As the NFL playoffs head into their first full weekend, here's some food for thought.
I remember reading about former NFL players and their difficulties getting disability checks out of their own union, despite a separate fund set up within the pension system to do just that. I had no idea it was this bad.
[NFL Players Association head Gene] Upshaw, who refused to speak for this article and elected to leave the country when Congress staged a hearing on the union's treatment of injured vets in late June, has responded to his critics with schoolyard taunts, calling [former player and Chicago Bears coach Mike] Ditka too "dumb" to understand the issue and threatening to break [former Buffalo Bills lineman Joe] DeLamielleure's neck.This is odd behavior for one of the highest-paid officials in the history of organized labor, and, in any case, these attacks duck the issue at hand: the needs of broke and battered ex-players. An exhaustive investigation -- including interviews with dozens of injured vets, evaluations of their medical charts and reports from doctors selected by the league, and conversations with critics of the Players Association in the medical and legal community -- reveals a pattern of conduct by the NFLPA that denies former players the money they need and to which their injuries should entitle them. What emerges is a picture of a labor union that has turned its back on the men who built it, and officials who use their power not to advocate for their brethren but to protect the assets of the 32 owners with whom they once did battle.
How has the union failed its members? Well,
From his bellicose beginnings as a union chief in 1983, Upshaw, the Hall of Fame guard for the Oakland Raiders, has been dogged by allegations of fiscal mismanagement. As reported by the Boston Globe in 1990, the sloppy bookkeeping included a loan of $100,000 made by the union to Upshaw that prompted a Department of Labor investigation in 1988 (it's illegal for a union to lend any official more than $2,000), but that was later chalked up to back pay, deferred salary, or an advance on his severance.But the greater outrage, by far, is what he hasn't accomplished. He failed to win guaranteed contracts in bargaining, failed to get his players long-term health insurance, and failed to get as big a percentage of total revenues as union chiefs have in other sports. Baseball, which took in $5.1 billion in revenues in 2006, provides 10-year veterans a maximum annual pension of $180,000; football, by contrast, which grossed $6 billion last season, pays 10-year vets only about $50,000 a year. On a yearly basis, according to figures provided by union critic Parrish, baseball pensions average three times the NFLPA's (roughly $36,000 to a sub-poverty $12,000). Some of the greatest men who ever played the game receive pensions of a couple of hundred dollars a month.
"It's a colossal failure of leadership by Upshaw, who simply refuses to admit he made mistakes," says Cy Smith, who was co-counsel in the Webster case. "He failed to account for the violence of the game by getting insurance and disability, and is afraid to go back to the owners now and say, 'Guess what? I f***ed up.' "
There are horrific examples in this article. Here's one:
[Mike] Mosley, a blazingly fast returner and flanker for the Buffalo Bills in the '80s, ripped his right knee making a cut on turf and went down in a heap, untouched. The doctor who attended to him botched the treatment so badly that Mosley, who ran a 4.28 in the 40, could barely stop and start on a two-move pattern. "He 'fixed' the cartilage, which was fine, and left the ligament, which was torn, and I ran on it and frayed it completely," says Mosley, now 49, in the thick-as-gravy accent of small-town central Texas. "I went from being the return champ in 1982 to being unable to bend my knee by '84. Then the leg withered, and that was it. I was home on my front porch at 26."Mosley, a golden boy in high school and college -- he was the wishbone quarterback at Texas A&M, where boosters threw cash and cars at him and the girls lined up to ride shotgun -- fell fast and hard once football was done, lapsing into deep depression. He tried to get a job, but his knee kept buckling, and he had additional problems with his shins and back. In 1998 he filed for disability and, to his shock and relief, was approved. The $9,000 a month allowed him to buy a small house and win custody of his five-year-old daughter Kendall, and though medical expenses ate up most of the rest, he was able to fashion a life again. And then in '04, without a word of warning, the pension board cut him off. He appealed to the union, but it soon stopped taking his calls. In short order he lost his house and truck, and he and his daughter were forced to move in with his 75-year-old mother. She is in very frail health, has run through her savings, and must feed three people on her Social Security check of $319 a month. Mosley, a man of 49, hides in his room, surrounded by football trophies. The look he wears when you flush him out is that of a dying quail.
"There's nothing left," he says. "They took it all from me, and never even gave a reason. If you talk to Upshaw -- and I tried like hell to -- could you ask him how he lives with himself?"
Upshaw was a helluva player for the Raiders, but he seems to have learned all of his management philosophy from that team's owner Al Davis. The Raiders, after all, left their birthplace in Oakland for greener pastures and more money south in L.A., and then went back north once they'd tapped out all the entertainment dollar they could get in Southern California. In the process, Davis and his co-owners have kept a lot of money for themselves. Upshaw seems to think that he owns the Players Association and its cash. Why else would he pay himself $6.7M a year? (For comparison, the NBA's players union pays its boss $2.1M, while the baseball players union pays its boss a paltry $1M per year.)
On second thought, maybe Upshaw's trying to emulate Jimmy Hoffa; milk the union for as much as you can for as long as you can.
If you're a pro football fan and you have a dollar or two to spare, you might go look at Gridiron Greats, a non-profit assistance fund designed to help former players who need it.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 11, 2008 12:01 AM | TrackBack