Wellington Mara lived a remarkable football life, one that was intertwined with the development of the National Football League from a ragtag, almost semi-pro confederation into a global multibillion dollar business. Mara – who was just nine years old in 1925 when his father Tim, a legal bookmaker, invested $500 to buy an NFL franchise – in many ways became the NFL’s model owner.

The 1925 season proved a turning point for the faltering league when running back Red Grange signed a contract with George Halas and the Chicago Bears following his All-American season at the University of Illinois. When the Grange-led Bears played the new Giants in New York’s Polo Grounds that December, a sellout crowd turned out and the elder Mara netted a reported $143,000, which infused badly needed funds into the cash-strapped team.

After the season, Grange demanded a five-figure contract and one-third ownership share of the Bears for his services in 1926. Halas refused. Unfazed, Grange and agent C.C. Pyle rented Yankee Stadium and petitioned the NFL for a franchise. The fledgling league refused. Tim Mara obviously felt threatened by Pyle’s request, and the NFL backed him up despite the subsequent formation of a new league featuring Grange to compete with the NFL.

This was the younger Mara’s introduction to a philosophy called “Leaguethink,” which he continued to champion through the years and survives to this day. The success of the sport and the league was above the interests of an individual – a philosophy that would take on new importance once the NFL found television.

Mara once explained that it was NFL Commissioner Bert Bell who understood how TV would change the football industry. In 1951, the Los Angeles Rams, who had televised all 12 of their games the previous year, stopped televising home games after attendance dropped nearly in half. Bell urged other teams to blackout home games in an effort to keep fans in the stands instead of in front of the TV.

By 1953, the NFL was defending its blackout policy in a U.S. District Court, where a judge ruled the policy did not violate anti-trust laws.

“That was a big test case for us,” Mara would say. “I think the big value of TV was the promotion, that it should show what a great event this was, what a great game this was. It made people want to come to the ballpark.”

In 1958, Mara and the Giants found themselves at the epicenter of the TV revolution. Mara had pieced together most of the Giants’ 1956 championship team and 1958 Conference Championship team that played the Baltimore Colts at Yankee Stadium in what was called the “Greatest Game of All Time.”Many still regard it as such,partly because it was football’s first overtime game, partly because it was the first one televised nationally. As the Colts’ Alan Ameche dove across the goal line to capture the NFL title for Baltimore, thousands of viewers across the country sat glued to their TV sets, convincing TV executives that the NFL could be big business.

Two years later, Mara played a big role in shaping the NFL’s TV revenue-sharing plan when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle attempted to change the league’s television policy. Rozelle wanted to sell the NFL’s collective TV rights as a single package and share broadcasting revenues equally among the 13 owners.

Rozelle saw the changing playing field and knew the big market teams in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles could get enormous contracts and leave behind smaller markets in Pittsburgh and Green Bay. In 1961, Rozelle not only had to sell the concept to the 14 NFL owners, but to Congress as well.

On September 30, 1961, Congress passed the Sports Antitrust Broadcasting Act, which allowed sports leagues to pool and sell their TV rights. After that, Rozelle went to work convincing his 14 owners that a cooperative league package, or “Leaguethink,” was best.

“My brother Jack, George Halas, and [L.A. Rams owner] Daniel Reeves, we were the three teams that were most affected,” Mara said. “Without that, why, we wouldn’t have the league we have today.”

Rozelle was eternally grateful for the role Mara played in the process.

“Well argued that the NFL was only as strong as its weakest link, that Green Bay should receive as much money as any of the other teams,” Rozelle said.The decision allowed Rozelle to play CBS against NBC in contract talks and gave all 14 owners far more money than they could have gotten individually.

Mara was also at the forefront of playing city against city in getting funding for a new stadium.

Still putting the interests of football ahead of his own, Mara had begrudgingly allowed owner Sonny Werblin’s Jets to continue playing in New York after the American Football League merged with the NFL in June 1966. A grateful AFL subsequently gave Mara $10 million for invading the Giants’ territory.

Five years later, Mayor Lindsay put forth a $24 million plan to renovate Yankee Stadium, where the Giants had played since leaving the Polo Grounds in 1956. Mara wanted no part of it. Instead, he entertained an offer from Werblin to move to New Jersey.

The Meadowlands proposal featured a 75,000-seat stadium and a racetrack. The facility would also include luxury boxes, a new revenue source for NFL teams and more importantly, for NFL owners who knew they wouldn’t have to share the revenue stream with their colleagues. Mara jumped at the deal, and the Giants moved to New Jersey in 1976.

Nearly four decades later, Mara’s Giants and Robert Wood Johnson’s Jets are building a football stadium together in New Jersey. The Giants-Jets Stadium project is another example of Mara doing what was best for the league. The Mara family plan called for an 80,000-seat facility with the Giants practice facility adjacent to the stadium. Johnson, who was rebuffed in his bid for a Manhattan stadium, wanted a 90,000-seat building with businesses surrounding the facility and a Giants practice field away from the stadium.

The two franchises, with a lot of help from NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue,reached an agreement to share the stadium, share building expenses, and erect an “NFL urban village”around the new Meadowlands structure.

The Giants could have built a stadium in the Meadowlands, and the Jets could have moved to Queens, but in the end, both ownerships listened to Tagliabue and his staff and worked out a compromise to get a New Jersey stadium built. The decision to cooperate means the two franchises will not only save building costs, but avoid competing with one another to land major corporate sponsors to buy naming rights for the facility and other stadium sponsorships.

The NFL is America’s most prosperous sport in part because Wellington Mara put the NFL’s interests first. But of course, there is another component to the stadium deal.The Maras, a business family first, has made hundreds of millions of dollars by putting the league first and the Giants second.