Most people assume that Paul Tagliabue starred on the gridiron somewhere along the journey to becoming commissioner of the National Football League. As it happens, basketball was his game, so much so that at one time he was Georgetown University’s all-time leading rebounder.

Whatever the game, Tagliabue has proved to be an astute and engaged player, and for his contributions to sport and his commitment to leaving the world a little better than the way he found it, the NCAA has named him as the 2007 Theodore Roosevelt Award recipient.

Tagliabue will be recognized during the Honors Celebration January 7 at the annual NCAA Convention in Orlando, Florida.

Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, whose concern for the conduct of intercollegiate athletics led to the establishment of the NCAA in 1906, the "Teddy" is the highest honor the NCAA bestows on an individual. The award is presented annually to a former NCAA student-athlete for whom competitive athletics in college and attention to physical well-being after graduation have been important factors in a distinguished career of national significance and achievement.

Though the now-retired Tagliabue spent much of his career operating in the professional sports arena, he readily admits intercollegiate athletics influenced his life.

"The opportunity to go to Georgetown was something my parents couldn’t have afforded had I not been a basketball player and had an athletics grant-in-aid," he said. "That enabled me to go to an outstanding university in circumstances where I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to go."

The balance between athletics and academics was so positive, Tagliabue said, that it allowed him to branch far beyond the hardwood into other pursuits, such as serving as senior class president. "When you boil it all down, intercollegiate athletics helps you mature quickly. It helps you understand what leadership means in a concrete setting and also gives you a set of values about cooperation, teamwork and competition that you need to balance throughout your life," he said.

The political science major and Rhodes Scholarship finalist took those lessons to heart in a way that ultimately made him a leading candidate for a job he never aspired to hold — that of NFL commissioner.

Tagliabue had represented the league as a partner at Covington & Burling, a Washington, D.C., law firm and then the NFL’s principal outside counsel. He specialized in the areas of television, expansion, legislative affairs, franchise moves, labor and antitrust cases. Before that, he had served in the defense department as a policy analyst on European and North Atlantic affairs.

"But I never dreamed I would be the commissioner of any sport," he said. "It was just complete serendipity. I had worked in the defense department in political and military policy, but mostly I’d been practicing law for 20 years. My name came up and I decided to take the position."

Though the expansion of the league from 28 to 32 teams and securing the largest television contracts in entertainment history (totaling about $25 billion) highlight Tagliabue’s tenure, he believes his most significant accomplishment in 17 years as commissioner was forging a collective-bargaining agreement that solidified the partnership among the teams, players and players association.

A long strike in the early 1980s and a lockout later in the decade had fractured relationships, and Tagliabue said as a successor to Pete Rozelle in 1989 it was a challenge to repair the damage and recover enough to operate under labor peace for the entirety of his time as commissioner. Those agreements remain in place.

Other important initiatives under his watch were systematically expanding the game internationally and creating the NFL Youth Football Fund, which is a partnership between NFL teams and the players association that supports participation at all youth levels from Pop Warner through high school.

"Those kinds of things were more important than the financial growth," Tagliabue said. "When you do the other things right, the financial growth takes care of itself."

Though intercollegiate athletics played an important role in his life, he said as commissioner he never opined about how the NCAA should conduct its business. Other than some positive interaction on issues related to the game itself such as safety and sportsmanship, he said the NCAA and the NFL maintained a long-standing tradition of working independently, with the leaders in each focusing specifically on their priorities.

However, as a former student-athlete, Tagliabue would carry at least one important message to current players: Athletics is a beginning, not an end.

"It’s an opportunity that entails not just competing in athletics but working at your academics, working at your leadership skills, working at your community talents and using athletics as a way of maturing and developing as a whole person," said Tagliabue, who cited the career of former Supreme Court Justice Byron White to illustrate his point. "That is the way, ideally, student-athletes would view the opportunity and conduct themselves."

Tagliabue admits to an array of role models that have guided him along the way, including Roosevelt, White and coaching legends Vince Lombardi and Joe Paterno.

"Some of the other role models I had were early athletes in baseball, basketball and football," he said. "People like Jackie Robinson in baseball and Marion Motley and others who were trailblazers in football. And Bill Russell and others in basketball really took their sports and competition to a level that taught many lessons to many people about how to excel and compete and how to do so respecting your opponent."

To be sure, Tagliabue himself is a worthy role model. He was a freshman and three-year varsity basketball student-athlete at Georgetown. The captain of the 1961-62 squad, he still ranks ninth in career rebound average and 21st on the all-time rebounder list at the school. After graduating from Georgetown in 1962, he attended New York University School of Law, where he graduated with honors three years later.

Among other initiatives he engineered as NFL commissioner include reorganizing the league’s management structure, adopting stringent policies on steroids and other drugs, and establishing a league-wide Internet network and the subscriber-based NFL television network. Tagliabue retired in September.