FOOTBALL'S FIRST STRIKE
Mills, Nicolaus
As a child growing up in Ohio, I thought of the Cleveland Browns as gods. In that belief I was no different from most of my school friends. Our fall Sundays were spent watching the Browns on...
...Equally important, players are now eligible for severance pay after two years in the league...
...Not the size of the players...
...Above all, there is the matter of television...
...Distribution of pay: In this area the NFLPA sought to reverse a situation in which players negotiate their contracts individually and are subjected to a system that results in wide variations in pay...
...The average team plays in stadiums (many of them financed by local taxes) that in contrast to the nation's factories operate at 94 percent of capacity...
...In 1982 the problem for the owners was that the athletes they had hired were not local toughs who could be replaced nor workers whose labor could just as easily be done in Taiwan or Haiti...
...Nor their speed...
...But I know that the pleasure pro football and the Browns give me cannot be separated from a deliberate blindness on my part...
...A look at the structure and operation of the 28 football teams of the NFL makes the reasons for the strike clear...
...The union recognized that at a time when football is being financially transformed by technology (network television and the prospect of cable television), it is essential for players to share in the transformation...
...What they have formally conceded in the agreement they signed are their most far-reaching proposals: a share of television revenues and a wage-scale arrangement the NFLPA would administer...
...That the NFL owners should have fought the NFLPA so bitterly and been prepared to cancel the season is not surprising...
...It is the associations of childhood that as adults draw most of us to football, and to be reminded of the game's cost—of pensions and bonuses and crippling injuries—is to be deprived of the willed naiveté fanship requires...
...They centered on nothing less than the question of worker control in an industry whose 1,500 worker athletes, because they are so wellknown, have the power to influence the country far out of proportion to their numbers...
...It was not until I was 13, however, that I got to see the Browns close up...
...Their five-year $1.6 billion contract amounts to an estimated 46 percent of the NFL owners' gross—down 10 percent from their first strike demand but an improvement over the owners' counteroffer...
...Even now, I am still not anxious to acknowledge the realities of the game...
...Under the NFLPA proposals differences in quality would have been acknowledged not through individual contracts but by a bonus system that would take into consideration everything from how many games a player started to whether his team made the Superbowl...
...Thus the incentive to hire an inexperienced rookie and replace a veteran (who after 12 years could receive $140,000 in severance pay) is reduced, and players who are cut by teams leave the league with the financial means to begin new careers...
...The 28 teams of the NFL do not negotiate separately with the networks but have a joint contract that guarantees them $1.6 billion over the next four years and pays each team (in a true socialism-for-the-rich plan) equal revenues regardless of its quality or fan appeal...
...I did not stop watching professional football because of that afternoon, and although I live in New York City, I continue to root for the Cleveland Browns...
...It was a shock...
...THE NFLPA STRIKE DEMANDS were designed to change this situation in two areas: 22 • Sources of revenue: The NFLPA's key demand here was for a linkage between revenues NFL teams pull in and salaries paid out to players...
...The players' union sought to minimize the gross differences between what a quarterback and a lineman, a star and an average player receive by introducing a wage scale based on seniority...
...The shock was the violence of the game...
...NICOLAUS MILLS 23...
...I had expected heroics and perfection...
...Rather, they were the central figures of a glamour industry, who realized that unless they organized themselves with a blue-collar solidarity, they were in danger of having their professional status undermined...
...In a sport that emphasizes endurance, team play, and the sacrifice of ego, the lessons of the playing field would have been carried to the marketplace with remarkable ingenuity by the original NFLPA proposals...
...So with most fans and so, too, with their cool reaction to this fall's National Football League strike...
...Professional football's early teams, Chicago, Green Bay, Hammond, Dayton, were funded by companies seeking to reduce worker discontent by fostering team loyalty, and throughout its history the League has constantly opposed serious organizing efforts by its players...
...Unlike Chrysler or International Harvester, the NFL is an industry where profits are on the upsurge...
...The minimum NFL salary is now $30,000 for a rookie but, most significantly, the minimum increases $10,000 per year to a maximum of $200,000 for a player with 18 years of service...
...Certainly, the issues raised in 1982 by the NFL Players' Association's 57-day strike were not naive ones...
...What they have gained, however, is a variation on these original demands...
...Free agency has never been part of pro football, and so, despite its dangers (the average career lasts 4.6 years), its players are paid less (an estimated $84,000 per year) than either baseball or basketball players...
...What would have been lost would not be the incentive to excel but the owners' right to reward excellence as they saw fit and to pay (in an effort to keep rival leagues from forming) their highest bonuses to untried rookies...
...Otherwise they are in danger of losing their bargaining power, of conceding control over the most expansive economic force in their business...
...The results are instead a mixed bag for the players...
...What I saw instead was what television and huge stadiums conceal, the degree to which every professional football play—each tackle, each block, each run—is dominated by collisions so fierce that 20 and 30 yards away you can hear the thud of flesh against flesh, flesh against hard plastic...
...Our fall Sundays were spent watching the Browns on television or, if someone's father could be persuaded to take us, from the upper deck of Cleveland Stadium...
...Nor Otto Graham, who had the kindly, worn face of a minister rather than the look of an athlete...
...Finally, because of the NFL's immunity from antitrust law, a team has for all practical purposes the power to control a player's service for his entire football career...
...It was early August, and my uncle, who was friends with Otto Graham, the Browns' star quarterback, took me to the team's training camp to watch their annual intersquad game...
Vol. 30 • January 1983 • No. 1
