NFL players likely will get sacked in labor dispute

Friday, February 04 2011

DeMaurice Smith is wearing a power suit. Black with pinstripes, French cuffs and a tidy pocket square. He is fit and confident and always looks you in the eye when talking, the confidence of a decorated former trial lawyer coming out in every sentence as Smith, the NFL players’ union executive director, wages a multibillion-dollar fight he’s compared to war. This article was written by Sam Mellinger and appeared in the Kansas City Star.

If you didn’t know better, you’d have no idea his side is about to cave.

Oh, the union might avoid a complete disaster. Maybe the players can win on safety, or a rookie wage scale or better long-term health care. Maybe it’s enough that Smith and other union leaders can stand in front of reporters and cameras and put on a strong face.

But nobody — not even some players, when they speak honestly and privately — expects this to be anything other than a rout for the owners.

This is the backdrop of Super Bowl week here, the lead-up to what most likely will be an ugly fight and what almost certainly will end up as a win for the owners in forcing the players to take an almost 20-percent pay cut.

It’s a shame, too, because this is the sport in which fans have the most sympathy for athletes.

Football players could learn a few things from baseball — those overpaid, guaranteed-contract hardliners.

• • •

Baseball players stick together. That’s it. That’s their secret. People have said they form the strongest union in America and there is any number of theories why.

Nothing matters without this fundamental truth: Professional baseball players stick together.

Maybe it’s a shared struggle, either through decades of lost battles with ownership before free-agency in the 1970s or the common experience of minor-league baseball. Former union bosses Marvin Miller and Don Fehr deserve credit for cultivating an environment where players see a higher calling in sacrificing for the whole and a better future.

Dave Winfield signed a historically big contract in 1980 and was one of the union’s most outspoken supporters in 1981, even though the strike cost him a small fortune. Tony Gwynn supported a 1994 strike that cost him a chance at batting .400.

Contrast that with the NFL, where Joe Montana was among those to immediately cross the picket line in 1987.

Here’s another comparison: Major-league baseball players and union leadership actually see the 1994 strike as a wonderful thing. This is their biggest triumph, a victory over the colluding owners in which the players won every important issue. The lost salaries and World Series are collateral damage in a principled fight with a higher purpose.

Contrast that with the NFL, where the players are terrified of a lockout, and it doesn’t help that the first deadline is the one that hurts them most. If there’s no collective-bargaining agreement by March 3, around 500 pending free agents will miss out on big contracts with immediate bonuses. This is only the beginning.

Benefits and medical insurance cut off then, too, so any player with a pregnant wife or sick kid is suddenly paying out of his own pocket. Some of these men have children with serious diseases, or who are on transplant lists.

The baseball union tends to look at labor negotiations in terms of what it can gain.

The football union tends to focus on what it can lose.

• • •

It wouldn’t be fair to oversimplify this. Baseball players have inherent advantages in these negotiations because their sport is visibly and demonstrably inferior without the stars. Ever been to a T-Bones game?

Football is different. Players who went through the 1987 strike describe the helplessness of sitting at home watching replacement games and knowing those other guys are getting paid. When the players wear pads and helmets, new stars are easy to create. Owners pray on the players’ insecurities.

“They’ve got the bat, and they’re going to swing it,” is how one player describes it.

Already, you’ve seen the cracks. Twitter isn’t helping, when fans and ownership see the only thing players seem to agree on is that Jay Cutler is a wuss.

This week, Sports Illustrated released part of an interview in which commissioner Roger Goodell says that not one of two dozen or so players he spoke to while investigating accusations against Ben Roethlisberger stood up for the Steelers’ quarterback.

Goodell is too smart not to assume some motive here. He knows that any current disarray within the union has a long and — for the owners, at least — lucrative history.

They’re swinging that bat already, knowing they can’t miss.