Post by TheShadow on Feb 8, 2006 18:37:30 GMT -5
www.contracostatimes.com/
Upshaw shows the way for the NFLPA
By Eric Gilmore
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
It was June 1983 when Gene Upshaw placed the call to Raiders owner Al Davis, asking to meet with his boss.
Upshaw was mulling a big decision and wanted Davis' advice.
Should he retire from football and take a job as the NFL Players Association's executive director? Or, after spending the 1982 season on injured reserve, should he return to the Raiders for another year?
Davis told Upshaw to meet him that night in San Francisco at a restaurant where he and his wife were having dinner. He promised him 20 minutes.
"I sat in that restaurant with Al Davis and his wife, and we sat and talked about what I was going to do," Upshaw said last month.
"That 20 minutes turned into three hours. Now it's turned into 23 years."
Upshaw, a Hall of Fame guard, took that union job, with Davis' blessing and encouragement. And for nearly a quarter of a century, he has held it.
Upshaw led the players through a bitter and failed strike in 1987. He led them to a huge antitrust victory in federal court in 1993, forcing owners to grant them true free agency for the first time as part of a seven-year collective bargaining agreement. He led them as the salary cap grew from $34.6 million in '93 to an expected $92 million-95 million in 2006.
And now, Upshaw is leading them in their toughest battle with owners in over a decade, trying to negotiate an improved labor agreement, likely through at least 2011.
"This one we're trying to get now will be my last one, no doubt about that," said Upshaw, whose contract as executive director runs through 2008.
This negotiation is no slam dunk.
Players are pushing hard to get a bigger share of the wealth. They get 64 percent of "designated gross revenue," primarily from television deals and ticket sales. Now they want at least 64 percent of all revenue, including money from local marketing and advertising.
Millions and millions of dollars are in play. What's more, the clock is ticking toward 2007, the final year of the deal.
Here's the kicker: 2007 will not have a salary cap unless players and owners agree to extend the CBA by March of that year. Consider that the nuclear option.
"Once you get to that, there's no way in the world we'd ever agree to a cap again," Upshaw vowed.
In the coming months, Upshaw, 60, will be smack in the middle of this minefield, trying to make a deal.
Growing up in the small south Texas city of Robstown, Upshaw never dreamed he'd one day lead a football players union.
Yet in retrospect, that's when Upshaw began preparing for this job that demands he wear so many hats -- diplomat, politician, advocate, brawler -- and remain cool under fire.
"I grew up in the segregated South, where there were separate schools, separate water fountains, separate restrooms, separate everything," Upshaw said.
"My dad (Gene Sr.) would never allow us to believe we were second-class citizens or not part of the community. He would not allow us to take the other side where we would be so hostile and fighting against everything that was there. You were aware of it but never let it stand in the way of what you had to do."
It was as a child in Texas that Upshaw learned the value of hard work, picking cotton during scorching summers. His father and mother, Cora, instilled the virtues of "discipline, religion and education," Upshaw said. They were "very active" in their church and community, where Gene Sr. eventually served a stint on the city council and Cora ran a senior citizens center.
Upshaw never intended to play football when he enrolled at Texas A&I, a small college some 24 miles from Robstown. He had played only one year of high school football and still weighed under 200 pounds when he graduated.
"I was not into football," Upshaw said. "I didn't like it. I liked baseball a lot better."
One day, though, Upshaw was watching A&I's football team practice when the coach spotted him.
"What are you doing here?" the coach asked.
"I'm just looking," Upshaw replied.
Not for long. A&I's coach persuaded Upshaw to walk on to the football team. Then he soon gave Upshaw a scholarship. By the end of his freshman year, Upshaw said, he had grown to 6-foot-5 and 260 pounds.
"I outgrew baseball and grew into football," Upshaw said. "It was a means and a way to get out. I never thought I'd wind up the No. 1 draft choice of the Raiders."
But that's exactly what he became in 1967. And it soon became clear that this big guard from a small Texas school was a natural leader.
Upshaw played in the Senior Bowl with some of college football's biggest stars, from Bubba Smith to Bob Griese to Alan Page and Steve Spurrier. Upshaw was a team captain for that game and for the College All-Star Game.
Early in his NFL career, Upshaw was chosen to be a Raiders team captain. He kept that honor until he retired.
"We called him 'The Governor' because he was the politician on the team," former Raiders fullback Pete Banaszak said. "He was the team captain and deservedly so. Gene was a good leader.
"Gene was always a good talker. Talked a lot, played both sides of the fence pretty good. We liked Gene. I liked him. He was a great teammate. A lot of the young guys looked up to him."
Even during his career with the Raiders, Upshaw was involved in Democratic Party politics and was appointed to several state and local commissions and boards.
"We felt he would be a politician one day," said Hall of Fame tackle Art Shell, who had a locker next to Upshaw's. "He always talked about being in politics.
"He was a very vocal guy. Always had the press. The press would migrate to him because he always had a line for them to write in the papers. I'm trying to get dressed, and he has a doggone press conference."
A funny thing happened on Upshaw's way to the governor's mansion. He became more and more involved with the NFLPA. He served as the Raiders' union representative throughout most of his playing career and eventually became union president.
Then the NFLPA made him its executive director.
"It's funny," Upshaw said. "Everyone always thought I was going into politics. I always tell (them), 'What do you think I'm in now? This is the biggest political job you can have.'"
Upshaw has had to deal with Congress, the media and lawsuits. He has had to rally his union troops during tough fights. And every few years he has had to win re-election.
"It's a very political environment to operate in," NFLPA assistant executive director Doug Allen said. "Knowing how to count votes and how to build consensus and a majority is a very necessary skill set.
"He had that going before he got here. All you had to see is how he operated in the Bay Area and in the locker room with the Raiders."
Playing for Davis, Upshaw said, helped prepare him for his current job. Davis encouraged him to be involved with the union as a team representative and later as its president.
According to Upshaw, Davis even pointed him in the right direction at times in his battle with owners.
"He encouraged me all the time," Upshaw said. "If it hadn't been for him back when I was playing, the union might have been in a different position than it is today."
Upshaw succeeded Ed Garvey as NFLPA director during one of the union's bleakest times. The players were coming off a 57-day, seven-game strike in 1982. True free agency was still a dream. The NFLPA was in dire shape financially and psychologically, rife with bitterness and divisiveness.
"The fates blessed us to have Gene," NFLPA western director Dave Meggyesy said. "Starting with his experience. Starting with his skin color. Starting with his upbringing in Texas and what that was about, just his sensibilities."
Shell called Upshaw the right guy for the job at that volatile time.
"He played the game," said Shell, now the NFL's senior vice president of football operations and development. "He understood the concerns of the players, and he also had an idea of what the owners were going through. He could see both sides."
"When I took over in 1983, the first thing (owners) did was say I was militant," Upshaw said. "I was coming off a strike. It was a bitter strike.
"It was always perceived in those days if you were big and black you were militant. Then all of a sudden you go through all of that, you end up where we are today. You will hear some people say, 'Maybe he's too close.'"
Too close to the owners. Too close to commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Too close to the so-called enemy.
Those are some of the charges Upshaw has heard from his critics during the past 13-plus years of labor peace in the NFL.
Upshaw's response?
"You keep your friends close and your enemies closer," Upshaw said. "You have to. I remember (former NFL coach) Bum Phillips saying it years ago. 'You catch more bees with honey then you do with vinegar.'
"But you never lose who you are through all this. There are certain things that can be negotiated, and there are some things that are not negotiable."
Former baseball players union boss Marvin Miller has been one of Upshaw's most outspoken critics, pointing to the dearth of guaranteed contracts in the NFL and the NFLPA's acceptance of a salary cap.
"Every league's union except the NFL's has chosen to hire professional leadership," Miller told the Newark Star-Ledger last year. "The NFL Players Association hired a former player. You see the results."
Upshaw has heard it all before.
"When God issued brains, he didn't just issue them to Marvin Miller," Upshaw said. "We have a few of them."
Meggyesy, another former NFL player, said Miller is off-base when he criticizes Upshaw.
"The proof is in the pudding," Meggyesy said. "We're getting the largest percentage of the gross. We have the best benefits package. What other measure do you want?"
When Upshaw became union chief, players and owners were, in many ways, fierce adversaries. Now, he said, they are partners, trying to grow the game financially together so both sides will benefit.
"I think more than anything, he's caused the relationship with the league to mature to a point that the players truly are, both by agreement and in reality, partners with the owners," NFLPA general counsel Richard Berthelsen said. "When we started back in the early '70s, it was like chipping at the Rock of Gibraltar. Now in a real sense we own a major share of the rock."
Now the players and Upshaw are trying to increase their share of that financial rock.
"Gene's political instincts are absolutely impeccable," Meggyesy said. "He really does know when to push and when not to."
