NFL owners vote to allow Falcons sale

New Orleans NFL owners unanimously approved the sale of the Atlanta Falcons on Saturday to Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, who immediately said Dan Reeves would remain coach.

Blank needed 24 votes to make the purchase official.

Blank, paying $545 million for the Falcons, said Reeves’ contract would be extended three years. Reeves, also an executive vice president, will see his focus shift more to coaching. Blank said he and Reeves will recruit a new general manager.

Blank, 59, built a fortune after he and Bernie Marcus co-founded The Home Depot, starting with two stores in Atlanta. There now are 1,300 stores, an empire that saw Blank’s worth grow to a reported $1.6 billion.

Reeves, 58, and the club, had a mutual option that allows him to return in 2002.

Giuliani to say thanks in Super Bowl ad

New York There’s never been much loved lost between New York City and the rest of the country, but former mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Sept. 11 changed all that.

Giuliani, who will offer America a nationally televised thank you for its post-Sept. 11 help in a Super Bowl ad today, said the attacks brought the city and country together.

“There was a feeling of unity that emerged: We all became Americans, and we all became New Yorkers,” Giuliani said Saturday. “And whatever barriers there had been became very, very insignificant.”

Giuliani’s 30-second TV spot was paid for by Monster.com, which will donate $350,000 to the Twin Towers Fund to benefit the families of uniformed personnel killed in the attack.

The former mayor, who wrote his own script and did not receive a fee, delivers the message from atop a Rockefeller Center skyscraper, with lower Manhattan and the missing twin towers as a backdrop.