Tose: The Movie

A program about the best, most-liked owner that most people have never heard of: Leonard Tose. Tose bought the Eagles in 1969 for $16 million and immediately fired the coach and vowed to make this perennial loser a champion. He convinced UCLA's Dick Vermeil to coach the Eagles and eventually guided the team to the Super Bowl in 1981. However, it was before the free-agent era and Tose was never able to attract enough talent to win the big game. His legacy is a remarkable mix of a lavish lifestyle and spectacular philanthropy. Tose had four wives (and a mistress), drove a Rolls Royce, traveled to games in a helicopter, made frequent shopping trips to the south of France and by his own admission was a heavy smoker and an alcoholic. However, he is also largely responsible for the creation of the first Ronald McDonald House, which established a home for people whose children were being treated for cancer and he constantly clipped out newspaper articles about people in distress and instructed his staff to dispatch large sums of money to these needy strangers. He was brusque, arrogant, and often insulting but he was also kind, compassionate and desperately seeking validation and love. As written in his obituary, "Leonard Tose...threw on every down."