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When 32-year-old theoretical physicist Ron Unz decided to run for governor, even some friends tried to talk him out of it.

“Politics is not the kind of thing you expect geniuses to go into,” said Eric Reyburn, who attended Harvard University with Unz.

Rivko Knox, Unz’s aunt, worried that the race would be brutal. “I said: ‘Can you take criticism? What if you speak and people laugh at you?’ ”

David Horowitz, the conservative activist, was more blunt. Instead of a politician, Unz “looks like a person who reads science fiction novels at night and spends all the rest of his time on a computer talking to other people about science fiction,” said Horowitz, who has spent hours discussing politics with Unz. “I told him: ‘You’re an intellectual. . . . Your passion is ideas. You’ll be murdered.’ ”

But Unz, the soft-spoken owner of a small computer software company in Silicon Valley, calculated the odds and made up his mind. A month ago he formally challenged Gov. Pete Wilson for the Republican nomination, launching a statewide media blitz financed with more than $1 million of his own money.

Ever since, Unz has blistered Wilson, calling him a hypocrite, an opportunist–even a closet Democrat. The ultraconservative long shot has attacked the more moderate incumbent for raising taxes, bashing immigrants and supporting “the pathology of the social welfare state.” Although he has been short on specific solutions, Unz’s relentless debating style and his willingness to spend freely have won over some skeptics.

“I was afraid he would embarrass himself. But he hasn’t. I’m glad he’s out there pushing,” said Horowitz, who has dubbed Unz’s campaign “The Revenge of the Nerds.”

Arnold Steinberg, a Republican strategist, said his reservations have been replaced by enthusiasm. He tried to talk Unz out of running, he said–but ended up signing on as an adviser.

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Few people believe Unz can beat Wilson–Unz admits that his campaign is an “uphill battle.” Still, some Republicans worry that the young challenger will wound Wilson, making it easier for a Democrat to replace him.

The Wilson campaign, which at first attempted to ignore Unz, recently began responding to him, labeling one TV ad in which he accused Wilson of letting Los Angeles burn during the 1992 riots “a new low” in the campaign. Though their recent tracking polls show only about 8% of Republicans would vote for Unz, Wilson’s camp has begun to take him more seriously, poking into his background–and informing reporters of the results.

Dan Schnur, Wilson’s spokesman, said one call to First Boston Bank, one of Unz’s former employers, yielded this tidbit: Unz is remembered as the only job applicant ever to list his IQ on his resume.

In fact, Unz may have one of the few IQs worth noting on a resume. It has been estimated at 214, a statistic that one intelligence expert describes as “one in a million.” Educated at Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford universities, he has mastered not only theoretical physics and computer programming, but also ancient Greek history. The author of several scholarly papers on the Spartan naval empire, he is probably the only gubernatorial candidate who warms to the subject of Plutarch.

“The history of the Greek city states really gives you a sense of how nations or states can decline,” said Unz, who claims that his many areas of expertise have each helped prepare him for executive office. “People told me that politics can be frustrating. But when you have sat month after month working on the same computer program, you get used to . . . incremental change.”

Braininess does not necessarily yield political savvy. Unz used the mathematical concept of “expected return” to assess whether he should enter the race. Multiplying the probability by the possible payoff, he concluded that if he had at least a one-in-five chance, running would be worth it. But most political experts say he drastically misjudged the odds.

If Unz’s intellect is unique among political candidates, Unz says that is not the reason to vote for him. Instead, he wants people to respond to his ideas–among them, smaller government, fewer regulations and traditional values. He claims he, not Wilson, is in the Republican mainstream.

He rails against bilingual education and affirmative action (policies that he says amount to “ethnic separatism”) and bad-mouths welfare programs that he says foster “irresponsibility, illegitimacy and a total sense of disconnection from the work ethic in American society.”

To hear Unz’s current ideology, one might never guess at his background.

Unz’s ads describe him as “the Republican for governor,” but he grew up a Democrat. He was born in the San Fernando Valley in 1961 and had his first involvement with politics at age 11 when he donned a McGovern T-shirt and accompanied his mother door to door, stumping for the Democratic presidential candidate.

The candidate who vows to “roll back” public assistance programs once relied on those programs for survival–when growing up in North Hollywood, he and his mother were on welfare. Unz, who today describes the culture of illegitimacy as a root cause of crime, was born out of wedlock–a fact that made the young Unz feel “very ashamed,” he said.

Some politicians might use such personal details to bolster their arguments. Unz, by contrast, prefers to keep them at a distance, discussing his childhood only at a reporter’s request.

“I really don’t think my personal background has had much of an impact on my views,” Unz said recently, moments after comparing his mother, Esther–a former high school teacher who he says “made some stupid mistakes”–to TV’s “Murphy Brown.” “The ‘Murphy Brown’ case works great on TV, but it’s not clear to me that it works in practice.”

In his case, Unz says, “the system worked.” Enrolled in public schools, he proved a top student–a math and debating whiz who as a senior in high school became the third Californian ever to win first place in the national Westinghouse talent search competition. Despite his own success story, he firmly believes that welfare does more harm than good.

“The truth is that the cost of living in America, if you’re talking about living relatively simply, is pretty low. The marginal cost of eating simple foods and not starving is minimal. And there . . . would be more charitable organizations in society if these (welfare) programs didn’t exist,” he said, adding that he does not believe that the assistance he and his mother received “was that much of a help.”

Esther Unz recalls things differently. To cut costs, she said, she and her young son lived with her parents. But when she fell ill and was unable to work, she applied for aid. The money she received from the government was essential, she said.

“Ron’s father was out of the picture very soon. . . . But my parents’ home was paid for. What saved us financially completely was there were no rent payments,” she said, adding that her son’s conservative views are something of a mystery to her. “For some reason he turned to the other side. I never tried to structure him as far as (political) party. He just kind of came out this way.”

Despite their differences, she is immensely proud of her son and believes his sincerity and industriousness would make him an effective governor. She has long worried, however, that his penchant for hard work has left him without a fully rounded life.

“Now all I can hope for is he will have time for some extracurricular life,” she said. “And get a girl. Because he has had very few in his life.”

Unz says he wants to marry and have children, eventually. But when he puts his mind to something, he says, he focuses completely. For several years his financial software company, which devises specialized “code” to help Wall Street firms manage their investments efficiently, has been his primary fascination. So far he has not given his personal life the same kind of attention.

A visit to Unz’s large Spanish-style home in Palo Alto reveals a life completely built around work. Three of the five bedrooms–which house his company, Wall Street Analytics Inc.–are filled with files and computer equipment. The rest of the house appears largely unoccupied. He sleeps on a mattress and box spring set on the floor. His spacious living room not only lacks furniture–it is utterly empty.

“I’ve only lived here a year,” he says, nodding toward a well-appointed kitchen he has never used. “Monomaniacal” is the word one friend says Unz uses to describe himself. Asked what he does for fun, he answers: “I’ve been very busy.”

When asked the same question, Unz’s best friends from Harvard do not hesitate. For fun, they said, Unz has always loved to talk politics. “Ron’s idea of a good time at a party is to have five or six people stand around and talk about the issues of the day,” said Reyburn, who fondly remembers a nightly college ritual: dinner, spiced with spirited political debate.

“He’s an intellectual, not a party animal,” recalled Robert Dujarric, another friend who remembers those dinners warmly. “He likes to talk to people. Even though he’s very much at home in the realm of computer software and numbers, he likes to socialize.”

Unz graduated in 1983 with a double major in theoretical physics and ancient history and headed to England. There on a Churchill Science Fellowship, he studied quantum gravitation under Stephen Hawking.

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While continuing his studies at Stanford in 1986, Unz and two of his former junior high school teachers developed a plan to create a public academy for Los Angeles County’s high-ability students. Despite winning the support of some educators, the proposal was rejected by officials who worried that if an elite school drained off the best students, ordinary schools would become less challenging.

Unz describes this incident, his first deep involvement on a public policy issue, as an eye-opener. He came to believe that if he wanted to improve society, he would have to get rich enough to champion the causes important to him.

He took a summer job on Wall Street in 1987, working in mortgage finance at First Boston Bank. He taught himself computer programming and soon wrote “The Solver,” a program that used the computer to carve up mortgage loans into securities–a series of calculations that until then had been done by hand.

Unz’s work was outstanding, his colleagues recall, and he accepted a full-time job. But some who worked with him said he could be inflexible when he believed he was right. It was that single-mindedness that ultimately led to his departure, they said.

David Warren, a managing director at First Boston who was hired the same day as Unz, recalled: “He came from an academic background where if your professor told you to do x, and you did y because it was better than x, and then you explained your reasoning–your professor shook hands with you and said: ‘Congratulations, you were right.’ He felt that was the way he was going to behave.”

Unz’s bosses did not share this approach. A few months after taking the job, Unz left to start his own company. For the next six years, Unz worked seven days a week, up to 20 hours a day, writing computer code in his modest apartment in Queens.

New York City appalled him. The crime and the poverty proved to Unz that welfare programs not only were not working but were the cause of society’s decline. He began reading Commentary magazine, and was so impressed that he ordered 15 years of back issues. When his long hours started to pay off (his first sale, to a Wall Street investment firm, netted nearly $200,000), he used the money to fund conservative projects.

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Unz will not say what he is worth, but says he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute in New York City and to Linda Chavez’s Center for the New American Community in Washington, D.C. Even before moving back to California two years ago, Unz sought out the Los Angeles-based Horowitz to see if he needed funding.

“I wanted to do this book ‘Surviving the PC University,’ ” recalled Horowitz, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. “He said: ‘How much will it cost?’ I said $10,000, and he pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check.”

“I don’t care much about money,” said Unz, who drives a compact car and has spent more on clothing while preparing to become a candidate than he had during the previous several years. “The whole reason I wanted to make money was to be able to influence policy.”

Late last year, when Unz realized that no other Republican was likely to challenge Wilson, that attitude made it easy for him to volunteer. To others, spending a hard-earned personal fortune to run what in all likelihood will be a losing race might seem crazy. To Unz, it was civic duty.

“The odds are, you lose. But if you don’t try it, you’re sure to lose,” he said, adding that he plans to spend a lot more of his money before the June 7 primary. “A lot of this is patriotism. . . . At some stage, individuals have to decide whether they’re going to make an effort.”

So far, Unz’s rhetoric has been dominated by criticism of Wilson. His lack of specific alternatives has hurt him even among some Republicans who dislike Wilson.

“He’s not for me,” Dieter Holberg, a retired engineer, said after hearing Unz speak at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. “You can say, ‘Cut things.’. . . But it would have been long done if it was easy to do.”

But at times he strikes a chord. The California Republican Assembly, a conservative grass-roots organization, has endorsed him. And recently, after hearing Unz blast programs such as prenatal care, drug rehabilitation and “New Age self-esteem counseling,” a few members of UC Berkeley’s College Republicans came away impressed.

“You get a strong sense that here is a fundamentally competent person who is intelligent enough to grasp everything–though that is not the same thing as being able to command or lead. But I don’t particularly think that Wilson leads,” said Gregory Sikorski, 27, a history major. “I will support him now and support the Republican (nominee) later.”

The “toxic and chaotic” culture at the centre of the United Kingdom’s government led to a delayed response to the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in about 23,000 more deaths across the nation, a damning report from an inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic has found.

The inquiry, which former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered in May 2021, delivered a blistering assessment (PDF) on Thursday of his government’s response to COVID-19, criticising his indecisive leadership, lambasting his Downing Street office for breaking their own rules and castigating his top adviser Dominic Cummings. The inquiry was chaired by former judge Heather Hallett.

“The failure to appreciate the scale of the threat, or the urgency of response it demanded, meant that by the time the possibility of a mandatory lockdown was first considered it was already too late and a lockdown had become unavoidable,” the inquiry found. “At the centre of the UK government there was a toxic and chaotic culture.”

The global pandemic, which began in 2020, killed millions of people worldwide, with countries enforcing lockdowns in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus.

The UK went into lockdown on March 23, 2020, at which time it was “too little, too late,” the inquiry found, revealing that if the nation had gone into lockdown just a week earlier, on March 16, the number of deaths in the first wave of the pandemic up to July would have been reduced by about 23,000, or 48 percent.

“Had the UK been better prepared, lives would have been saved, suffering reduced and the economic cost of the pandemic far lower,” the inquiry found.

A failure to act sooner again, as cases rose later in the year, also led to further national lockdowns, Hallett’s inquiry found.

A campaign group for bereaved families said “it is devastating to think of the lives that could have been saved under a different Prime Minister”.

There was no immediate comment from Johnson on the inquiry’s findings.

The UK recorded more than 230,000 deaths from COVID, a similar death rate to the United States and Italy, but higher than elsewhere in western Europe, and it is still recovering from the economic consequences.

“Mr. Johnson should have appreciated sooner that this was an emergency that required prime ministerial leadership to inject urgency into the response,” the inquiry found.

Following the release of the inquiry’s findings, Sir Ed Davey called on Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, to apologise on behalf of the Conservatives.

“As this report is published, my thoughts and prayers are with all those who lost loved ones during the pandemic, and everyone who suffered,” Davey said. “This report confirms the abject failure of the last Conservative government.”

Ellie Chowns, a Green Party MP for North Herefordshire, said the British people were “let down” by their government.

“Families and communities – especially children – are still living with the consequences. It’s vital to learn from this report, and invest far more seriously in pandemic preparedness, so that Britain can be secure and resilient if – or when – we are again faced with such a challenge.”

The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and information from the country is seen as key to preventing future pandemics. As late as June 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was working to uncover the origin of the pandemic, with its work still incomplete, as critical information has “not been provided”.

“We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in June.

In 2021, Tedros launched the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a panel of 27 independent international experts.

Marietjie Venter, the group’s chair, said earlier this year that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals.

But she added that after more than three years of work, SAGO was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not COVID was the result of a lab accident, despite repeated requests for detailed information made to the Chinese government.

A botched net zero scheme which has caused damp issues in thousands of homes was the result of ”serious failings at every level”, a UK government official has said.

Last month, the National Audit Office found that 98% of the 23,000 homes that had external wall insulation installed under two separate schemes will result in damp and mould if left unaddressed.

Its damning report also found that hundreds of homeowners’ health and safety had been put at immediate risk because the insulation work had not been done correctly.

Appearing before Parliament, Jeremy Pocklington, the most senior civil servant at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, said the failures were “unacceptable”.

These schemes commonly used external wall insulation, which involved fixing insulation boards to the exterior brickwork and then applying render to make it waterproof. It can go wrong when water becomes trapped behind the boards.

The damage also applies to about a third of homes which had internal insulation installed under the ECO4 scheme and the Great British Insulation Scheme, available to residents in England, Scotland and Wales.

More than three million homes have been insulated under a variety of government schemes over the last 20 years. Billions of pounds of public money have been spent on it.

Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Pocklington began his evidence session by saying his thoughts were with the families and households affected.

The chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, said the NAO report findings were the ”worst” he’d seen in 12 years of chairing the committee and accused the department of negligence.

Mr Pocklington said there had been poor oversight of the ECO4 and the Great British Insulation Scheme by Trustmark, the body responsible for overseeing the quality of the insulation work.

However, he added that the department ”did not oversee these schemes in the way that they should have done”.

Independent MP Rupert Lowe said this amounted to ”systemic failure of a government department”.

Acknowledging this remark, Mr Pocklington, said ”there are serious failings at every level of the system that are systemic”, and that the department “didn’t take enough steps to ensure that Trustmark was set up to deliver appropriately”.

Simon Ayers, the chief executive of Trustmark, earlier told the panel of MPs that his organisation had raised the issue of faulty installations with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero from late-2022, but they were “informal operational meetings” and minutes were not taken.

Mr Pocklington explained that the department had been under pressure after dealing with the Covid pandemic and the effect on energy prices of the war in Ukraine.

Labour MP Clive Betts asked Mr Pocklington whether the department would take responsibility for all of the homeowners that have been ”badly treated” under all of the government’s energy efficiency schemes, not just those carried out since 2022.

Mr Pocklington said the focus was on the two schemes which had taken place since 2022.

Asked by Mr Betts if the government would “stand behind” affected homeowners, Mr Pocklington said the government’s responsibility was ”to ensure that the schemes we put in place operate effectively and that there are appropriate systems of consumer protection in place”.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — President Trump says that his government will boycott the Group of 20 summit this month in South Africa over his claims that a white minority group there is being violently persecuted. Those claims have been widely rejected.

Trump announced Friday on social media that no U.S. government official will attend the Nov. 22-23 summit in Johannesburg “as long as these Human Rights abuses continue.” South Africa’s Black-led government has been a regular target for Trump since he returned to office.

In February, Trump issued an executive order stopping U.S. financial assistance to South Africa, citing its treatment of the Afrikaner white minority. His administration has also prioritized Afrikaners for refugee status in the U.S. and says they will be given most of the 7,500 places available this fiscal year.

The South African government — and some Afrikaners themselves — say Trump’s claims of persecution are baseless.

Descendants of European settlers

Afrikaners are South Africans who are descended mainly from Dutch but also French and German colonial settlers who first came to the country in the 17th century.

Afrikaners were at the heart of the apartheid system of white minority rule from 1948-94, leading to decades of hostility between them and South Africa’s Black majority. But Afrikaners are not a homogenous group, and some fought against apartheid. There are an estimated 2.7 million Afrikaners in South Africa’s population of 62 million.

Afrikaners are divided over Trump’s claims. Some say they face discrimination, but a group of leading Afrikaner business figures and academics said in an open letter last month that “the narrative that casts Afrikaners as victims of racial persecution in post-apartheid South Africa” is misleading.

Afrikaners’ Dutch-derived language is widely spoken in South Africa and is one of the country’s 12 official languages. Afrikaners are represented in every aspect of society. Afrikaners are some of South Africa’s richest entrepreneurs and some of its most successful sports stars, and also serve in government. Most are largely committed to South Africa’s multiracial democracy.

Trump claims they’re being ‘killed and slaughtered’

Trump asserted that Afrikaners “are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated.” The president’s comments are in reference to a relatively small number of attacks on Afrikaner farmers that he and others claim are racially motivated.

Trump has also pointed to a highly contentious law introduced by the South African government that allows land to be appropriated from private owners without compensation. Some Afrikaners fear that law is aimed at removing them from their land in favor of South Africa’s poor Black majority. Many South Africans, including opposition parties, have criticized the law, but it hasn’t led to land confiscations.

Trump first made baseless claims of widespread killing of white South African farmers and land seizures during his first term in response to allegations aired on conservative media personality Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News. Trump ordered then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into the allegations, but nothing came of any investigation.

South Africa rejects the claims

The South African government said in response to Trump’s social media post that his claims were “not substantiated by fact.” It has said that Trump’s criticism of South Africa over Afrikaners is a result of misinformation because it misses the context that Black farmers and farmworkers are also killed in rural attacks, which make up a tiny percentage of the country’s high violent crime rate.

There were more than 26,000 homicides in South Africa in 2024. Of those, 37 were farm murders, according to an Afrikaner lobby group that tracks them. Experts on rural attacks in South Africa have said the overriding motive for the violent farm invasions is robbery, not race.

Other pressure on South Africa

Trump said it is a “total disgrace” that the G-20 summit — a meeting of the leaders of the 19 top rich and developing economies, the European Union and the African Union — is being held in South Africa. He had already said he wouldn’t attend, and Vice President JD Vance was due to go in his place. The U.S. will take on the rotating presidency of the G-20 after South Africa.

Trump also said in a speech last week that South Africa should be thrown out of the G-20.

Trump’s criticism of Africa’s most developed economy has gone beyond the issue of Afrikaners. His executive order in February said South Africa had taken “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies,” specifically with its decision to accuse Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza at the United Nations’ top court.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boycotted a G-20 foreign ministers meeting in South Africa in February after deriding the host country’s G-20 slogan of “solidarity, equality and sustainability” as “DEI and climate change.”

Imray writes for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — Paul Tagliabue, who helped bring labor peace and riches to the NFL during his 17 years as commissioner but was criticized for not taking stronger action on concussions, died Sunday from heart failure. He was 84.

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tagliabue’s family informed the league of his death in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Tagliabue, who had developed Parkinson’s disease, was commissioner after Pete Rozelle from 1989 to 2006. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of a special centennial class in 2020. Current Commissioner Roger Goodell succeeded Tagliabue.

“Paul was the ultimate steward of the game — tall in stature, humble in presence and decisive in his loyalty to the NFL,” Goodell said in a statement. “I am forever grateful and proud to have Paul as my friend and mentor. I cherished the innumerable hours we spent together where he helped shape me as an executive but also as a man, husband and father.”

Tagliabue oversaw a myriad of new stadiums and negotiated television contracts that added billions of dollars to the league’s bank account. Under him, there were no labor stoppages.

During his time, Los Angeles lost two teams and Cleveland another, migrating to Baltimore before being replaced by an expansion franchise.

Tagliabue implemented a policy on substance abuse that was considered the strongest in all major sports. He also established the “Rooney Rule,” in which all teams with coaching vacancies must interview minority candidates. It has since been expanded to include front-office and league executive positions.

When he took office in 1989, the NFL had just gotten its first Black head coach of the modern era. By the time Tagliabue stepped down in 2006, there were seven minority head coaches in the league.

In one of his pivotal moments, Tagliabue called off NFL games the weekend after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was one of the few times the public compared him favorably to Rozelle, who proceeded with the games the Sunday after John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. A key presidential aide had advised Rozelle that the NFL should play, a decision that was one of the commissioner’s great regrets.

Tagliabue certainly had his detractors, notably over concussions. The issue has plagued the NFL for decades, though team owners had a major role in the lack of progress in dealing with head trauma.

In 2017, Tagliabue apologized for remarks he made decades ago about concussions in football, acknowledging he didn’t have the proper data at the time in 1994. He called concussions “one of those pack-journalism issues” and contended the number of concussions “is relatively small; the problem is the journalist issue.”

“Obviously,” he said on Talk of Fame Network, “I do regret those remarks. Looking back, it was not sensible language to use to express my thoughts at the time. My language was intemperate, and it led to serious misunderstanding.

“My intention at the time was to make a point which could have been made fairly simply: that there was a need for better data. There was a need for more reliable information about concussions and uniformity in terms of how they were being defined in terms of severity.”

While concussion recognition, research and treatment lagged for much of Tagliabue’s tenure, his work on the labor front was exemplary.

As one of his first decisions, Tagliabue reached out to the players’ union, then run by Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Fame player and former star for Al Davis’ Raiders. Tagliabue had insisted he be directly involved in all labor negotiations, basically rendering useless the Management Council of club executives that had handled such duties for nearly two decades.

It was a wise decision.

“When Paul was named commissioner after that seven-month search in 1989, that’s when the league got back on track,” said Joe Browne, who spent 50 years as an NFL executive and was a confidant of Rozelle and Tagliabue.

“Paul had insisted during his negotiations for the position that final control over matters such as labor and all commercial business dealings had to rest in the commissioner’s office. The owners agreed and that was a large step forward toward the tremendous rebound we had as a league — an expanded league — in the ’90s and beyond.”

Tagliabue forged a solid relationship with Upshaw. In breaking with the contentious dealings between the league and the NFL Players Association, Tagliabue and Upshaw kept negotiations respectful and centered on what would benefit both sides. Compromise was key, Upshaw always said — although the union often was criticized for being too accommodating.

Tagliabue had been the NFL’s Washington lawyer, a partner in the prestigious firm of Covington and Burling. He was chosen as commissioner in October 1989 over New Orleans general manager Jim Finks after a bitter fight highlighting the differences between the NFL’s old guard and newer owners.

Yet during his reign as commissioner, which ended in the spring of 2006 after pushing through a highly contested labor agreement, he managed to unite those divided owners and, in fact, relied more on the old-timers who supported him than on Jerry Jones and many of the younger owners.

Tagliabue was born on Nov. 24, 1940, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was the 6-foot-5 captain of the basketball team at Georgetown and graduated in 1962 as one of the school’s leading rebounders at the time — his career average later listed just below that of Patrick Ewing. He was president of his class and a Rhodes scholar finalist. Three years later, he graduated from NYU Law School and subsequently worked as a lawyer in the Defense Department before joining Covington & Burling.

He eventually took over the NFL account, establishing a close relationship with Rozelle and other NFL officials during a series of legal actions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Tagliabue was reserved by nature and it sometimes led to coolness with the media, which had embraced Rozelle, an affable former public relations man. Even after he left office, Tagliabue did not measure up in that regard with Goodell, who began his NFL career in the public relations department.

But after 9/11, Tagliabue showed a different side, particularly toward league employees who had lost loved ones in the attacks. He accompanied Ed Tighe, an NFL Management Council lawyer whose wife died that day, to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a few blocks from the NFL office.

Art Shell, a Hall of Fame player, became the NFL’s first modern-day Black head coach with the Raiders. He got to see Tagliabue up close and thought him utterly suited for his job.

“After my coaching career was over, I had the privilege of working directly with Paul in the league office,” Shell said, “His philosophy on almost every issue was, ‘If it’s broke, fix it. And if it’s not broke, fix it anyway.’

“He always challenged us to find better ways of doing things. Paul never lost sight of his responsibility to do what was right for the game. He was the perfect choice as NFL commissioner.”

Tagliabue is survived by his wife Chandler, son Drew, and daughter Emily.

Wilner and Maaddi write for the Associated Press.