Batterman says NHL and NFL labour problems not the same

Saturday, February 05 2011

He is so ferocious, he has the livelihoods of more than 2,100 incoming and outgoing NFL players quaking in their low-cut cleats. This article was written by Mike Klis and appeared in The Denver Post.

He is so strong of mind and tough in talk, the fear is he can temporarily prevent all those bruising, menacing football players from playing the game indefinitely.

The best football players in the world are afraid of Bob Batterman because they know that just a few years back he caused all those teeth-missing hockey players to crawl back on their knees and beg for mercy at drastically reduced salaries.

Football players have been told to expect a lockout in large part because Batterman is on the owners' side.

"I know," Batterman said, smiling, but hardly deviously. "I think maybe that's why they hired me. I should charge a fee."

I was surprised when I saw the man I had been calling Bob "Lockout" Batterman. He is a couple inches shy of 6 feet and may or may not weigh 160 pounds, depending on his sports coat fabric. He has short- cropped, gray hair. He is extremely accommodating, distinguished, polite and friendly.

He reminds me of another famous sports labor lawyer: Marvin Miller. Only Miller was a baseball union man and Batterman is the NFL management attorney who led the lockout of the entire NHL season in 2004-05.

Miller vs. Batterman. I'd almost pay a quarter to watch that negotiation.

In the end, NHL players took it in their hockey shorts. Compared to performers in the other three major sports, hockey players are playing for peanuts.

And so NFL players union director DeMaurice Smith has told his constituents to be afraid — be very, very afraid — of Batterman, whom the league hired in 2007 to represent them in negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.

"That's when they made the decision as to who would lead and develop and execute your game plan," Smith said Thursday at the NFL Players Association news conference. "In 2007, long before I became the union's executive director, he became their quarterback."

Batterman does not agree with Smith's characterization and has 44 years of mostly peaceful negotiations with the union to prove it.

"The NHL was losing hundreds of millions of dollars," Batterman said of the 2004-05 lockout. "It was completely broke. There was no recognition on the union's part, there was no willingness to compromise and we were forced to shut it down and they came back at significantly reduced player costs.

"They did not have the opportunity that we have in the NFL to make the changes that needed to be made and still give significant protection for the players. That's the difference. It was all negative there. The NHL model would have been best described as disaster. This is not."