After football players raised an index finger (“one” for unity) in a brief pre-game gesture of union solidarity on the season’s opening day, we hear that ESPN radio says 99 percent of the calls and emails ESPN got were critical of the players.
A startling revelation indeed: who would have thought that watching football could cause more brain damage than playing it? It seems that this sport is dangerous to everyone’s health (especially mine, as a lifelong Chicago Bears fan).
Here’s a small snippet of what National Football League players go through, from the Detroit Lions’ season-opening experience. Not only was the Lions’ last-gasp miracle winning touchdown catch nullified on a bizarre rules technicality (the number of coronaries and psychotic episodes this caused among Motor City fandom is not known), but the team’s prized quarterback and a starting defensive back suffered shoulder separations that will keep them out for at least a third of the season and the entire year, respectively. And two other vital defensive starters were already down from pre-season game injuries.
Every fan (and every fantasy football owner) can replicate this kind of list for his or her team. And we’re not even talking here about tragedies like the death of the Cincinnati Bengals’ Chris Henry, who died December 17 falling from his fiancee’s pickup truck while in an apparent frenzied state. The autopsy revealed traumatic encephalopathy—severe behavior-altering brain damage that can only be diagnosed by analyzing tissue samples after death, unlike a concussion—which was undoubtedly caused by the violence of the sport in which Henry made his living, and which probably also accounted for his previous violent episodes and run-ins with the legal system.
The NFL owners’ solution: increase the regular season from 16 games to 18, and cut the percentage of league revenues allotted to the players under the salary-cap system.
The collective bargaining issues are complex, but the NFL season is playing out under the threat of an owner lockout beginning next spring. Unbelievably, the TV networks that feed the league’s money machine have agreed to pay the league even for games that aren’t played—money the owners would subsequently repay from future revenues, thereby reducing what they’ll have to share with the players. No wonder the players’ union (NFLPA) is threatening to sue the league over this and other labor law violations.
Another possible owners’ ploy, if the lockout fails to produce a players’ surrender, would be to declare a bargaining impasse and impose terms, which would force the union to strike and allow the owners to bring in “replacement players,” i.e., scabs who are brain-dead even before their first snap of NFL action.
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On the players’ side, the so-called nuclear option—a high-risk gambit they’ve used before, with mixed results—is to decertify their union. This action could expose the league’s entire salary-cap and draft systems to the threat of anti-monopoly legal action, since such restraints on the “free market” are legitimate when collectively bargained but not when the owners implement them unilaterally.
I hate to stereotype, but it does appear that a major element weakening the players’ hand in this looming confrontation is the absence of solidarity consciousness among the fan base. During the 1987 players’ strike, they found that people would buy tickets to watch the abysmal product produced by replacement players. Whether this condition is brought on by alcohol or gambling addiction, excessive exposure to Fox and ESPN, or the generally dismal state of labor in contemporary America is a subject for deeper analysis than I can attempt here.
The union will be attempting to hold on to the current share (59.7 percent) of league revenues allotted for player salaries and some degree of player contract guarantees, to improve the current system where most players are essentially contingent (if highly paid) casual labor, subject to being cut at any time. The union’s also seeking restitution for older retired players who have gotten little or nothing from the league’s woefully unfair pension structure. Many retired players, led by former Bears player and coach Mike Ditka, have fought the league and the union for years over this issue.
There’s time to negotiate, and there are some points of agreement, such as the need for a rookie salary structure so that high draft picks aren’t handed more money than experienced veterans before they’ve played a down. Still, the fundamental issue is the owners’ determination to gut the union, and at this point the NFL’s players and owners are on a helmet-to-helmet collision course.
Detroiter David Finkel predicts that his beloved Bears and hometown Lions will win a combined total of seven games this season, not counting their two games against each other that they cannot both lose.
Why can't NFL players seriously begin to scout out stadiums and hire managers so that in the event of a lockout they could set up their own league? Athletes are in a unique position. They are the machinery and the product.
So they won't have major network TV and 60,000 size crowds for a while and their salaries won't be in the millions. In the long run they and we would be better off.
