan since the days of George Allen and the 110% effort.

Tagliabue and Finks have worked for years together on NFL problems, but they are dissimilar types. For one thing--unlike Finks and each of the last two commissioners, Rozelle and Bert Bell--Tagliabue has never worked for an NFL club.

His most useful affiliation with the league has been as Rozelle’s adviser, in which role he operated behind the curtains, far removed from the field of strife.

His biggest fights have been with opposing lawyers in courtroom cases involving the NFL-- including Raider cases and other antitrust duels in which he and the league were routinely defeated.

In those fights, as he well knew, he was just doing his best in losing causes.

He was originally assigned to the league when he was 28 by his Washington law firm, Covington & Burling, where he has moved up steadily to become one of the five management committee executives in an organization that employs 275 lawyers.

A native of New Jersey, son of a Jersey City building contractor, Tagliabue studied law at New York University, where his former classmates still talk about the day he registered for classes.

Standing in line, he suddenly remembered that he’d forgotten his wallet and lacked so much as a dime for a phone call.

That didn’t seem to dismay the son of a wealthy contractor. Turning to the next man in line, a stranger, Tagliabue asked for a loan of $400.

“That was every cent I had in the world, except the $400 I needed to register,” the man remembers. “But I gave it to him on the spot. There was something about him that made me trust him.”

The stranger, later Tagliabue’s roommate, was Lamar Alexander, formerly governor of Tennessee, now president of the University of Tennessee.

“Tags looked me up and paid it off the next day, as promised,” Alexander said, recalling the incident from his home in Knoxville. In Tagliabue’s old neighborhood in New Jersey, they remember that he was a tough guy, too.

In the basement of the Tagliabue home, they still point to the scarred concrete wall where the would-be young basketball player deliberately banged his elbows day after day, preparing himself physically to fight for rebounds.

“I’ve seen the wall myself,” Alexander said. “It’s hard to believe that a kid would work that hard just to be a basketball player.

“He also entertains splendidly. During my school days, I spent some delightful holidays with Tags and that big Italian family of his.

“He was just the way then that he is now--not flashy, but very easy to be around as you get to know him. He wears well.”

Tagliabue’s high school was St. Michael’s in Union City, N.J., where he was active in both academics and athletics as an honor student, basketball player and state high jump champion.

Continuing the same interests at Georgetown, he was a Rhodes Scholar finalist one year, majored in government and was captain of the Hoyas’ 1961-62 basketball team.

Showing an occasional sly humor, Tagliabue likes to remind acquaintances that he’s in the Georgetown Hall of Fame.

“They retired my number, you know,” he said. “At least, I think it was mine. Of course, it was also Patrick Ewing’s number.”

He also tried a bit of humor during his first NFL press conference. Asked what he expects to be his first test as commissioner, he said, “I hope it isn’t an earthquake.”

That didn’t go over as well as he’d hoped, but, undismayed, he had a useful recommendation on how to break the impasse with the NFL players’ union.

“We should bring in the same five-person committee,” he said, identifying the one that recommended him.

Tagliabue came to Cleveland with his wife, Chan. Their daughter, Emily, is a high school senior. Son Drew, an Amherst student, is spending his junior year in Japan.