Summit Background Information Packet

2009 Independent Retired Players Summit & Conference Presented by

The Independent Advocates For Retired NFL Players In Association with

&

BACKGROUND INFORMATION PACKET May 29-31, 2009 South Point Hotel, Casino, Spa Las Vegas, Nevada

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121 Receive Disability Benefits-Maybe by Bernie Parrish The “Truth Squad” says I erred by only reporting the 121 disability recipients listed on the Supplemental Disability Plan. The “Truth Squad” says I “erred”, I “erred”…really. There is no tax, or any other reports on the number of disability recipients. The most prominent numbers are the phony ones that come from the NFLPA and NFLPA attorney Doug Ell in perjured testimony to Congress. The auditors of the retirement and disability plan, the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan do not list the number of beneficiaries covered, or any amount, not $20 million or any other amount paid to disabled beneficiaries. No number of retirement beneficiaries or disabled beneficiaries is listed in their strange incomplete audit, only the total “Benefits Payments” are listed at $53,332,266 for 2006, $50,581,207 for 2005, and $49,030,378 for 2004. No number of retirement beneficiaries is listed in any Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan audit by Abrams, Foster, Nole, & Williams, P.A. And no number of disabled recipients is listed in the Abram’s audits, ever. Dennis Curran, Greg Aiello, Harold Henderson, Roger Goodell, Carl Francis and Lanny Davis’ “Truth Squad” all scatter self serving claims of $20 million or just under $20 million a year is paid to 90, 106, 121, 130, 284, 317, or 428 disabled NFL players, only 4 of whom are disabled with concussion or brain injuries out of the over 13,000 living who have played in the NFL. The Abram’s audit doesn’t cite or even mention $20 million of disability benefits, or any of the numbers strewed about by the NFL propagandist, let alone who it is actually supposed to be paid to. I believe we have an action against Abram’s et al for the piece of _____ they call a “Financial Statement and Independent Auditors Report.” We didn’t get an audit; we got another NFL propaganda piece.

The Employers (the Clubs) fund the retirement plan, not the current players: Current players do not contribute any of their salaries to the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Benefit Plan. Form 5500 for 2004 shows an Amount paid by employer column 3(b) $59,436,976 column 3(c) Amount paid by employees None (That would be the current players paid $0), Form 5500 Annual Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan 2005 Page2 Column 3(b) Amount paid by employer $64,769,237 3(c) Amount paid by employees None (That would be the current players paid $0), Form 5500 Annual Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan 2006 shows the same accounting, Employer Contribution 3(b) $67,938,458 and column 3(c) Employee contribution None (That would be the current players paid $0). Dennis Curran, Senior Vice President of the NFL told a Congressional committee that “In 2006 alone, the Clubs contributed $126 million to the Retirement Plan.” The “Clubs” are not the 2

“current player’s salaries,” even though the $126 million is pure fiction. How can the IRS report say employer contribution $67,938,458, and the NFL VP responsible for the accuracy of the IRS report say the Clubs contribution was $126 million for 2006? Somebody is not telling the government or the public the truth. How about that “Truth Squad”? Both the IRS tax forms and the NFL Vice President who is over the plan, said “the Employersthe Clubs” alone fund the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. Any reasonable person, including a Congressman or Senator must conclude that either the Tax forms have been falsified and NFL VP Dennis Curran lied to Congress, or the “Truth Squad” and all who claim the current players contribute a portion of their salaries to fund “the” retirement plan are lying. Baseball has had only one player retirement plan from the beginning. They didn’t attempt to screw their older players by diverting money into 2nd Career, and other splinter plans that include only most recent players and exclude the older players. Now the NBA has acted and improved their retirement plan to a fairer level. Only the NFL owners are making a concerted effort to deny the benefits intended when the retirement plan was established, based on the foundation asserted by Pete Rozelle that “It should be obvious to all players that the amount of the benefit payments and the possibility of later including retroactive service prior to the 1959 season, are entirely dependent upon one basic factor—namely, adopting measures to produce the highest possible income for the Benefit Plan.”

'Am I An Addict? Yes' By JOE HENDERSON, The Tampa Tribune Published: December 31, 2007 Updated: 12/30/2007 11:22 pm TAMPA - Around a table at Mike Ditka's restaurant in Chicago, three retired players from the National Football League met for dinner a couple of months ago. Mercury Morris, Dave Pear and Tim Harris played for years in the NFL. Pear was the first Tampa Bay Buccaneer selected to the Pro Bowl. Morris was a standout running back for the Miami Dolphins, and Harris was a linebacker for Green Bay and two other teams. Although they were in town to publicize what they say is the league's indifferent attitude toward its former players, that night they unwittingly became symbols for another problem that has received little attention. At least that's how it seemed to Jennifer Smith, whose organization - Gridiron Greats - works with retired players in need. "At one point, all three of them pulled out giant baggies, loaded with pain pills," she said. "They started 3

comparing what was in the bags and passing them around the table. It was like, 'Hey, I need some of these.' Or, 'How's that one working for you?' It was amazing." Alex Stalcup, an addiction treatment specialist in California, has sounded the alarm after seeing significant increases in the number of football players at his clinic hooked on pain medications. Retired players appear to be hit particularly hard. They become dependent on medications to mask the effect from injuries during their careers, and the cycle begins anew after retirement when they often face a daily battle against pain. Wally Chambers, a once-fearsome defensive end who was a mainstay on the Bucs' 1979 divisionchampionship team, knows about the pain. Now 56, he has endured seven operations on his back, three hip replacements, and various treatments for shoulder, neck and knee problems. He needs a cane to walk from his couch to the front door, and for most routine chores he gets around on a motorized scooter. He said he alternates his medication every month or so, thinking it helps him avoid addiction. But he also said medications are a daily part of his life. "There are guys in worse shape than I am, but you'll never know it," he said. "They're ashamed to come forward, or they just don't want people to see them this way. Back when I played, the league was so secretive and closed-mouthed, so it's hard for guys to get over that and come forward and admit they have a problem. "And there are a lot of things going on that the NFL and players union are trying to keep hush-hush. They don't want people to know." The strength of pain medicine, such as Vicodin and OxyContin, combined with the large doses many former players use, has long-term health implications. Extended use can damage the liver and kidneys, and there can be emotional repercussions as well. "Many of them develop severe depression," Stalcup said. "They feel the best thing is to die. No one talks about it, so they feel they're the only person in the world with this problem." 'Pain Changes A Lot Of Things' The league's insurance benefit covers a player five years after his career is over, with an additional 18 months available under COBRA, a federal program, and the league recently enacted a plan to provide joint replacement surgery. To Mercury Morris, it's not enough. "Those players have been excluded from the process by the league," he said. "These people should be taken care of, but the league has appointed itself to be in charge of appeals. I don't think they care that it's a problem." Players also complain the full effect of their injuries didn't surface until they had been out of the game for a decade or more and their insurance had expired. In that case, NFL Vice President Greg Aiello said, players can petition the league for disability payments. "The medical needs of retired players is something we're addressing now," Aiello said. "There are ways 4

for them to get assistance." There is plenty of need. Reggie Harrison, now known as Kamal Ali Salaam-El, played four relatively anonymous seasons in the NFL. You would have to be a student of football history to remember much about him, although his blocked punt against the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X helped swing the game for his Pittsburgh Steelers. Salaam-El, 56, hasn't played the game since being released in 1978, but the game still plays him. It left him with a broken bone in his spine that wasn't discovered until after his career ended, a bad knee, a fractured hip and memory problems related to concussions. It also left him addicted and desperate with debilitating pain, rarely leaving his home in Woodbridge, Va. "Am I an addict? Yes," he said. "All my medications are pretty much illegal. I get them any way I can. I will even stoop to marijuana; anything I can to relieve pain, I do it. The day I get caught is the day I'm going to be sorry, but until then I'll do what I have to do. I was never sold on drugs, but pain changes a lot of things." Former St. Louis Cardinals guard Conrad Dobler, who played in the 1970s and early '80s and said he uses pain medication to combat the effects of multiple surgeries, was even more direct about the cycle of drug use in the league. Now 57, Dobler admits he has battled post-retirement drug problems to combat the effect of 17 surgeries - including five knee replacements - since his playing career ended. "If you put down 50 former players, I might know one who isn't on drugs," Dobler said. "Who am I to judge how much pain a guy is in? Of course you get hooked on it. With Vicodin, I used to take that by the handfuls for seven or eight years before I began to wean myself off them. Was I addicted to it? Yeah, I probably was. "I was taking three or four thousand Vicodin a year, with OxyContin in between. The more you take, the more resistance you build up. To me it was just like candy at the end. Could I have functioned without the drugs? Hell, no." Dobler figures he and other players of that era paid the price to help build the NFL into the giant it is today. And, he said, former players need adequate assistance to deal with the effects from injuries. "Coal miners who wound up with black lung disease, that's what they had to do to support their families," he said. "With us, I don't know anyone from my era who doesn't take drugs for pain. There are a tremendous number of people who can't function without them. Of course, the NFL doesn't want to hear that. It opens up real big liability issues for them." Management Is The Key Stalcup said it's important to make the distinction between those addicted to medications and those who are dependent on them to deal with long-term pain. "The centerpiece of addiction is that you can't control your use, so when someone goes in with a 5

problem, they are told, 'Oops, this is too much,' and are stopped cold turkey," he said. "There's no logic to it. "The problem is, some of those people have continuing pain issues. They get set up in two ways - they get taken off the opiates way too fast; it leaves a giant hole in their nervous system. That's called clean. But they can't sleep, they're psychologically negative, and they hurt. So what do they do? That's when they need professional help to manage their pain." Pear, 54, hasn't played since Super Bowl XV in 1981 with Oakland. He said he played despite suffering a herniated disk in his neck. "The Raiders just shot me up with drugs and pills and pushed me out on the field," he said. "And when I was done, they pushed me out the door. The Raiders used to have a doctor whose nickname was Needles. His job was to give you a shot. That's the way it was there: give you a shot, give you a pill, go have a drink and go play." Pear said the league has abandoned him and other players in need. "It's another one of the deep, dark secrets the NFL wants to push under the rug," he said. "It's like concussions. It's like disability payments to former players. It's a corrupt process. It's rotten to the core." The full effect of their injuries sometimes isn't felt until they are out of the game for a decade or more. By that time, getting assistance from the NFL, they say, is difficult at best. That assumes they bother to seek help at all. "The league doesn't understand the problem," Pear said. "I've spent over $500,000 of my own money on surgeries. We're not getting the help we need, and I know a lot of players who are in big trouble and trying to do it alone." There are no reliable estimates for the number of former players in need, only a suspicion that the number is much larger than most would guess. Salaam-El said his daily battle to combat pain is all-consuming. He said he is completely disabled and in constant, severe pain. "It starts when you open up your eyes," he said. "You don't know what time it ends." His plight sounds way too familiar to other former players. "It's hell, man," said Clem Turner, 62, who played four seasons with Cincinnati and Denver and later wrestled professionally. Although Turner takes regular medication to combat the effects of 19 surgeries, he said he is not addicted and that his pills are prescribed by doctors. "I need it to exist," he said. "Honest to God, if I had known I was going to suffer like this for a moment of running up and down the field, oh, hell, no!" Tim Watson played for the Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants, plus the Barcelona Dragons of the World League and the Arizona Rattlers of the Arena Football League. He retired in 1999 after a serious neck injury: a cracked vertebra similar to the one that threatens the career 6

of Bucs running back Mike Alstott. Watson, 37, works with the NFL Alumni. The group has asked the league to provide data on the number of addicted former players. "Because the league is so competitive and the money is what it is, the pressure is there to keep playing no matter what," he said. "Coaches look the other way and say, 'Do what you've gotta do - wink, wink.'" The Choice You Make It becomes a game of daily compromises, accepting the risk of long-term damage to stop the pain today. "There is no fine line. You're talking to a lawyer; it's all gray," said former Bucs nose tackle Brad Culpepper, 38, now a lawyer in Tampa. "Pain management versus addiction? How can someone on the outside who's not feeling the pain decide? "These doctors haven't lived through 20 years of football and all these surgeries to say that taking 10 Vicodin a day is too much, so you need to take three. If your quality of life is such that you can't even get up off the couch, then I'll sacrifice my liver and kidneys to live my life enjoyably." Players aren't forced to play football. The violence and speed that lead to injury are also part of the attraction that has turned the NFL into the most successful sports league in history. Even Salaam-El said he'd play again and risk being in the same condition he is in now. "I didn't say football players are the smartest people in the world," he said. "I do say we're the toughest." Even the toughest guys need help. "We as players made a choice to play, but our families didn't," Pear said. "Too many of us are in a situation that creates hardship on families when we are denied benefits. "I have lived in chronic pain for the last 25 years. When a person is in pain, you'll do whatever you have to do. And if this doesn't change soon, these guys who are playing now are going to find themselves right where we are. I wouldn't wish that on anyone." Reporter Joe Henderson can be reached at (813) 259-7861 or [email protected].

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An Audit is not an audit by Bernie Parrish An Audit is not an Audit when it is an NFL Retirement Plan Audit; then it is a scam, a cover up, a numbers obfuscating scheme, another of the NFL confabulations in their Delay, Deny, and Hope They Die programs. The attached Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan annual ―Audit‖ never mentions the number of people covered by the Plan. This audit never once states the number of retired players covered by the retirement plan. It does not cite the classes of people (players) covered, such as plan beneficiary, disabled player(s) drawing retirement benefits, family death benefit survivors, separated spouses, or whoever else might be covered. This blatant omission of the number of people (retired players) covered is the chief characteristic of the 2004 to 2006 NFL Player Retirement Plan audits done by Abrams, Foster, Nole, & Williams, P.A., 2 Hamil Rd Suite 241, West Quadrangle, Baltimore, MD 21210-1886, 410-433-6830. It is worse than absurd. You can‟t do an audit (financial statement) of a pension (retirement) plan and not state the number of people covered by that plan. That is unless you are doing it for the NFL, NFLPA, Gene Upshaw, Paul Tagliabue, Roger Goodell, or the NFL owners they shield. (I have mailed Eric Tamarkin a copy of both the 2004-2005 and the 2005-2006 Abrams, Foster, Nole & Williams PA financial statements) The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan Board of Trustees is primarily responsible for this self serving phony Audit because they approve paying for it every year. It is used to carry out subtle abuses of fiduciary duties such as; less than 20 plan beneficiaries out of the at least 14,695 living retired (13,000) and active players (1,695) have paid the fee and requested a full copy of this official retirement plan ―audit‖ in 2007. This 20 is actually more than usual. This flawed ―audit‖ document is the only place where retirement plan amendments, made in secret, by the Groom Law Group are made available to the 14,695 retired and active players covered and affected by these clandestine self serving amendments. Groom Law Group and the Retirement Board claim this is compliance with notice to Plan participants and beneficiaries required by ERISA. It is not. The plan Board does not now nor ever has given the proper ―identifying in plain English, understandable‖ ERISA notices of amendments to the beneficiaries. This secrecy is to Groom‘s, the union, the owners, and the retirement board‘s advantage but to the great disadvantage of the players and retired players. Even before this inadequate notice is given Groom has used these ―illegal‖ amendments in court defenses against retired disabled players who are trying to obtain their rightful disability benefits. A rather simple study (survey) will show which amendments that have been used by Groom in cases against retired disabled players before they have been made part of the plan and before the plan participants and beneficiaries have been notified of their existence. Groom drafts these amendments, then refers to them as part of the plan, thereby ERISA law they must comply with as if they, Groom had nothing to do with creating and inserting them in the plan documents. Retirement plan reports make cloudy deceptive references such as referring to participants and beneficiaries. Who are the participants as opposed to the beneficiaries referred to in the plan? Why are 8

there no payments attributed to disability payments in this audit? Why are there no itemized benefits payments to any or individual or class of participants or beneficiaries listed? Why does our plan, the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Players Retirement Plan perform administrative services for the Second Career Savings Plan, Player Annuity & Insurance Co., Player Annuity Program when these plans are all used by the NFLPA cabal to pay off and manipulate the current players to influence them to vote against the best interests of the retired players? Page 12 of 2004-2005 ―audit‖ shows a $138,007,594 loss from investments with no explanation of it. I think a $138,007,594 loss in one year on investments deserves an explanation, especially when it is during a period when the NFL Plan‘s Investment manager, Callan Associates is being sued by the San Diego Public Employees Union Pension Plan for huge investment losses to their plan caused by Callan Associates using their kick back ―Pay to Play‖ schemes that they use in managing the investments of our pension plan assets. Pay to Play, kick back schemes and conflicts of interest are part of the reasons NY, Connecticut, and Illinois made Aon Corporation, our NFL Retirement Plan‘s actuary pay $190,000,000 of restitution to those three states. In addition, Elliot Spitzer forced Chicago Bears owner Patrick Ryan to write a letter of apology to his customers for ―cheating‖ those customers. Spitzer also made Ryan agree to remove ―conflicts of interest‖ from Aon‘s business model, but overlooked the egregious conflict of interest of Ryan being an NFL owner/employer, and the NFL Player/employee retirement plan actuary at the same time. Ryan and his Chicago Bears partner, Andrew McKenna are top Republican-Bush fundraisers and their NFL conflict of interest is being protected by the administration from prosecution within the Dept of Labor and the DOJ. Bush‘s first cousin, Jim Pierce is Managing Director of Aon Corporation. Pierce participated in an unusual coincidence moving an Aon meeting from the Twin Towers on 9-11, where several hundred other Aon employees died when the Towers collapsed, to a safe hotel meeting room several blocks away. The reason given was the size of the meeting. Please note the ―audit‖ shows Aon collected $574,617 in 2006, $492,951 in 2005, $395,323 in 2004 a total of $1,462,891. In a single year, 2005, Aon (Patrick Ryan, Chicago Bears owner) collected over $1,929,509 in fees for ―Contract Administration‖ from the Professional Football Player‘s Insurance Trust, whatever that is. In 2004 this ―Player‘s Trust‖ paid Aon $2,039,174. One could reasonably assume Aon receives comparable fees every year from this Aon NFLPA contrived insurance scheme which would total $5,953,245 for 2004 to 2005 period. That is Aon; the Chicago Bears owners were paid $7,416,136 for these two services alone from 2004 to 2006. Aon also provides services for all but 2 NFL Club front office pension plans, and is paid some amount from every team in the NFL. Numerous IRS form 5500‘s and other Dept of Labor forms ask if Aon Consulting, the Actuary/Consultant is affected by ―(d) Relationship to employer, employee organization, or person known to be a party-in-interest‖ and Aon always answers ―NONE‖. With Patrick Ryan owning huge interest 22,000,000 shares of Aon in 2005, and receiving $5,000,000 of compensation as an Aon executive while he is also a Chicago Bears owner, the answer as to being a party-in-interest is ―YES‖ not ―NONE‖. Ryan is a major fund raiser for the Bush administration. The retired NFL Players and their families are victims of a Ryan/Bush cozy relationship. We are not going to roll over and play dead because of the rapacious greed of the NFL owners who exploit every angle for profit including deceptive audits as well 9

as the political angle of the Ryan/Bush relationship. The owners try to hide their psychotic denial and abuse of the retired NFL players behind the players union and their obsequious Commissioner. The current owner‘s hatred of retired players is rooted in our having kicked their ancestor owner‘s, in some cases parent‘s, butts to win the pension plan proving that the players and their fans are the only indispensable factors in professional football. Tearing the pension out of the hides of their owner (parent) predecessor heroes George Halas, Paul Brown, Wellington Mara, Charles Bidwill, Art Rooney, and Carroll Rosenbloom, Bert Bell and Pete Rozelle makes them more than nervous about getting their own butts kicked by those same players who are in the process of forcing them to honor the commitments made by those tight fisted ancestor heroes during the 1959 to 1963 era. Owner‘s finest hours are when threatening to move franchises to force the taxpayers to pay for their money factories (stadiums). Blackmailing cities is what these modern day owners are really good at and little else within the sport. Now they are stumbling their way into putting all their games on Pay TV beginning by creating their own NFL (pay) TV network. They have even brought former NFL (retired) Commissioner Paul Tagliabue back out to defend his screwing over of the retired players in their retirement and disability plan and the fans with NFL Pay TV. The retirement plan and the disability plan are the same plan and this plan, this single plan, the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan must be fixed in its entirety, not just the disability portion of the plan. There are numerous ways to go about these repairs but none of them include the services or input of Groom Law Group, Akin Gump Law firm, Jeff Pash, Dennis Curran and those who have corrupted the plan from their positions in the NFL office and their legal counsels, or the NFLPA leadership and legal counsel and pension board trustees and plan administrators. One way is to allow the retired players to vote in union elections on a one man one vote basis. This will give the active current players the right to vote for the rest of their lives so that future generations cannot become dominated by a handful of union profiteers who use their union positions in collusion with management to enrich themselves at their member‘s expense as has occurred over the past 15+ years. One reasonable solution would be an election demanded and overseen by Congress through federal agencies in late February or early March 2008. This could be an effective way to clean up this self serving exploitative union cabal and solve the problems caused by limitless union officer terms that enable manipulation of the union for personal gain like the outrageous $6.7+ million a year compensation of the Executive Director. Bernie Parrish, Retired NFL Players advocate and author of best selling book They Call It A Game 202-386-6400 [email protected]

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Bitter Battle For the Old Guard from SI.com

He succeeded in the trenches at Super Bowls and bargaining tables, but NFL union boss Gene Upshaw is under siege again -- only this time he's butting heads with angry, hurting vets from his generation Posted: Thursday January 31, 2008 1:56PM; Updated: Tuesday February 5, 2008 1:40PM By Gary Smith I never believed in ghosts. So when I was told they were out there moaning in the field, my response was no different than yours, no doubt, would be. I rolled my eyes and laughed. For nearly two years I ignored strange sounds. I spent weekends following the quests of the mighty Colts and then the perfect Patriots, weekdays diverted by sagas of quarterbacks who drowned dogs and cornerbacks who showered 81,000 dollar bills on naked dancing girls. I'd just turn up the volume on game days, make the collisions grow louder. But then one night, when the strange noises grew insistent, I ventured outside. It took a moment for my vision to adjust to the dark. But there they were. A horde of ghosts pursuing a tall, solitary figure.

Gene Upshaw. Chris Usher/SI

Conrad Dobler was near the front of the charge; how could I not remember him? Even with his hair turned white, his legs hobbled by five knee replacements, the old St. Louis Cardinals guard delivered a helmet-first shot. "Some people have no conscience," he snarled, "and he's one of them." Then came a neck-snapping tackle from an old Baltimore Colts safety. "We have no interest in working with a man of his morality," said Bruce Laird. "He is a nonentity. . . . He means nothing to retired players." On came another ancient guard, a former Buffalo Bill with a savage forearm shiver. "I won't stop until that bastard's gone or in jail," said Joe DeLamielleure. "He's a disgrace to every player, past and current." Next came a creaking running back and a quarterback, one high and one low. "He is nothing more than a pawn," howled Mercury Morris, the former Miami Dolphin. "This is a scam. It's always been a scam and always will be a scam." Ex-Houston Oilers QB Dan Pastorini's hit was swift and brutal: "He makes me sick." 11

Then it grew worse. One of the eldest ghosts, a onetime Cleveland Browns cornerback, arrived like a missile and administered the lowest blow of all. "A habitual liar," Bernie Parrish hissed, and then demanded to know why the man wasn't a suspect in the unusual death of his ex-wife. Finally I caught a better glimpse of their target, the tall, impervious one who just kept trudging onward. The thick padding and tape wrapped around his long arms and hands, as if he were a mummy, sparked my memory. It was Gene Upshaw. I heard a crowd roar. It occurred to me that I'd drifted into the unlikeliest sort of ghost story. Everyone was rooting for the ghosts! It was almost impossible not to. Creeping along the sideline on a walker, bent at a 45-degree angle, was the all-time great Oilers running back, Earl Campbell. Confused by foggy memory, neck locking up from damaged vertebrae, advancing on an artificial left hip was Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys safety Mel Renfro. Dialing his wife because he couldn't remember where he'd parked the car was former All-Pro Carolina Panthers linebacker Kevin Greene. Out of a Maryland homeless shelter, trying to squeeze by on his $400-a-month NFL pension was O.J. Simpson's former blocker, Bills tackle Donnie Green. Enough. There were just too many of the hobbling and homeless, the broke and disoriented, to identify them all. How had it come to this? I drew nearer. The ghosts were eager to explain. For three decades, from Pop Warner to retirement, they'd been groomed to spit at the pain, which was ever-increasing as the colliding bodies grew larger and faster, and they'd soldiered on in silence for years after they'd faded away. But then came the day when the consequence of all those head-ons, all that pounding on all that green pavement called artificial turf, demanded its reckoning. The mornings when they awoke and realized they could barely get up . . . or didn't even want to. The multiple knee and hip replacements, each In achieving long-term labor peace Tagliabue and Upshaw became close -- too close for one carving a year of recovery time out of their lives; some old pros. the depression, vertigo, Alzheimer's and thoughts of Charles Dharapak/AP suicide, which some doctors linked to the multiple concussions they'd suffered; the spiraling medical costs and the realization that neither their pension nor their disability plan -- if they even qualified for it -- could possibly keep pace, had combined to overwhelm them. Yes, many of their predecessors had carried such torments to their graves, but that was before $1,280 CAT scans and $2,280 brain MRIs, before the Internet had provided former players a forum to compare plights and emerge from their isolation, before the advent of unfettered free agency and guaranteed shared revenue in the 1990s had made the current players and their benefits plan far richer . . . and the disparities between the old and new warriors so striking. The ghosts sat there on Sundays, watching all that glitter, pomp and money, listening to old comrades who'd escaped with their glibness and good health trade quips on the screen. My heart went out to them. I'd whooped over their collisions; probably you had too. Maybe they were 12

our ghosts. But my fascination kept turning to their unflinching prey. Why were they stalking him instead of their old employers, the wealthy heirs and barons of commerce who had owned their teams and their sport? Why Gene Upshaw, their union's executive director for 25 years, their league's All-Pro guard in the 1960s and '70s with the Oakland Raiders -- one of them? He was the character I'd never seen in any horror tale. The haunted one who refused to be spooked. It was 37 years ago that he'd started wrapping himself. He'd begun, in the fourth year of his Hall of Fame career, with a pair of work gloves and elbow pads, overlaying them with a single roll of half-inch tape from his fingers nearly to his jersey sleeves. Then he'd upped it to two rolls per arm, then three. He'd begun slicing the cardboard tubes that the tape came in, fitting one half over each arm for more protection before starting the wrapping, then adding a fourth roll of tape, two inches wide, over all that. I remembered him leading those leftside sweeps alongside his fellow All-Pro and best pal, tackle Art Shell, running over defenders without breaking stride, his beard and Afro jammed inside that silver helmet, those two long white clubs swinging from those stevedore shoulders, dangling frayed padding and tape. "Sometimes I think it's still on him," a friend of his, Neil Grasso, muses. "He never took it off." He'd needed it, all through the trench wars with all those multimillionaire owners in the '70s and '80s, when he rose to NFL Players Association president. Needed it when negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement nearly came to blows. Needed it when Cowboys president Tex Schramm, at a meeting over the dangers of artificial surfaces, thundered, "If we tell you to play on concrete, you'll play on it!" Needed it when Schramm cried, "You're the cattle, we're the ranchers. And we can always get new cattle!" He was an old Raider, used to being one of the bad guys, and an offensive lineman, conditioned to withstand punishment. So that's what he did when the haunting began two years ago, ignoring the retired players' shrieks. He and Harold Henderson, the league's executive vice president of labor relations, conferred and agreed: The loud and bitter ones' numbers were relatively small; some of the ailing oldtimers, like Renfro, blasted no one. It would all blow over. Mistake. The noisy ones' numbers and media skills grew. They'd tapped a vein, the anguish of everyone who has spent hours getting refusals and runarounds from medical insurance companies and HMOs. They targeted Upshaw. As unspookable as Union Daddy seemed, he had to be jumpier than Corporate Granddaddy, the NFL. The battle grew fierce and finally -- just as it would in the third or fourth quarter during Upshaw's playing days -- his perfect pregame wrap job began to lose its adhesion. Loose ends began to dangle that the ghosts could snag and use to unravel him.

Union president Troy Vincent, a former safety, is following Upshaw's path as a labor leader. Lynne Sladky/AP

Two were his own quotes, when his anger at all the head slaps finally spilled. "The bottom line is I don't work for [retired players]," he told The Charlotte Observer in January 2006, responding to DeLamielleure's cries against him and their benefits. "They don't hire me and they can't fire me. They can complain about me all day long. They can have their opinion. But the active players have the vote. That's who pays my salary. [The retirees] say they don't

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have anybody in the [bargaining] room. Well, they don't and they never will. I'm the only one in that room. They don't even have a vote." Literally, his words were correct. Labor law dictated that a union -- unless management waived the restriction -- could bargain only for current employees, not retired ones. But the connotations were disastrous, and the recounting of that quote in newspapers and on the Internet made it seem as if the mummy were taunting the ghosts again and again. DeLamielleure kept banging. "The only guy who's been in power longer than Gene Upshaw is Fidel Castro, and he thinks he's done a great job too," he said. "We need the government to step in and clean up this act. Nobody thought a guy who'd played with us would throw us under a bus." Upshaw flared again, this time to the PhiladelphiaDaily News. "A guy like DeLamielleure says the things he said about me, you think I'm going to invite him to dinner?" he growled. "No. I'm going to break his goddam neck!" Lord, did DeLamielleure and the ghosts make hay with that one. They sprayed it across cyberspace, along with DeLamielleure's claim that his family feared for his life. They got hold of Upshaw's union income for the year ending on Feb. 28, 2007: $6.7 million! A few months later, when they persuaded Congress to call a hearing on their plight, Upshaw didn't show up. He was vacationing in Europe. Now there was tape dangling everywhere for the ghosts to grip and rip. They ravaged him in the media, they got a second congressional hearing, they paraded their most piteous in a series of press conferences. One of Upshaw's key lieutenants, regional director and former New York Jets running back Clark Gaines, shook his head in disbelief. "I've never seen such hatred spewed at one person," he said. I looked around. The ghosts, for the moment, were gone. I asked the mummy if he'd sit down and unwrap some more. He opened a desk drawer, rifled through it, then opened another. No, he really didn't have time for this. Each morning at seven he grabbed The Washington Post, a banana and a coffee, and headed to his office in downtown Washington, skipping lunch to work till 9 p.m., running to airports to address the active players in team meetings at the NFL's 31 cities and catching red-eyes home so he could pack a dozen more work hours into the next day, a job he'd been doing longer than any other sports labor leader in American history. He was a 62-year-old man -- two years from his retirement after a career in which he'd won for his players 60% slice of the revenue of the world's richest sports league -- who had been blindsided in the final moments of the game, and somewhere in this damn desk there was a piece of information that would help prove that he. . . .

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He came upon his screwdriver, hammer, pliers and drill instead. He'd been installing coat hooks for his colleagues, hanging photographs in the union's new offices, and a few days back had repaired his office toilet. Maybe he was a stonehearted, stonewalling, pension-plundering fat cat. But I'd never seen one of those do his own plumbing. He'd grown up in dusty little Robstown, Texas, in a house with no running water, outhouse out back, all three sons packed in one bedroom. Churching all day Sunday at Mount Zion Baptist, schooling every weekday in a four-room building, cotton-picking every summer day from age seven, when he could barely see over the stalks. At 6:30 a.m. a jobber would pull up in his pickup, and Gene -- along with his brother Marvin, younger by a year and a half -- would join the three dozen men and women sardined in the back. He'd trudge down rows he couldn't see the end of, beneath a DeMarco, aided by Dobler (left), is at odds sun he could escape only by flopping under a trailer at lunch break, cracking open the prickly cotton bolls and with Upshaw over what the union has done for him. stuffing the white fluffs into his burlap sack until dusk Tim Sharp/AP to earn money -- a buck twenty-five per 100 pounds -for his school clothes. His father, Eugene Sr., a laborer at an oil refinery, would check the numbers etched in the boys' notepads each evening, measuring them against the weekly target he'd set. "Hmmm," he'd grunt. "Gene got 200 pounds today. Marvin only got 125." Dad loomed everywhere. He was unofficial arbiter on the black side of Robstown, eventually a city council member, the boys' Little League president and their home-plate ump; save your breath, Gene learned on the mound or in the kitchen, if you didn't like a call. Eugene Sr. didn't hug or crack jokes. He cracked the belt. Even in church, hauling you into the room beside the altar, with the whole congregation wincing to your wails. Gene figured out the deal by age six -- "You just didn't challenge him" -- and felt the belt's fullest wrath just once thereafter, at 12, when he inked his name onto the outer edges of the new church hymnals. Marvin whooped when it finally happened. "Fools' names and faces are always seen in public places" were the words Dad whipped into Gene. Gene became a junior deacon, choir singer, baseball team captain, peacemaker and problem solver, a lower-case Daddy. Marvin became Cain, trying every taunt in his arsenal to make Abel crack. "But you can't argue," says Marvin, "with someone who won't argue," so he'd settled for his thrills on the line of scrimmage. At every level -- in practices against each other as Robstown High teammates, in college when Gene's Texas A&I Javelinas took on Marvin's Trinity Tigers, and in the pros when the Raiders played the Kansas City Chiefs -- Marvin, a defensive end, would tap the teammate who lined up across from his brother, motion to him to trade places . . . and then tee off on Gene before the snap. Marvin would get penalized. Gene would shrug and shake his head. "I'd say, 'Just keep doing it,' " Gene said. "It didn't hurt. You can't hurt me. It's just a stupid play. I'd never let Marvin know if he got my goat. You never get that privilege." Marvin got all the piss, vinegar and early growth spurt. He was the high school star. Gene was still mucking on the B team through his junior season, schlepping the first-down chains on Friday nights. He 15

didn't like contact, playing football only because a buddy did. His dream was to pitch in the bigs. A few months after Gene graduated, carrying $75 from his dad for tuition, he hitchhiked 24 miles to Texas A&I. The football coach, former NFL halfback Gil Steinke, noticed him watching the morning practice of August two-a-days. Gene was still only 6-foot and 200 pounds. "Why don't you go get a uniform and come out this afternoon?" Steinke asked. Gene still has no clue why he replied, "O.K." Within three days he had a scholarship. Within a year he stood 6' 5" and weighed 260. Steinke kept trying to make a defensive lineman out of him and fumed when he couldn't get Gene to make a tackle. But flip him to the other side of the line, and could he ever fight one off. He began to relish the teamwork and glimmer, off in the flat dusty distance, of an exit from life in a refinery or cotton gin. He jumped from a projected third-round pick in the 1967 NFL draft to a first-rounder after proving he could handle the blue-chip behemoths in the Senior Bowl as well as he had the NAIA galoots. Then he recoiled after Al Davis and the Raiders selected him. No, Gene told them, he'd heard about the rowdy players out there and whispers of racial tension among them. He wasn't going. At each major threshold of his public life -- his entries into college football, the NFL and the union -- he crossed with cold feet. Davis persuaded him to give the Raiders a chance. Cornerback Willie Brown, Oakland's player rep, talked him into joining the union after he'd refused during his rookie year. Somehow, the guy on the fringe always ended up at the core. Upshaw became the Raiders' alternate player rep in his fourth season, then their player rep and team captain. Politics fascinated him -- he would be appointed to the Alameda County Planning Commission -- and a path within the union opened up before him. He became a member of the executive committee in 1976 and its president in '80. He was the one guy in union meetings listening to everyone, mulling every issue's effect on every other issue while other player reps ranted, and finally blurting, "Do you realize how stupid you sound?" Davis kept importing players from way out on the edge, knowing Gene would pull them to the center. Knowing Before senators last fall, Ditka (right), with that the Governor, as teammates called him, would Upshaw and Goodell, testified on retiree organize camaraderie nights every Thursday at a local benefits. watering hole and herd them when the edge called them Susan Walsh/AP back. "You didn't talk to Gene," says his old linemate Shell. "He'd talk to you. You heard him before you saw him. When he wasn't talking -- get worried." Truth be told, he was remarkably personable for a mummy, often seeking the lowliest in the building -the janitors, line cooks and doormen -- to shoot the breeze with. He was a treasure chest of old expressions, nuggets like, "You can wish in one hand and s--- in the other and see which one fills up." He became the only man to play in Super Bowls in three decades, the anchor of what many still consider NFL history's best offensive line, then retired on his terms in June 1983, after a three-hour chat with Davis at a San Francisco restaurant. 16

His marriage to Jimmye Lee Hill-Upshaw -- with whom he had one son -- had ended, but he'd already found the woman who would become his second wife, Teresa Buich, a catering manager at an Oakland Hyatt where the Raiders held team events. He'd already paved the way, with all the years he'd served the union, for his second career: He'd replace Ed Garvey as executive director and become the only player and nonlawyer ever to take charge of a major sports union. Physically, he'd set himself up for his second life too. He was a freak, an offensive lineman who had jogged three miles after a two-hour practice, who'd suffered only a few busted fingers and a jammed clavicle on a football field in 15 years, and who shed 30 pounds within a few months of his retirement and kept it off for life, pounding out five- and 10mile runs on a treadmill while everyone else was pounding down lunch. He moved to D.C. and began his new life as leader of a unique labor force, 78% of whose members would be divorced, bankrupt or unemployed two years after their jobs -- often because of injuries -- had been terminated. Another executive might have anticipated the trap the ghosts were setting: the feelings trap. Another executive, early in the crisis, would have called a news conference and issued press releases assuring everyone how much his heart went out to those suffering and how hard he was working behind the scenes to improve their lot. But Upshaw's catalog of emotional experience did not contain that page. When his father's circulation went to hell in his 50s and doctors sawed off both his legs just below the knees, Eugene Sr. wouldn't brook sympathy or help. He drove himself to the hospital to get the second one lopped. He went right on driving and changing the brakes on his car; the only way Gene could help him was covertly. Even near the end, after the old man's Christmas Eve stroke at 74, he awakened from a coma, barked "Boy, get outta here" to Marvin at his bedside, went to the bathroom after his son left, then crawled right back into his coma and never woke up. Upshaw's second mentor, Davis, declared war on death and decay, hurling hundreds of thousands of dollars and summoning experts from around the world to fight any disease that threatened a friend or associate -- but always under a cloak of secrecy. That was the code Upshaw learned about dignity, pain and loss. But now he was breaching it. He shut the tool drawer in his desk, opened another drawer and pulled out a folder. It was a file on Brian DeMarco, a former Jacksonville Jaguars offensive lineman who said he'd been shot up with lidocaine to keep him on the field through an injury in the '90s, leading to spinal degeneration so severe that a titanium rod had to be inserted in his back, preventing him from working and three times leaving his family homeless when he couldn't get disability payments. Upshaw fell silent as he slid across the desk a photocopy of a $2,398 check that he had written to cover DeMarco's rent, then a $535.55 check to pay for DeMarco's moving company. Just several, Upshaw said, among nearly 10 grand worth of checks he had written out of the union's Players Assistance Trust fund beginning in 2006 with approval from the PAT board. And still DeMarco had skewered Upshaw in '07 for "stepping away from the guys he sweat with and bled with." DeMarco, Upshaw insists, never even filled out his disability papers. DeMarco countered that he had phone records for 128 unanswered calls to the union. Until last summer, Upshaw had resisted his lieutenants' pleas to publicize the checks that he'd written to quietly help players in dire need. He ran his affairs out of a sealed vault, like his Dad and Davis, farming out no task -- even leaky office commodes -- that he didn't have to. He fetched his own photocopies and faxes, booked his own hotels and rental cars, typically left his staff unaware of his whereabouts, rarely answered his cellphone and mentioned nothing about his work, not even the haunting, to his wife when 17

he came home at 9:30 . . . and started cooking. He cooked his collard greens, his chops and his chili the way he ran his union. If someone drifted in and looked over his shoulder, says his brother Marvin, Gene would pretend to sprinkle an ingredient into the pot, just to throw him off. "Cook does his cookin' and wants no one else in his kitchen," says Marvin. "He wants to feed everyone and know they're satisfied, but he doesn't want the recognition. He's more comfortable being the mother and father making it happen. He's the protector. He gets his strength from you needing him. Don't question him. It'll just slow everything down." He'd clean it all up himself too. He'd be the charming host, the splendid storyteller when he and Terri threw a dinner party, then slip away when everyone else was still tittering over tequila shots and coffee, load up the dishwasher, scour the pots and counters and return to inform everyone it was time to shut it down. If they didn't, he did. He'd turn off the lights. The pope, his pals outside of football called him. Oh, they could've told the ghosts that they'd approached the Pope all wrong. Yes, he had access to wonderful things: to tickets and luxury boxes, Super Bowls and parties and nifty NFL paraphernalia. SWAG, his buddies Grasso and Norm Singer called it. S--- We Ain't Gettin'. "SWAG is like the benefits issue," says Grasso. "You don't say to Gene, 'I deserve this' or 'I demand this.' That's the worst thing you can do. He decides when to give it out. You let the Pope take care of you. If these retired guys just did this behind closed doors, they'd get much more of what they want. All things flow from him. He'll come to you and tell you where you're going, and when you get there, he'll take care of you like a king. He loves to give. He's incredibly generous. But you don't question him. You don't challenge him. It's like he's got it all figured out in his mind." That hermetic seal had its advantages. It consolidated Upshaw's power. The union virtually has to hire him as a consultant when he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 2010, just for the four-decade encyclopedia on NFL labor-management history in his head and his cabinets -- a filing system bewildering to anyone but him. But the hermetic seal has drawbacks too. Carl Francis. He was the NFLPA's entire public-relations department, one man gasping to meet media inquiries about all the union's contractual and players' rights issues even before the haunting began. Francis couldn't possibly satisfy the rash of reporters calling about the retirees, driving even more media into the ghosts' camp. But Upshaw wouldn't send reinforcements onto the public battlefield. Fools' names and faces are seen in public places. Why should he have to convince people that he hadn't threatened DeLamielleure's life? Everyone who knew Upshaw knew that he wasn't a violent man and that his remark was a figurative expression of anger. Why should he have to prove that he cared about the suffering of his peers? He'd won the NFL's Byron "Whizzer" White Humanitarian Award in 1980 for helping so many charities, and he'd written scores of personal checks for players' coffins and funerals, widows and orphans. He'd had so little leverage, his first decade as executive director, to increase pensions. He'd rallied his union to picket lines that kept melting because players' careers were too brief for them make a long-term stand, and owners held the billy club of antitrust exemption. He'd led the association out of its dark ages -- when it was $4 million in debt and he couldn't even cash his own paychecks -- by calling a flea-flicker after the failed '87 strike, decertifying the union in order to strip the league of its exemption, then winning an antitrust suit that brought expanded free agency in '93 and the fattest guaranteed slice of the 18

gross of any union in sports. Television, which loved the prolonged labor peace and stability that ensued, rewarded it with staggering revenue increases, from a $420 million deal in the early '80s to the current $4 billion-plus package. The average player's yearly salary during Upshaw's tenure as union chief soared from $120,000 a year to $1.4 million, and the post-'93 players suddenly had sweet benefits and a juicy 401(k) plan. Upshaw became the most important black sports executive and most significant African-American labor official in the U.S. He remained as old school as leather hightops, but his new sackful of goodies, the lockerroom card games he'd fall right into when he visited teams and the rap tunes he could reference -- his treadmill iPod music -- kept him plenty now with the new crowd, and the players thundered their affirmation of his 2006 extension of the collective bargaining agreement, 1,795 votes to five. "That's my approval rating," says Upshaw. But that '93 shift in dynamics contained a hidden virus. It turned the union and the NFL into partners, in effect. It turned commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Upshaw into regular dinner mates instead of the combatants that Gene and former commish Pete Rozelle had been. It cast Upshaw, in the eyes of the ghosts, into the role of the insider, the preserver of the status quo, rather than the outsider clawing for disenfranchised players' rights. It meant that any increase in the retirees' benefits would come out of the 60% that had already been shoved across the table, from the owners' side to the current players', which had the potential to set one generation against the other. It took 13 years for the virus to metastasize and wallop Upshaw. Oh, it was sickening for a man who'd been seen as a militant in the '70s and '80s to be called a "pawn" by his peers, and the "personal pet" of the commissioner by HBO's Bryant Gumbel. Galling, to click on the TV and radio and discover that the ghosts had found a bullhorn, Iron Mike Ditka, the old Chicago Bears tight end and coach, calling Gene "a fraud." Galling, to look up and see even a 90-year-old leaping on the dogpile, the attorney who led baseball's union from 1966 to '83. "Every league's union except the NFL's has chosen to hire professional leadership," said Marvin Miller, who had hammered MLB's owners for the best pension plan in all of sports. "The NFL Players Association hired a former player. You see the results." Galling, to get flogged for missing the first congressional hearing, when he'd received notice of it just six days before and was about to leave on a long-planned family vacation with his wife and the two sons from that second marriage. Galling, to hear his income flung about as evidence of his fat-cat detachment, when about half of that $6.7 million came from onetime bonuses and left him with a base salary about $1 million more than any other major sports union leader. Most galling of all, the effect of that fateful quote in which he said he didn't represent the retired players. When in truth, he said, he'd increased their pensions after each of the last four collective bargaining agreements, was carving $82,000 per year out of the average current player's salary to improve NFL retirees' benefits, and he'd intended that quote to be targeted at DeLamielleure in particular, not retired players in general. But the cogwheels of cause and effect could not be halted. John Wooten, a Browns guard in the 1960s, read that quote and decided that the moment, at last, had come. He called the ghost that even other ghosts crept softly around. He called Bernie Parrish. Wooten read the quote to his old Cleveland player rep, the 71-year-old man who had presided over the union in the early '60s, turned over to the Justice Department his claims of NFL malfeasance and ties to organized crime -- no charges were ever brought -- and wrote a harrowing exposé of the league, They 19

Call It a Game, in '71. Parrish's eyes narrowed. He canceled his cozy retirement from a successful second career as a hotel construction magnate and began a painstaking search of names, numbers and dates. He concluded that players from his era were getting shafted, but he had no legal recourse to force the union to increase their benefits. Instead, he filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Upshaw, the union and its Players Inc. merchandising arm of enriching union officers by diverting millions of dollars that he says should have gone to retired players for commercial use of their images -- a suit that has been dismissed and refiled in federal court and which could compel Upshaw and commissioner Roger Goodell to testify under oath. Parrish studied the disability plan, which was riddled with obstacles -- many placed there by management, not the union -- that often prevented the lame from qualifying, and he gave the ghosts their battle cry: "It's delay, deny and hope we die." And every week to 10 days, he e-mailed a scorching newsletter to a group list that numbered nearly 2,000, including disgruntled members of Gridiron Greats, Fourth & Goal and Retired Players for Justice. "They're throwing a handful of pebbles in their ocean of bulls--- and expecting us to applaud as the ripples go away," he says. "We're not going away. They're going to write a check." Then came his gut punch. Parrish dug up an old story last year about the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of Upshaw's first wife in 2002, more than 15 years after their divorce. Jimmye Lee Hill-Upshaw's remains had been found on a rural property in Afton, Okla. -- near a mental health clinic at which she was being treated -four months after she was reported missing. Investigators had found no evidence of foul play, yet Parrish e-mailed the brotherhood: "Why wouldn't they have at least questioned Upshaw?" he asked. "Why wouldn't they have given him a lie detector test?" Yahoo.com sports learned of the mass e-mail and published Parrish's suspicions. "Anyone who'd bring the death of my ex-wife into this is lower than a snake's belly, and he's a liar," Upshaw seethes. "I've taken every body blow you can take. But it won't change who I am or what I do. My life and career will not be defined by it. The record will show that I did work for retired players, for every improvement they got. "Sure, there are things about the disability plan I'd like to improve. I want the guys who deserve it to get it. But I'm limited in what I can do. The owners administer that plan as well -- that's Taft-Hartley labor law. But do you see the retired players going after the owners? "We never forgot the retired players. We never left them behind. Yeah, we've got a billion in the benefits fund, but we owe a f---ing billion [to all qualified retirees]. I've got that big-ass liability and I've got to pay for that. Ed Garvey drilled it into my head: If they all knock on the window for their pension, it's got to be there. "Look at it this way. If you put a pile of money in a room with 10 people in it and ask them to split it up, do you think someone outside that room's going to get any of it? But that's what I do every new collective bargaining agreement. I'm the one who takes some of it from the 10 guys in the room and gives it to the guys that aren't even in the room -- the retired players. I gave $147.5 million of the $571 million that went into benefits last year to retired players to increase their plan. That's what I've done! I don't know how many people would do that. It's not human nature. Sheeeeet. It just doesn't happen. It didn't happen when we were playing! But you can't turn this into a welfare state! It's not what it is!" 20

The tipping point had come. He'd never admit he was hurt, but his colleagues, who loved him, watched in sorrow as he closed the door and holed up in his office. If the ghosts were going to reach as high as Congress and as low as his ex-wife's autopsy to annihilate him, Upshaw decided, then he too would have to do the unthinkable. He asked for help. He called ghost-busters. That was them -- the team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe -- that I noticed huddling with Upshaw on the sidelines. They were experts at crisis management in trials, on Capitol Hill and in the court of public opinion. They began working the aisles of Congress last summer, issuing white papers, contacting media, convincing Upshaw to explain his side. Many of the ghosts' pensions were so pitiful -- as scant as the $126.85 a month of former Green Bay Packers cornerback Herb Adderley -- because they'd taken a lump-sum payout early, wiping out 25% of their nest eggs, and begun drawing their pensions at age 45 instead of waiting until 62, then seen the sums cut in half each time they divorced. Once a retiree elected to start receiving his pension, as in virtually every other benefits plan, he couldn't qualify for disability no matter how dramatic his decline. But how, the ghosts cried, could you compare a gladiator's benefits plan with that of a factory worker's or clerk's? Football was unique; the plan had to reflect that! Yes, the ghosts had all returned to the field, now with an even fiercer vengeance. Why, that disability program was a Chutes and Ladders board, they screamed, designed to make them vanish through trapdoors. It was nearly impossible to get approved for total permanent disability, sneered Dobler; hell, Stephen Hawking himself, blowing through a tube to operate his laptop, would be deemed fit to work by the NFL's and union's mutually approved doctors. Anyone who'd played knew that football injuries often didn't manifest their severity until a man was years removed from the game -- oops, sorry, Mr. Dobler, even though you've had five knee replacements and 13 leg operations and spent months in a Vicodin haze, you applied after that pesky 36-month window for a line-of-duty injury claim had expired. A mere return telephone call, when you've left a message at the union looking for help in navigating the board? Forget it, the ghosts claimed. About as much chance as proving that your disability stemmed solely from that horse-collar tackle in '72, and not from something else. So screw the Chutes and Ladders board, growled Dobler, who also cares for his quadriplegic wife. Just give us a decent pension like the major leaguers have and we'll pay for our own medical and assistedliving costs. Even if a retired pre-'93 player didn't tap his pension early, as Dobler -- due to draw $48,000 a year beginning at 62 -- hasn't, NFL pensions paled next to baseball's; they were roughly one third. Well, of course they paled, countered Upshaw. Where were these groaners in the '70s and '80s, back when the strikes he called kept caving in, back when baseball's union held firm and larded its pension pantry? Why, he said, it would cost $1 billion to bring the NFL's pension plan up to par with MLB's now! And here came Tagliabue out of retirement, chiming in his support. "The players' rallying cry back then was, 'We want our money now,' " said the former commissioner. "Gene's spent his life trying to convince players saying, 'Give me the money now,' to put that money into pensions." Damn right they'd wanted it now, shrieked the ghosts. They were mayflies, their careers lasting an 21

average of three years, here and gone before they could even grasp the issues, many believing the rumors circulating that the average NFL player's life span was 54 years -- dead men don't draw pensions! No wonder 325 pre-'93 retirees had tapped theirs early! But alas, said Henderson, the NFL labor relations negotiator, that tale turned out to be urban legend. A study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in the early '90s found little difference between the mortality rates of NFL players and the general populace. Each side smelled racism. "Seventy percent of the current players are black and 70 percent of the retired players are white," says Dobler. "So a cultural thing is going on here. The league that's 70 percent black is telling the league that was 70 percent white, 'Screw you.' " "Race may be an issue," says Henderson, an African-American. "There's been too many comments from retired players about thugs wearing jewels and driving racy cars denying money to the guys who say they built the game and made it great." But the active players, for the most part, voice a desire to help their destitute forebears, and when one of them -- Chiefs offensive tackle Kyle Turley -- donated his paycheck from the season's finale to help them, hundreds of others anted up. Wonderful, says Upshaw, he's all for such generosity, but, he adds, when he made his presentation to the current players at team meetings last fall, showing how much he and the executive committee agreed to put aside for the ghosts' benefits plan, he often heard a rumbling of surprise that told him there are limits. So let us talk to the current player reps, demands Laird, the former Colts safety who runs Fourth & Goal. "Upshaw refuses to allow me to," he says. "There's no communication going on. We have no voice, no vote, no representation. No one ever asks us what we want or need." My head swam. Both sides, thanks to Parrish, were armed to the teeth with data they claimed proved their point. It would take a year and an army of auditors to determine whose numbers were accurate, and I had neither. I wondered if somehow, instead, all the clanking of canes and walkers and titanium knees could cease for a moment, if all the black-and-white, good-against-evil banners could be removed, and a straightforward debate could commence, with the color gray invited. Because it would be a doozy, a Scruples question for the ages. Why should current players, who pay an average of $235,000 a year for their own benefits, pay to increase the pensions of former players, when employees in few other corporations do? How could they not, with all that misery right in front of them, when they're earning such staggering sums? But don't most of us -- windows up, doors locked, cellphones to our ears -- roll right past misery every day? All those fans out there, howling for the dignity of their old heroes . . . would they agree to take pay cuts to improve the benefits of employees who worked for their company 30 years ago? How many years should a man have to work to receive a hearty pension? Is three years, the NFL's minimum to be vested in the plan, enough? Or six years, the average career of a vested NFL player? That's one seventh of an average American's working life. Who could expect to make a living wage for the rest of his life off that? 22

But these players went to war for our entertainment, took brutal risks. Don't we -- doesn't somebody -owe them for all our weekly whoops and fantasies, for the cost of what has become our national religion? Perhaps a small percentage of ticket revenue, TV money or even astronomical profits from selling a franchise -- the going rate is nearly a billion dollars -- should be set aside to cover the players' wreckage. Or is their pain their karma, the harvest of personal obsessions that drove them into the arena? Couldn't Upshaw and the ghosts, I asked, lead such a debate? Couldn't they sit down together and acknowledge the game's shadow side -- the fears, vulnerability and pain that its broken vets carry -- so that the exorcism could begin? They looked at me as if I'd taken one late hit too many. The Super Bowl was drawing near. I could guess what would happen. The NFL, having suffered plenty of collateral damage from the ghosts' salvos, had recently joined with the union to form a new group, the Alliance, to alleviate some of the misery. Upshaw, at his annual Super Bowl press conference, would extol the glowing health of his union and point to these new attempts to help the wounded vets, including a fund to cover joint replacements and a streamlining of the disability process. The ghosts would hold their own Super Bowl press conference, under the auspices of Gridiron Greats. They'd auction off golf, poker and party time with the old pros to raise money for their casualties, and howl that the latest improvements are swell, but c'mon, the whole system needs overhauling. The war would go on. Two ticking bombs -- the increasing awareness of concussions' toxic long-term effects and the alarming rise of obesity among linemen -- could make it more vicious still. Hall of Fame Bears running back Gale Sayers would attend the ghosts' press conference. He might not howl. He'd likely just keep killing Upshaw and the NFL softly, reminding everyone, "This is not how a family works." Then Sunday would come, and my family would gather in front of the TV when the hitting started at 6:18 sharp. I wondered if I'd turn up the volume. Find this article at: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/football/nfl/01/31/upshaw0214/index.html

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Brent Boyd‟s Story Thursday, February 8, 2007 Updated: February 11, 4:54 PM ET Fighting for benefits By John Barr and Arty Berko Special to ESPN.com RENO, Nev. -- Brent Boyd grimaces as he folds his 6-foot-3 frame onto his living room couch, the scar on his recently replaced right knee the only outward sign of a body that has broken down. He reaches for the TV remote control, his favorite blanket and prepares to spend the next several hours in his modest home in the same familiar pose. This is how Boyd spends most of his days, too exhausted to even get up off his couch. It's hardly the life Boyd envisioned for himself when he graduated with honors from UCLA in 1980. He was selected by Minnesota in the third round of the NFL draft and immediately impressed Vikings head coach Bud Grant and the rest of the coaching staff with his ability to master every position on the offensive line. Press clippings from Boyd's rookie year contain quotes from Vikings coaches who raved about his intellect. Today Boyd has been diagnosed as being clinically depressed. He is also withdrawn and so ashamed of what his life has become that he's cut himself off from friends and former teammates. "I care about these people but I'm just embarrassed about my condition and I just kind of hang out here," Boyd says, his voice cracking. To find out how Boyd sank this low you have to go back to his rookie year in 1980, to a preseason game in the Orange Bowl that would dramatically change his career and his life. "The hit itself I don't remember," Boyd says of a blow to the head that left him momentarily unconscious. "I remember when I came to, I couldn't see out of my right eye and I kind of panicked." After taking some plays off -- Boyd can't remember precisely how many -- he was told by Vikings coaches and the team's medical staff to get back in the game. "This was 1980 and I don't even know if they used the word concussion," Boyd says. "You were just trained to stay in the game. … You want this job? They better carry you off in a coffin." Boyd remains convinced he suffered many more concussions over the course of his seven-year NFL career, although that one game in Miami is the only time he lost consciousness. In the weeks and months after the preseason game against the Dolphins, Boyd experienced physical and mental changes that would take him years to fully understand. He says headaches, dizziness and memory loss became a part of his daily life. Boyd eventually had difficulty remembering teammates' names. The player who, as a rookie, mastered every offensive line position says he could barely remember how to play left guard by his second year. After a series of injuries, including a broken leg, Boyd was eventually released from the Vikings in October 1986. "You know, I had such big plans and had graduated with honors from UCLA and at that time I think everybody who knew me thought this guy is going to go on to big things after football, besides football. I just couldn't," Boyd says, reflecting on the physical toll of his years in the NFL's trenches. Boyd's friends at the time watched his marriage crumble, his drinking increase.

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Barry Axelrod, who works primarily as a sports agent representing MLB players, got to know Boyd through a network of UCLA alumni. He recalls how he and others in the social circle of former Bruins judged Boyd in the years that followed his NFL career. "[At first] we just thought, 'Well, god the guy got done playing football and now he's just … won't work hard and won't hold a job down and he's lazy,'" says Axelrod, Boyd's longtime friend. "Now I feel badly about that because I didn't realize, in fact he didn't realize, that there was something physical going on that was causing this," Axelrod says. Boyd says he suffered from persistent flu-like systems, that he had many days that felt like a bad hangover that wouldn't go away. "I couldn't maintain the concentration that I had … I didn't have the drive that I had. The main thing is I was tired, I was dizzy," Boyd says. "Here he was someone with all the potential to accomplish anything in the world and he couldn't manage a sales job because he would have to pull to side of the road and fall asleep," says Terry Lowey, a marriage and family therapist who has been treating Boyd since September for depression and anxiety. It wasn't until 1999, after years of being misdiagnosed, that Boyd's depression and other lingering health problems were finally linked by doctors to the concussions he suffered as a player. By that point, Boyd's inability to hold down a steady job had pushed his financial situation to the brink. "They were losing their home, their car," Axelrod says. "They were on the verge of being homeless and, in fact, there were times when Brent was living out of his car." Axelrod reached out to his clients and his network of UCLA alumni to start a fund for Boyd and his son Anders, whom he'd been supporting as a single parent since 1992. Major leaguers Mark Grace, Rick Sutcliffe, Jeff Bagwell and former Bruins quarterback and actor Mark Harmon, among others, all agreed to provide financial assistance. "The NFL wouldn't do a damn thing for me," Boyd says. "The major league baseball guys were making sure I was surviving and I hope that embarrasses the hell out of the NFL." The NFL did provide a one-time payment available to players in dire need of financial assistance. Also with Axelrod's help, Boyd also reached out to the NFL Players Association for monthly disability benefits. Retired NFL players are eligible for partial disability -- a minimum of $1,500 per month -- if they can simply demonstrate that their disability prevents them from working. But those same retirees can get full disability payments -- a minimum of $4,000 per month -- if they can prove their disability stems from a football-related injury. ESPN has reviewed many of Boyd's medical files and confirmed his disability through documents and interviews with several of his current and former treating physicians. But for Boyd, securing full disability benefits from the NFL Players Association would mean months of battling a retirement board comprised of league and union representatives. In May of 2000, Boyd was sent by that board to see Dr. J. Sterling Ford, a San Diego neurologist. Dr. Ford wrote

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in his report that Boyd "had a least one significant closed head injury in the course of his playing career and, in all likelihood, had many other ill-defined ones." When asked on the retirement board's standardized form if Boyd had "an illness or injury resulting from a football-related activity," Dr. Ford checked the box marked "yes." Axelrod recalls how pleased he and Boyd were by Dr. Ford's findings. "When a report comes in from an NFL-chosen doctor, so totally in favor of Brent Boyd, you know, it's over, it's done," Axelrod says. "What more can you possibly need?" But four months later the retirement board sent Boyd to a psychiatrist in Long Beach, Calif., for a second opinion. Dr. Branko Radisavljevic found Boyd was "totally disabled" and, when asked on the retirement board's form if Boyd had "an illness or injury resulting from a football-related activity," Dr. Radisavljevic also checked "yes." Case closed? Not exactly. "I was automatic," Boyd says. "They had treating physicians. They had their own physicians. How could they not approve that?" Despite having a second opinion that confirmed what Boyd's own doctors had been telling him for years, the retirement board demanded Boyd see yet another neurologist for further examination. "My experience with the board was they find every possible way to delay making a decision, at least a decision favorable to the player," Axelrod says. Frustrated, and increasingly suspicious of the retirement board's reluctance to approve his disability claim, Boyd traveled cross-country in March of 2001 to see Dr. Barry Gordon, a behavioral neurologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for two days of neuropsychological testing. Dr. Gordon, who has not responded to repeated requests from ESPN for an interview, wrote in his report: "the records available to me are incomplete in ways that may be relevant for my impressions." But he still found Boyd's physical and mental health problems "could not be an organic consequence of the head injury." "I was furious and very depressed," Boyd says, recalling his reaction to Dr. Gordon's findings. "Luckily, I don't own guns or else I may have used on one myself." Boyd remains convinced the retirement board "doctor shopped" until it finally found a contrary medical opinion. He says much of Dr. Gordon's exam at Johns Hopkins was actually conducted by an ill-prepared graduate student. Still, based largely on the findings of Dr. Gordon, the retirement board rejected Boyd's claim for full disability benefits in April of 2001. "I felt I'm done because no matter what evidence I give them they're never going to approve this claim," Boyd says. "They [the retirement board] said, 'You're welcome to get another doctor's opinion.' I couldn't afford that." "I think he got very depressed and at times felt like there was no hope and that's scary when you see a friend go through that," Axelrod says of Boyd's frustrations with the disability process. Boyd eventually challenged the retirement board's ruling in federal court.

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Despite the medical evidence from his own treating physicians and despite medical evidence from physicians approved by the retirement board itself, the court rejected Boyd's appeal, ruling that the board "did not abuse its discretion" in its handling of Boyd's disability claim. "The man loves football, to this day, with all of his heart so this organization that he absolutely loves betrayed him," says Lowey, who has since tried to help Boyd move past the anger and bitterness he feels toward the NFLPA. While nobody from the NFLPA would speak with ESPN about Boyd's case, NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw did address Boyd's allegations at a recent news conference. "To say that the NFLPA is 'doctor shopping,' we don't have anything to do with it, with the process," Upshaw said. The facts say otherwise. The retirement board, the ultimate authority on disability cases, is made up of three league and three union representatives. To say the union has nothing to do with the process is simply untrue. Upshaw went on to say, "If a doctor determines that a player is entitled to a disability and he meets the standards he gets it." But in Boyd's case, two doctors, chosen by the retirement board, determined his disability was football-related and his claim was still rejected. Today, Boyd spends hours going from one doctor's appointment to another, including physical therapy for the right knee he had replaced last May. He recently remarried and gets by on his wife Gina's salary from the post office, social security and a nearminimum $1550 per month in disability payments from the NFL -- a fraction of the $8,200 per month Boyd was seeking in disability payments. Gina Boyd sees daily the toll it takes on her husband that he can't contribute more. "I just let him know every day that I love him … I don't want him to feel that he's any less of a man," she says. Boyd recognizes he is not exactly a household name, that stories of other high-profile retired players suffering from post-concussion syndrome may make for more colorful headlines. "I'm glad the stories are getting out there," Boyd says. "I didn't know Mike Webster had a problem until he was dead," he adds, referring to the former Steelers center. Webster died in 2002 after years of suffering from ailments linked to concussion-related brain damage. "I'm just a guy nobody's heard of," Boyd says. "But most of the guys who played in the NFL are like me, guys you've never heard of, and we're hurting bad. We need help." John Barr is a reporter and Arty Berko is a producer for ESPN's Outside the Lines.

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Casualties of the NFL They put their bodies on the line every Sunday to stage the most brutal, ravishing, and profitable pageant in sports. But in a scandal of staggering proportions, they play hurt, sustain severe physical and mental damage, and are denied help when they need it most. --Paul Solotaroff He came off the snap and started upfield, the linebacker dead in his sights. Brian DeMarco -- 6-foot-7 and ripped at 320 pounds; the rare pulling guard who could run like hell and bench press 500 -- led his tailback, Corey Dillon, into the hole. DeMarco, with a full head of steam, was set to bury the linebacker, put a helmet between his numbers, and plant him, when someone tripped Dillon from behind. Dillon fell crosswise on the back of DeMarco's legs, pinning his knees to the turf. In slo-mo DeMarco was falling forward himself when the linebacker lowered his helmet and drove through DeMarco, knocking his chest downfield as his hips went upfield, practically cleaving him in two. "I heard the pop in my back as I was going down and just felt this pain like I'd never felt before," says DeMarco, who had recently signed with the Cincinnati Bengals after four solid years with the Jacksonville Jaguars. "I'm at the bottom of the pile under a thousand pounds of guys, and I'm thinking, I'm never getting up. I'll never walk again." In the grand scheme of things, he'd been hit harder: shots that broke ribs and left them slapped on sideways; head-tohead collisions that knocked him senseless and smashed the orbital bone around his eyes; blows that sheared knees and turned elbows inside out. None of those, however, had managed to shove his spine forward on his pelvis and shave off bits of vertebrae like ice chips. Here was terror: DeMarco couldn't work his legs, and the pain between his hips sawed him in half. They got him to the sideline, where the trainer and his staff laid DeMarco on the bench and tested his legs. He wasn't, in fact, paralyzed, though he couldn't sit up. And so the doctor stepped in and did what doctors have done since the banzai days of Vince Lombardi. He produced a four-inch needle, hiked the player's jersey up, and injected him several times with lidocaine. The numbness set in, DeMarco got to his feet, and, minutes after breaking off bits of spine, reentered the game. He was 27; in a few months he would be out of the sport, a young man with an old man's body. Eight years later, and a thousand miles away, a woman gets out of a car. She has driven from the airport through the kiln of southeastern Texas to a suburb of Austin that isn't really a suburb; it is more like the rubble of an ugly spacecraft that has crashed in the middle of nowhere and been repurposed. The houses thrown up here are flimsy and dour and the residents mostly evacuees of Hurricane Katrina. The woman rings the doorbell and fans herself; the heat, even in May, is wearing spurs. She waits and waits; at long last, footsteps. Invited in by his wife Autumn, she finds the man she came to see sprawled on a couch, unable to stand. Although the house is cool, he is sweating profusely and can't find a position, seated or prone, that doesn't cause him grotesque pain. Every so often his huge body jerks in spasms of head-to-toe agony. The fits, when they come, turn him as white as the walls and send unself-conscious tears down his cheeks. It's DeMarco at 35: dirt-poor, broken, and in a headfirst spiral, taking his wife and children down with him. The visitor, Jennifer Smith, takes a look around and can scarcely believe her eyes. "There was no food in the house, and I mean none -- not a box of mac and cheese or a can of tuna," she says. "Brian and Autumn hadn't eaten in a couple of days and between them had 75 cents. Total." Smith, who runs a charity called Gridiron Greats that gives money and care to ex-football players whose injuries have left them in dire straits, has flown in on short notice. She's come with with $2,500 in cash from a private donor and the authority from her board to cut a check for thousands more when the banks reopen on Monday. But before she can take this family to the nearest Wal-Mart for the fill-the-pantry shopping they sorely need, she first has to get a 320pound cripple off his sweat-soaked couch and into her car.

It is one of the master stories of the American century: a workingman's game of make-believe warfare becomes the richest, most ravishing pageant on earth, a carnival of beauty and gore. The players, like the sport, transform before us, turn massive and mobile to make panoramic violence on our behalf, then get up, walk it off, and go again. The big

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get faster and the fast get bigger, staging goal-line hurdles and blindside hits the likes of which no one has seen before and won't again, till SportsCenter airs at six, showing the plays and their end zone celebrations until they're etched in the dura of our skulls. Forty years ago football's TV rights sold for $9 million a year to CBS; last year the networks paid out a combined $3.7 billion, or more than $100 million per team. Thirty years ago it cost $16 million to buy a franchise in Tampa Bay. By 2004 Robert McNair was paying $700 million to found the Houston Texans; for bidders who hope to place a new team in Los Angeles the asking price could top $1 billion. But the men on the field who generate those billions are real; they bleed; they break; their brains cloud. The nature of their injuries, particularly the mind-dimming concussion, has dominated the off-the-field news of late. Post-mortem exams of Andre Waters (suicide at 44), Terry Long (suicide at 45), Justin Strzelczyk (car crash at 36), Mike Webster (heart attack at 50) -- showed staggering brain damage in men so young and affirmed that football is no longer a contact sport but real-life Mortal Kombat in cleats. Stunningly no one in the sport has stepped up to address the scope and depth of the injuries -- not the teams, not the owners, and certainly not the one organization charged with looking after the athletes, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). In a game expected to take in $7 billion this year and that exceeds all others in causing bodily harm, fewer than 3 percent of the men who played in the league succeed in getting disability benefits. Worse, the players union turns away ailing vets despite a pension fund with $1 billion in assets. The great Earl Campbell is 52 and relies on a walker to get around. Al Toon, the best receiver in the history of the New York Jets, ended his career after his ninth concussion, in 1992; the Jets' next-best receiver, the oft-concussed Wayne Chrebet, left equally ravaged after the 2005 season and is still debilitated by headaches. Three of the best centers ever -- Jim Ringo, Mick Tinglehoff, and Webster -- were all beset with severe dementia as young men. Twenty years ago, when linemen weighed 280, it was common for them to play on into their 30s. Now offensive tackles average 320, and a typical career lasts three and a half seasons, or just half a season more than the minimum to qualify for a pension. Nor does playing longer secure one's finances during old age. Full pension payouts start at 55, which is around the time the average former player dies, two decades sooner than non-players. But bigger-faster-stronger only begins to tell the story when it comes to short careers and early deaths. The NFL offseason has become a misnomer, with mini-camps, workouts, and OTAs (organized team activities) that the league hilariously calls "voluntary." The regular season has 16 games, but the postseason now has four rounds of games for those hardy enough to survive. Helmets have improved, but players are taught -- still -- to lead with their heads. "If I got my hat between your numbers, I'd take you anywhere I wanted," says Daryl Johnston, the Fox TV analyst and ex-fullback for the Dallas Cowboys, who opened huge holes for Emmitt Smith during Dallas's glory years in the '90s and played in two Pro Bowls. Adds Johnston, who retired with a broken neck after 11 brutal seasons in the league, "Strap a helmet on, run headfirst into a wall, then do it again 35 times. That's what I did every Sunday afternoon." Then there is the matter of the game's mentality, a form of mass psychosis passed down through the decades by coaches and players alike. "You can't make the club from the tub" is its motto, a summation of the imperative to play through pain, get back on the field with all manner of debilities, lest your teammates taunt you and your coaches replace you the very first chance they get. In the only major league sport without guaranteed deals, the majority of players are essentially cows at market -- large, anonymous slabs of beef to whom too few in management feel financial loyalty or, for that matter, human concern. "When I broke my neck doing what I was trained to do, the league and union told me to get lost," says Johnston, who filed for disability and says he was curtly turned down by the retirement board. "The second I couldn't play I was dead meat to them. It was 'So long, see you later, and don't call us.' " Mike Ditka, the embodiment of old-school toughness as a player and then as the coach of the Chicago Bears, says it was just as bad back in the day. "I took cortisone injections three times a week and had four hip replacements after I quit the game, but that's football, and we chose to play hurt. We paid the price and thought the game would pay us back, but the league and union sold us out. In every sport, you've got your adversaries. I never thought we'd have to fight our own." Ditka, who earned a pittance by today's standards as a player and whose sizable wealth was amassed off the field, has taken it upon himself to redress the plight of ailing vets, many of whom he played with and against. He's joined

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forces with Gridiron Greats founder Jerry Kramer, and a board of directors that includes several Hall of Famers (Gale Sayers, Harry Carson, Joe DeLamielleure, and others) to raise a hue and cry against the Players Association for its abandonment of ex-players. "It's criminal," says Ditka at an upstairs table in his huge, clamorous steakhouse in Chicago. "There's so much money in this goddamn game, and no one gives a shit about these guys. Bill Forrester's attached to a feeding tube, Joe Perry has to choose between eating and pain pills, and here's this Upshaw, with his $6.7 million salary, saying there's no dough left to help them out. That's greed talking, and nothing else." He is speaking, or more like it, shouting about Gene Upshaw, the long-serving chief of the players union, who's become the white-hot focus of some veterans' rage. "The NFL is the worst-represented league, on the players' side, in pro sports," said Joe Montana in a 2006 newspaper survey of Hall of Famers. DeLamielleure, the anchor of the Buffalo Bills line that blocked for O.J. Simpson, turns red as a fire ant when asked about Upshaw. "I won't stop until that bastard's gone or in jail. He's a disgrace to every player, past and current." 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 Ditka too "dumb" to understand the issue and threatening to break 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.

Because they are always going backward in pass protection, and because, for many years, they weren't allowed to use their hands to block, there's a notion that offensive linemen are passive creatures who stand around waiting to get hit. Brian DeMarco has one word for this: bullshit. "Those draw plays and sweeps where we're coming down the line and have 10 yards to pick up speed? Man, I've crushed guys so bad they were carried off twitching. A couple of them were never the same again." DeMarco was a monster in the free-weight room, loading the bar out till it bowed on his shoulders, doing squats with 900 pounds. He'd been like that since boyhood, a 5-footer in first grade whose father, a former lineman himself, taught him to play the game of football with a mean streak. He was first to every practice and practically lived at the stadium during the off-season, training six, seven hours a day. A good thing, too, because the coach who drafted him was a tireless old-school bully. "That first training camp under Coach [Tom] Coughlin was the most abusive, hellacious thing I've ever been through," DeMarco says. "An unbelievable heat wave, 110 on the field, and we're doing full-speed hitting twice a day for eight weeks. I saw grown men give up and walk off in tears, good players who signed with other teams." Coughlin, a bellicose, red-faced screamer who coached the Jacksonville Jaguars from their inception in '95 till his firing eight years later (he's currently on shaky ground as the coach of the New York Giants), is a product of the Bill Parcells coaching tree, a man who, like Parcells and Bill Belichick, had little or no tolerance for "softness." "Tom told us straight up that injuries were bullshit and he wasn't gonna stand for 'em," says DeMarco. "He said, 'You sit out a game and I'll fucking waive you. I don't want cowards on my team.' No matter how bad you were, you were gonna play, which is why four of the five guys who started on that line are now severely messed up in their 30s." He ticks off names and medical conditions: Tony Boselli, left tackle, washed out at 29 after a string of surgeries to his shoulder, knee, and ankle; Leon Searcy, right tackle, badly hobbled by leg woes and waived out of the league at 32; Jeff Novak, left guard, retired at 31 after playing on a leg that bled like rotting meat, and which the then-team doctor so grossly mishandled that a jury awarded Novak $5 million when he sued the physician, Dr. Steve Lucie. "Lucie was

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no more than a yes-man for Coughlin, but it was the trainers who really put the wood to us," says DeMarco. "They handed out these big, long packets of Vicodin and shitloads of muscle relaxers like Soma and Flexerall and were always hassling you with 'You playing? You're playing, right?' -- and that wasn't just on game day. That was Wednesday practice." (The Jacksonville Jaguars declined to comment for this article; the Bengals told Men's Journal: "The rules regarding injury treatment procedures are based on the government regulations and the NFL's collective bargaining agreement. The Bengals, to the best of the team's knowledge, are in complete compliance in these areas regarding Brian DeMarco.") DeMarco is half-sitting and half-lying on a couch in a house kept dim during the day. Even lamp light can crease his eyes and trigger the cluster migraines that send him back to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Since May, when he stopped taking pain meds cold turkey, he has lived in the kind of crackling, bone-on-bone agony that might best be called electric. Ask him where it hurts and he lets out a breath: "Man, ask me where it doesn't; that's quicker." Just now, there are sharp stabs under his ribs, the residue of the kind of bad-luck spill that linemen take all the time. In a game in '97 he knocked down Tony Siragusa, the Pro Bowl nose tackle of the Baltimore Ravens. Siragusa was on his back, one leg planted in the turf, when DeMarco was slammed sideways by someone behind him and landed on Siragusa's upturned knee. Three ribs shattered and two dislodged from the cartilage that bound them in place. DeMarco was carried off to the sideline by teammates, barely able to breathe for the pain. Trainers laid him out on a metal bench and had staffers huddle around him so that no one would see what happened next. "The doctor took this needle, filled it up with lido[caine], and put a towel in my mouth saying, 'This'll burn,' " says DeMarco. "He stuck that four-inch needle up under my rib cage -- six big shots from my rib cage to spine, and suddenly I couldn't feel a damn thing. They wrapped up my ribs, which were sticking out sideways, and sent me back in on the same series." Many of DeMarco's stories begin and end this way: a savage blow that rips tendon or bone and a hasty in-game visit with the team doctor, who numbs him up with long needles before he's sent back into the game. "Anytime a crowd's gathered around on the sideline," he says, "they're doing something they don't want you to see." Dave Pear, the ex-Pro Bowl nose guard, agrees. After three stellar seasons with Tampa Bay in the late '70s, he was playing his third game for the Oakland Raiders when he was hit and felt "lightning" down his spine. "I came over to the sideline and the team doctor -- his nickname was Needles -- sends me back in the game. He says I had a broken neck, and I was in agony the rest of the season; but he said I was a hypochondriac and there was nothing wrong with me, and shot me up with whatever he said I needed." Pear, who's 54 now, has had seven operations on his upper and lower spine. He hasn't known a moment without grinding pain since that game against Seattle in '79. He somehow played on through the Super Bowl in 1980, getting handfuls of Percodan from the Raiders' staff and doing further damage to the discs in his neck till he was properly diagnosed in 1981 by an independent physician. (The Raiders declined to comment, except to say that Pear's back surgery was not performed by a team physician, he played only after completing a physical, and he was released due to personnel issues, not injuries.) Like DeMarco, Pear's spine is busy with rods and screws that creakily bolt the whole mess together. He hasn't worked in years and barely earned a living when he did, driving around in a series of lowly sales jobs that left him doubled over in his van. Pear had two young children that he couldn't chase after and a wife who had to do the bulk of the parenting while holding down a full-time job, and in 1995 he applied once more for NFL disability. The first time he did so, in 1983, Pear was approved by the physician the league sent him to, and he waited for a check. Instead he was told by Dee Becker, a union claims rep, that he'd brought too much "information" to the examining room (i.e., X-rays and case files from his surgeon) and was disqualified for "influencing" the doctor. "I said, 'You must be kidding,' and she said, 'Nope, that's how we do it. Flat out, you're not going to get it.' " Pear, whose neck and back pain had become intolerable, applied in '95 for a new class of claims -- permanent and degenerative conditions. As before, he had a slam-dunk medical case: three fused discs, a host of neural damage, and a sheaf of reports from spine experts. The league's appointed doctor found him "markedly incapacitated," but again Pear learned he'd been denied. "I called Dee Becker at the player's union and said, 'What do you have to be to be called "disabled"?' And she says, 'Unless you're in a wheelchair like Darryl Stingley, you won't get the benefit.' " In despair, Pear took his pension early and gets $600 a month from the NFL for his six years of backbreaking service. His drugs alone cost him twice that much, and he survives, albeit barely, on his spouse's salary and a modicum of Social Security. He has, however, managed to keep a roof over his head, which is more than Mike Mosley can say. Mosley, a blazingly fast returner and flanker for the Buffalo Bills in the '80s, ripped his right knee making a cut on turf

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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-asgravy 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?"

The billion-dollar question, of course, is why. Why have the pleas of DeMarco, Mosley, et al., been met with indifference, even hostility? Why has ex-Pro Bowler Conrad Dobler been denied five times for disability, despite 13 operations on one leg? Why is Willie Wood, the gallant Green Bay safety, unable to pay for his assisted living facility? Why is Mercury Morris, the fleet tailback who fractured his neck as a Miami Dolphin, still fighting in appeals court to overturn the pension board's decision, 20 years later? Why did Johnny Unitas, the onetime face of the NFL, die embittered by the league's callous treatment of his teammates? Since no one at the union's DC office responded to multiple e-mails and phone calls, the best one can do is sift the facts. Begin with the pension fund, which the players union won after a bitter fight with owners in the '60s. It has grown, like the game, from a shoestring concern to an instrument of vaulting wealth and continues to take in more -tens of millions more -- than it pays out in benefits each year. Team owners paid $67.9 million in 2005 to cover the monthly checks for retirees, and the plan, called the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan, earns millions more a year in additional interest on its vast investment holdings. From early on a supplement of the plan provided disability funds for injured ex-players. The checks were mostly modest and not easily gotten, particularly if you said your suffering was football-related. Nonetheless, some veterans won, and eked by on sums equal to what they'd get as pensioners. But all that changed in 1993, with the landmark bargaining agreement between players and owners that made partners of the long-term enemies. The Groom Law Group, a K Street, Washington, outfit, was hired first to write the collective bargaining agreement and later to represent the NFL retirement plan. To the existing bureaucracy -- a sixman board of trustees, made up of three reps from owners and players apiece -- a screening committee was added with the power to approve or reject claims. Confusing new rules and categories were added, and retired players were reduced to one kind of claim, football degenerative injuries. But unless they could prove that their health woes were caused by football, they stood no chance of ever collecting the $9,000 a month. And most of those who won claims had to win them over and over again, as the board sent them to doctors every second year to recertify their debilities. "That's the trick they pulled on me," says Mosley. "They shopped and shopped till they found a quack doctor who would cross me off the list." The union says it pays out $20 million a year to 317 disabled ex-players and that many of them get the maximum benefit of $18,600 a month. But tax forms for 2006, the most recent year available, show that only 121 players receive disability, for a total of roughly $9.2 million. Then there is Upshaw's oft-repeated assertion that the money to pay these claims comes from active players. That's misleading. Every cent of the fund is put in by the owners, although in 2006 active players reduced their annual salaries by an average of $56,000 to contribute to the fund. "Gene lies and lies, telling the young guys today that they'll have nothing to retire on if he pays us," says Bernard

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Parrish, the former cornerback for the Cleveland Browns, who's a spry 71 and comfortably fixed, having earned a handsome living building hotels. "It's divide and conquer, and it distracts them from his real job, which is guarding the owners' money." Because disability claims are protected by privacy laws, the union doesn't disclose who is turned down or why. But the case of Mike Webster, which played out in court, afforded a rare look at its mind-set. Webster, the seemingly immortal Steelers center who made the All-Century team and was the four-time captain of a Super Bowl champion team, retired in 1990 after 17 seasons and immediately presented signs of dementia. As offensive line coach for the Kansas City Chiefs, he slept on a bench in the locker room and couldn't recall where he lived. He gave whatever money he had to total strangers, wound up bedding in his truck, and frequently zapped himself with a Taser gun to quell the pain in his back. "He was drifting for years when I got him to doctors who diagnosed severe TBI (traumatic brain injury)," says Bob Fitzsimmons, a West Virginia lawyer who worked, pro bono, for seven years to bring the case to closure. "The union hired an investigator to try to discredit Mike, brought their own doctor in who agreed with my doctors, and they still denied us three or four times and kept trying to spend him dry. Finally we got to trial and won a huge judgment in district court. But even after the union lost again on appeal, Upshaw told reporters that if the board voted that day, they'd still go against Mike, six to nothing." Upshaw's confidence in the board is hard to fathom, given that three of its reps are, like Upshaw himself, supposed to put players' interests first. But Upshaw's appointees are all compromised in one way or another. One, Tom Condon, is Upshaw's agent, who negotiated his salary as the head of the union, a sum that wildly exceeds what union chiefs make in other sports. (Upshaw: $6.7 million a year; Billy Hunter: $2.1 in basketball; Donald Fehr: $1 million in baseball.) A second is Jeff Van Note, a broadcaster for the Atlanta Falcons, whose salary is paid by team owner Arthur Blank. The third is Dave Duerson, who pled guilty to beating his wife and throwing her out a hotel door and into a wall. If that seems a shabby way to staff a pension board, it is very much in keeping with Upshaw's style. 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 fucked up.' " Jerry Kramer, the Pro Bowl guard who founded Gridiron Greats, adds, "You could almost understand this in 1967, when the TV deal with networks paid $9 million. But the sport grew like crazy and the billions rolled in, while the attitude at the union never changed. It's still 'delay, deny, and hope they die,' which is thinking that I can't fathom."

When you talk to ex-players like Kramer and Ditka, what you come away struck by is their acceptance of pain as the wages of a job well done. Hips that don't work, knees that have stopped bending: It is all part and parcel of the warrior life, something to be borne with equanimity and a certain brand of crusty pride. It is a very different thing, though, with the rash of brain trauma that has overtaken the sport. That is spoken of with dread and sorrow, even by the martial Ditka. "I know way too many guys it's happened to -- Larry Morris, Jim Ringo, Harden Hill, John Mackey -- I could go on and on," Ditka says. "It just tears you apart to see 'em like that, and then have the league claim it didn't come from football.

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Why aren't we doing more to help these guys? Why is it all on their wives and families, and how many more are out there?" Brent Boyd, a former guard for the Minnesota Vikings, has some thoughts on these matters, though he can't always string them together. When you've been hit in the head as much as he has, moments of clarity are hard to come by, and words and memories can elude him. He can't, for instance, tease apart the blows that hurt him from the ones that left him merely dazed. But that first whack -- no, he doesn't remember that either, though he does recall his terror on waking up. "I'm laid out, wondering why I can't see, or get up, and then I'm on the sidelines screaming, 'I'm blind! I'm blind!' Well, coach comes over and asks if I can see out of one eye, and he sends me back right in." This last story is related not in rancor but fondness; Boyd loved his offensive line coach, a guy named John Michaels, and worshipped the man they both worked for in Minnesota, the god-of-thunder head coach Bud Grant. Even as a rookie Boyd was a mainstay on a line that included two Hall of Famers, and the only way a lineman left a game, he says, was if they carried him off in a box. And so he played through the haze and smoke in his head and managed to slog on till the final gun. With all the concussions, major and minor, that followed over the course of seven years, this got to be something of a habit with him, and he discovered he was actually adept at it. "We had a drill with the Vikings where they mimicked concussions, though guys called them 'dingers' then and laughed about them, like you'd had a few too many at a party," says Boyd. "They'd lie you facedown on the Astroturf, spin you around 12 times, then roll a ball out in the other direction and tell you to go get the fumble. Well, sooner or later you'd learn to get that ball when your legs wouldn't go in that direction." Boyd, a soft-bellied, wheat-haired man whose manner suggests an affable dentist, is 50 now and has reason to regret his nonchalance on closed-head wounds. After wandering, post-football, through his 30s and mid-40s in a dizzy, dogtired stupor, he saw a neurologist who peered inside his skull and found irreparable blunt-force trauma. The lesions are in his brain's vestibular region and have left him with the equivalent of an incurable migraine, in constant, vise-grip pain that can't be quelled. He has bouts of vertigo that knock him off his pegs two or three times a day, exhaustion that fells him after a couple of hours upright, and nausea and cold sweats that come from nowhere and render him a dripping mess. His life, or what passes for one, is a crawl of appointments with doctors and physical therapists, and the counter in his kitchen is lousy with drugs that don't seem to do him much good. It has been like this for Boyd since 1986, his last year in the game. A third-round draft pick from UCLA, where he graduated with honors in 1980 and hatched long-range plans to become a lawyer, he learned all the positions on the offensive line and became the second rookie ever to start a game for Grant, whose disdain for playing kids was loudly known. But in his second season Boyd tore a ligament in his knee and, after major reconstruction, began taking an anti-inflammatory that compounded his on-and-off headaches. Between the side effects of the drug and his frequent concussions, he found it harder and harder to manage his symptoms, and in 1986 the Vikings cut him midseason, after he'd played for half a year on a broken leg. Exhausted, he retired at 30, having earned about a half-million dollars over seven years. For the next two decades Boyd sputtered and stalled like a Yugo in the breakdown lane. He got a job selling insurance, but couldn't remember appointments and often had to stop en route somewhere and nap for an hour in his car. He and his first wife divorced, and Boyd, with his small son Anders in tow, free fell down the economic ladder. By the summer of '99 he was officially homeless, having sent Anders off to live with his mother while he slept in a car borrowed from his pastor. In the spring of 1999, though, he got in to see a psychiatrist who asked him, for the first time ever, if he'd had a concussion. An exhaustive three-day assessment was done by a neurologist, using SPECT scans and MRIs. It located the lesions in the brain's vestibular region and ruled emphatically that the damage there was causing his multiple symptoms. Boyd applied for disability, using the report to back his claim. He says a union liaison named Miki Yaras-Davis scoffed at him on the phone, saying that the owners "would never approve a claim for concussions," adding that "they wouldn't open this can of worms because the problem was too widespread." Nevertheless Boyd was sent to a physician picked out by the NFL. Dr. J. Sterling Ford echoed Boyd's doctor and approved him for disability. The appeals board deemed Ford "equivocal," however, and sent Boyd to a psychiatrist for a second opinion. He too found on Boyd's behalf, and Boyd, who by now had enlisted the help of a lawyer friend, the powerful baseball agent Barry Axelrod, demanded the board obey its own findings. After hemming and hawing, it gave

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him the minimum of $18,000 a year. But Boyd insisted on his due, and the board shipped him to Baltimore for yet a third opinion, this one from a neurophysiologist named Barry Gordon. The tests there were conducted by a grad student, not Gordon, who popped in only to tap Boyd's kneecaps and shine a light in his eyes. Gordon wrote a report noting Boyd's records were "incomplete," despite his substantial history of doctors' visits. He was out of appeals. Boyd, who hasn't worked since 1999 and is all but housebound by his symptoms, lives in Nevada with his second wife Gina and Anders, who is now 19. They are crowded into a 900-square-foot cottage with leaks they can't afford to fix. In a flush month they get out to see a first-run movie, though Boyd rarely has the energy to do so and can't easily follow what he's watching. "If I'm like this at 50," he worries, "what's 60 going to be like? Is that when the union finally cuts us a check, to have someone come in and change my diaper?" This is a reference to a rare benevolence from the league -- the so-called 88 Plan. Named (or numbered) for the great John Mackey, the Baltimore Colts tight end who was afflicted in his 50s with severe dementia, it provides a sum of money for the care of ex-players beset by Alzheimer's or comparable brain conditions. There's a catch, naturally: Survivors of athletes on the 88 Plan don't receive any disability from the NFLPA, and payments don't kick in till the patient has been deemed unfit to care for himself. If Boyd ever does get the money he's owed, he may not be intact enough to know it. In the meantime he seethes over his treatment by the union and shakes his head at the shameful way the league has addressed brain trauma. "Every reputable expert says that blows to the head'll cause damage if they happen enough," Boyd says. "But the NFL happens to have the only neurologists who say that the jury's still out." In 1994 the NFL established the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, with Dr. Elliot Pellman as its chair. If the league has little trouble finding experts to discount the link between concussions and early-onset dementia, Pellman may be why. His specialty is rheumatology, not brain trauma and neurology, and his committee reports, including one that backed the practice of sending players with concussions back into games, have been widely scorned by neurologists. In 2005 the New York Times reported that he'd misstated his bona fides for more than a decade. Two years later he stepped down as chairman. This summer, unable to ignore the startling news -- Andre Waters' suicide in November 2006 and the release of forensic exams that showed he had the brain of an 80-year-old Alzheimer's patient -- the league staged a "concussion summit" in Chicago. At the conference, whose stated aim was to share knowledge of brain trauma, brain scans of Justin Strzelczyk done by Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, showed that Strzelczyk, like Waters, Long, and Webster, had the brain of a much older man, or a severely punchdrunk boxer. The NFL committee's doctors downplayed this as exceptional and sneered at their credentialed critics, dismissing their work as "soft science." "They'll go to their graves denying that concussions hurt guys, and in Upshaw they've got the perfect stooge," Boyd says, adding that the summit was nothing more than PR. "Gene'll do and say anything the owners want, as long as he gets his money."

Jennifer smith spent a week with the DeMarcos, getting their rent paid and utilities settled, then persuading a wealthy friend of Gridiron Greats to buy the family a used truck. All told, the fund has given them more than $20,000, though it can't extend itself much further. "We're a new nonprofit with a tiny staff, and there are a lot of guys out there who need our help," says Smith, a vibrant blonde in her early 40s who quit TV and film producing to run the fund. It raises money primarily through its online auction of football memorabilia (gridirongreats.org), and has so far taken in about $400,000 in the seven months since opening its doors. "What Brian needs -- what all our guys need -- is for the league and union to honor their obligations. We're a Band-Aid at best." Smith put DeMarco in touch with Cy Smith (no relation), the lawyer who helped win almost $2 million for the children of the late Mike Webster. DeMarco will file -- again -- for his disability benefits, this time with Smith over his shoulder. "I can't tell you how grateful we are," DeMarco says. "If Jennifer hadn't stepped in when she did, we'd've been out in the street with our two kids. We're nowhere near safe yet, but --" he stops himself short, perilously close to tears "at

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least we're part of the way there." Before Smith left town she enacted one last mercy. On a smoldering June day she piled the DeMarcos into a truck and took them to a pawn shop in north Austin. She'd called ahead, and owner Mark Ekrut had the goods in question ready for their arrival. Out of a plastic bag came a weathered pigskin that had been signed by every member of the Jacksonville Jaguars, a keepsake given to DeMarco by his teammates from the Jags' inaugural season. Smith had redeemed the ball to auction online; all proceeds will go to the DeMarcos for living expenses. DeMarco, who'd been hovering near tears all morning, clasped it to his chest and broke down. In a near-empty store on a Thursday morning, his sobs echoed off the hocked golf clubs and band saws and dusty Jesus crosses in the case. "Thank you," he croaked to Ekrut, who'd advanced him $1,000 and never put his treasures up for sale. "Forget it," said Ekrut. "I knew you'd come back. You're a good man who fell on hard times." DeMarco thanked him again, then thanked and hugged Smith, laughing, crying, and wincing all at once. Taking up his football, he started for the door, a long, slow haul on one good leg.

Copyright ©2007 by Men's Journal LLC WENNER MEDIA: RollingStone.com | Us Online

Upshaw proven to be a liar: Despite critic, we will pursue key issues

Charlotte Observer stands by accuracy of Upshaw article MICHAEL PERSINGER Related Content 1/15/06: Ex-players say NFL neglects retirees

Sometimes people in the news say things that later make them uncomfortable, and Gene Upshaw is uncomfortable these days. Upshaw, the NFL Players Association executive director, says comments from him in a Jan. 15, 2006, article about retired NFL players' concerns over pension and health benefits were taken out of context. Most recently, he discussed the comments for a story in the Philadelphia Daily News. The Observer interviewed 13 NFL Hall of Famers for the original story; all of them pioneers in a league that now generates $7 billion in revenue annually. Some of those players described crippling health and financial difficulties and expressed disappointment at how Upshaw was handling those issues. Upshaw responded sharply to the criticism, both to the Observer and to other sources. "The bottom line is I don't work for (the retired players)," he said in that January 2006 interview. "They don't hire me and they can't fire me. They can complain about me all day long. They can have their opinion. But the active players have the vote. That's who pays my salary. "They (retirees) say they don't have anybody in the (bargaining) room. Well, they don't and they never will. I'm the only one in that room. They're not in the bargaining unit. They don't even have a vote." Those words created a firestorm among former NFL players that continues. That has made Upshaw uncomfortable, and he has fought to distance himself from the comments and discredit the Observer's story. "The writer called me and said he had this quote from (Hall of Famer and Charlotte resident Joe) DeLamielleure, who says I don't do anything for retired players and every retired player ought to get up every day and try to get me fired," Upshaw told the Daily News for a story published Friday. "I said, `You can tell Joe DeLamielleure he didn't hire me, he can't fire me and I don't work for him.' But that's 36

not the way it came out." While DeLamielleure was among the 13 players the Observer interviewed, Upshaw's answers were in response to questions about retirees in general. He was quoted accurately. In fact, in the weeks before and after our story, Upshaw maintained the position reflected in our story in at least four instances: • In a memo to retired players initialed by Upshaw and dated Dec. 2, 2005, before the publication of our article, Upshaw noted that "we help former players not because we have to, but because we want to, and perhaps most importantly, because the active players want us to. Like any other labor union, we represent only active employees. You are not union members and we do not represent you." • In an e-mail to retired players dated Jan. 20, 2006, five days after publication, Upshaw said, "Much has been made of my recent comments to The Charlotte Observer. These comments were made in response to several retired players' criticism of me and the NFLPA. While my response was not meant to be offensive, I stand by what I said." • An article in the New York Times on Feb. 2, 2006, said Upshaw "didn't back down" from comments in the Observer. In that story, he touted his record in improving benefits for retired players. • At a Super Bowl news conference that same day, Upshaw addressed the plight of retired players and our story to the national media, but didn't mention concerns about how he was quoted or the context of our original story. Also, he has never called the Observer to challenge our story or clarify his position. So why did Upshaw wait more than a year to say he thought he was taken out of context? We tried to find out. Charles Chandler, the reporter on the original story, went to Atlanta Saturday, where Upshaw spoke to a gathering of retired NFL players. Chandler asked to speak with Upshaw. Chandler outlined for NFLPA spokesman Carl Francis our reasons for being in Atlanta. Francis said Upshaw would have nothing to say and Upshaw was tired of "commenting on comments." After initially being told Upshaw had left the meeting site, the Intercontinental Hotel in the Buckhead area, Chandler was told Upshaw had not left yet. Chandler, not a registered guest at the hotel, stayed. Later, Upshaw twice ignored Chandler when he approached, once on his way from a meeting room to an elevator and once while he was on his way to a waiting car. Neither Upshaw nor Francis answered a follow-up e-mail seeking comment. Chandler remained at the hotel, seeking to speak to others in the group of NFL retirees and NFLPA officials. A short time later, a hotel security guard asked Chandler to leave the premises at the behest of NFLPA officials. Upshaw, whose annual salary is $4.5 million, and the league has made changes to the pension and health care packages for retirees since the Observer's story. Those changes, which include doubling older retirees' pensions from $100 to $200 per month per year of service, only begin to address the problem, some retirees say. So, for now, questions remain about NFL retiree issues. And we intend to keep pursuing the answers. Michael Persinger is executive sports editor: [email protected]; 704-358-5132

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Monday, December 3, 2007 Updated: December 4, 3:12 PM ET

Congress questions NFL record-keeping on disabled players By Peter Keating ESPN The Magazine While the NFL has insisted that it is committed to helping disabled former players, the league does not maintain records of which players, or how many, are driven from the game by injury, ESPN.com has learned. That fact is contained in more than 2,000 pages of documents the NFL and NFL Players Association delivered to the House Judiciary Committee last month. It has startled members of Congress who are investigating the NFL's disability benefits. And it has added to a growing feeling among key members of the House and Senate that the league's business practices deserve increased scrutiny and possibly new regulation. "Neither the NFL nor the NFLPA keeps data on players who retire due to injury, a simple fact that I find amazing," Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who chairs the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, told ESPN.com. "Sometimes you don't keep track of something when you don't want to know what the answers are." "We are still in the information-gathering steps," Sanchez said. "But we're not going to go away, throw our hands in the air and let the league and the players' association run the system the way they want." Sanchez's subcommittee, a subset of the House Judiciary Committee, held hearings on the league's disability benefits plan on June 26 this year. Emotional testimony was offered at those hearings by several former players, including Brent Boyd, a Vikings offensive lineman whose career was ended by injuries and who has spent a decade fighting for the highest category of disability Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., is still looking for benefits. answers from the NFL and the NFLPA. "The [NFL Retirement] Board's tactics are to delay, deny and hope we die," Boyd testified. Boyd and other retired players found a sympathetic audience among House members, who at times seemed irritated with statements made by the NFL and NFLPA. At one point in the June hearings, Douglas Ell, chief attorney for the disability plan and the NFLPA, revealed that 317 players were receiving disability payments, out of about 7,900 who are retired. "In one of the most dangerous sports in the history of mankind, only 300 players are receiving disability payments?" an incredulous Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., asked. Despite such criticism, the NFL said it has not been lobbying Congress against taking action on disability benefits. "To the contrary, we have been fully cooperative with the interested members and committees and have provided the information they have requested," league spokesman Greg Aiello said. "If a proposal is advanced with respect to disability benefits, we would review and comment on it in a respectful and constructive way." On Sept. 18, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation took up the disability benefits issue. Members of that chamber seemed markedly less interested in the subject than their House counterparts -- only a handful attended. 38

But since then, individual senators have pursued the subject on their own. Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and David Vitter, R-La., sent a series of nine questions to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who replied in writing. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent queries to Goodell and NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw, and met privately with retired players. And Sen. John Ensign, R-Ariz., met with Boyd, who recently launched Dignity After Football, an advocacy group for disabled former players. On Oct. 12, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and his colleagues on that committee wrote to Goodell and Upshaw, formally requesting information to prepare a bipartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. According to the committee's letter, the CRS report will provide "an objective analysis of the types and severity of injuries suffered by NFL players, the benefits programs available to injured players, and the barriers to former players seeking benefits." "In addition," the letter stated, "the report will delve into related issues such as the problem of concussion and its long-term effects on players." "We do not know how many players end their careers because of injury," the NFL stated in its written responses to the House Judiciary Committee. "Players retire for many reasons; because they do not make the team, because they wish to start their second career, because they lose the desire to play, or because they wish to spend more time with their families. No records are kept regarding the reasons that players retire." The NFL released that portion of its response to ESPN.com this week. "The data concerning injuries and what does or does not cause a player to leave the game of football is not tracked by the NFLPA," a spokesperson for the players' association told ESPN.com. The judiciary committee expects the CRS report to be completed by the end of the year. The NFL and NFLPA took until Nov. 5, 10 days beyond the committee's original deadline, to answer the congressional queries. The league and players' association both declined to make the bulk of their responses public. Conyers has not yet determined whether or when his committee will release the documents. But neither the league nor the union could respond to all of the questions the committee posed. The sixth of 32 questions sent to the NFLPA asked, "How many players have retired because of an injury or injuries? What types of injuries did these players sustain?" The seventh of 11 questions sent to the NFL had almost identical wording. And neither the NFL nor the NFLPA knew the answers. Asked this week about disabling injuries, the union suggested it is the league's job to track the reasons players retire. "Perhaps you should ask the NFL this question -- or each team individually," an NFLPA spokesperson told ESPN.com. Meanwhile, the NFL said it is difficult to determine why players leave the game. "Other reasons players retire would be declining skill, the team has decided to go younger, the team says it will no longer pay the player at that level for cap reasons and the player decides it's time to hang it up," Aiello told ESPN.com. "In all those cases, an older player like that may also have some injuries from his long career. Did he retire 'due to injury'?" As members of Congress probe the rest of the responses, they are particularly concerned about the lack of representation former players have in the league's benefits process. "Right now, we're seeing so many claims rejected that it raises questions," Sanchez said. "This is my concern: Is it something that's systematic, to discourage, harass and utterly defeat these retirees? Let's face it, after years of going through the process, you wonder if it's worth it." The NFL offers several forms of assistance to disabled players. Under its main plan, players are eligible for anywhere from $18,000 to $224,000 a year, depending on when they played and the types of injuries they have sustained. But only four players have qualified for the maximum level of payments since 1993. And many of the former players who have tried to obtain benefits have described the process in nightmarish terms. 39

Applications first go to a two-person Disability Initial Claims Committee. They then move to a Retirement Board that contains three members appointed by the NFL and three by the NFLPA. The board generally does not meet with the players or their physicians, but can ask them for additional medical reports, and has full discretion to accept whatever evidence it finds convincing. Currently, the Retirement Board includes Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill; Ravens president Dick Cass; Chiefs owner Clark Hunt; Tom Condon, who heads the football division at Creative Artists Agency and represents Upshaw; former All-Pro center Jeff Van Note, who is now a broadcaster; and former All-Pro safety Dave Duerson. None of the six members is a doctor or disability expert. If Congress chooses to act, it could affect the NFL's business in a wide variety of ways. The federal government regulates interstate commerce and workplace safety and has allowed the league to remain largely exempt from antitrust laws. In June, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., said that inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could start showing up at NFL workouts. "I believe we could mandate almost any conditions that we wanted to," Feeney told The New York Times. The congressional investigations could also broaden to include a look at pensions for retired NFL players, another subject of considerable controversy in recent months. "This could go next to Ted Kennedy's Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions," said one commerce committee staff member, who asked to remain anonymous while predicting what members of the Senate might do next. It's more likely, however, that after the CRS report on the disability plan is complete, Congress will amend federal labor laws to change the structure of the Retirement Board. In September, Upshaw proposed legislative action to give the union control of the board. "Since the NFLPA has been criticized when applications are denied … it makes sense for the players to be the ones making the disability decisions," he told the Senate. But many key members of Congress feel the board should be independent of both the league and the union, one way or another. At the June hearings, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., repeatedly told the NFLPA's lawyers that independent professionals, not NFL and players' association appointees, should be on the board. According to his spokesman, NFL In September, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., suggested that the board should commissioner Roger Goodell hasn't lobbied Congress despite the be made up of doctors -- and Goodell said he was "not opposed" to that threat of action. idea. And Waters, who is married to former NFL player Sidney Williams and has said she personally was frustrated by the NFLPA when she tried to help a friend obtain disability benefits, reportedly is looking into a congressional takeover of the plan. "We do not believe that congressional action is necessary," the NFL's Aiello told ESPN.com. "The current system is a product of collective bargaining within the statutory, regulatory and legal framework established by Congress, various federal agencies and the federal courts. These are issues that must be addressed in the next round of collective bargaining." Peter Keating writes about sports business for ESPN The Magazine.

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Local ex-pro fights NFL Dave Pear, others struggle for medical and pension benefits By kerry eggers The Portland Tribune, Feb 1, 2008 Before injuries took their toll, Dave Pear was an All-Pro nose tackle for Tampa Bay. COURTESY OF DAVE PEAR Dave Pear has been in Arizona this week, speaking on behalf of disabled former NFL players through a program called ―Gridiron Greats.‖ On Sunday, the former Benson Tech great will be back at his home in Sammamish, Wash., perched in front of his television, watching the New York Giants challenge the New England Patriots at University of Phoenix Stadium in Super Bowl XLII. ―I do enjoy football,‖ says Pear, 54, twice an All-Pro nose tackle during his six-year NFL career. ―It was my life for so long. ―My only complaint is, once you become injured, the NFL does not live up to the bargain. Don‘t get hurt playing. Once you do, baby, you‘re on your own.‖ Pear got hurt during his years with Baltimore, Tampa Bay and Oakland (1975 to 1980). He retired at age 27 after winning a 1981 Super Bowl ring with the Raiders. He has had seven spinal surgeries and four fused discs, and has four screws in his lower back. Over the next three years, he says, he will need surgery to replace both hips and to remove the screws from his back. That‘s not to mention the countless concussions he says he suffered during his time in the NFL – injuries that may have resulted in one or more strokes. He currently takes 15 pills daily (including Neurontin and Lamictal) for pain control and sleeping aid. ―I‘m in chronic pain,‖ says Pear, who played at the University of Washington from 1972-74. ―When I walk, it irritates my hips. I‘m walking with a cane to take the pressure off my back. I fall asleep during the day, have vertigo and short-term memory loss from repeated concussions.‖ Pear, who says he is unable to hold a job, is among a growing group of ex-players who are challenging the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. He and his wife, Heidi, live on the salary she 41

receives from working two jobs, plus his $606 monthly NFL pension check – since he qualified in 2004 – along with an additional $2,000 a month from the Social Security Administration disability fund. The Pears have been together since 1973; they married in 1980. Their two children, ages 24 and 20, live with them in Sammamish. For years, Pear has fought the NFL Players Association for medical benefits to which he believes he is entitled. He says the NFLPA has turned its back on him and many others who suffered life-altering injuries. ―Football is a game where they teach you to play through the injuries,‖ Pear says. ―It‘s something the NFL doesn‘t want to talk about. A player makes the choice to play. It‘s a dangerous sport. I accept that. But I didn‘t realize once you get injured, the NFL will not pay the medical bills and follow the plan (to which) you‘re entitled.‖ In September, U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell he wants the league to take seriously complaints from injured retired players about little medical guidance, counseling or assistance while dealing with the effects of debilitating injuries. Kerry said that if the NFL didn‘t get its house in order, he would introduce legislation to create a commission to provide oversight of the NFL Retirement Board. Goodell – who didn‘t return multiple e-mails from the Portland Tribune – has voiced interest in the cause. The NFL and NFLPA have agreed to a series of improvements in disability procedures and have added some new programs, including one for joint replacement. In October, Goodell had a 25-minute phone conversation with Pear over his case. But many ex-players consider the changes to be too little and the commissioner‘s reaching out to Pear as mostly lip service. ―Pear is one of those cases where there are no words to describe how he could be ignored by the NFL,‖ says Lake Oswego‘s Jane Arnett, the wife of ex-NFL back Jon Arnett. She has taken up the cause of those ex-players in need. ―Yes, Goodell called him, but that means nothing,‖ she says. ―It‘s all a pretty package to make you think they‘re doing something.‖ Pear says that ―whether by court of public opinion or in a court of law, they‘re going to have to be accountable at some point. It‘s a dark cloud hanging over their head, and it‘s going to get darker.‖ Injuries ended career early An All-Coast defensive tackle at Washington as a junior, Pear missed most of his senior season with a knee injury. He played well in the East-West Shrine Game, though, and was a third-round pick by Baltimore in the 1975 NFL draft.

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As a 6-2, 250-pound nose tackle in the NFL, Pear was All-Pro in 1977 and ‘78 and was the first Tampa Bay Buccaneer selected for the Pro Bowl the latter year. The next season, he suffered a herniated disc in his neck during his first season with Oakland. ―That‘s when my serious injuries started,‖ he says. ―The Raiders never acknowledged my injury. Once you injure your neck, you shouldn‘t be playing, because you risk paralysis. They treated it by giving me shots and pills. ―I was pressured by (Raider owner) Al Davis and his guys – the whole organization – to keep playing. I was giving myself shots of orgatine (an anti-inflamatory used to treat neck injuries), trying anything to continue to play. After the ‘79 season, I had lost my zip and was an average NFL player at best.‖ Pear lost his starting spot in 1980, his last season in the NFL. He says he continued to play as his injuries worsened. He says he played about 20 plays in Oakland‘s 27-10 victory over Philadelphia in Super Bowl XV at the Superdome in New Orleans. The official scoresheet credits Pear with two tackles. ―I was operating at most at 25 percent (capacity),‖ he says. ―I knew it was my last game. I never took pills or got shot up to play in a game, although they wanted me to. We had a doctor – his nickname was ‗Needles‘ – who gave me shots of Xylocaine and Cortisone during the week before a game. I would take Percodan after the game.‖ At training camp the following summer, Oakland released Pear. He went to a doctor at the Stanford Medical Center, who scheduled surgery for the herniated disc. ―I saw Al Davis,‖ Pear says. ―I explained I was going to have an operation and he couldn‘t turn his back on me, that I had helped him win a Super Bowl and got injured playing for him. He told me he wouldn‘t accept responsibility for the injury. He said he‘d call me the following Monday. I never heard from him.‖ Davis did not return multiple phone messages from the Tribune. Pear had a year left on his Oakland contract, but the Raiders contested it. He took them to arbitration and received ―a small portion of it.‖ Pear applied for line-of-duty benefits through the NFL Players Association, the union that represents the players and to which the players pay a portion of their annual salaries. In 1983, the NFLPA sent him to a doctor, who rated Pear‘s disability at 50 percent to 59 percent through ―football-related injuries.‖ But Pear‘s claim was ultimately denied after a six-person NFL Retirement Board deadlocked 3-3 on his case. The board was – and still is – composed of three trustees representing players and three representing management. The player trustees ruled in Pear‘s favor; the management ruled against him. To break the deadlock, the case was sent to arbitration, though bylaws stipulate a tie is supposed to be broken by a medical advisory physician. The arbitrator ruled against Pear. The case was referred to an arbitrator, says Greg Aiello, the NFL‘s vice president of public relations, ―because the question at issue was whether his disability met the requisite percentage of severity requirements. … (There were) a myriad of possible nonmedical reasons, in addition to disabilities, that might cause a player to end his career. The use of a medical advisory physician is discretionary, not mandatory under the plan.‖ 43

The section in the retirement plan that pertains to a 3-3 vote, however, reads this way: ―The retirement board shall submit to the medical advisory physician for final determination.‖ ―The language can‘t be any more plain than that,‖ Pear says. ―It says ‗shall,‘ not ‗may.‘ An arbitrator who knows nothing about the field of medicine was allowed to make the deciding vote.‖ Pear says in the years since his retirement as a player, he has held sales jobs in the freight and paper industry and in advertising. ―I‘ve tried so many different things,‖ says Pear, who hasn‘t worked since 2004. ―But because I fall asleep, it‘s hard to hold a job.‖ In need of money, at age 45 Pear accepted early retirement from the NFL, which ultimately has cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. ―The retirement board decides what‘s in your best interests,‖ he says. ―They knew I had a disability. By me taking an early retirement, though, the plan pays out less. It saved them a lot of money.‖ In 1995, with a new collective-bargaining agreement in place, Pear filed for total and permanent disability with the NFL. His appeal was denied because the retirement board determined he wasn‘t totally incapable of work. ―The doctor determined I could work a ‗sedentary job,‘ with no excessive standing, no bending, little lifting, frequent rest breaks,‖ Pear says. ―What employer is going to want to have you under those limitations?‖ Pear has contacted representatives of the NFLPA and its legal counsel many times, asking for a copy of his medical records, retirement plan documents and other papers regarding his case. He says he gets back only partial copies and once was told a document was ―in storage.‖ ―They will not allow injured ex-players to access their records,‖ Pear says. ―They‘re playing a shell game.‖ Union head criticized Several years ago, Pear says he traded e-mails with former Super Bowl teammate Gene Upshaw, now the executive director of the NFLPA. ―The last one he wrote was so incorrect, I told him I was disappointed with the advice I was getting from the NFLPA,‖ Pear says. ―Gene reprimanded me, said he didn‘t appreciate the tone of my e-mail, that it was counterproductive. I‘ve never been able to get him on the phone.‖ Upshaw did not return multiple phone messages from the Portland Tribune. According to USA Today, Upshaw received more than $6.6 million for his union-related work from March 1, 2006, to Feb. 28, 2007. His annual salary dwarfs that of his counterparts, Donald Fehr in baseball ($1 million) and Billy Hunter with the NBA (more than $2.3 million).

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―Gene has totally forgotten the people who elected him and paid dues to help pay his salary,‖ Pear says. ―He‘s supposed to represent us, but when we‘re asking our former employees to pay medical bills, he makes it sound as if we‘re asking for charity. He‘s the master puppet for the NFL.‖ Pear has company with those sentiments. Jon Arnett, 72, made it through a 10-year NFL career (1957-66) in relatively good health. ―I‘m one of the few guys who spent that long in the NFL without a knee injury,‖ says Arnett, who moved to Lake Oswego from Southern California in 2005. Arnett, who enjoyed a prosperous post-NFL career as an investment banker and is a partner in a food distribution company, became aware of the plight of several of his former teammates and competitors on the gridiron. He says pension benefits ―are a joke.‖ ―The league doesn‘t care,‖ Arnett says. ―It‘s that simple.‖ Arnett says a move by Congress to take away the NFL‘s antitrust protection would be a step in the right direction for ex-players‘ rights. ―And I‘d like to see somebody dethrone Gene Upshaw,‖ Arnett says. ―He‘s been an embarrassment … a sycophant for the owners. He probably has his foot against the door stopping any solution for these things to help (disabled ex-players). If you had a more sympathetic guy in this position, there wouldn‘t be this problem. He‘s part of the problem.‖ Cases could be in hundreds After reading or hearing about the sad case of such ex-NFL players as Dick ―Night Train‖ Lane, Mike Webster, Joe Perry, John Mackey and many others, the Arnetts have become advocates. ―These are make-no-excuse kinds of guys,‖ says Jane Arnett, an Oregon native who persuaded her husband to retire here. ―They strap it on and don‘t complain. But after investigating their plight, we were stunned by what we found. It was unbelievable the number of ex-players in peril. The stories were heartwrenching. ―For instance, it‘s not most of the guys or even half of the guys, but there are 10 times the instance of dementia among ex-players as opposed to the general population. Pensions are insufficient, and the NFL pays out Band-Aid amounts of money for medical problems. We‘ve identified almost 100 (ex-players), but some say there are from 500 to 600 guys in trouble. We‘ll raise money to try to supplement their medical expenses and make their month-to-month existence a little easier.‖ The Arnetts have started an organization that will hold a fundraiser for former players. In recent years, the Groom Law Group has been retained to handle claims by ex-NFL players applying for disability benefits. Groom represents both the NFL and the NFLPA. ―A prudent person would ask, ‗How is it not a conflict of interest to represent both management and the union?‘ ‖ says Pear, who says he has dealt unsuccessfully with Groom representatives, receiving only redacted parts of articles he has sought concerning his case. 45

Multiple phone messages left by the Tribune for Alvaro Anillo of the Groom Law Group and Miki YarasDavis, director of benefits for the NFLPA, went unreturned. Since Kerry‘s report last September, the NFLPA has hired big-time attorney Lanny Davis to address the situation. ―The NFLPA is spending (the ex-players‘) union money to fight the men they are supposed to be representing,‖ Jane Arnett says. ―Last year, Major League Baseball spent $500,000 on legal fees. The NFL spent $5 million. Why don‘t they just give that money to these men who are clearly in trouble?‖ „It‟s like the Mafia‟ Former NFL running back Mercury Morris – who settled his own claim with the NFL out of court for $295,000 more than a decade ago – considers the battle for ex-players‘ rights a personal crusade. He has advised Pear throughout his battle to gain benefits and was annoyed when Goodell had an NFL attorney, Larry Lamade, contact Pear via e-mail with a series of questions last month. ―Ultimately, (Lamade) will do nothing for Pear,‖ Morris says. ―As soon as the Super Bowl is over, (the NFL will) drop him like a bad habit. He was sent to get Pear out of the hair of the commissioner and make him look like he‘s trying to do something. It‘s all a scam.‖ In response to an e-mail from the Tribune, Lamade referred questions to NFL spokesman Aiello. Aiello‘s reply cited recent improvements made to the disability plan procedures and a pledge ―to continue to discuss additional ways to improve medical benefits for retired players.‖ That evidently won‘t help Pear, though Morris says Pear may be able to help others. ―Dave is in a position I‘ve not seen happen,‖ Morris says. ―The commissioner has hired an attorney as an intermediary between the NFL Management Council and the NFLPA. The problem is, Dave is getting handled. But he‘s in a unique spot. He‘s going to get noticed. And he‘s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other players being screwed out of the benefits they‘re due.‖ Last year, the NFL instituted the joint replacement program for ex-players. ―But they make it very difficult to qualify, and the payments to some of the players who have qualified are woefully insufficient,‖ Jane Arnett says. Jon Arnett says groups such as Gridiron Greats – whose representatives, such as Mike Ditka, have been outspoken with criticism about the NFL‘s treatment of its former players – ―are pissing off the NFL, which is defeating the cause. But the dichotomy is, if somebody doesn‘t do it, the NFL won‘t respond. ―There are 32 owners protected by the Sherman Antitrust (Act). They don‘t have to be transparent. They don‘t have to tell you anything. It‘s like the Mafia.‖ Pear says he will continue to fight the fight. Every bit of exposure for the cause will help. ―It‘s like David versus Goliath,‖ he says. ―But I‘m going to take my stand, and I‘m not going to back down. 46

―I‘ve been fighting this for 25 years. If I have to, I‘ll fight for 25 more.‖

Dead athletes' brains show damage from concussions     

Story Highlights NEW: Researchers find start of brain damage in 18-year old athlete who died NEW: Same type of brain damage found in sixth dead NFL player Damage from repeated concussions is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy Symptoms can include depression, sleep disorders, headaches

By Stephanie Smith, January 27, 2009 CNN Medical Producer (CNN) -- For years after his NFL career ended, Ted Johnson could barely muster the energy to leave his house. "I'd [leave to] go see my kids for maybe 15 minutes," said Johnson. "Then I would go back home and close the curtains, turn the lights off and I'd stay in bed. That was my routine for two years. "Those were bad days." These days, the former linebacker is less likely to recount the hundreds of tackles, scores of quarterback sacks or the three Super Bowl rings he earned as a linebacker for the New England Patriots. He is more likely to talk about suffering more than 100 concussions. "I can definitely point to 2002 when I got backto-back concussions. That's where the problems started," said Johnson, who retired after those two concussions. "The depression, the sleep disorders and the mental fatigue." Until recently, the best medical definition for concussion was a jarring blow to the head that temporarily stunned the senses, occasionally leading to unconsciousness. It has been considered an invisible injury, impossible to test -- no MRI, no CT scan can detect it. But today, using tissue from retired NFL athletes culled posthumously, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), at the Boston University School of Medicine, is shedding light on what concussions look like in the brain. The findings are stunning. Far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. That damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). On Tuesday afternoon, researchers at the CSTE released a study about the sixth documented case of CTE in former NFL player Tom McHale, who died in 2008 at the age of 45, and the youngest case to date, an 18-year-old multi-sport athlete who suffered multiple concussions. While CTE in an ex-NFL player's brain may have been expected, the beginnings of brain damage in an 18-year-old brain was a "shocking" finding, according to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, and co-director of the CSTE. "We think this is how chronic traumatic encephalopathy starts," said McKee. "This is speculation, but I think we can assume that this would have continued to expand." CTE has thus far been found in the brains of six out of six former NFL players. "What's been surprising is that it's so extensive," said McKee. "It's throughout the brain, not just on the superficial aspect of the brain, but it‘s deep inside." CSTE studies reveal brown tangles flecked throughout the brain tissue of former NFL players who died young -- some as early as their 30s or 40s. 47

McKee, who also studies Alzheimer's disease, says the tangles closely resemble what might be found in the brain of an 80-year-old with dementia. "I knew what traumatic brain disease looked like in the very end stages, in the most severe cases," said McKee. "To see the kind of changes we're seeing in 45-yearolds is basically unheard of." The damage affects the parts of the brain that control emotion, rage, hypersexuality, even breathing, and recent studies find that CTE is a progressive disease that eventually kills brain cells. Chris Nowinski knows well the impact of concussions. He was a football star at Harvard before wrestling professionally with World Wrestling Entertainment. In one moment, his dreams of a long career wrestling were dashed by a kick to his chin. That kick, which caused Nowinski to black out and effectively ended his career, capped a career riddled with concussions. "My world changed," said Nowinski. "I had depression. I had memory problems. My head hurt for five years." Nowinski began searching for studies, and what he found startled him. "I realized when I was visiting a lot of doctors, they weren't giving me very good answers about what was wrong with my head," said Nowinski. "I read [every study I could find] and I realized there was a ton of evidence showing concussions lead to depression, and multiple concussions can lead to Alzheimer's." Nowinski decided further study was needed, so he founded the Sports Legacy Institute along with Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and the co-director of the CSTE. The project solicits for study the brains of ex-athletes who suffered multiple concussions. Once a family agrees to donate the brain, it is delivered to scientists at the CSTE to look for signs of damage. So far, the evidence of CTE is compelling. The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, along with other research institutions, has now identified traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of late NFL football players John Grimsley, Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Justin Strzelczyk and Terry Long, in addition to McHale. Grimsley died of an accidental gunshot wound to the chest. Webster, Long and Strzelczyk all died after long bouts of depression, while Waters committed suicide in 2006 at age 44. McHale was found dead last year of an apparent drug overdose. "Guys were dying," said Nowinski. "The fact of the matter was guys were dying because they played sports 10 or 20 years before." So far, around 100 athletes have consented to have their brains studied after they die. Ted Johnson was one of the first to sign up. He said he believes that concussions he suffered while playing football explain the anger, depression and throbbing headaches that occasionally still plague him. Johnson said he played through concussions because he, like many other NFL athletes, did not understand the consequences. He has publicly criticized the NFL for not protecting players like him. "They don't want you to know," said Johnson. "It's not like when you get into the NFL there's a handout that says 'These are the effects of multiple concussions so beware.' " In a statement, the NFL indicated that their staffs take a cautious, conservative approach to managing concussions. While they support research into the impact of concussions, they maintain that, "Hundreds of thousands of people have played football and other sports without experiencing any problem of this type and there continues to be considerable debate within the medical community on the precise longterm effects of concussions and how they relate to other risk factors." The NFL is planning its own independent medical study of retired NFL players on the long-term effects of concussion.

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"Really my main reason even for talking about this is to help the guys who are already retired," said Johnson. "[They] are getting divorced, going bankrupt, can't work, are depressed, and don't know what's wrong with them. [It is] to give them a name for it so they can go get help." "The idea that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine is gone," said Nowinski. "We know we can't do that anymore. This causes long-term damage."

Dispute between former NFL players, union escalates Former NFL players are encouraged to use a website to express their concerns over retirement plan. The move comes in response to the players' union setting up its own website to "get the facts out." By Greg Johnson Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 5, 2007 The public relations battle between retired NFL players and their former union escalated again Thursday when a Chicago-based retiree group encouraged former players to publicize gripes about the union's pension and medical disability plan on its website. The Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund described its move as a counter to "dirty play tactics" by the NFL Players Assn., which on Sept. 27 established a website to help correct what it described as false allegations by retirees who believe they have been short-changed by the league's retirement system. Former NFL player and coach Mike Ditka, who invited former players to post their stories on gridirongreats.org during a news conference in Chicago, described the union's website as "deplorable" and "despicable." Ditka, who last month testified about alleged medical disability plan shortcomings during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, called upon union leaders to "focus their attention on fixing a pathetic disability program." Ditka said that NFLPA Executive Director Gene Upshaw "should be ashamed" by the NFLPA's "deplorable tactics." But Upshaw has stated that the union website is simply an attempt to "get the facts out" in the increasingly heated debate with former players. Word that the NFLPA had created the so-called "truth squad" website infuriated some retired players because it debuted less than 24 hours after a meeting in New York City that was attended by retired players and top NFL officials, including Upshaw and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. During that meeting, attendees said, the parties agreed to try to limit public attacks and work together to find solutions. "I remember hearing the words 'kinder and more empathetic,' " said Jerry Kramer, founder of Gridiron Greats and a former Green Bay Packers star. ―So I was especially disturbed by Gene's attack on the [former players] that are having the hard times. That was the last thing I would have expected, and I suspect that a lot of other people in that room were surprised, given the tone of the meeting." 49

Some former players also questioned why such vocal critics as Bruce Laird, a former Baltimore Colts player, weren't invited to the Sept. 26 meeting -- or to a previous meeting, during which a dozen former players met with league and union officials to discuss the league's retirement and medical disability system. "I wasn't invited," Laird said Thursday. "But my understanding is that the message from the meeting was, 'Let's bury the hatchet and see if we can come to a meeting of the minds.' But someone at the union obviously didn't get the memo." [email protected]

NFLPA‟s PR campaign claiming benefit increases are smoke and mirrors, Delay, Deny, and Hope We die. By Bernie Parrish author of best seller They Call It A Game, former officer of NFLPA 1960‘s, pension plan pioneer, player advocate since 1959, Officer of Retired Players for Justice. Claims of retirement benefits increases for retired players by Gene Upshaw and his PR shills are greatly exaggerated and consistently misrepresented. These are abuses clouded by calculated statements from the NFL owners through their company union the NFLPA to cheat the retired players out of previously contracted for retirement benefits an disability benefits. First off there are no laws that say there has to be professional football or an NFL or a players union and there are no laws against their existence either. This brutal dangerous industry is unique. It is under no obligation to imitate or follow the pattern of any other business in the world. An NFLPA Retired Members Directory 2004-2006 publication by the NFLPA, says that in ―March 1987 Players who played prior to 1959 receive pension benefits for the first time. Six lines later the same publications says ―June 1994 Pre-59ers included in Pension Plan.‖ Well, was it 1987 or 1994? The NFLPA‘s written histories are self serving manifestos rather than accurate accounts of what happened or when it happened. There is no one in or around the NFLPA today who has any idea what went on in 1959. Their accounts of history are simply self serving tales of fiction. They are making it up to try to make the retired players look bad, and to cost those retired players the retirement plan they won at great personal sacrifice and raw courage fighting the most ruthless monopoly in America in 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965. I have the advantage of being one of the guys who was there, with the men who made it happen. Having written an autobiography a best selling book They Call It A Game recounting our player‘s battles with the owners and the traitors within our own ranks, I am an acknowledged writer and historian, an expert on the era and the players union and the pension plan. It was not as if the early NFL players didn‘t believe they were laying the foundation for themselves and all future of players who also would be involved in building a tremendous industry. But our earlier players have been double crossed by the owners who are using their control of today‘s company union to 50

do it. Those owners have always been bitter that we threw off their yoke and kicked their butts for a pension and did it without agents or lawyers holding our hands. The excerpt from the following memo written by the NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle explains what happened in 1959 and 1960 and shows the intent of both the veteran active players and the league for the future of the NFL Player Benefit Plan. It did not include having thugs like Gene Upshaw/Paul Tagliabue/Roger Goodell come along in the early 1990‘s and cut us out of our plan, and by playing the current players off against us retired players. The Pete Rozelle Memo follows here: THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE 20 May 1960 MEMORANDUM TO:

NFL Veteran Players

SUBJECT: NFL Player Benefit Plan Early History and Development of the Benefit Plan ―Upon the advice of competent benefit plan consultants, retroactive service prior to 1959 was not included. The amount of benefit payments was to depend entirely upon the amount contributed to the trust fund. The league consultant decided that it would impractical to include service prior to 1959 at the outset of the plan; at least until it was known that there would be sufficient income to cover such service. It should be obvious to all players that the amount of the benefit payments and the possibility of later including retroactive service prior to the 1959 season, are entirely dependent upon one basic factor— namely, adopting measures to produce the highest possible income for the Benefit Plan. Club owners and players were extremely enthusiastic when the Benefit Plan was first formulated. It was readily and willingly agreed that both the clubs and the players would cooperate completely in developing sources of income for the Benefit Plan. It is significant to note that, unlike benefit plans in other sports, the NFL plan does not call for individual player contributions. This means that not one player is paying one cent toward the cost of the Benefit Plan.‖ PETE ROZELLE, Commissioner

Now in 2007 the NFL is a $7.1 billion industry. 1959 to 1993 the retirement benefits were $60 per month per season that is $0 increase in 35 years. In 1994, 35 years after the plan began the benefits were increased by $24 a month to $84 per month. In 1998, 5 years later the benefits were increased by a measly $16 per month to $100 per month. In 2002 Art Modell, Baltimore Ravens owner and a group of owners increased the benefits by $100 per month to $200 per month. Unbelievably Gene Upshaw opposed this increase but the owners overrode him and jammed that $100 benefit increase down his throat. 51

That 2002 $100 per month increase cost only $19.4 million as evidenced by the employer contribution increase from $23.6 million in 2001 to $43 million in 2002, while Upshaw falsely claims it cost $110 million. NFLPA attorney Joseph Yablonski‘s sent a threatening letter dated August 29, 2006 on behalf of Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA to me as the leader of our retired players movement, that in one paragraph claims both a $110 million and a $250 million increase, both relating to the 25% retirement benefits in a ridiculous distorted mish-mash of typically inaccurate misleading NFLPA propaganda. A 25% benefit increase on $50.58 million of total benefits paid in 2005 costs $12.6 million, not $110 million, and certainly not $250 million. That is $12.6 million, peanuts out of $7.1 BILLION. A 25% increase amounts to a total of only $12.6 million, not the phony claimed ―$120 million to bring the total to $700 million‖ as stated by Gene Upshaw and the NFL office‘s Harold Henderson on July 27, 2006. $110 mil, $120 mil, $250 mil, $700 million are thrown around fast and loose to try to confuse the players and the public and the government in order to cheat the retired players out of their retirement and disability benefits. ($53.33 mil x .25% = $13.33 mil) Examining what exactly has happened with the only significant increase. The employer contributions were: 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

$24,211,136 $26,675,399 $23,654,464 $43,074,347 $49,599,601

If the entire employer contribution in 2002 was only $43,074,347, how could the benefits be increased by $110 million as Upshaw has claimed repeatedly? $110 million is not $19.4 million, the true increase in 2002. Upshaw and his gang act like if they tell their tales enough times it will turn into the truth. Their $110 million is ―wrong, incorrect, a bald faced…‖ The NFLPA‘s attorney Joseph Yablonski knows it is wrong, but he and Upshaw and the rest of his cabal continue to make these false statements to financially damage the retired players. I don‘t believe that is legal. On page 2 of Yabolonski‘s 10 page 8/29/06 threatening letter written on behalf of his clients Gene Upshaw and the NFLPA, he is spinning the tale that ―This year the NFLPA negotiated for an additional $250 million to be spent on improving retired player benefits as part of the 2006 extension of the CBA.‖ In truth and fact, the 25% benefit increase proposed will cost 25% of the total benefit payout from 2006 of $53.33 million, which is $13.33 million, not $250 million or $147 million or $170 million or the phony claim of $82,000 per active player. $82,000 times 1,695 players totals $138.9 million. Even 6 years times $13.33 million is not $250 million. It is $75.6 million. Also, you must consider that $10 million of the disability payments and all the medical payments are included in that $53,332,266 total benefits payment. One must also note that the $53.33 million of retirement plan benefits also include an unknown amount of disability benefits lumped together (hidden) and duplicated in statements depending on what the owners and their union are selling at the moment. If the estimate is $10 million (of the ―nearly $20 million‖ claimed to be paid to disabled players by the NFL cabal), then $10 mil of the $53.33 million is actually disability payments and not retirement benefits. Medical expense payments also are paid out of this $53.33 million. So the cost of 25% should really be 25% of $43.33 million or about $10.8 million minus a variety of medical expense payments. 52

The NFLPA‘s $50 per month increase is $1.63 per day. $50 divided by 30.5 days per month equals $1.63 a day increase which is indeed pitiful. The owners say that they dump $700 million in cash (calling it player benefits) in a pile and let a bunch of the asylum‘s inmates with diamond earrings and size 10 ball caps worn sideways, with a history of arrests for gun violations and 3AM shootings outside strip clubs, DUI‘s, 9 children by 9 different women, murder, and Dog Fighting can decide how much of the pile of cash should go into the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. Those inmates don‘t have a clue that there is only one retirement/disability trust fund. The owners don‘t even tell the inmates that the disability and the retirement plan trust fund is the same fund, a single fund they must get their own disability payments from. Upshaw and the owner‘s claim the inmates run the asylum and decide how much goes into the retirement/disability plan, one absurdity after another. The owners claim the inmates are the plan fiduciaries. Settling the disability plan without settling the retirement plan is not really possible. It is the same plan. But don‘t tell the inmates. The owners and their company union are trying to hide behind these fairytales. Gene Upshaw told the press, “And you have to understand, everything we (the NFLPA) are able to do comes from the guys in the locker room today. The active players pay the freight. They write the check. It comes out of their 60 percent that I negotiate on their behalf.” As usual that Upshaw statement doesn’t match up with the facts. The active players “write no check.” If they do, they owe taxes on that Upshaw imposed “check.” “Their 60% is another myth. It is really only 40.5%, but first contracts must be honored and expenses paid before players can be paid. And one of those contractual obligations is a Pension plan contract between the owners and the retirement plan. It is an owners contractual obligation that the current players play no role whatever in. In fact there are no real negotiations. The Chicago Bears’ owner, our plan actuary, dictates to the company union (Upshaw) how much the owners/employers will contribute to the plan, and that is what is contributed by the owners, including the Bears owner. Of course that is a conflict of interest. Employers cannot legally be actuaries for their employees pension plan, not even in the corrupt NFL operations.

During our negotiations with the NFL owners in 1960, Pete Rozelle NFL Commissioner said in his historic March 20, 1960 Memo to NFL Veteran Players, “It is significant to note that, unlike benefit plans in other sports, the NFL plan does not call for individual player contributions. This means that not one player is paying one cent toward the cost of the Benefit Plan.” Further proof that active players make no contributions to the retirement plan is that on IRS Form 5500 for 2006 page 4 line 9i it says “Employer contribution” $67,938,458 million. There is no reference to any “employee (active player) contribution” or any “checks from active players” and these form 5500 tax returns have had the same “Employer contribution” reference for over 40 years and there has never been a single reference to any active player contribution not in 1962 nor in 2006 or any year in between. This is another Upshaw/Tagliabue/Goodell PR scam, a clear misrepresentation. In testimony to the Congressional Committee June 24, 2007 the NFL‟s staff pension expert for 20 years, attorney Dennis Curran told the committee that the “retirement plan is funded by the owners” less than an hour later NFLPA & Retirement Plan attorney Doug Ell testified that “the active players fund the Retirement Plan”. Committee Chairwoman Rep. Linda Sanchez told Curran and Ell in opening the hearing that even though they were not under oath the witnesses would be under the same legal penalties to tell the truth as if they were under oath. Obviously either Curran or Ell was lying to the committee. Their combined testimony displayed the NFL‟s utter contempt for the committee, for the congress, and for the laws of the United States of America. 53

Not only is this claim a fraud, but the claim of having negotiated for 60% of the $7.1 billion gross is another fraud just as the fact that active players write no checks to the player retirement or disability plan. The amount that goes to the active and retired players is only 40.5%. That means there is over a billion dollars of union PR BS cash missing somewhere. 60% is an Upshaw myth.

―Side letters‖ is another Lanny Davis ―get the bad news out early‖ tactic. A couple weeks ago I wrote an email to the 1500 in our community about the ―secret side letters‖ that hide Upshaw‘s true compensation that begins at over $6.7 million reported in the 2007 IRS LM2 reports. Those secret under the table side letters are between Upshaw and his accomplice Troy Vincent who plans to succeed Upshaw, and would have remained secret if their existence had not been exposed by my essay to our retired players email community. These ―secret side letters‖ amend the CBA and when their content is exposed will tell the real story of NFLPA corruption. Upshaw‘s new writer, Lanny Davis is the author of ―I did not have sexual relations with that woman.‖ Upshaw‘s own quotable quotes ―I have not took my pension…‖ and ―…break his God damn neck‖ ―I‘m tattooed with it…‖ have the Lanny Davis ring to them, don‘t they? Diverting employer contributions to complex insurance and investment funds is the way that most labor racketeering works according to the Dept of Labor’s OIG website. The CPA firm of Thomas Havey was the NFLPA’s accountants through early 2003 until their star accountant Frank Massey was convicted of helping the iron workers union leader hide extravagant personal expenses in general overhead. “In a 2003 plea bargain, former partner Francis J. Massey pled guilty to assisting top officers of the fund "in falsifying Form LM-2 reports from 1992 to 1999 to hide in excess of $1.5 million in personal dining, drinking and entertainment expenses," according to the Department of Labor. Separately, former partner Alfred S. Garappolo pled guilty to "knowingly and willfully concealing and failing to disclose" to investigators information regarding the embezzlement of $33,000 from the fund.” Massey plea bargained a 5 year sentence and a $35,000 fine. Havey was the Arthur Anderson of labor unions before Frank Massey’s corruption took them down. Thomas Havey’s Frank Massey was also the person who went to the IRS and Labor Dept with William Hundley and Robert Peloquin to save Upshaw from criminal prosecution for loaning himself $100,000 of union funds when the legal limit is $2000. It was Massey who came up with the argument that Upshaw was taking his severance pay early, and the IRS and Labor Dept accepted the ridiculous idea which was never used before or since to justify any other illegal union loan. In 2003 Calibre CPA Group PLLC replaced Thomas Havey as the NFLPA’s accountants. Calibre has been very creative in coming up with labels covering up money paid to Gene Upshaw in Retention Bonuses, Trust funds and deferred payment plans. Further research reveals that Upshaw in 2007 hired Charles Ross to be the NFLPA‘s new in house accountant, replacing William Garner who ―kept two sets of books‖ as in house accountant. Ross, an alleged tax expert, came from CPA Thomas Havey‘s disgraced Washington DC office, the one that prepared the NFLPA‘s LM2 reports for Upshaw from 1990 to 2003 until their office was closed by the 2003 Havey embezzling union funds scandal. Now this is a developing scandal worthy of Lanny Davis. The San Francisco office address of the NFLPA and Thomas Havey, CPA‘s is still one and the same even 54

though Dave Meggysey suddenly resigned in unison with the Players Inc crowd, from his do nothing $234,000 a year NFLPA job and vacated that office. Address: Western Office NFLPA & Tomas Havey CPA 423 Washington Street, Suite 700, San Francisco , CA 94111. Coincidence? Not really.

When the Retirement Plan was initially put into writing the Plan said the following. BERT BELL NFL PLAYER RETIREMENT PLAN (As Amended March 15, 1963, May 17, 1963; December 13, 1963; and October 13, 1964) and TRUST AGREEMENT (As Amended May 17, 1963; and May 23, 1963) ARTICLE 16 16.1 Under no circumstances shall any funds contribution to the Trust or to the Insurer, or any assets of the Trust or funds on deposit with the Insurer ever revert to, or be used or enjoyed by, any Employer or the League, nor shall any funds or assets ever be used other than for the benefit of the Players, Vested Players, and Retired Players, and their beneficiaries. This section may not be altered or amended. “ This Article 16.1 does not say, may not be altered or amended until Paul Tagliabue & Jeff Pash from Covington and Burling Law Firm and his leashed pet show up and they decide to violate this agreement and screw the Retired Players over cutting their funding to peanuts. Tagliabue/Goodell/Pash/Upshaw still have their Groom Law Group violating this clause ―altering and amending‖ the retirement Plan document contract clauses holding down benefits while abusing and exploiting retired players because in their arrogance they believe they can hire guns like Lanny Davis and get away with it. In 2006 an amendment was added to the Collective Bargaining Agreement called for the NFLPA to make its ―best effort‖ to increase benefits for ALL retired players. Instead of making the ―best effort‖ on behalf of ALL players as this contract amendment required, the Executive Director gave himself a 200% or more increase in his own compensation and unilaterally dictated a 25% benefits increase to retired players. The 25% increase is meant to be a vindictive insult to retired players who criticize Upshaw‘s outrageous treatment of them and his personal greed and his illegal collusion with the NFL owners. There was no one to negotiate with since CBA ―negotiations‖ were completed and a ―best effort‖ could have been 500% since there was no one to oppose it. This sort of contorted situation is the norm rather than the exception for the NFL. In addition to the league cabal working to cheat retired players by diverting funding to new insurance and retirement and medical plans that exclude retired players, there is also the Plan actuary Aon Corporation owned by Chicago bears owner Patrick Ryan a plan employer whose own contributions are lowered by what we believe are his own companies cooked actuarial analysis of our Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. Ryan is also a Republican fund raiser who the Dept of Labor is protecting from prosecution under an order from the Bush administration to the Dept of Labor not to prosecute any high profile white collar crimes.

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We retired players need for Congress to suggest that the NFL match Major League Baseball‘s pension plan and to scrap and redraft a disability plan that fits the unique circumstances of professional football the most dangerous sport to participate in, in the world today. The pre 1982 players receive only 34% of the employer contribution. The current players receive the other 66%, which isn‘t fair since we pre 1982 players won the retirement plan and gifted it to you current players, and you reward us by taking 66% of the employer contributions, let a small group of union profiteers gain control of the union and use it to make themselves rich. That is not exactly what we envisioned when we tore the retirement plan out of the tight little fist of the owners we faced like Paul Brown, George Halas, Wellington Mara, Art Rooney the parents of the over privileged brats you call owners today. $250 per month per year played is 34% vs. $470 per month per year played at 66%, why? What did you do more than us to be entitled to 66% and divert double that amount to your other investment and pension schemes that excluded us, but did you go to an owners meeting and threaten to file an anti-trust suit or go on strike if Brown, Halas, Mara, Rooney and the others didn‘t deliver a retirement plan in 30 minutes. They conceded the pension plan in 30 minutes. 34% of an employer contribution of $67,938,458 is only $23,099,075. The league‟s income this year is $7.1 billion. 0.01% = $ 71,000,000 even you rich celebrities can figure out how little $23,099,075 is of $7.1 billion. Get your agent who as Upshaw told the AP “work at (his) beck and call” to figure it out for you.

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From the Los Angeles Times

BILL DWYRE

Former Rams great Jon Arnett bucks the system He boycotts team reunion in Los Angeles to protest the NFL's treatment of struggling retirees who need medical assistance.

Bill Dwyre July 17, 2007 Normally, Jon Arnett would have been in Los Angeles last weekend to celebrate his pro football heritage. Yup, right here in the city that has no pro football, isn't in the club and may never again know the secret handshake.

 Arnett's e-mail to teammates details his motivations

Arnett chose to stay away in protest. "I am anti-Rams, and anti-NFL," said Arnett, an All-American running back at USC who played in the NFL for 10 years, seven with the Rams. "The league has 32 owners, and I think they are a bunch of whores." These sentiments came from somebody who, in his prime, was Walter Payton-esque in his ability to make other players look silly trying to tackle him. He played in five Pro Bowls and is in the College Football Hall of Fame. Arnett is 72, lives in Lake Oswego, Ore., after many years in Palos Verdes, and still is active in a food distribution business that brings him to Los Angeles at least once a month. He is not an old guy who has lost it. He has a daughter who is a junior in high school, and the only thing he has retired from is the L.A. freeways. Arnett boycotted a Rams reunion, a celebration of 70 years of team existence that was organized nicely by Merlin Olsen and Robert Klein and brought together hundreds of former players for a Saturday night dinner and plaque presentation that afternoon that commemorated the reunion. The plaque went up in the Coliseum's peristyle end, on a pillar across from a plaque for Rams hero Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch. Arnett meant no disrespect to Olsen or Klein or any of the former Rams. He even wrote them an e-mail, saying that a sciatic nerve injury made it difficult for him to travel. "I pretty much used that as a valid excuse," he said. 57

Arnett's wife, Jane, did not join him in the boycott. She came, and her mission was more than social. She made the rounds, greeted old friends and took down some names of former NFL players, Rams or nonRams, who she was told might be unable to get proper medical insurance or medications. "Jon and I have watched this happen, watched retired players who just don't have enough," she said. "It is so sad. I hear from wives, and the stories they tell are heartbreaking. One wife of a former player — somebody whose name you would know immediately — is in so much pain and can't afford to do anything that their life is miserable and his wife didn't know what to do. She went to a counselor and he told her to leave him. She's not going to do that. She loves him." The Arnett plan is much more than talk. It has a name, Retired Professional Athletes Assn. (RPAA), and a funding plan. "We have talked to many corporate sponsors, some of them Fortune 500 companies, and none of them connected to the NFL," Jane Arnett said. Right now, the RPAA has offices at the Arnetts' dining room table. Jane Arnett joked that it would be nice if the NFL, which has generally treated older alums on the pension and medical insurance issues like unwanted relatives in rest homes, would step up and give them back their dining room. Husband Jon doubts that eventuality, adding the chilling thought that, if the NFL just continues to ignore these issues for another 10 to 15 years, they will go away. "We'll all be dead," he said. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has scheduled a meeting for a week from today. He said it would include "all parties." When that phrase was used in a recent column in The Times, another former NFL star, Bernie Parish, responded angrily that Goodell and the NFL would never include "all parties" in this process. Presumably, Parish, among the more militant on these issues, did not expect to be included. Olsen, one of the Rams' Fearsome Foursome who went on to further fame and fortune as a TV star, said, "Bernie Parish doesn't compromise, and you won't get one with him in the room." Olsen said he is willing to fight this fight for his NFL brethren, but his medical situation is taken care of. He said that when he was about to retire from pro football, he and his lawyer negotiated an exit package that included medical benefits for life, if needed. "When my body starts breaking down, I need a new knee or hip, and my regular insurance doesn't handle it, this will," he said. "Never had to use it, and hope I won't, but I've got it in writing." Olsen said there were others who did the same, but frequently, when they needed to use the insurance, their team would offer a cash buyout instead, and most took that. Saturday's ceremony was a chance to show off the venerable old Coliseum once again. That went well, except for one strange moment. When the plaque was unveiled, standing right there alongside a handful of Rams greats, was Rams President John Shaw. 58

Shaw, of course, cut the deal and was on one of the first buses out of town when the Rams departed Southern California for St. Louis. He may be a Ram, but he's damn well not a Los Angeles Ram. Situations such as that are precisely why Arnett stayed home. Shaw is employed by owner Georgia Frontiere, and that's a close enough connection for Arnett to validate his decision. "I cannot imagine any former player wanting to pay homage to her in any way," Arnett said. So the fight goes on, and the filthy-rich NFL looks worse and worse in the public while it appears to stonewall writing some checks to help its heritage. "Jane and I have identified more than 300 former players who are struggling, who really need help," Arnett said. "Some of them need to do things like skip breakfast so they can pay for their pills." Maybe next week, the NFL will start to swallow some of this responsibility. Maybe the league will make some sort of commitment to fix this. And, as we all know around L.A., if the NFL makes a commitment, well … Never mind. -Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. For previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre. -From: Jon Arnett To: Los Angeles Rams teammates Subject: July 10 e-mail … I find it rather difficult to honor anything that has the present-day stamp of NFL approval and franchise ownership. It is a completely different culture than that which I knew … all revenue directed. -For the entire text of Arnett's letter, go to latimes.com/sports.

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Everett, Wash. Published: Sunday, December 23, 2007

Yesterday's heroes, remembered After years of putting their bodies on the line every Sunday, some retired NFL players have been left out in the cold, injured and sick with no disability insurance. But a number of current and ex-players, including former Seahawk Kenny Easley, are lendin By Scott M. Johnson Herald Writer Kenny Easley wants to start by saying he's one of the lucky ones. He's had four knee surgeries and an ankle surgery. He's had a kidney transplant and still takes two pills a day just to regulate his body's ability to function. Like the old joke about the three-legged dog that can't bark or bite but answers to the name of Lucky, Easley still considers himself one of the fortunate ones. Curt Marsh feels the same way. And he's had the bottom of his right leg amputated, endured two hip replacements and has had rods put in his wrist and spine. He's undergone 30 surgeries during his 48 years of life. And yet luck, Marsh says, is on his side. That's because, unlike many NFL players from similar generations, Easley and Marsh are covered by disability insurance. It's the common story of those who do not get those same monthly paychecks that has motivated guys like Easley, Marsh and even some of the current stars of today to fight for a change in the system. "I just feel that it's my responsibility to help," said Easley, a 48-year-old former Seattle Seahawks safety who has championed the cause for former players for more than a year. "I see guys who played with me who are suffering, and unnecessarily suffering. It doesn't have to be that way." When it comes to sacrificing one's body on the gridiron, a common analogy is that football is like being in 60 automobile accidents in a three-hour period. Easley recently compared the game to the ancient Roman sport that involved throwing a man and a lion into an arena for the entertainment of others. He once said it would be a "miracle" if any former player retired without at least one debilitating injury. And yet, there are plenty of ex-players suffering without what they deem to be sufficient compensation from the league. The stories of the unlucky ones are often told but not always heard. There is former offensive lineman Brent Boyd, who has been diagnosed with clinical depression stemming from, he contends, the concussions he suffered as an NFL player. There is former NFL running back Delvin Williams, who had several knee and ankle injuries during his career and eventually spent 12 years, and thousands of dollars of his own money, fighting in court for degenerative disability coverage. Earl Campbell, one of the most recognizable stars from the 1980s, uses a walker after undergoing back surgery. The list goes on and on.

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"There are some players out here hurting, and some stuff has to be done," Easley said. "It doesn't have to be that way. We're making strides, but we're not where we need to be." Two Web sites -- www.gridirongreats.org and Easley's www.dignityafterfootball.org -- have been dedicated toward helping players from the pre-collective bargaining agreement era. And last month, current Kansas City Chiefs lineman Kyle Turley announced that he will give his paycheck from today's game against Detroit to the cause. Five Kansas City teammates and Minnesota center Matt Birk are among those who have since joined Turley in donating today's earnings. It's a good start, critics say, but there's still work to be done. The well-publicized argument, which went in front of a House of Representatives subcommittee over the summer, stems from a pre-Collective Bargaining Agreement disability plan that has many ex-players feeling left out. Boyd, Marsh and former player/coach Mike Ditka were among those who spoke before the House's judiciary subcommittee in September, claiming that -- in Boyd's words -- the NFL system is "corrupt" when it comes to disability coverage of players who retired prior to the 1993 CBA. Easley, whose career ended after just seven seasons because of a kidney condition that he blamed on overuse of aspirin to help play through the pain, understands the plight even if his own finances are in order. "If you retired before 1993, when they negotiated the CBA, you are basically stuck in a time warp in terms of disability, pension and survival benefits for your wife and kids," said Easley, who has had several business ventures to supplement his income since a 1987 retirement. To the credit of the NFL, and its players association, the system has improved over the years. And thanks to organizations like Gridiron Greats, money is being raised for the cause. But for many, the help comes too late. The most high-profile case involved former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster. The nine-time Pro Bowler suffered from amnesia, depression and several other disabilities that some have blamed on the injuries he endured during a 17-year playing career. According to a 2004 ESPN story, Webster became addicted to painkillers and often used a Taser gun on himself to take away the pain. Webster died in Sept. 2002, at the age of 50, while living on the streets. "He died a pauper's death," Easley said. "Mike Webster. I mean, he was the Pittsburgh Steelers. When you talk about the Steel City and all of that, a guy that was iron, Mike Webster was all that. "He played (17) years, an All-Pro, and he couldn't get declared disabled by the National Football League doctors. And he died -- homeless, penniless and basically unnoticed. And that's a shame." Then there's the case of Marsh, who is comparatively fortunate despite more visible signs of the violence that football can bring. Marsh, who played six seasons as an NFL offensive lineman, had his right foot amputated in 1994 following a severe ankle injury he suffered seven years earlier. He has had 30 surgeries in his life in all. "I've got lots of missing parts, and still for me to get (disability), it took three tries over a year and a half," said Marsh, who works as a motivational speaker and still lives in Snohomish County. "You get caught in this labyrinth of trying to get help. They're always looking for a reason not to give help. That's how the system works." Marsh was also critical of a policy that pays disability but doesn't always provide insurance to cover medical costs. "Having a monthly check is great," he said, "but people like me are also in the position where the body needs medical help as well. Just a check isn't enough; you're going to need to go to the doctor and have surgeries too." NFL spokespeople have contended numerous times that millions of dollars have been earmarked toward explayers. The NFL Players Association put out a release over the summer stating that 317 ex-players were still receiving disability.

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NFLPA president Gene Upshaw pointed out that the Players Association has increased funds toward ex-players in each of the three successive CBAs since 1993. "We reject charges that the present NFL disability benefit system treats veteran players harshly or denies them access to benefits," Upshaw said during testimony in the September hearing. "The factual record disproves those charges. "Of course, the system can be improved, and (NFL) commissioner (Roger) Goodell and I are determined to simplify and expedite the processing of claims." Marsh admits that the NFL and its players association have made strides over the years. For example, the NFLPA lobbied for something called the "degenerative disability pension," which compensates players whose health deteriorates after their careers are over. Under the former system that was in place before the 1993 CBA, players had 12 months to file for disability, and any future health problems were no longer covered. But Easley and Marsh are among those who think more can be done. "It would do the image of the league a lot of good," Easley said last month. "This voice that is rumbling along and gaining steam, it's not going to go away until there's some justification for retired players." Thanks to active players like Turley and Birk, both of whom have opened themselves to criticism from their peers, that voice is now being shouted from later generations.

© 2008The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA

December 3, 2005

PAGE ONE A Hobbled Star Battles the NFL Doctors say football left Victor Washington 'totally disabled.' Two decades later, the league still disagrees. By ELLEN E. SCHULTZ Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

December 3, 2005; Page A1

Football propelled Victor Washington from an orphanage in Elizabeth, N.J., to the National Football League. He starred as a rookie and was selected for the Pro Bowl after the 1971-72 season. But few teams he faced gave him more trouble than the NFL itself, after his playing days. Seven years after injuries ended his career, Mr. Washington applied for NFL disability benefits. He had racked up injuries to a knee and shoulder (in 1973), back (1974) and elbow (1976). Doctors hired by the league said the injuries -- and depression from chronic pain -- had left him totally and permanently disabled.

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But the NFL didn't see it that way. League officials agreed he had a disability. But they said it wasn't football-related, so his benefit would be lower. Mr. Washington appealed, and after more medical reviews, the case went to an arbitrator, who also found he didn't have a football-related disability. The arbitrator used a novel rationale: The NFL's disability plan referred to disability from "a football injury" -- but the player had several. That was in 1986. After years of more appeals, evaluations and trustee rulings, and then litigation, the status of Mr. Washington, now 59 years old, is back in the hands of the NFL plan for one final determination.

Victor Washington, holding trading cards from his days as a Pro Bowl player in the NFL.

Scores of other players from the 1960s to the 1980s have faced similar long fights with the league over disability. They played, for the most part, before the era of whopping pay packages that today's stars negotiate. Although most NFL players suffer injuries of one sort or another during their careers, only 90 of the more than 7,000 former pro players covered by the NFL disability plan receive football disability benefits. The NFL plan says it pays all legitimate disability claims. In contesting the former players' claims over the years, the league says, it was doing what any prudent employer would to protect the plan. "The trustees have to make some tough calls," says Douglas Ell, a lawyer with the Groom Law Group, which represents the NFL plan. "The trustees are fiduciaries, and can't just say, 'This guy was in the Hall of Fame'... and pay him extra money he doesn't qualify for." Mr. Ell dismisses Mr. Washington's claim that his football injuries have rendered him disabled. "He says that football made him crazy," says Mr. Ell. Many football players, the lawyer says, blame football for creating their problems after retirement. It isn't just old football players who can face such a gauntlet. Workers in any industry, dealing with any employer-sponsored insurance plan from pensions to health care, fall under the auspices of a decades-old federal law that can make obtaining benefits an ordeal. The law, paradoxically, is one whose explicit purpose was to protect benefits. It is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa. Congress passed it in 1974 to prevent abuse of workers' pension rights. But thanks in part to court interpretations, the statute has evolved into one that covers far broader territory and can have an unanticipated effect, tilting the playing field in favor of employers and serving as a legal shield for them. PURSUING BENEFITS See a chart showing former NFL players who fought the league's disability plan with mixed results. 63

In what would turn out to be a pivotal provision, the law essentially exempted private employers' benefits plans from state laws. And though the law was designed primarily to cover pensions, the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that it covers other benefits, such as disability and health care, as well. The high court also has ruled that no punitive damages can be awarded in Erisa cases. That means there's little downside to delaying or resisting approval of a claim, since the worst that can happen is that the employer will later be ordered to pay. For employees, however, the lack of punitive damages means it is often difficult to afford -- or even find -- legal representation. These legal hurdles were among the challenges Mr. Washington faced when, several years after leaving the NFL, he found his health deteriorating. The son of a 16-year-old single mother in New Jersey, he was reared by a series of relatives. When this family safety net unraveled, he spent three of his teen years in an orphanage in Elizabeth, N.J. He thrived in the new structure and developed his aptitude for football, baseball and track. In 1965, a recruiter for the University of Wyoming saw him playing high-school football in Plainfield, N.J., and offered him a full scholarship. He played well at Wyoming, but was expelled in his junior year for fighting. With the endorsement of one of his college coaches, Mr. Washington went on to play three seasons in the professional Canadian Football League. The San Francisco 49ers then picked him in the 1970 NFL draft. He was the team's rookie of the year in 1971-72, runner-up for that honor in the NFC conference, and went to the Pro Bowl at the end of the season. The 5-foot-11, 195-pound Mr. Washington later played for the Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills. Playing as a defensive back, running back and wide receiver, he took the field against the likes of Joe Namath, Terry Bradshaw and O.J. Simpson. At his peak he was earning about $50,000 a year. Mr. Washington often played on artificial turf, at the time not much more than a carpet over poured concrete. He recalls sailing though the air in a 1973 preseason game and looking down. "I knew my knee was going to hit first, and there was nothing I could do about it," he says. "I never complained about being hurt, because I was hurt all the time. That whole year I played on that cracked kneecap." As his injuries mounted during his career, he says teams gave him painkillers and Valium so he could keep playing. "I took every play like it was my last play -- that's the only way to play," Mr. Washington says. In 1976, knee trouble sidelined him for good. Leaving pro football after nine years was hard. At age 30, he suddenly lost everything: career, income, friends, identity. His marriage unraveled. He moved in with his grandmother in New Jersey and enrolled in business courses at a community college. In pain and depressed, he says, he couldn't concentrate or sit still. He didn't have health coverage and couldn't afford physical therapy. Mr. Washington's exit after an injury wasn't unusual. NFL players on average leave after 3.2 years, most having been hurt at some point. Players from the 1960s to 1980s played when helmets and padding were more primitive and when rules on physical contact were looser. Team doctors would prescribe potent mixes of amphetamines and painkillers to keep players in the game, according to court records in benefits disputes, and some players bulked up on steroids.

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A survey released in October by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina said that nearly a quarter of former players had three or more concussions in their careers and that later, these men were five times as likely as other ex-players to be diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Last year, the researchers also found by questioning 2,488 former pro players that 22% had knee surgery and 10% had back or disc surgery after their careers ended. An NFL spokesman says such studies are flawed because they rely on the ex-players' word. The league's medical liaison, Elliott Pellman, who also heads the New York Jets' medical department, says there is little credible research on whether football leads to serious medical problems later in life. Dr. Pellman says the league has studied players who had multiple concussions and found that "they had all returned to normal. Does that mean there may or may not be problems 10 to 15 years from now? I don't know, but the early objective data says no." Dr. Pellman says the NFL hasn't studied former players' health because they are no longer employees and are geographically scattered. About 130 former NFL players file claims for disability benefits a year, but few get them. Of the 7,561 ex-players from the 1960s until today covered by the plan, only 135 receive disability benefits. Ninety of those have a disability the NFL plan deems football-related. Their benefit is at least $4,000 a month, plus a supplement that can bring it up to more than $9,000 a month. Another 45 receive nonfootball disability benefits, which pay a minimum of $1,500 a month. The total amount the league paid in disability last year: $1.2 million a month, or $14.5 million for the year. Of that, about $8 million came from the league's more than $5.2 billion in annual revenue, and the rest was paid from the players' pension plan. Why so little? Part of the reason is that while the NFL plan offers generous benefits by the standards of other employers, it requires players to be "totally and permanently disabled," meaning that they are essentially unable to work. When the NFL and the players initially negotiated the benefits in the late 1960s, it's unlikely they foresaw the complexity the future held. Few players have severe disabilities as clear-cut as those of wide receiver Darryl Stingley, who was paralyzed during a preseason game in 1978. The more common injuries cited in disability claims -- cervical spine injuries, osteo-arthritis, knee, hip and other joint injuries -- can't be as easily measured. Debilitating problems may not show up for years and can be exacerbated by use of painkillers and steroids, along with substance abuse. And when it comes to areas like depression or head injuries, determinations can be especially subjective. In Mr. Washington's case, for example, the NFL plan trustees have claimed that his difficult childhood led to his depression. By the early 1990s, the Players Association was pushing for better disability benefits, concerned that the existing benefits of $750 a month for nonfootball-related disabilities and $4,000 for football-related disabilities weren't adequate. They got them -- but the decisions didn't get any simpler. The NFL

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maintains that the generosity of the benefits -- now exceeding $110,000 a year -- attracted more unqualified applicants. Retired players disagree and say the result was a backlash against applicants. "Injuries may not put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, but you still have injuries," says Randy Beisler, who was a guard and defensive end with the Philadelphia Eagles, 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs until a broken neck put him out of the game in 1978. Although NFL doctors concluded in the 1990s that he was 80% disabled, he gave up seeking benefits after his claim had dragged on for five years. Former players also say the players union has turned its back on retired players, favoring active players instead. The union says the NFL plan has been run well, providing valuable benefits to eligible players, while deterring false claims. Doug Allen, assistant director of the Players Association, says the NFL plan has won most of the lawsuits filed against it, which confirms the trustees were right in the first place. Of more than 20 lawsuits filed by retired players in the past decade, all but four were initially decided in favor of the NFL plan, says Mr. Ell, the plan's lawyer. Of those four, two were reversed on appeal, and two are pending in the appeals court. "The number of times the courts have agreed shows the quality of the leadership," says Mr. Allen. "One of the things we want to make sure of is that the plan is kept safe so that the owners can have confidence that the bargain they made will be upheld." Thanks to Erisa, the retirement-security law, disability-plan trustees have wide discretion in deciding who has a disability, and their decisions are hard to challenge. Claimants unhappy with trustees' rulings must follow an elaborate Erisa-prescribed appeals procedure that allows weeks or months for each party to act in each step of the process. Until the process is pursued to the end, an employee or retiree can't take a dispute to court. For Otis Armstrong, who suffered a career-ending cervical-spine injury in a 1980 game and later had pain and numbness in all his extremities, the process from first claim to a court filing took five years. It was "replete with delays, confusion, stalemates and inconstancy on the part of the" plan's board of trustees, Judge John Kane of federal court in Denver later wrote. For the former Denver Broncos running back, the judge wrote in 1986, "each time he nears the goal line and is about to obtain the disability benefits which the plan promises to injured players, the yard markers are changed and the clock is stopped." The NFL plan ultimately paid the benefit. Mr. Washington filed his claim in May 1983. Orthopedists hired by the NFL plan enumerated his painful problems, such as arthritis, degenerative joint disease and an inability to fully extend one knee. A Rutgers University professor of psychiatry hired by the NFL wrote -- according to later court files -- that depression and difficulty with concentration, "combined with his physical injury and significant pain (both knee and back) indeed render him disabled by his football related injuries." Nevertheless, the NFL plan concluded Mr. Washington's disability wasn't football-related, and approved a benefit of just $750 a month instead of the $4,000 a month he would have collected had the NFL decided his disability was caused by football.

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Mr. Washington appealed this status. The NFL sent him for more medical evaluations. The psychiatrists and other specialists who saw him this time said he suffered from physical injuries, post-traumatic stress syndrome and depression related to chronic pain. They said he had a total disability related to football. In March 1985, the plan's trustees split 3-3 on whether his disability was football-related and thus would bring him the higher level of benefits. The three trustees representing players said it was. Team-owner trustees said they thought his depression was the result of his troubles as a youth, not chronic pain caused by his football injuries. With the trustees deadlocked, the decision went to an arbitrator, who a year later noted the plan's definition of a football-related disability as the result of "a football injury." Focusing on the word "a," the arbitrator said this meant it must be from a single injury. Because Mr. Washington had several, the arbitrator ruled in 1986, he wasn't eligible for the higher benefits. Based on this interpretation, the NFL plan denied the claims of several other former players that were pending at the time. Mr. Washington continued to collect $750 a month in non-football disability benefits. Annual medical evaluations required of disability recipients continued to conclude he was totally disabled as a result of football. Then in 1993, the NFL and the players union adopted a new disability plan which gave Mr. Washington a new chance to apply for benefits. The NFL trustees denied the claim, saying once again that while Mr. Washington was disabled, it wasn't because of football. They provided no explanation for disagreeing with medical opinions. Mr. Washington appealed again. The NFL plan hired a private investigator -- standard procedure in disability cases -- to question his neighbors, friends, minister and ex-wife, seeking evidence that his injuries were exaggerated and that he'd held a paid job. In 1998, the NFL plan offered Mr. Washington $400,000 to settle his long disability dispute. The sum was equal to retroactive football-related-disability payments back to 1993, a year when the program changed. The settlement didn't acknowledge he was due such a higher level of benefits, however, and indeed, it said that from then on, he'd still get just $1,500 a month. Mr. Washington says he didn't feel he was in a position to turn the settlement down. His grandmother had died in 1989, leaving him her house. He sold it and moved to Phoenix, because he'd played there once in a college game, against Arizona State University, and knew a former player who lived there. "I knew the desert was dry and warm, and decided that was where I needed to be," he says. "I had to come up with a program to try to get well." To become part of a community in his new home, he joined the local Black Republican group, which was trying to get the state to make Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday. He also became an ordained pastor in a local Baptist church, working as a volunteer minister. Nonetheless, by the time he received a settlement offer, Mr. Washington says he had given up his church work, because it was physically too draining. At home, he had sole custody of his three-month old son, the product of a brief marriage. He says he used the settlement money to pay off his legal fees, and to

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move to a neighborhood with good schools. He settled into the routine of taking care of his son and visiting his mother, who was in a nursing home nearby. A new dispute arose in 2001 when Mr. Washington turned 55 and his benefit converted to a pension. He thought it would convert at the higher level, and wrote to the plan. The response: a letter from an NFL lawyer saying that his settlement barred him from making any further claims. Mr. Washington wrote more letters asking that his claim be reconsidered, but the trustees, without informing him, voted in spring 2002 to reject his claim. A year later, Mr. Washington learned about the case of another ex-player who'd also been told his disability wasn't football-related because it didn't stem from a single injury but several. That player, Donald Brumm, had sued, and in 1993 an appellate court declared the NFL's decision to deny benefits arbitrary and capricious. Said the Eighth Circuit Court in Minneapolis: "To require that a disability result from a single, identifiable football injury when the relevant plan language speaks of 'a football injury while an active player' is to place undue and inappropriate emphasis on the word 'a.' " Mr. Washington himself now sued, asking a court to set aside his settlement on the ground that the NFL had breached a fiduciary duty by not telling him of the Brumm decision five years earlier. He faced a well-funded foe. The NFL, with its billions in annual revenue, is allowed to pay the cost of defending a player's suit out of the money in the pension plan itself, which totals more than $784 million. Tax filings show the NFL plan paid the Groom Law Group in Washington, which includes Mr. Ell, $3.1 million in 2003. Mr. Ell says the cost of defending disability claims is "more than a million a year," and the rest of the fee pays for work Groom does on the investment side, regulatory compliance and other expenses, such as travel costs. In March, a federal judge in Phoenix ruled the NFL plan had breached a duty to Mr. Washington by not disclosing relevant facts. The judge set aside the settlement and ordered the NFL plan to determine whether Mr. Washington is eligible for football-related disability payments. Once again, doctors hired by the league will be evaluating the former player. But even if the plan determines he was disabled by football, it still could say he doesn't qualify for football-related disability benefits. The reason is an amendment the league adopted in 1998, the year of the now-dead settlement. It states that psychological disability, the kind Mr. Washington claims, doesn't qualify as a football-related disability unless it stems from a brain injury. And should Mr. Washington prevail on the appeal, and win his claim, the NFL plan might argue he isn't entitled to retroactive payments, thanks to another amendment that limits back-payments. "The NFL keeps changing the rules of the game while it's in play" to keep former players from collecting benefits, says Susan Martin, a lawyer at Martin & Bonnett in Phoenix, who is representing Mr. Washington. "And it drags these cases out so long that people give up, or die." The NFL has filed an appeal of the Phoenix judge's decision. Mr. Washington faces another peril: The NFL plan has indicated in court documents that if the trustees determine Mr. Washington is not totally and permanently disabled as a result of football, it could demand that he repay the $400,000 with interest.

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Write to Ellen E. Schultz at [email protected] URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113357303605213061.html

Copyright 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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NFLPA vs. NFL By PAUL DOMOWITCH Philadelphia Daily News Posted on Tue, Jun. 24, 2008

WASHINGTON - Gene Upshaw isn't looking for a fight, but by God, he's not going to run from one, either. The Hall of Fame guard made that clear last year when he went toe-to- toe with a group of retired players, led by fellow Canton residents Joe DeLamielleure and Mike Ditka, who came after him with clubs and pitchforks over the league's pension and disability system, and he's making it clear again now, in the wake of last month's decision by the NFL owners to opt out of their collective bargaining agreement with the players 2 years early. The owners' 32-0 vote might turn out to be nothing or it might turn out to be the first shot in a long, bloody labor war. Either way, the 62-year-old leader of the NFL Players Association intends to see it through to the end. "I'm staying until this battle is over," Upshaw said in a recent interview with the Daily News. "I have to. We're not changing generals in the middle of the war. That's what they do over in Iraq. Every other week, there's a new damn general over there. "We're going to be here and we're going to see this through, and then we'll see where the chips fall. But I'm not leaving until we have a deal." Upshaw has been at the helm of the NFLPA for a quarter century. Took it over when it was a powerless, apathetic organization that couldn't even afford office furniture. Steered it through the rough seas of a 6- year court battle that eventually brought true free agency to the league. Since 1993, he has overseen a decade-anda-half of labor peace that has made lots and lots of money for both the players and owners. 70

League revenues, which hit $7.6 billion in 2007, are rising at the unfathomable rate of $500 million per year. The average value of an NFL franchise right now is $957 million and climbing. The league's salary cap has more than tripled in the last 15 years. Just 27 months ago, faced with the threat of losing the cap that has been in place since '93, the owners, at the urging of outgoing commissioner Paul Tagliabue, approved by a 30-2 vote a CBA extension that, among other things, gave the players 60 percent of the league's revenue pie. Now, the owners say the deal isn't working for them and needs to be modified. "Clearly, the economics are not working for the owners," Tagliabue's successor, Roger Goodell, said last month after the opt-out vote. "We have been investing more in stadiums, and the cost of generating revenue is becoming more significant. And it's not a secret what we're going through from an economic standpoint that creates more risk in the marketplace." There's no reason for football fans to panic yet. All the early opt- out vote did was shave the final 2 years off the CBA, which will expire in March 2011 now rather than 2013, with the final year of the deal being uncapped if a new agreement isn't reached by March 2010. That still leaves a lot of time for the two sides to work out their differences. But there already is an ominous, getting-ready-for-war tone in the rhetoric coming out of both camps. "Until we went to Atlanta [for the opt-out vote], I would've said that [a work stoppage] was possible but very unlikely," said a high-ranking executive for one NFL club. "But after going to Atlanta, I'd put it at least 50-50 right now. Because the reality from our side is, most teams are doing very mediocre [profitwise]." No one other than Upshaw and Goodell are identified in this story because owners and management have been told not to comment on the negotiations. 71

"We're not trying to hit a grand slam home run here," the executive added. "We're just trying to get things back in line. If Gene is willing to work with us and help move the pendulum back closer to the middle, it'll get settled. If Gene takes the attitude that, 'This is bullbleep. They're making money and I'm not going to give up a penny,' this will be a big war. It won't be a little war, it will be a big war." Said Upshaw: "The easiest thing for them to say right now is that the player costs are too much, and that they're paying the players too much. But let me make one thing crystal clear. We're not going backward." A quick change of heart How isit that a deal the owners overwhelmingly approved just 2 years ago suddenly has become so onerous that they're willing to risk the league's first work stoppage since 1987? Well, Upshaw has been wondering the same thing. "All of the economic arguments they're making now [about why the deal is bad], where were these 32 billionaires when it came time for the CBA to be approved [in '06]?" he said. "Did they all go out to lunch? They approved this deal, and now they're saying the deal's not working." The truth is, the owners hardly were in love with the deal in '06. But if they rejected it, there would have been no salary cap in '06, and they weren't ready to deal with that scenario then. So they agreed to a player-friendly deal that included increasing the players' share of the league's total football revenue to 60 percent. They also reluctantly acquiesced to Upshaw's insistence on a club revenue-sharing plan by which the league's higher-revenue teams would supplement the lowerrevenue teams. "We should have realized the deal wasn't very good," one owner told the Daily News. "But we were facing the cap deadline and people thought, 'Listen, it's not a 72

good deal. It's not nearly as good as where we were. But can we live with it as opposed to having a huge mess?' "Once we fully understood the full impact of what went into the deal, we concluded it didn't work at all. Which some people realized fairly quickly and others just got their arms around in the last few months." Many owners and executives blame Tagliabue for urging them to approve the deal. He was getting set to retire and clearly wanted to get a new labor extension done before he rode off into the sunset. "All of us were guided by the commissioner and the CEC [NFL Management Council Executive Committee], and they said we think this is appropriate," one AFC executive said. "Everybody raised their hand and said yes. But it was too fast. Paul just wanted to get it done." Said another league executive, "I wouldn't put it solely on [Tagliabue]. All of us voted for it. Nobody held a gun to our heads. But he was sailing the ship." G3 is cornerstone issue An even bigger concern right now for the owners than the players' 60 percent cut of the revenue loot and club revenue sharing is the rising cost of building and operating the league's stadiums. Nineteen of the league's 32 teams are playing in stadiums that have been built or have undergone major renovations since 1995. Four more clubs - the Giants, Jets, Cowboys and Colts - have new stadiums under construction. A fifth, the Kansas City Chiefs, is spending nearly $400 million to renovate their 36-year-old stadium. The new stadium in the Meadowlands that will house the Giants and Jets is expected to cost slightly less than $2 billion, which is about $1.5 billion more than the total cost of construction for Lincoln Financial Field ($540 million), which opened in 2003. 73

When the league first began its stadium-building spree in the mid-1990s, Upshaw and the NFLPA agreed to collaborate with teams on a stadium-funding program called G3. The program allowed teams such as the Eagles to borrow a maximum of $150 million from the G3 fund, depending on their market size, which would be repaid with the visiting teams' share of club-seat revenue once the construction project was finished. The league also received a salary-cap credit from the union, which basically shaved a percentage off the cap total, based on the loan amounts, to help with the burden of stadium construction. With stadium construction now costing much more, and other stadiums needing capital improvements, the league wants to increase funding help in the G3 program. But Upshaw has thus far shown little interest in expanding the union's role in the program, pointing out that the players association already has committed $2.3 billion over the next 15 years toward stadium construction. "We're not going to approve [more G3 funding] just because they want us to," Upshaw said. "They're the ones building these billion-dollar stadiums, not us. They never asked our opinion. "This past year, we took 2.3 percent of the total [from the players' 60 percent share of league revenue] and put it into stadium construction. Which is anywhere from $175 million to $180 million. That's money that would be going to the players. But it's not. It's going to stadium construction. "There's not one other sports union - not baseball, not basketball, not hockey - that pays for fields or arenas that they play in except us. Now they're complaining that we're not giving them enough."

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The owners don't understand why Upshaw would be reluctant to expand the union's role in stadium construction, since much of the increased revenue that new stadiums bring in increases the cap, and consequently, player salaries. "Gene already has gone down the path of realizing that it's in the players' best interest to participate in the G3 program and continue to build new stadiums and push up the revenues," one league executive said. "It seems logical to me that if you buy that, that when the stadiums become more expensive, you just expand the scope of that program and the [cap] credits that go with it. It's a no-brainer. But he either doesn't see that or doesn't want to acknowledge it yet." Upshaw isn't completely opposed to expanding the union's role in the G3 program. His biggest problem is that, in addition to wanting larger cap credits because of the construction cost increases, the owners also want the union to help them fund capital improvements to the stadiums as they get older. He said the Falcons want cap credit to paint the roof of the 16-year- old Georgia Dome and the Carolina Panthers want cap credit to replace the scoreboard at 12year-old Bank of America Stadium. "That's the issue," Upshaw said. "We agreed it had to be revenue- producing [to get cap credit from the union]. They can't just do stuff because they want to do it and think we're going to help pay for it. That's not going to happen. Because, at the end of the day, they still own the stadium, not us." Revenue vs. debt The NFL's skyrocketing revenues would seem to indicate that the league is rolling in dough. But the owners say the revenue numbers are a bit misleading. While the new stadiums are producing a lot of revenue, which is driving up the salary cap, the owners say their profits are being eaten up by the rising player costs and the debt service from the stadium-construction loans, as well as the operating costs of the new stadiums. 75

"Smaller-market teams aren't doing great because they've got lower revenues [from older stadiums] and high player costs," a league executive said. "Then you've got the bigger markets where the team overwhelmingly had to pay for the stadium. They got some public contribution, but it wasn't much. They have the higher payroll plus all that debt and stadium operating expenses. Plus, in Gene's world, a bill for revenue-sharing. So you end up with a deal that works for neither [smallmarket or big-market teams]." Upshaw has asked the league to show the union proof that the current CBA isn't working. The union is privy to all of the league's revenue numbers, which are used to calculate the salary cap. But it isn't able to audit teams' costs, such as their stadium loans and other financial information. "We're not taking their word and their reporting system as a means to determine how well they're doing," Upshaw said. "There's a lot we would need to see and digest and believe. It can't just be the same reporting package that [each team] sends to the league. Because they lie." The one team that the union can get accurate cost data on is the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned. And Upshaw said the Packers' financial numbers hardly show a team on the verge of economic peril. "If you look at the Packers' financials from a year ago, they made $18 million," Upshaw said. "The league says, 'Well, that's an anomaly. They're different.' Yeah, they're different. But $18 million is $18 million. Any company would love to make $18 million. "You've got a stadium and franchise increasing in value every year. You've got your payroll pretty much set. And you're able to make $18 million in profit? Not a bad deal." Said Goodell late last month, "We are not in financial straits. We've never indicated that. We've never stated that. But it's very clear that the owners don't 76

believe this deal is working. And it's important for us all to sit down at the table and try to address the matters that aren't working for the ownership." Impact of a new commish One of the most significant reasons for the league's 15 years of labor peace was the unique relationship between Upshaw and Goodell's predecessor, Tagliabue. They became good friends who viewed each other more as partners than unionmanagement adversaries. They collaborated on the historic '93 CBA, as well as four more extensions after that. "Probably the most important thing Paul has done is kept us out of the courtroom," Upshaw told the Daily News 2 years ago. "He knew and I knew that if we stayed out of the courtroom and used the league's assets, which is the players, we could grow the game in a way that is unbelievable. And that's what happened." Upshaw doesn't have the same kind of relationship with Goodell that he had with Tagliabue. Only time will tell how that will affect the negotiations for a new CBA. "[Roger] has to be able to do what Paul was able to do all those years, which was build a consensus," Upshaw said. "Paul never walked into a room and took a vote. It took him time. That was the way he worked. But there are a lot of new owners now that Roger's dealing with that Paul didn't have to deal with. That makes the dynamics a little different. "But Roger and I have been able to work together on all of the issues so far. This will be the test. This will definitely be the test. Because the thing about what we both do, I have to deliver the players and he has to deliver the owners. If either one of us can't do that, we can't make a deal. There won't be a deal. I need him to be strong and he needs me to be strong." Goodell, a senator's son who worked his way up the NFL ladder from a public relations intern to its top boss, has a different personality and a different style than Tagliabue, a former anti-trust lawyer. 77

"Paul had an amazing ability to persuade people without you feeling like he was arguing with you," a league executive said. "He could drive consensus and it just felt like he was making sense whenever he talked. "Roger has a completely different style. He's much more aggressive. He has somewhat of a temper. He just doesn't have the type of personality that's going to lend itself to having the kind of relationship with somebody on the opposite side of the table from him as Paul had with Gene. "The key right now is that neither side get emotional. Because if you stay calm and rational and fair about this thing, you should be able to figure this thing out. The problem will be if either side gets too emotional, too intense, and gets itself too hyped up. Roger is more capable of personally getting a little bit hyped up and getting his back up against the wall than Paul ever would have been." Goodell isn't the only wild card in these negotiations. There also is concern on the owners' side about what they perceive as the growing influence of union attorney Jeffrey Kessler on Upshaw. "If you asked anybody on our side why Gene seems to have changed from a let'sfigure-out-a-solution-to-the-problem guy to the way he's been acting lately, everybody would tell you it is Kessler," one owner said. Kessler, a partner in the New York law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, is one of the union's two main out-of-house lawyers, along with James Quinn. League executives view Quinn as a reasonable man with a similar personality to Tagliabue's, while Kessler is viewed as much more confrontational and tougher to deal with. "Quinn kept Gene in the mind-set of, ‘There are a lot of things that the teams and the players should be on the same page with and some things we need to fight about. So let's pick our spots,'"a league executive said. "Kessler's one of those guys who just likes to fight about everything. He's just a pugnacious guy." 78

Upshaw is amused that anyone in the league might be worried about someone else influencing him. Maybe because he's an ex-player, maybe because he's black, maybe because he doesn't have a law degree, people have been suggesting for years that others have been pulling his strings. "That's what always amazing about Gene Upshaw," he said, purposely referring to himself in the third person. "I'm never my own man. Everyone influences me. I'm not smart enough to figure all of this out by myself. "The fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, it's my call. It's not Kessler's call. It's not Jim Quinn's call. It's my call because I'm the one who has to go into the locker rooms and tell the players." No cap? No problem The owners ultimately approved the '06 labor extension because they were afraid of losing the salary cap. Upshaw has repeatedly said that if the two sides ever get to an uncapped year, you can kiss the cap goodbye. "I won't try to convince the players again that they need to have these [cap] constraints," he said. But according to one league executive, a growing number of teams are starting to think life without a salary cap might not be all that cataclysmic. "I don't think it's a majority yet, but a lot of teams are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of not having a cap," he said. "I don't know if [the number of teams] is going to flatten out or keep going in that direction." Another executive said that while a salary cap is good for the whole league collectively, it's not necessarily the best thing for the teams that are most profitable. "Gene would be shocked if he ever knew the mixture of teams that are moving toward being very comfortable with an uncapped year," the executive said. "He 79

probably assumes its teams that are in the top five in revenue in the league, when in fact, that's not necessarily the case. "It's also teams with more modest revenues, but because of the nature of their stadium deals are doing quite well and feel, if there's not a cap, they'd do just fine." Upshaw said that decision is totally up to the owners. "They are essentially renting a system from us," he said. "We agreed to give them a salary cap for a specific period of time. They agreed to pay us 60 percent of the revenues for that cap. When they decide not to do that anymore, that's fine. "But if they ever decide they don't want a salary cap, and then wake up one day and change their mind and decide, 'You know what, maybe we need that,' guess what? The price is going to be a lot higher than it is now. And they're not going to want that." *

Nothing but pain for ex-Jet Walker BY JIM BAUMBACH [email protected] 9:57 PM EST, November 26, 2008 Remember Wesley Walker? Sure you do. How can anyone here in New York forget the way the former Jets receiver used to make sprinting past defenders look so easy, so effortless. These days Walker is 53 years old, nearly 20 years removed from his last game in the NFL. And effortless would be the last word his family and friends would use to describe his daily quality of life. Like so many retired football players, Walker said he is paying a steep price for all those hits he took during his career, which lasted 13 years until 1989. But what makes Walker different from many former football players, however, is that he said he doesn't specifically know what's wrong with him. Or how to fix it. According to Walker, he is in pain, constant pain that stays with him every waking hour. So much so that if he's not at his job as an elementary school gym teacher in Kings Park, he said he often prefers to be at his Dix Hills home, in his bed, under his electric blanket, watching a movie. Anything, he said, to take his mind off the pain. (Article continues on next page) 80

"I keep waiting for somebody to say, 'This is what you have and this is how we're going to treat it,' but it doesn't happen," Walker said by telephone last weekend. "They just say, 'Let's try this,' 'Let's try that,' but we're not getting anywhere and it's been very frustrating." Walker said doctors have called it chronic pain from football injuries like the neck strain he played through the final three years of his career. He said that led to spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spine, which led to nerve damage all over his body. He said he hasn't felt his feet since he stopped playing. Friends are frustrated because doctors these days seem determined to fight the pain, not treat the underlying cause. Walker said he's had so many adverse reactions to painkillers that he's sworn off them. He said he recently finally found one that works, but he only takes it when he desperately needs it, in fear of becoming addicted. "I know he loved playing," said his closest friend, Robin Appel a yoga instructor from Babylon, "but he's made mention often that if he knew then what he knows now, he probably wouldn't have played." Coming from an athlete who competed on the highest stage, who overcame being legally blind in one eye to succeed as one of the league's premier receivers of his era, those are not words used lightly. "I may not have played this game, or, who knows, maybe I still would have, because I loved playing so much," Walker said. "But I certainly would have treated things differently." Athletes are competitive by nature, and they are taught to ignore pain. As coaches so often say, if you're out on the field you're not injured. Walker said he remembers taking countless cortisone shots in his knees, shoulders, back, wherever. And what did that earn him? He described his post-playing days as: a lifetime of pain, too many doctor's visits to count, multiple surgeries, including a procedure two summers ago in which 14 screws and a plate were inserted into his neck. Walker said he is thinner than his playing days, to the point that people who see him actually remark how good he looks. "They don't know I'm at my worst," he said. "I don't look the part." Except shirtless, he said, when you see that the muscle tone from his chest and arms are gone, the result of atrophy. Bill Davey, a fellow gym teacher at Park View Elementary, has learned firsthand in their three years working together that Walker's physical appearance is deceiving. "The guy looks so good that you think he could put on the pads and make another catch," Davey said. "But the shape he's in, he couldn't get hit once without falling completely apart." Davey said he can tell how much Walker is hurting on any given day by the number of times Walker grimaces as he moves around. Davey said he helps Walker get by in gym class by having Walker do the warm-up stretches while Davey handles the more active work. The scary ride has taken an emotional toll, as well. 81

"He's a very chipper kind of guy, very outgoing, but you just know he's in pain just by talking to him," said Walker's oldest son, John, 25, an assistant lacrosse coach at West Point Prep in N.J. "He's just unhappy because he hurts 24 hours a day. It's terrible, knowing the person he was. That's the best way to describe it." As is the case with many retired former football players, getting assistance hasn't been easy. When Walker played, player salaries were nowhere near what they are now; he started at $30,000 and said he made over $700,000 his last season. So he did what most players back then did after retirement: He got a job. He's been teaching ever since, the last nine years in Kings Park, and he has health insurance through that job. He said he receives a $1,500 early-retirement pension per month from the NFL, and $600 in workman's compensation. But his family and friends can't help but worry that if he's feeling this bad at 53, how will he get by when the day comes when he can't work. Walker said the NFL and NFLPA recently denied his application for complete disability because he is still able to work. A spokesman for the NFL confirmed that, but said Walker can still seek additional help from the NFL Player Care Foundation. "The association has not let us know what benefits we're entitled to," said Walker, a former player rep, "and that's what I'm disappointed in our union for. I don't know what's entitled to me." He hopes that by telling his story, "doors will be opened for other people," current players will do what he didn't do, think about their futures more when it comes to playing hurt. Because what he's going through, he wouldn't wish on anyone. "I wake up every morning, 2 or 3 o'clock, and I can't sleep," Walker said. So he said he lies there, in pain, waiting for another day, to do it all over again. Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

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Illegal Procedure: NFL Disability Claims John V. Hogan, Esq. www.johnvhogan.com [email protected] © 2008

I. INTRODUCTION. Imagine playing a football game where the other side chooses the referees, and those referees have only one or two rules to guide them? Imagine playing a football game where the opponent keeps moving the goal line, and adding time to the clock when it suits their fancy? Imagine the other side having the authority to take away a touchdown without any justification – just because they can? This sounds ridiculous – but it is the type of game many former NFL players find themselves in when applying for disability benefits from the NFLPA. The evaluation of disability claims of former NFL football players under the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan (“the Plan”) has come under significant scrutiny in the past year, culminating in hearings before Congressional and Senate subcommittees. At these hearings, and in the media, former players have chronicled their disability horror stories, while the NFL and NFLPA have defended the Plan, and the disability decisions made under it. There has been much heated rhetoric on both sides, and Congress has recently sought additional detailed information from the NFL and the NFLPA about injured players and evaluation of their claims under the Plan. The NFL and NFLPA have agreed that some changes need to be made to the Plan, and that benefit adjudication should be streamlined. In December, 2007, the NFLPA announced several purported improvements to their disability procedures; yet did not mention adopting “Social Security standards” as they had announced they would do several months earlier and in their testimony to the Senate and Congress. 83

Despite all of the attention to the Plan’s evaluation of disability claims, no one has evaluated the adjudication from a detailed factual and legal perspective. After all, the Plan, and its disposition of disability claims is governed by federal law – the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974,(“ERISA”) and its implementing Regulations at 29 CFR Part 2560. This paper will attempt to do just that – analyze the Plan’s evaluation of “total and permanent” disability claims by former NFL Players from the proper legal perspective, and detail why the law is not being followed, and how claims are being improperly denied. This paper will not address Line of Duty disability; pension or other benefits available under the plan; nor will it address claims that the NFL and NFLPA are not otherwise adequately providing for the needs of former NFL players in need.

II. THE SUPER BOWL OF DISABILITY BENEFITS: THE NFLPA PLAN As set forth in the NFLPA’s White Paper, issued in September, 2007, the Plan offers “(The) most generous and flexible disability (benefits) in Professional Sports.” While this is true, it has often been very difficult for former players to obtain the benefits offered. According to the White Paper, as set forth in the Plan, there are four categories of total and permanent (“T&P”) disability benefits: 

Active football – where a player is eligible to receive $224,000 per year if he becomes totally and permanently disabled due to NFL football within six months after his career ends.



Active non-football – where a player is eligible to receive at least $134,000 per year if he becomes totally and permanently disabled from any other cause within six months after his NFL career ends. (for example, in an automobile accident)



Football degenerative – where a former player who is vested (at least three years of credited service) is eligible to receive at least $110,000 per year if he becomes totally and permanently disabled due to NFL football injuries within 15 years after his career ends, or age 45, whichever is later. 84



Inactive, non-football related – where a former vested player receives a minimum of $18,000 a year ($21,000 for applications on or after April 1, 2007) if he becomes totally and permanently disabled and does not meet one of the other categories.

These benefits can be received in addition to other disability benefits available to former players, including workers compensation or social security disability. When a disabled player reaches the League retirement age of 55, and is eligible for a retirement pension under the Plan, he will receive the higher of the retirement or disability benefit from the Plan, but not both. These benefits continue for the life of the former player. Disability benefits under the Plan can be paid retroactively for up to 42 months prior to filing an application with the NFLPA benefits office. In contrast, most private employer disability benefit plans require the beneficiary to prove disability while still employed, or shortly thereafter. A claimant for Social Security Disability Insurance (“SSDI”) benefits usually needs to prove that he or she is disabled within five years of last working in FICA covered employment, and retroactive payment of benefits is limited to 12 months prior to the month a SSDI application is filed. Furthermore, private disability payments are generally reduced by other disability benefits, such as workers’ compensation and/or SSDI; and SSDI is subject to offset by workers’ compensation benefits. It would seem obvious that active players seeking football or non-football related total and permanent benefits would have an easier time proving their claims due to readily available recent and current medical records documenting both the cause and extent of their disability. For former players seeking the rather generous football degenerative benefits after becoming totally disabled some years after leaving the League, the task becomes much more difficult. III. OFFICIAL RULES AS MERE SUGGESTIONS: IGNORING ERISA The Bell/Rozelle Plan clearly acknowledges that it comes under the purview of ERISA law, and various provisions of the Plan set forth language straight from ERISA Regulations. However, whether the intent and requirement of these Regulations are actually followed appears suspect. 85

In promulgating ERISA claims procedure in 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) set forth background information and implementing regulations in the Federal Register providing for faster, fuller and fairer benefit claim decisions. DOL felt that it was imperative to have decisions issued promptly at both the initial and appeal stages; and that all plans should provide at least one level of administrative appeal. In the Bell/Rozelle Plan, the initial determination is made by the Disability Initial Claims Committee (“DICC”), comprised of two individuals – one appointed by the NFL Management Council, and the other by the NFLPA. Per ERISA, once an application is filed and complete, the initial determination should be made within 45 days, with up to two extensions allowed – for a total of no more than 105 days – where the extensions are necessary for reasons beyond the control of the plan. Despite this regulation, the DICC has frequently exceeded these time frames. The DOL acknowledged that adjudication of disability claims can often be difficult to resolve due to complex issues. Nevertheless, these mandatory time frames were adopted due to DOL’s belief that speedy decision-making is a crucial protection for claimants who need the replacement income that disability benefits provide. Once a claim is denied by the DICC, ERISA regulations provide a similarly brief period in which an appeal filed by a former player must be decided by the full retirement board (“Board”). They too consider the Regulations as mere guidelines, and take whatever time they deem necessary to make a decision. IV. PAGES MISSING FROM THE PLAYBOOK: DISABILITY POORLY DEFINED. Imagine that the officiating crew for a football game was only given one or two rules – and after that, it was up to each one to decide what constituted a penalty. Former players seek a similarly impossible situation when they go for Plan ordered medical examinations, and the criteria which constitute total and permanently disabled is essentially left up to each physician. Section 5.2 of the Plan states that a former player will be deemed to be totally and permanently disabled if he has become totally disabled to the extent that he is subsequently prevented from or substantially unable to engage in any occupation or employment for remuneration or profit. 86

Any disability while suffered in the military is excluded, but a player is not excluded merely because of benevolent or charitable employment or because he manages personal or family investments. However, the notion that the disability must be “permanent” is quite misleading, as the Plan periodically re-evaluates players, even after they have been found “totally and permanently” disabled, and has ceased benefits in a number of these cases, even without any showing of significant medical improvement. It would seem to follow that the permanency requirement may be confusing to evaluating physicians who are asked to complete a “Total and Permanent Disability Benefits” questionnaire. Similarly, what does “total” disability mean? Surely it means different levels of impairment among different physicians. Does it mean being a total invalid? In a wheelchair? Does it mean impairment to the point of being unable to engage in full-time, competitive employment? What if a former player would be capable of working part-time, or on his own schedule? Until and unless the Plan further defines “total” disability, different doctors will continue to offer different opinions on whether the same former player is “totally and permanently” disabled. V. INCOMPLETE PASS: “DISABILITY” NOT JUST A MEDICAL DECISION. When the DICC or full Board determines that a player is not disabled, their meeting notes state that he has been denied because he is “employable”. This is totally inappropriate. When the Plan sends a player for an examination by a neutral physician or a Medical Advisory Physician (“MAP”) examination, and the physician has opined that the former player is not disabled, they ask the doctor: “In what type of employment can he engage?” This too, is completely inappropriate, and beyond the expertise of a medical doctor. More appropriately, a physician can set forth his opinion on a former player’s work-related limitations and abilities – such as how long he can stand, how far he can walk, how much lifting and carrying he can perform – and then a vocational specialist needs to make a determination whether there is work that can be performed considering the players limitations (“residual functional capacity”) and any training or work skills he might possess that can still be applied to jobs that exist in the national economy. 87

Evaluation of the vocational aspects of whether a former player can work is completely missing from the Plan’s disability evaluations. In one former player’s case, he was denied benefits when a MAP set forth the following opinion on his ability to work: “I feel that Mr. (former player) is capable of employment for remuneration and profit. I feel that he would certainly be restricted in the type of occupation that he could pursue…he would need to be in a position of sedentary or light work where he would be able to change positions from a sitting to a standing position on a frequent basis throughout the day…” This former player, who does not have a college degree, and who has no relevant work experience outside of football never had his claim evaluated by a vocational specialist to determine whether he is in fact employable. While Social Security guidelines are not binding on the Plan, the Social Security Administration has more experience in adjudicating disability claims than any other group or organization in the United States. One of their Rulings provides that when a person does not have transferable work skills from previous work, and is limited to sedentary to light work with a need to alternate sitting and standing, he may not be capable of working, as most unskilled jobs are particularly structured so that a person cannot alternate sitting or standing at will. Therefore, in reality, this former player may not actually be “employable”. While it may be appropriate to rely on the opinion of a MAP as to a former player’s medical limitations, it is not appropriate to rely on a medical doctor to determine whether such an impaired individual is capable of working. Additionally, there seems to be little, if any, consideration of how the effects of pain or sideeffects of medication might impair a former player’s ability to perform the cognitive demands of work. The sedating effects of muscle relaxants or narcotic strength pain relievers-commonly prescribed for the severe orthopedic impairment many former players suffer would clearly further provide significant work performance limitations.

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Similarly, the headaches, dizziness, memory and concentration problems which are common sequelae of concussions may further serve to limit a former player’s ability to sustain competitive employment. It seems apparent that many former players have been denied benefits by the Plan, not because they were capable of working, but rather, because the definition of disability is vague and ambiguous, and there has been a total lack of evaluation of the crucial vocational aspects of “work for remuneration or profit.” VI. MOVING THE GOAL LINE : THE DISABILITY INITIAL CLAIMS COMMITTEE. (1) Neutral Zone Infraction: The Disability Initial Claims Committee The two members of the DICC are delegated with the responsibility of making initial disability decisions. The application is granted only if both members vote in favor of the claim. If one member votes against allowing the claim, it is deemed denied. There are numerous problems with the operations and actions of the DICC. Although the Plan provides that former players may be sent for a “neutral physician examination”, the practice has effectively become mandatory, perhaps because the members of the DICC do not have the training, knowledge or experience to properly adjudicate these claims. If nothing else, sending the players for a “neutral” examination is expedient. In many, if not most claims, the applications are denied based upon this report, regardless of the other evidence which has been submitted in support of the claim. More egregious is the apparently common occurrence of a deemed denial when one of the DICC members votes again the claim, even though the “neutral physician” report and opinion fully supported the claim. (Former players Curt Marsh and Brent Boyd testified to Congress about this.) Needless to say, the dissenting member of the DICC is always the person appointed by the NFL Management Council.

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Under the basic precepts of Trust Law, and as set forth in the Plan, both members of the DICC have a fiduciary duty of loyalty and care to the former player – not to the NFL or the NFLPA. The same can be said of the party-line votes of the full Board. Section 8.8 of the Plan provides: “The Retirement Board and the Disability Initial Claims Committee will discharge their duties with respect to the Plan and Trust solely and exclusively in the interest of the players and their beneficiaries…”

In such cases, as were set forth by former players Brent Boyd and Curt Marsh (among others) where the NFL Management DICC member voted against the claim, despite opinions from a “neutral physician” in support of the claim, it would appear that a significant violation of the Duty of Care owed the former players under the Plan had occurred. While the Plan grants full discretion to the DICC and Board, these members do not have the discretion to act arbitrarily or in bad faith. It is a clear violation if they put the interests of the NFL Management Council above those of the player. Yet, this seems to be standard operating procedure (2) Too Many Men in the Huddle: While the manner of the meetings of the DICC is not objectionable per se, it should be noted that the meetings appear to take place via teleconference, with additional “advisors” participating, including several attorneys from the Groom Law Group always present. The participation of attorneys at the initial stages of disability adjudication may well be unique to the Plan. (3) Touchdown Call Overruled: Notice of an unfavorable DICC decision. In cases where one member of the DICC has voted to grant benefits, and the other to deny, the former player receives a written notice indicating that his claim has been deemed denied under Plan provision 8.6. Some denials may contain some additional conclusory reason for the denial 90

such as “the dissenting member of the DICC felt the evidence was conflicting”. Such cursory denials are woefully inadequate under ERISA regulations. Under ERISA regulations, the Plan is required to inform the former player, in a manner that can be understood, why his claim was denied, and what additional information would be needed to succeed on appeal. The Bell/Rozelle plan feels that these requirements are met by explaining that the claim was denied because one DICC member voted against it; and their idea of perfecting an appeal is submitting to another “neutral exam”. What the ERISA Regulations clearly require and intend is that the former player receives a detailed notice which sets forth and discusses all of the evidence which was considered, what weight was given to various opinions about the player’s limitations, and why the evidence considered was not supportive of the claim. In many cases, the players are unable to tell whether the DICC member(s) have actually read all of the evidence submitted, as assurances that it is contained in the file do not necessarily equate with a guarantee that all was read and considered. When the DICC is meeting via teleconference – with the participants in several separate locations, and considering several claims at one sitting, it is impossible for a player to be assured that all of his evidence was considered unless it is specifically discussed in the decision. One federal court, commenting on the ERISA notice requirements stated: “ERISA claims process is not designed to be an endurance contest where employee must continue to appeal without knowing what information the employer needs (to grant the claim)…” Another court noted: “The purpose of the (ERISA) notice requirement is to insure that where a claimant appeals the denial…he will be able to address the determination issues and have a fair chance to present his case.” For example, to comport with ERISA notice requirements, after discussing all of the evidence, a denial notice might come to the conclusion that the claim was denied because the player’s treating orthopedist did not express an opinion whether the impairments were related to NFL 91

injuries. Another notice might state than an opinion was disregarded because it was not supported by a current MRI. In such cases, the player is put on notice of the deficiency of the claim, and then has the opportunity to obtain the missing information or documentation. If he is able to obtain such information, and cure the deficiency, then the claim should be granted on appeal. This is not the way the Bell/Rozelle Plan operates. Rather, a former player is left to wonder where his claim was deficient, and take his chances on appeal that any additional information he might submit fills the void. Regardless of what is submitted, the Plan will want to send him for another “neutral physician” exam – effectively another hurdle to success. This system of disability determination is akin to adjudication by a roll of the dice – or running a gauntlet - and is completely contrary to the purposes and intent of ERISA regulations.

VII. THE “HAIL MARY” PASS: APPEAL TO THE FULL RETIREMENT BOARD. When a former player’s claim is denied by the DICC, he may appeal to the Full Retirement Board, which is comprised of six members. Three are chosen by the NFL Management Council and three by the NFLPA. Much like a desperate “Hail Mary” pass, the success depends upon on luck. Under ERISA Regulations, the Board is required to give a full and fair review of the claim that takes into account all comments, documents, records and other information submitted by the former player, without regard to whether such information was submitted or considered in the initial benefit determination. In practice, this does not occur. Rather, another “neutral physician” examination is ordered – even before the Board has the opportunity to review the file. The NFLPA White Paper indicates that another examination is mandated by federal law (ie. ERISA). They cite the provision that provides that when a medical judgment was relied upon at the initial level, a new and independent medical opinion must be obtained. 92

This is a complete perversion of the law, as the applicable ERISA regulation presupposes that if the claim was denied, that the medical opinion was unfavorable. As set forth by the testimony of players such as Boyd and Marsh, their claims were not granted even after a second fully favorable “neutral physician” examination and report at the full Board level. In these cases, the three members designated by the NFL voted against awarding benefits – again, an apparent violation of their fiduciary duty of care and exclusive loyalty owed to the former player. Even the NFLPA White Paper acknowledges three to three votes – but fails to acknowledge this as an obvious ERISA violation. In cases where the Board is so deadlocked, the claim is then referred to a Medical Advisory Physician for a binding medical determination. However, the Plan section regarding the duties of a MAP (Sec. 11.4(b)) is often misused. Plan Section 11.4(b) provides that a MAP is to review all material submitted to the Plan, and may arrange for an additional consultation, referral or other specialized medical services deemed necessary, including another physical examination. This section as written clearly indicates that the MAP is to have an advisory role. However, in practice, the full Board asks the MAP to conduct another physical exam. The player’s claim then hinges upon this one examination, regardless of the number of other favorable reports and examinations. In addition, while the plan calls for the MAP to make a binding medical determination, in practice this opinion is inappropriately used to determine a former player’s employability – and thus his eligibility for benefits. As discussed above, whether an individual can actually work in spite of his medical limitations also requires an expert vocational evaluation. After a denial by the full Board, a player may seek further review appeal by filing suit in U.S. District Court under ERISA. The NFLPA White Paper touts the fact that since 1993, the courts have upheld 24 of 25 of the Boards denial decisions. The main reason for that success rate is that the courts do not retry the claim themselves, and are required to sustain the Board’s decision if there is not an abuse of 93

discretion. Basically, if there is one medical opinion which supports the denial, that is enough to sustain the decision, even where two or more medical opinions support a finding of disability. However, if the members of the DICC and full Board were properly following the Plan and ERISA requirements, it is obvious that more claims would be granted and there would be little need to resort to the courts.

VIII. ROSTER MOVES: DECEMBER 2007 CHANGES TO PROCEEDURE. The NFLPA announced that several changes were made to help streamline and expedite the disability process. Those changes included employment of a Medical Director; a Claims Specialist to assist former players in completing their disability applications; “regional” physician panels (to conduct examinations) and having the Board vote on appeals via email ballots. None of these changes will address the problems and deficiencies set forth in this paper. The other change announced is that most players might not have their granted claims reviewed as often as is the current practice. This improvement, like the others, may be more of a procedural convenience, rather than a substantive benefit to former players. Until and unless the Plan requires that a showing of significant improvement has occurred, players will be subject to cessation of their benefits because a subsequent examining physician has a different opinion than that of the doctor’s used to grant the claim. Generally it is a requirement in ERISA case law that in a group or private disability policy there needs to be medical improvement for a claim to be ceased. A finding of medical improvement and the ability to engage in substantial gainful activity is a specific requirement for the Social Security Administration to cease a claimant’s benefits. Such requirements serve to preclude “second guessing” that the individual was or is disabled, and provide a beneficial presumption that he was at the time the benefits were granted. Noticeably absent from these improvements is any mention of how, what or when “Social Security” standards will be employed by the Plan, despite the fact that the NFL Management Council and the NFLPA announced in June, 2007 (on the eve of the Congressional sub94

committee hearing on the issue) that they had agreed to incorporate Social Security standards in their disability evaluations. Just what did they agree to? Even if a favorable Social Security Disability decision will be used by the Plan, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than the lowest paying category of disability benefits – inactive, non-football related will be “automatically” granted. That is because if an SSDI claim is awarded at the initial application or reconsideration levels, there is no written decision which discusses the evidence considered, nor even the basis for the award of disability. If there is a written decision, Social Security regulations require that all of an individual’s impairments be considered, and would not be confined to a former player’s NFL injuries. Thus, most former players seeking the much more lucrative football degenerative benefits will most likely still have just as much difficulty obtaining these benefits as they do now. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, testifying before a Senate sub-committee in September 2007, was asked whether the Plan had applied Social Security standards in recent disability evaluations. He clearly misspoke when he testified that “in applicable cases they had been applied.” I don’t think he was being deceitful. Rather, I suspect that he and perhaps NFLPA Chair Gene Upshaw really are not aware of the details of how the Plan operates, and why it doesn’t work. John Hogan is an Atlanta-based Disability Law Attorney. He has represented individuals seeking disability benefits from New York to California over the past 25 years. His practice includes Social Security and Long Term Disability claims, and currently represents several former NFL players seeking benefits from the NFLPA. He is peer-review rated “A-V” by Martindale-Hubbell.

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NFL disability hassles add to pain of lingering injuries The football body is broken. The old player's right hand grips a cane. His right shoulder is bisected by a surgical scar. His left hip is ceramic, his left knee titanium. His right knee and his back ache constantly, but he wants no more surgeries. Roger Anderson stands in the doorway of his Portsmouth home, chest heaving. It has taken him several minutes to answer the doorbell, as he warned a visitor it would. "I push around a lot slower, but I do it," he says. "Every step I take, I'm in a lot of pain." It is mid-June, a blazing afternoon. A form sits on a living room table, inside a purple folder with the words "Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan" on the cover. Anderson has begun filling it out in longhand. "Am not able to work. I have trouble walking, making use of a cane to move around, but I can." Anderson, 65, is applying for disability from the NFL. He played offensive and defensive tackle for the New York Giants for four years in the 1960s, before moving on to the Canadian Football League, the World Football League, and finally, the semipro Norfolk Neptunes. To qualify for even the lowest-paying form of disability, he must show the aches he experiences today are related to the games he played in his 20s. It is no easy task. There are medical and financial records to gather, doctor s to visit. Some players hire lawyers just to shepherd them through the process. Anderson is tackling it by himself. History suggests his chances are not good. Football takes its toll. A 144-page Congressional Research Service report titled "Former NFL players: Disabilities, Benefits and Related Issues" opens with a classic understatement summarizing both the allure and the cost of the game: "Professional Football is a very popular sport, and the physical nature of the game of football is part of its appeal, but at the same time, playing the game can exact a physical and mental toll on players. Violent collisions, as well as other aspects of the sport, can and do cause injuries." The NFL is indeed as popular as ever. Annual revenue approached $8 billion last year. In a 2005 Harris Poll, fans chose football as their favorite sport, outpolling baseball, basketball and auto racing combined. Injuries in the NFL occur at a rate eight times higher than any other major pro sport, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Yet, of the nearly 8,000 eligible retired players, 224 were receiving long-term disability benefits as of October, the NFL Player s Association reported to Congress. It's a small percentage for any industry, 96

"much less one as physically demanding as professional football," U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez of California said at a hearing last summer. The NFL's disability system is broken, its many critics say. It's a subject that sparks outrage among some retired players, who charge both the league and the players union with colluding to deny payments to former players. "Delay, deny and hope they die," said Brent Boyd, a former Minnesota Vikings player who has testified before both houses of Congress. "The disability system is so completely busted and so wrong, it doesn't need a tweak here or there; you've got to blow it up," said Bruce Laird, a former Baltimore Colts safety who started an organization called Fourth and Goal to push for changes to the pension and disability systems and to assist retired players who are in need. Boyd and his UCLA teammate Kenny Easley, a former NFL star from Chesapeake, started an organization called Dignity After Football, to lobby for the rights of retired players. At least a half-dozen other, similar organizations have cropped up. To Sanchez, the crux of the matter is simple: "Is the NFL, a multibillion-dollar organization, fairly treating the employees who built it?" Former greats like Mike Ditka and Gale Sayers don't think so and said as much before Congress. When celebrities like Ditka and Sayers testify, people pay attention. They also take notice when a Hall of Famer like former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster winds up homeless and dies at 50 after struggling with dementia. Still, many of the players in need were never famous, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada pointed out in a speech three days before last season's Super Bowl. "Many were faceless figures behind helmets, lost to history but for yellowed photographs and dusty highlight reels," Reid said. "They helped build the league, but they never earned much from their on-field days." Players like Roger Anderson. "I don't want no pity party," he says. "I'm a proud guy." Even leaning on a cane, Anderson remains an imposing figure. He stands about 6-foot-4 and is still thick in the shoulders and arms, with a granite handshake. On this hot afternoon, he's wearing cargo pants, sneakers and a tank top. His graying but still-dark hair is parted neatly. His eyes are framed by horn rimmed glasses. He is a well-read man who likes jazz festivals and art shows, but with the price of gas and his many medications, he hasn't gotten out much lately. His ancestry is African American and Cherokee Indian. In his prime, he was quick and powerful at 270 pounds, long before players trained with weights. "I just had that natural country-boy strength," he said. "I was just out there like a big oak tree, that's all." 97

He was pure country, born in Bedford, the youngest of seven children and the only boy. Orphaned at 7, he and three sisters were sent to live with one grandmother in Oxford, N.C. Three other sisters went to Lynchburg to live with another. Doted on by his sisters, Anderson was shy. He withdrew into sports and books, reading about his football heroes like Lou "The Toe" Groza, Gino Marchetti and Jim Parker. He wanted to be a kicker like Groza but outgrew the position. He played football at Virginia Union, where both his parents had graduated, and was drafted by the Giants in 1964. A late-round pick from a small college, he learned early to keep his mouth shut and play, even when hurt. Miss a game with an injury and you might lose your job. Dare sign with an agent and you might be traded. Players had little leverage or bargaining power. And by today's standards, medical care was crude. "Back then if you were lying on the ground and they had to send a trainer out for you, your butt was either unconscious or dead," said Ed Beard of Chesapeake, who played in the NFL from 1965 to 1972. "If you could walk, your butt was going to go out there and play, and a lot of guys are paying the price for that today." Players were smaller then, but the game was dirtier. Asked if he remembers any specific plays that were particularly painful, Anderson laughed. "I remember them all," he said. His aching knees? The result of chop blocks, or blocks below the knees, legal in those days. The ruined shoulder? It makes Anderson recall Hall of Fame tackle Bob Brown, the toughest player he ever went against. Brown, 280 pounds, loved to club an opponent's shoulders with his forearm. Bouts of forgetfulness? Anderson's signature pass rush move was to ram his opponent with his head. Helmets then were thin and flimsy by modern standards. One of Anderson's most painful injuries was a hematoma that kept his arm locked at a 45-degree angle. To straighten it, a trainer rigged a weight to a rope. He underwent no surgeries during his playing days. Those were reserved for star players, he said. Reserves like Anderson? "You were just another piece of meat, thrown away after they used you," he said. Anderson's NFL salary peaked at $27,000, good money in the late 1960s but not the set-for-life money players make today. Like most players, he maintained one home in the city in which he played and another in his hometown. "You made more than the average person, but after taxes and all your expenses, you couldn't really put anything away," said Roger Brown of Portsmouth, who played from 1960 to 1969. 98

Most worked second jobs during the offseason. After football, Anderson coached at I.C. Norcom High and Norfolk State. He also worked as a corrections officer in a state juvenile prison until hip replacement surgery forced him to leave in the early 1990s, he said. He became a licensed massage therapist. He drove for Hampton Roads Transit until about five years ago. A widower, Anderson lives alone and gets by on an NFL pension and Social Security disability, mostly. The medications he takes don't do much for his pain, he said. He gets more relief from working out riding an exercise bike, doing some light weight lifting and sitting in a Jacuzzi. "My dad's in pretty bad shape, but there are some former players that are far worse," Anderson's son, Keith, said. "The biggest thing is you see people my dad's age who worked normal, 9 to 5 jobs and they are still very active. You see some former players like my dad who are in their 50s and 60s and they move like they are 80-year-old guys." The NFL offers four types of "total and permanent" disability benefits, two for active players, two for former players. As the Congressional Research Service report states, "While former players may be concerned about several of the different benefits available to them, the T&P disability benefit seems to be particularly contentious." To put it mildly. John Hogan, a disability lawyer with 25 years experience based in Georgia who has worked with NFL players, has called the NFL's disability system the worst in the country. "In a nutshell, it's governed by federal law called ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), and they don't follow the rules," Hogan said. "They don't really explain to people what the standards are for disability; they are too ambiguous about telling people where their claim fell short. And they typically ignore all evidence from players' own doctors and send them to their own physicians." Claims are initially considered by a two-member committee and can be reconsidered by a six-person retirement board. Half the members of each group are appointed by the NFL, half by the players association. "The system is really cumbersome; it takes a really long time," said Jennifer Smith, executive director of the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund, a private group that helps former players. "Not a lot of people get approved. The threshold seems to be very high." Tales abound of players who were turned down multiple times. Former Patriots receiver Hart Lee Dykes, a Hogan client, was denied four times despite being declared disabled by three doctors. Boyd, a former center whose debilitating headaches were traced to concussions from football, also was turned down for a football-degenerative disability claim, the highest-paying category. Former Cowboys fullback Dar yl Johnston, whose career was ended by a broken neck, was denied the NFL's "Line of Duty" disability. Webster's family didn't receive disability benefits until three years after he died - and only after a protracted court battle. One of the biggest complaints from former players is over the time limits built into the system. "Football degenerative" disability is the most lucrative available to former players, with a minimum annual payment 99

of $110,000. To qualify, an applicant must prove his disabilities arose from football activities and that the onset of the disability was less than 15 years after his final season. Former players say that deadline ignores the fact that old injuries can take decades to become disabling. "You can't adjudicate this as if it's a carpenters union or any type of AFL-CIO union," said Tony Davis, who played from 1976 to 1981. "Professional football is a whole different world and needs to be adjudicated in a whole different fashion. "If at 55 years old my knees are shot because of football I played, the NFL should be responsible for paying those medical bills." NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the late Gene Upshaw, the longtime NFL Players Association executive director who died last week, acknowledged flaws in the system but have said they are being addressed. In May 2007, the league, the union, the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the NFL Alumni Association formed the NFL Alliance to address medical and disability needs of ex-players. Since then, they have announced increases in disability benefits, health screenings, prescription drug discounts and care for former players with dementia. Other reforms are intended to reduce red tape in the disability application process. The group also announced an agreement with 14 medical centers across the country to provide joint-replacement surgeries and in-patient rehabilitation to qualified former players. "Our position is our track record speaks for itself in the area of approving all benefits for players," said NFLPA spokesman Carl Francis. "That area is a work in progress in which we will continue to do what's in the best interest of all of our players, particularly retired players." Goodell has stated that the NFL's benefits package is the most extensive in sports. He also has noted that federal courts have upheld 24 of 25 retirement board decisions that have been litigated. Upshaw had said criticism has been fueled by a small group of disgruntled former players. In a letter to a House committee, he noted that the "vast majority" of players who leave the NFL are "quite healthy" and capable of other employment. "The NFLPA is proud of the generosity of these plans," Upshaw wrote in the letter. "An employee of a corporation like IBM or General Motors does not get - and does not expect to get - disability benefits if he or she becomes unable to work decades after leaving the job." Upshaw pointed to a 42 percent approval rate for 1,052 players who applied for either line of duty, a partial disability program, or total and permanent disability from 1993 through 2007. It was not clear what the approval rate was for each type of disability. He said the NFL and NFLPA can't be faulted for not giving benefits to players who never applied. Critics like Davis aren't impressed with the changes made by the NFL and the union. Davis says both should be doing more for those who helped build the league. 100

"They've never done one thing ever until they had pressure put on them," Davis said. "None of these changes happened until somebody started embarrassing the NFL and the NFLPA." Anderson is no activist. He said he didn't know he could apply for disability until he read a newspaper article. A self-described loner, he doesn't stay in touch with former teammates, joking that many probably don't know he's still alive. In Douglas Park, the neighborhood where he has lived for nearly 40 years, Anderson keeps to himself. Playing in the NFL was one of the highlights of his life, the realization of a childhood dream for a "poor orphan country boy," as Anderson still calls himself. How many players like Anderson are out there? The congressional report found that neither the NFL nor the union collect data on the health of the approximately 7,900 former players who are vested. The issue could receive more congressional scrutiny. Some ex-players have asked for a Government Accountability Office audit of the retirement plan. Sanchez told The Charlotte Observer in late July that she isn't satisfied the league and the union have done enough for former players. She added that she might convene more hearings and that she would support threatening to remove the NFL's antitrust exemption if that's what it takes to get action. The congressional report noted that the subject of injuries, disabilities and benefits is a "complex" one with no easy or simple solutions. Anderson, who hobbled around for weeks tracking down medical and financial records to get his application together, can vouch for that. "I'm going to go down fighting," he said. "I know my rights. That Cherokee blood in me don't believe in crumbling." Ed Miller, (757) 446-2372, [email protected]

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Big Red alumni speak out By Dan O'Neill ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Sunday, Oct. 28 2007 Thirty years ago, Tom Banks was an All-Pro center, the axis of a football Cardinals offensive line that was among the best in the game. Today, Banks is unable to work and survives on Social Security disability. Thirty years ago, Mel Gray was among the most dangerous deep threats in the NFL and one of the fastest humans alive. Today, Gray is unable to ascend a flight of stairs and walks with a pronounced limp. Thirty years ago, Conrad Dobler was a cover boy for Sports Illustrated, which touted him as ―Pro Football‘s Dirtiest Player.‖ Today, 13 knee operations and five knee replacements later, Dobler is a poster boy for the crippling consequences of a career in the NFL trenches. Thirty years ago, the 1977 football Cardinals finished 7-7 to bring an unceremonious end to the memorable era of the ―Cardiac Cardinals.‖ Today, they represent a segment of the NFL population that feels abandoned by a game they loved, a ―game‖ that in some cases exacted a debilitating price. The NFL is estimated to be a $7.1 billion industry, an entertainment based on physical combat in modern Roman coliseums. A recent Los Angeles Times survey of retired NFL players showed that 78 percent of ex-players reported some kind of physical disability from their playing days. Yet, in a meeting of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, chairwoman Linda Sanchez (DCalif.) noted that fewer than 3 percent of former players are receiving long-term disability benefits. The NFLPA disputes that figure, saying 428 of the 1,004 applicants who have received a decision are collecting disability, or 42 percent. As a case study, the Post-Dispatch contacted 22 members of the 1977 Cardinals, a player for each starting position. Fourteen reported significant physical complications from their NFL careers. Some, such as Banks and Dobler, have life-impairing issues. None is getting much help from the NFL or their union, the NFL Players Association. They feel abandoned to a virtual NFL Island of Misfit Toys. ―They‘re waiting for all of us to die,‖ Gray said. ―They just want us to go away.‖ Better days The backbone and personality of the ―Cardiac Cardinals‖ in the middle to late 1970s was the offensive line, a collection of colorful characters. The tight-knit group included perennial Pro Bowlers like Dan Dierdorf, Bob Young, Dobler and Banks. It was the pre-eminent offensive line of its time. But time has not been especially kind. The foundation of those dramatic football Sundays has borne the brunt of the physical damage. That comes as no surprise to Dr. Mark Klion, an orthopedic surgeon and member of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who noted that offensive linemen are at a high risk for later health problems because of their size. ―They might still be quick on their feet and athletic, but those guys are significantly overweight and they 102

are putting much more stress on their knees and joints,‖ he said. This creates an occupational quandary. Super size is detrimental to one‘s long-range health, but super size is desirable to the NFL. Dierdorf was the biggest player on the offensive line in 1977, weighing in at 280 pounds. The Band of Behemoths either punished or absorbed punishment on every play. ―Dingers‖ and ―snot bubblers‖ were regular occurrences on game day, a notch in one‘s belt or a badge of honor. ―A snot bubbler was when you knocked the snot out of somebody,‖ Banks explained. ―You hit them so hard, the snot would be coming out of their nose and they couldn‘t control it.‖ None of those who carried the weight — literally and figuratively — blames the game for their problems. ―It was the culture,‖ Dierdorf said. ―You did what you had to do to play.‖ But those same players believe the down payment they laid for a flourishing sport has gone uncompensated. In 1967, the television rights to NFL games were sold for $9 million. Thirty years later, networks combined to pay $3.7 billion for those rights. Within that climate, franchise values have exploded. In 1967, an expansion franchise fee was $8.5 million. By 2002, it was $700 million. ―Unfortunately, the players whose shoulders on which this game was built played for nothing or next to it, comparatively speaking,‖ Dierdorf said. ―And it‘s a travesty that so many of these guys are hurting and destitute. I think it just falls into the category of taking care of your own.‖ Banks, for example, was a four-time Pro-Bowl choice. He now lives in Fair Hope, Ala., and is unable to work because of multiple hip and knee replacements. Like many players of his era, he collects no disability from the NFL because he took his pension shortly after his career ended. ―When I turned 45, I felt pretty good,‖ said Banks, 59. ―I went ahead and took my pension at 45. They told me straight up, ‗This makes you ineligible to come back and file for disability through the pension program.‘ I told them I understand. But I thought, ‗I feel pretty good, I‘m not going to worry about it.‘‖ Banks, who is divorced and lives alone, receives $935 a month from his NFL pension. If not for the $1,300 per month he gets from Social Security, he would be in dire straits. ―I would have never taken my pension if I had known I was going to be a cripple by the time I was 50. I never thought I would live this long.‖ For years, a rumor made the rounds that the life expectancy of NFL players was 55, a rumor Banks said many players took for gospel. Actually, a recent study found the average life span of an NFL player to be 62, still 10 years fewer than the average American male. Changed man Dobler posed for his SI cover shoot in July 1977. The picture would look quite a bit different today. His teammate of four years, defensive end Bob Bell, didn‘t recognize Dobler when he appeared on HBO‘s ―Real Sports‖ program. ―He looked like he was 80 years old,‖ Bell said. ―I was trying to figure out who it was. When they finally said his name, I couldn‘t believe it.‖ 103

The 6-foot-3 Dobler brought 260 menacing pounds with him when he pulled on a halfback sweep in ‘77. His post-NFL health problems have shrunk him to as low as 225 pounds. A staph infection nearly killed him last year. He has had three replacements and six operations on his left knee, two replacements and seven operations on his right knee. During one of those procedures, doctors found Dobler had a pulmonary embolism. They told him he might have only days to live, but he recovered. ―I wake up in pain, and when I walk I am in pain,‖ he said. ―But you learn to live with it.‖ The implications of his battering NFL career are only part of the challenge. He cares for his wife, Joy, who fell out of a hammock in 2001 and is paralyzed from the neck down. In the initial year of Joy‘s treatment alone, the medical costs were $18,000 a month. His first contract with the Cardinals in 1972 was for $17,000. His top salary was $130,000 in his final season with Buffalo. The Doblers are on the verge of selling their Kansas City home to make ends meet. Dobler has to continue to work to maintain health insurance. He has been denied disability from the NFLPA several times. And he is out of appeals. If Dobler were a retired Major League Baseball player, his lot would be considerably better. Larry Dierker, a former pitcher for the Cardinals and Houston Astros, earned $125,000 during his highest-paid season, nearly the same as Dobler‘s top pay. When Dierker turned 60 last year, he began collecting $180,000 in annual retirement benefits for his 14year MLB career, most of which was in the 1970s. Dobler, 57, played 10 seasons, also mostly in the 1970s. He is eligible to receive $24,000 in annual retirement now, or wait until he‘s 62 and receive $48,000. ―Please dispel this,‖ said Tim Kearney, a 10-year NFL linebacker who spent his last six seasons in St. Louis. ―Whenever O.J. (Simpson) gets in trouble, the talking heads say he‘s living off his NFL pension. No, he‘s not. ―O.J. played 10 years in the NFL. I get as much as he does because it doesn‘t matter who you were or what you did. He‘s not living off his NFL pension, trust me.‖ On ―Real Sports,‖ Dobler was asked how he faces the future. ―I don‘t really know,‖ he responded. ―I don‘t think it‘s really good. But you just take it, I guess. Find some way to handle it. If you can‘t handle it, make the choice to check out.‖ Heavy price Dierdorf also has paid a severe price for his 13 Hall of Fame seasons. The tab includes two hip replacements, two knee replacements and a serious staph infection. He has to use a cane to walk more than a few steps. ―I am actually going to star in my own show like Jack La Lanne,‖ Dierdorf joked. ―Only it will be a little different. One of the key prerequisites is you have to be able to stand up on your own. When you‘ve had everything replaced like some of us, that‘s no small accomplishment.‖ Still, Dierdorf considers himself fortunate. His successful post-NFL career as a broadcast analyst has allowed him to absorb the cost of operations and treatments, expenditures he would have little hope of 104

meeting with his NFL pension. ―The quality of my life is pretty darn good; I‘m not a complainer,‖ Dierdorf said. ―The good news is as I talk to you on the phone, I‘m not uncomfortable. Not every one of us can say that.‖ That includes Young, who died of a heart attack in 1994 at age 52. There is no conclusive evidence to connect the dots from Young‘s heart failure directly to his 16-year NFL career. Among other things, Young was a diabetic and a chain smoker. He also acknowledged, after his playing career was over, that he had used steroids. ―I loved him, everybody did,‖ Banks said. ―He was one of the greatest guys in the world, one of those special people. But he just wouldn‘t take care of himself. I know when Bob died, it made us all look around at ourselves and what we were doing. It made us try to get better control of our weight and work out more. You realized you just can‘t let it go.‖ Weekly wreck When you play football from the time you can ride a bike, when you embrace the money and the fame, when the testosterone is flying on a Sunday afternoon, you never stop to consider the brutality of it. ―It‘s like being in a car accident once a week,‖ said Gray, who played 12 seasons in St. Louis. Now a special education teacher and coach in Rockford, Ill., Gray recently had a knee replacement and suffers with arthritis from knee, shoulder, elbow and ankle operations he had during his playing days. ―Hell, I was one of the fastest guys in the league,‖ he said. ―Now I can‘t get out and play softball or basketball or anything like that. I have to take it easy. I‘m on the third floor of school and I have to take an elevator. ―I‘m 59 and I walk like I‘m a 75-year-old man.‖ Walt Patulski starred at Notre Dame before he played his last NFL season on the Cardinals‘ defensive line in ‘77. Patulski had six major operations during his career and needed a shoulder replacement in 2001. But it was a laminectomy — a surgery to treat spinal stenosis and relieve pressure on the spinal cord — that ended his career after five season Patulski has a pretty good idea where stenosis got started. ―When I was with Buffalo, we were watching the game films and there was a play where I was double-teamed and bent over backwards. I mean, folded almost in half, bent in a way your body is not meant to bend. ―(The coach) ran that play over about 30 times and he kept saying, ‗I don‘t know how your back wasn‘t broken.‘ ‖ Patulski‘s back didn‘t bother him at the time. Now it ―completely locks up‖ if he doesn‘t stick to a daily regimen of strengthening and straightening. Lee Nelson, who played 10 seasons in St. Louis, vividly remembers a fleeting moment when the ferocity of professional football made him recoil. A 5-10 cornerback, Nelson came up to meet a blocker and attempt to tackle Green Bay‘s John Brockington. 105

―I was knocked out on impact,‖ Nelson said. ―He twirled me in the air, and I just hit the ground limp. When I saw that on film — to see myself hit the ground like a piece of dead meat — it was hard to watch. It scared me.‖ The Cardinals faced double jeopardy: If smashing into other large men with body armor didn‘t get you, the rock-hard playing surface would. Thirty years ago, artificial turf meant indoor-outdoor carpeting with a thin pad on top of an asphalt surface. The Cardinals played on such surfaces at old Busch Stadium and two practice fields, Lindenwood College and Illinois State. The surface was also treacherously tacky, and the uncompromising traction injured many a knee. ―The players of today won‘t have the problems we‘ve had,‖ Dierdorf said. ―We‘re crippled because of Astroturf. We didn‘t know it was happening at the time, but there‘s an Astroturf generation out there now that is paying the price for having to play on that horrific surface.‖ Additionally, increasing attention is being paid to the after-effects of concussions. A study by Dr. Barry Jordan, director of the Brain Injury Program at Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, N.Y., surveyed 1,090 former pro players and showed that 60 percent had suffered at least one concussion during their amateur or professional careers, and 26 percent reported three or more. ―But back then, you‘d get your bell rung and they would tell you get back out there. It was no big deal,‖ said Kurt Allerman, a linebacker who played the first of his nine seasons with the 1977 Cardinals. ―I don‘t know how many concussions I had. I just knew that by my eighth or ninth years, it took less and less to put me in that state where I wasn‘t all there, seeing stars and stuff. I finally thought, ‗Boy, this can‘t be good for your brain.‘ ‖ Allerman, as well as other Cardinals, expressed concern about the residual effects from seeing those ―stars.‖ But none said he has been tested. ―I don‘t want to know‖ was the typical response. No regrets Despite the risks, the violence and the residual damage, none of the interviewed Cardinals regrets his NFL career. ―We were warriors and that‘s what we did,‖ Nelson said. ―We enjoyed what we did and we‘d go out and do it again, right now. We all would. You give me what the minimum wage is today, and I will go out there and limp my fool butt off.‖ No one talks of entitlement, but they do feel they have been used up and discarded like a set of old shoulder pads. They need only look at their baseball counterparts for supporting evidence. ―Since 1976, in nearly every negotiation, the current players have looked back for those retirees in the classes before them,‖ said Steve Rogers, a former major league pitcher and current assistant director to the executive director of the MLBPA. ―It‘s not because they have to, or are legally bound to, but because they are morally bound to. ―That was one of the things Marvin Miller preached: ‗You have a responsibility to those players who came before you.‘ And it‘s something that has been embraced.‖ Recent IRS forms show Major League Baseball pays out nearly twice as much as the NFL in retirement benefits. Meanwhile, the average payout for a retired NFL player in 2005 was $14,500. In a household that includes a wife and two children, that is $6,000 below the 2007 poverty line, according to the U.S. 106

Department of Health and Human Services. Yet the NFL pension fund has been reported to have as much as $1 billion in assets. ―The money is there to address all of those issues; a lot of it is already paid into,‖ said Keith Wortman, another member of the 1977 offensive line. ―It‘s not like this is General Motors and they‘re trying to figure out what to do with an enormous debt. The NFLPA doesn‘t have that problem. It‘s just a matter of doing the right thing.‖ Going public In recent months, the issues confronting retired NFL players have been debated in newspapers, on television and in Congress. Last month, a group of NFL veterans led by former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka and including Dobler addressed a House committee and asked for help. ―Don‘t make proud men beg,‖ Ditka said. ―Don‘t make them jump through hoops.‖ Some of the game‘s most revered stars or their families told stories of chronic pain, dementia, even suicide. The testimony left Congress wondering how such circumstances could exist in a league as financially fortified as the NFL. The committee issued a directive to Upshaw and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to address the issues. After meeting with owners last week, Goodell announced the league will add $10 million to its medical fund for retired players, designating the money for joint replacement surgery, cardiovascular screening and assisted living. The sum will be added to a $7 million fund agreed to in July by the league and the players union. Perhaps those are significant steps toward righting a wrong, but not all the 1977 Cardinals are holding their breath. ―It‘s nice that Congress is asking for information from both the union and the NFL,‖ Dobler said. ―But those boys have been lying for years, and I don‘t believe anything will be different. They will continue to lie, deny, and hope we die.‖ [email protected] | 314-340-8186

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The Pain Game By Michael Leahy Sunday, February 3, 2008; W08

Long after winning his Super Bowl ring, Dave Pear says his life is now a 'torture chamber' of pain. Can he and other injured retirees force the NFL to rethink its financial responsibilities to the generations that helped build the league? "I can't get warm," Dave Pear says in the kitchen. He is shuffling around his house in a heavy winter coat, the collar pulled snug to ward off the terrible chill he feels. Three decades ago, he played professional football for six seasons, made it to an all-star game, won a Super Bowl ring. Nowadays, his ravaged body is betraying him. "I'm so cold," he mutters, and shivers. "You cold?" No, I say. "I'm freezing," he says. The thermostat says 72 degrees. But his kitchen's warmth isn't touching Pear, whose old football injuries, coupled with the many resulting neck and back surgeries, leave his extremities cold on most days, no matter the season. It's football season, the time of year hardest on Pear's body and spirit. All the football talk on TV -- and in the Seattle suburb where he lives -- just serves as a bitter reminder to Pear of what has happened to his life and what he thinks the National Football League owes him. He walks unsteadily with a cane, his hips degenerating. He takes a step in the direction of the kitchen's fireplace and, unable to bend down, pokes at it with his cane, hoping to find a log there. No log. With his wife and two adult children off working for the day, he needs to deal with this problem on his own. He's been told by doctors not to lift anything as heavy as 15 pounds, preferably not even something like a log, if he can help it. He has what he calls "lightning bolts" shooting through his back and neck at all hours, and pains radiating clear down his left arm to his thumb. Since football, he has undergone seven spinal surgeries, including a 1984 operation to fuse a disk in his neck. He had his most recent spinal surgery last April, when doctors fused two herniated disks in his back. Not unexpectedly, the four screws holding the disks together have left Pear with postoperative discomfort, and at this moment he is experiencing a new throbbing in his right knee. His doctors have said that at some point he'll need two new hips. "I live in a torture chamber," he says. At 54, he shuffles like an ailing 80-year-old man. He suffers from chronic fatigue that leaves him falling asleep without warning on most mornings and afternoons, part of the reason he cannot hold a job and the reason the Social Security Administration, since 2004, has provided him with about $2,000 a month in disability benefits, in addition to picking up most of the cost of his surgeries through Medicare. At day's end, Pear often sleeps from 12 to 15 hours -- though, he says, no sleep is ever a deep sleep. He takes pills for the pain in his back and neck, others to ward off spasms and one, the powerful but potentially addictive Vicodin, intended as a last resort when all the other pain pills fail. On days when he absolutely must do everything in his power to stay alert, he takes Provigil, which is usually successful for several 108

hours. He's taken two Provigil this morning, but it is expensive for a family barely getting by, about $13 a pill, and so he can afford to take it only sparingly. "You wouldn't know it, but I was somebody once," he says wanly, and chuckles. In his glory days, he toiled against behemoths as a defensive lineman for three NFL teams, and, though undersized for his position at 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, he felled plenty of quarterbacks and superstar tailbacks while with the then-dreadful Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was the franchise's first player to be chosen for the Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game. He prided himself on delivering and absorbing horrific hits. In 1981, after struggling with injuries through what would be his last full season and playing in Super Bowl XV for the champion Oakland Raiders, he underwent surgery in which a bulging disk, pressing on another disk and a nerve for two years, was "hand-drilled out of my neck." By then, he says, he knew he was finished as a player. Off and on for the past quarter-century, he has been unsuccessfully pressing the NFL for disability benefits that he believes have been unjustly denied him by the league's retirement board. His monthly NFL pension is $606, but he estimates that he often spends about $1,000 alone out-of-pocket on medication. His wife cannot afford a health plan for herself that allows for anything other than coverage for catastrophic illnesses. The Pears soon plan to sell their house overlooking a lake, with no idea where they'll live next, other than that it will be a more modest place. Pear's desperation has driven him to join forces with a group of severely injured and financially struggling NFL retirees pressing their case to the media and Congress, all of them furious with the NFL Players Association, which represents active players and which the retirees believe has been complicit with the NFL in denying them their full disability rights. Back in his kitchen, Pear looks around, his face a mask of confusion. "What did I come in here for?" He digs his cane hard on the wood floor, pivots, stumbles, grabs a counter to steady himself. His blue eyes survey a pile of papers on the kitchen table. "What was I doing?" He squints and shakes his head. "Oh, forget it." He decides he wants out of the kitchen, anyway. "Warmer upstairs in the bedroom. I need some water. Would you like some water?" He pours two glasses. "God, I'm tired." He gulps, pushes off on his cane and, halfway up a flight of stairs leading toward his bedroom, he brightens. "Hey, I'll read a letter I got from a fan. He's a big fan. I'll show you my office." The office is in his closet, actually. Inside, he has set his computer on a tiny table and squeezed in a chair. The setup is near the bed he shares with his wife of 27 years, Heidi. Between the bed and his office-closet rests a red laundry basket, which is holding what looks like the random booty of a scavenger hunter -- a thick belt, scraps of paper, a scuffed-up old football, a purple-and-gold blanket. Most of the items are mementos from his glory days, which began at the University of Washington. He digs under the pile in the basket and gingerly lifts things. A black leather weight belt, meant to protect his back and torso, which he used when he was squatting and bench-pressing close to 500 pounds. The game ball awarded him after a Washington victory over Syracuse in 1973. An MVP trophy for his play at Washington. "I got my Super Bowl jersey around here somewhere," he says. He fingers the deflated football. "This is old, isn't it? Old like me." He puts it back in the red basket and looks around. "Would you like some water?" he asks. I point out he's already poured me some. 109

"Okay." He looks around. "What are we doing?" I remind him, and he nods. He finds the letter from the fan, an Army lieutenant colonel from Vienna, Va., named Matt Ferguson, who writes that his nickname is "Mad Dog." "I like that," Pear says. " Mad Dog." He slowly reads the words of Matt Ferguson: "I am a recently returned veteran of the Iraq War . . . I grew up admiring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their grit and honor. I am especially fond of you being the first Buccaneer ever selected to the Pro Bowl . . . I have attempted to pattern my military career after your example. I have always admired your tenacity and dignity in those early years. Congratulations on your selection as the 19th Greatest Player in Buccaneers history. It would be a huge honor if you could sign the enclosed photo of yourself in one of your games for my new Man Room. God Bless. -- Mad Dog." Pear grins. "That's from a fan, a fan named --" He stops and flips the letter over for a reminder. "Mad Dog," he says. He lifts the game ball from the red basket, stares at it, puts it back. "Would you like a glass of water or something?" he asks. His wife, having digested all the medical reports about his condition, says his forgetfulness is a function of "tired brain." In the years since he left football, he has been plagued by deepening memory problems, a result, he believes, of the many concussions he suffered during his playing days. "Don't feel sorry for me," he says. "At least somebody could say I chose this for myself. But my family never chose this. They're the ones suffering." He takes a long breath and sits down on the edge of the bed. He closes his eyes, then opens them. He reaches into the basket, picks up the trophy, stares at it and drops it back into the basket. Then he asks, "Would you like some water?" One afternoon, Pear pops a tape into his VCR. In the next instant he's watching the 1981 Super Bowl between his Raiders and the Philadelphia Eagles at the Louisiana Superdome. He eyes the screen, grinning. "Yeah, our team is ready. I'm surprised how charged up I'm getting watching this thing. You gotta be careful with yourself sometimes not to lapse into the old macho attitudes. Look at our guys. Eagles don't have a chance. That's why I have this." He lifts his left hand to show his Super Bowl ring. Each Raider on that year's squad received two rings, one for himself, and another as a pendant for a wife or girlfriend. Never thrilled with her husband's football career, particularly the way it ended, Heidi Pear long ago gave hers back to Dave, who is wearing it on a silver chain around his neck. "I guess I'm proud about being a champion, giving everything I had," he says. "Even if it ruined me." He settles back on his couch to watch the game's start. For the next minute or two, he is lost in a reverie. "You know, I can tell you what I was thinking that day," he mutters, finally. "I was standing on the sideline and thinking that it was too bad that I was gonna have to go out there playing with a broken neck in my last game -- because that's what it felt like: a broken neck." Pear gasps then, holds up a hand. He grabs his cane and tries standing up. "Gotta get up, gotta get up," he moans. Sitting this long on the couch has caused his back to knot up, which happens frequently. He 110

presses a hand to his face. Digging his cane into the floor, he walks around for a few minutes, then returns to the couch and sits gingerly. In the next couple of minutes, he turns his head, reluctant to watch this much longer. "The game bit me and my family so bad that if I watch these things too long, I get down," he says. "And then I end up wishing I hadn't watched at all." He doesn't see the same game that fans do. "Fans misunderstand," he says. "Football is not a contact sport. It's a collision sport." Thinking about today's generation of players, he says: "These young guys should be concerned about us and the other retired players now because some of them are going to be in the same place. You can't take the violence out of the game, and that's okay, because it wouldn't be football without the violence, I guess. But if you can't take the violence out, you gotta at least help the people who get hurt." Other than his pleading letters and phone calls to the league, its retirement board and the union, Pear stayed quiet for a long while. "I guess I was ashamed at times to talk publicly about what was happening to me," he says. "I think a lot of the retired players with troubles were like that for a long time." That has changed in recent years with the emergence of private organizations formed to assist struggling NFL retirees and publicize their plight. The two best-known -- Gridiron Greats, led by Hall of Famers Mike Ditka of the Chicago Bears and Jerry Kramer of the Green Bay Packers, and Fourth and Goal, made up of retired Baltimore Colts -- immediately made it their mission to prod the injured and destitute to express their anger. Last year, as Pear and a growing number of NFL retirees began coming out of shadows to tell their stories, a kind of critical mass was reached: For the first time, the retirees' woes caught the interest of a bloc of fans, media and politicians who, remembering the players in their glory, had difficulty believing what they were seeing. Onetime fleet young gods who ran for touchdowns now looked like old men. Powerful linemen of the '60s and '70s were visibly broken. Earl Campbell, the Hall of Fame Houston Oilers running back enfeebled by years of hits, needed a walker just to move. Former All-Pro offensive tackle Conrad Dobler, knees and hips ruined, shuffled with a cane at news conferences and talked of his medications and financial struggles. Thirty-five-year-old retired offensive guard Brian DeMarco, who suffered serious spinal and knee injuries while playing for two teams, was found in Texas, broke and unable to work or cope with his pain. Seventy-one-year-old Willie Wood, the legendary Packers defensive back whose interception was decisive in Super Bowl I, had taken residence in a Hyattsville assisted living facility, hobbled, suffering from Alzheimer's-like cognitive problems and unable to pay his bills on a $1,100 monthly NFL pension. But at least they were alive. The autopsy of Andre Waters, who played 12 NFL seasons in the 1980s and 1990s and committed suicide at 44, revealed a ravaged brain consistent with the advanced dementia of a man in his 80s. Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who won four Super Bowl championships and died of a heart attack at 50 in 2002, was plagued from the moment he left football by dementia and other brain injuries caused by his play, according to his doctors. Homeless and unable to find a job during much of his retirement, Webster also suffered from chronic physical pain, contended his family, who successfully sued the NFL's retirement board for more than $1.5 million after being denied a disability claim. Last year, the weight of the stories sparked two sets of congressional hearings. With a rapt Pear listening last September in a Senate hearing room, former Minnesota Vikings offensive guard Brent Boyd -- whose doctors blame concussions suffered in his playing days for his severe memory loss, bouts of depression 111

and joblessness -- blasted the league and union as deceitful in their treatment of veterans with disability claims: "There is fraud, corruption and collusion by the NFL." Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a member of the oversight panel conducting the hearing, urged the NFL "to get its house in order" and told NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and players association Executive Director Gene Upshaw that he was prepared to introduce "accountability or oversight" legislation if he did not see changes in the treatment of the retirees by the league and the union. But ideas for specific reforms to NFL practices were scarce among the lawmakers. Since 1993, virtually all disability payments received by retired players have come from a share of league revenue allotted to the active players, which since 2006 has been set at 60 percent. Politically and economically, the arrangement has placed the union and Upshaw on the horns of a dilemma: If the union doesn't address the needs of disabled retirees, it runs the risk of looking callously indifferent; if it does, the kitty for the active membership declines by whatever is spent on the disability awards. Upshaw, a retired player himself, acknowledges tensions. "I have [active] players who don't like us paying so much for the [retirees]," he says. Upshaw and the retirees' representatives agree on this point: There is virtually no bond between the active players and the retired ones. The union chief casually observes that the retirees don't pay his salary and that, therefore, he doesn't represent them. "My obligation is to the players playing now," he says. "And it's a different kind of group these days." Different generation, different expectations and a whole new set of riches for everybody involved. When Pear starred at a peak salary of $125,000, the average player's annual salary was less than $100,000. Today, it's about $1.8 million. The league's annual revenue has correspondingly soared several-fold and, in 2006, was estimated to be from $6 billion to $7 billion. The worth of NFL franchises is in some cases more than 40 times the value of teams in Pear's era. Pondering these numbers, Pear just shakes his head. "So much money there -- it's unbelievable that we're the guys who helped to build up the league, but we're the ones fighting for crumbs." But, Upshaw says, such a focus misses the point. He fears that, if disability payments "go to any borderline cases out there," the floodgates will open, and there "might be thousands" of claims from NFL retirees who will "say they hurt somewhere on their bodies . . . Heck, a lot of guys have little things." He says the league couldn't endure such a press of claims. "We couldn't afford that," he says. "And the [active] players wouldn't go for it . . . The players right now give up $82,000 a year [on average] to fund all the things we're doing with disability [payments] and pensions . . . We can't pay for everything for all the [retirees] asking for it. We want to protect money for the retired players who really need and deserve it." Upshaw says that, as of last fall, 428 retirees out of 1,052 applicants had been awarded disability payments from one of the retirement plan's programs, with the union having paid a combined $126 million on pension benefits and disability claims for the retirees. At last count, 317 were still receiving disability payments, he says. But retirees have long been suspicious of the union's numbers. A lawsuit filed against a subsidiary of the players union by Bernie Parrish, a former union executive and retired Cleveland Browns defensive back, asserts that tax records reveal that only 121 retirees received disability benefits in 2006. Worse, Upshaw's critics point out, the union has frequently joined the league in aggressively trying to deny retiree disability claims.

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Pear's cognitive problems do not qualify him for disability payments under the league's plan. As a general stance, neither the union nor the league believes that any player's mental impairment has been caused by football. Upshaw resents that people have made him out "to be the bad guy" in all this. "We're working with the league to make things better," he says, referring to a relatively new NFL program that covers joint replacements for qualified retirees that will be paid for by league and union contributions. Then there are league- and union-generated charitable programs, such as the Players Assistance Trust, which provided $1.2 million in assistance to struggling retirees in 2006, according to Upshaw. Pension benefits for the retirees have climbed on average by about 25 percent in recent years, he says. "We can't do everything overnight," he says. "But we've made progress, and where does it get you? . . . You're helping people, you're paying some of their bills, and then the same people criticize you? That just doesn't seem right." "I'll tell you what isn't right," Pear fumes later. "It's when rich people destroy hurting players and stop them from getting hundreds of thousands in their disability benefits -- and then have the nerve to tell some of them they should be grateful for getting a few bucks in charity. They try to make you feel guilty . . . Their policy has always been: Deny, deny and hope we die. That's the part fans don't know about. My wife says most fans don't want to know. She says, 'They don't want to hear about you guys being hurt, Dave.' She said they don't want you to kill Santa Claus for them. They just want to watch their games." When Heidi Pear arrives home, she finds Dave in bed in his winter coat, curled up, with his old college blanket over him. "This is what we have in front of us for our future," she says. "All these years Dave has had this, and how long was football really? Six years? And only four really good years?" She laughs casually, a coping laugh. "All that for football? The good days were so long ago. They don't feel real anymore." Heidi and Dave met as students at the University of Washington in the early 1970s. She was blond and pretty, with a bit of a hippie streak, and he was a defensive lineman on the football team. "I just thought, He'll do this in college and finish up," she says, "and then we'll get on with our normal lives together." But the Baltimore Colts selected him in the third round of the 1975 NFL draft, and, after his rookie year, he was picked up in an expansion draft by the fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who went winless in Pear's first season. But, amid the team's miseries, Pear swiftly mastered his role as the defense's nose guard. "It helped that I had a pretty high pain threshold," he says. "I was willing to do anything to be successful, anything. When I got hurt, I just made sure to get myself back into a game as soon as possible. It was do-what-you-have-to-do, and I did it all." That attitude was helping him to build a reputation around the league. "I play every play like it's going to be my last one," he said to Tampa media. Buccaneers officials praised his toughness. "You could cut off one of Dave Pear's legs, and he'd still be out there every Sunday, giving everything he's got," Buccaneers Coach John McKay told the St. Petersburg Times in 1977. Pear loved the attention. After sacking a quarterback, he enjoyed standing over him and lifting his arms toward the crowd, in the way of a victorious Roman gladiator asking the mob to decide the fate of the prostrate foe. "It was like, 'Do I let this guy up, or do I end it for him now?'" he remembers. "The crowd loved it. I loved it. Football was like battling in the Colosseum." With his antics, his long, flowing brown hair and his selection to the Pro Bowl team, he became a favorite of Tampa fans, who created a fan club 113

in his honor and regularly staged parties for him in the stadium parking lot after Buccaneer home games. He boasted of his success to a local newspaper. "Personally, I feel I'm the greatest nose guard in professional football," he said. "They double- and triple-team me every week, and they still can't touch me." The physical punishment he endured never worried him in Tampa. "My feeling then was what every player's feeling is," he explains. "If you think you might get hurt, you could never strap it on each Sunday and be King Kong out there . . . If I saw a guy get hurt during a game, I thought, 'That doesn't apply to me -- never gonna happen to me.'" By then he was living with Heidi, who did not relish either his popularity or personality change. "The early years were tough," she remembers. "He got a bit of the big head there. But I think it comes with that kind of athletic life. Everybody was telling him how great he was." In early 1979, after his Pro Bowl appearance and three seasons in Tampa, Pear told the Buccaneers that he wanted a raise on his contract that paid him less than $100,000 annually. The Buccaneers said no and traded him to the Oakland Raiders, who agreed to pay him $115,000 for his first season and slightly more for additional seasons. Pear was ecstatic. "I had what I thought was financial security," he says. "And then it happened. One play changed my life." It came on September 16, 1979, as the Raiders found themselves losing badly on the road to the Seattle Seahawks. A frustrated Pear, thinking he had been subjected to illegal blocks through most of the game, was looking for a measure of payback when Seahawks running back Sherman Smith got the ball and found a hole. Pear filled it. "I really wanted to nail somebody, and here comes Smith," Pear remembers. "He was a big guy, 230 pounds at least, maybe bigger. I didn't care. I was really gonna get him. I hit him. But I got the worst of it. I knew the instant it happened something was wrong. My neck felt like lightning. I felt the disk in there come out -- you don't really know what a disk is until you hurt it, and then you know, you feel this thing coming almost out of your neck. I could feel it move against a nerve. I was in agony. I was thinking, I wish I hadn't done that. And that was it. I was never the same again." He lost playing time and, by the next season, was second-string. By then, his back and spine, first injured during his Tampa Bay years, were plaguing him, too. He says the Raiders regularly tried to treat his pain with shots and pills, including Percodan, but that he never felt real relief. In desperation, he turned to Heidi to administer shots in the evening. She injected his neck with a drug that Pear never had tried before. "Dave got it somewhere," Heidi remembers. "It was a drug they gave to horses or something." None of the drugs helped. His second year with the Raiders would be his last with the club. After the Raiders' triumphant 1980 season and their Super Bowl title the following January, Pear went to Raiders owner Al Davis and explained that his damaged neck had made it impossible for him, at 27, to play again. He had a contract, but nothing in it was guaranteed. He says he asked Davis if the Raiders could see their way toward paying him for the following season in 1981. "I said to him, 'I'm going from here to get a neck operation -- I got a ruined neck playing for you,'" Pear recalls. "And Davis said to me, 'I'm not taking responsibility for your injury.'" Davis has not talked publicly about the matter, and messages requesting comment from him for this story went unanswered. Raiders public relations director Mike Taylor released a statement that, while never mentioning Davis, said the "Raiders organization" treated Pear fairly. The statement alluded to an arbitration in which the club paid Pear for several games into the season after his retirement. In an e-mail

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response to Pear's charge of "unfair and uncaring treatment," Taylor wrote that Pear's "extracurricular activities" with the Raiders needed to be "taken into account." "Did you know about his personal problems?" Taylor demanded during a phone interview. When invited to elaborate on Pear's problems, Taylor declined. Would readers regard an unsubstantiated accusation as part of a smear campaign? "Writers should use due diligence and find out on their own," Taylor replied. When Pear heard that a Raiders spokesman made a charge and then declined to elaborate, he said in disgust, "Because there's nothing there." Pear's departure from the Raiders had left him floundering. Pondering his rising bills and lack of an income, he decided he had no choice but to attempt a football comeback. His doctor officially cleared him to play while privately urging him not to, the Pears remember. In 1982, Pear played in the preseason with the San Francisco 49ers before being cut. The following year, he applied to the NFL's retirement board for "line of duty" disability benefits, available at the time for players who had suffered career-ending injuries while playing for an NFL club. Pear's claim was denied. "It wasn't that he couldn't play," Upshaw says. "He did play after the Raiders. He just wasn't good enough." For the next decade, Pear found jobs in sales. By the mid-'90s, while living in Florida, he became scared about his job performance. He was increasingly falling asleep between appointments, sometimes while in his car. And his back and neck were worse than ever, despite several surgeries and related care that, he says, has cost him more than $500,000, because he has been unable to obtain health insurance since leaving football. In 1995, he believed his working days were running out. He applied for the league's total and permanent disability benefit with the retirement board. The doctor commissioned by the board to access his condition portrayed Pear as a man whose physical ailments left him able to do little. Presented with evidence that included reports on Pear's acute fatigue, the doctor said that Pear would require a job that granted him "frequent rest breaks." He would also need, the doctor added, to be limited to sedentary work. Pear should not stand for lengthy periods, should not bend and could not be expected to lift anything more than 15 pounds, the doctor wrote. "You tell me how many jobs like that are out there?" Pear says. The six-man board, made up of an equal number of management and union representatives, rejected his claim. Three years later, eager to put his hands on cash wherever he could find it, Pear filed for his early retirement pension from the league at the minimum age of 45 and started collecting $484 a month initially. The small benefit came to Pear's savings account at a severe cost: In accepting it, he sacrificed any claim to a disability payment forever, according to the rules of the retirement board plan. Then, out of nowhere, came what looked like the Pear family's salvation. In the late '90s, Heidi inherited $500,000 from a relative. At first glance, the money seemed to represent financial security, but the more 115

Dave thought about the sum, the more he worried. Perhaps, he reasoned, it wouldn't last in the face of his medical bills and expected unemployment in the near future. He began investing in risky tech stocks, and, when he started losing, he invested more. He lost the whole $500,000. "The pain I was under, the fatigue, the mental stress -- maybe I panicked and wasn't thinking right," he says. Heidi purses her lips while listening to him describe his anguish. "I told you to get us out [of the market], but we didn't get out," she says softly. "We were supposed to confer with each other." Dave drops his head and stares at their kitchen floor. "I don't know why I did it. I thought I had to make a bunch of money." He wraps his arms around himself. His voice shakes. "I don't know why." She looks down at him. "Oh, you were scared, Dave. You knew you couldn't work much longer." The Pears returned to the Seattle area in 2000, and he found another sales job. By 2002, he was selling shipping containers. As the months wore on, he says, dimensions and sales formulas became elusive concepts for him. Meanwhile, alarmed that her husband was suddenly getting lost on roads, Heidi took him to a neuropsychologist, whose reports detailed his profound memory problems and, worse, made clear that his decline had been particularly swift during the previous two years, his problems gaining a frightening momentum. Dave was a candidate for early onset dementia, said the report, and his nearly constant fatigue was likely a function of a damaged frontal lobe, possibly the result of blows to the head. "On our way out," Heidi remembers, the neuropsychologist "simply said to me, 'Good luck.' I'll never forget that. It was like, 'The handwriting is on the wall.' Everybody knew where this was going." The Social Security Administration declared him disabled. Dave's Social Security disability benefits have helped his family, but the money isn't enough for them to keep their house, Heidi says. She arises at around 5 every morning, teaches fitness classes at a gym until midday, then goes off to her second job as a merchandising representative. She generally works 50-hour weeks, then shops, makes dinner and looks after Dave. Dave is seldom allowed to cook anything because he might forget to turn something off. As Heidi puts it, "Dave is just here." No ethic counts more in football than a player's willingness to compete in pain while subjecting himself to on-field danger. Since the sport's inception, coaches from Knute Rockne to Mike Ditka have expected it; and players have prided themselves on exemplifying it. It's for good reason that many football men compare their sport not to another game but to war. "You're fighting in a battle, and then maybe you limp all woozy over to the sidelines and see a few guys really injured, and, man, it's like a triage unit in war," says Kyle Turley, an offensive lineman this past season for the Kansas City Chiefs. "You have to put it out of your mind and keep fighting. That's the way you're taught. That's part of what got us into these problems." NFL players have commonly grown up hearing stories of the game's legends persevering through serious injuries. The homilies carry a powerful message: A high pain threshold is to be emulated. Turley, a veteran of nine seasons in the NFL trenches, recalls being deeply moved by a story he heard about Jack Youngblood, the Hall of Fame Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman who limped off during a playoff game in 1979 with a fractured fibula. "He had a Rams trainer duct-tape a magazine or something around his broken leg and then he went back in," Turley remembers. "You believe that? The lesson is, 'You do whatever it takes to play . . . You get 116

hurt, you find a way.' There's no time for whirlpools or for healing up just right. You just suck it up and push through, and if you can't, you're out. There's a saying around locker rooms: 'No one has ever made the club from the tub.'" Since his youth, Turley has embraced the physical risks of his sport. "If you've made it to the NFL, you've seen talented teammates fall by the wayside in high school and college from injuries," he says. "It's sad. But that's kind of the beauty of the game. It's primitive -- there's no other sport like it. You're the gladiators. And when you're kind of an elite gladiator, the injuries you suffer are badges of honor -- until they really hurt you." Turley, who decided to retire in December, has suffered numerous concussions and already worries about his sudden bouts of forgetfulness. "I'm a little concerned about what's down the road for me," he says. His 32-year-old body is hurting more than ever. When looking at NFL retirees such as Pear, he thinks he might be glimpsing the ghost of his own future. "What has happened to Dave and other players is going to happen to a lot of players in my era," he says. "So we better start paying attention." It disturbs Turley that the NFL usually pays for health insurance for only five years after a player leaves the game. To show his commitment to the aggrieved retirees, he has donated $25,000 to Gridiron Greats and done a TV interview with Pear, whom he thanked on-air for his part in building the game for younger players. "I heard frustration in Dave's voice," he says. "Must be so hard on him, on all those guys . . . But to a man, if you asked those guys whether they'd play again, they'd say yes. It's what they dreamed about doing." At the peak of John Mackey's football career, his uniform number, 88, became famous in Baltimore. To his fans, perhaps his most memorable play came in 1971, when 88 caught a tipped pass from Johnny Unitas in Super Bowl V and streaked for a long touchdown, helping the Colts defeat the Dallas Cowboys. On a Sunday last November, the former All-Pro tight end walked haltingly down a short hallway and into the living room of his Baltimore condominium. Eighty-eight wore his Hall of Fame ring on his right hand and his Super Bowl ring on his left. He looked at his wife, Sylvia, and their two adult daughters, Laura and Lisa. The three women glanced up from a football game and smiled at him. Mackey sat beside them, then looked at a wall near the television and began talking. "One line on the right, one line on the left. Two lines on the right, two lines on the left." "He does that sometimes," Laura said. "Sometimes he counts squares in the bathroom." Mackey peered quizzically at the television screen. "Football," he said. A year ago, as his daughters remember, he glanced at the television to see a player in a Colts jersey with 88 on his back. He exclaimed, "Look at me." A few second later, he muttered, "That's not me. Who is that?" Mackey was diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia in 2001, at age 60. He and Sylvia were living in Los Angeles at the time, but Sylvia immediately decided to move him back to Baltimore. "I wanted him in a city where he was known, so that people could help him if he ever got lost during a wandering stage," she says. Her worst fear became a sudden reality. He strolled off at a Baltimore Ravens game. Panicked, Sylvia and her daughters searched the stadium without success before it occurred to Sylvia that in this hometown crowd he would probably receive help. Before leaving the stadium, she called their condo in the hope that he was there. John answered. Since John couldn't explain, Sylvia can only imagine that a longtime fan of his recognized him and drove him home. 117

By then, Sylvia was working as a flight attendant for United Airlines, both for the salary and to secure a health insurance plan for the Mackeys. But no insurance plan available to her could pay for the round-theclock home nursing care that her husband soon needed, and her husband's $2,450-per-month pension wouldn't offset such expenses, either. In 2006, Sylvia wrote a letter to then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, asking for help, explaining the toll of her husband's dementia on their family and emphasizing that she knew of other retired players in similar straits. Last year, her letter triggered the creation of the 88 Plan, funded by the union and the league, and named in honor of Mackey and his uniform number. As of late December, according to the players union, the applications of 80 retirees had been approved for benefits under the 88 Plan. For John's care at home, the Mackeys receive a $50,000 benefit annually, which is used to hire a 40-hour-per-week daytime nurse. Families with dementia victims who require care in a facility will receive $88,000 annually. But the 88 Plan does not provide benefits to retirees with less serious cognitive problems, such as Pear's. The six-man retirement board that has been the bane of Pear and other angry retirees will decide who receives the 88 Plan benefits. Former Colts safety Bruce Laird, a leader of the retiree group Fourth and Goal, sees the 88 Plan as only a first step toward addressing the needs of players with profound cognitive problems that fall short of dementia. At 57, he has his own health worries, after a 14-year professional career that ended in 1986. "I had dozens of concussions when I played -- four in one year alone -- and I kept going back in games," he says. He has been convinced by his own forgetfulness and by a pack of studies that -- though not unanimous in their conclusions -- suggest a link between long-term participation in football and an enhanced risk of dementia. A University of North Carolina study that assessed 2,552 retired players determined that the players who had incurred at least three concussions were more than three times as likely to suffer from significant memory problem than those with no history of concussions. "A lot of the retired players just keep suffering in silence," Laird says. "Some are too screwed up even to get out of bed. Sylvia fought and won. But it was Sylvia. Not the union." Sylvia Mackey doesn't particularly care about who gets the credit, just as long as the league and the union face up to what she sees as an inevitability. "People get hurt in this game," she says. "That's football." From his office on 20th Street NW, Gene Upshaw picked up a phone last year, looking for help. The volume of retired players' attacks against him had driven the football union chief to Washington power lawyer Lanny Davis, whose legal specialty is not labor relations or litigation but rather what Davis cheerfully terms "crisis management." When the wolves are baying at the door, Davis is a man to call. His experience at guiding clients through controversy dates back to his days as a legal counsel in the Clinton White House, where, during the greatest crisis of that presidency, he dispensed advice to allies on how to deal with a media corps voracious for information about Bill Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Davis can envision a possible way out of the public relations mess for the players union and the NFL, a solution that might, among other things, enable retirees in Pear's position to receive disability benefits from the league. Noting that, since last September, the players union Web site has stated that any retiree 118

receiving Social Security disability payments has effectively proved his medical eligibility for the league's total and permanent disability benefit, Davis says that Pear might deserve the league benefit, now worth more than $110,000 a year, despite being denied it in 1995. "It'd need to be thoroughly considered," he says. "Perhaps it can be done, if there is no black-and-white rule . . . I'd be curious about Gene's view." Upshaw's view is not Davis's view. Upshaw indicates that, for the moment, he is not malleable on the subject of retirees in Pear's situation. "He took his pension," Upshaw says, sitting in his office recently. "Pear can't undo his decision, and I can't undo it. I cannot just go around fixing his mistakes and other players' mistakes just so that they can get a benefit." Now and then, Upshaw walks into another room to fish out records with information about Pear, along with charts and statistics about the NFL's treatment of retired players. At 62, the robust union executive has a strong gait and is about 20 pounds leaner than during his 15-year playing career, when he played offensive guard at 255 pounds and was a nimble 6-foot-5 wrecking machine on his way to the Hall of Fame. He and Pear were Raiders teammates in 1979 and 1980. In 2006, Upshaw earned $6.7 million, including bonuses, from the union, which easily makes him the highest paid union leader in professional sports. But he contends that, if anything, he is "underpaid," given his accomplishments and responsibilities. He points out that the average player's salary was a relatively paltry $85,000 when his union work began in 1983. It has increased more than twenty fold since. He raps a conference table with his pen. "I am the only guy in the room saying to the [active] players that we need to think of people outside this room -- the retired players," he says. "The union doesn't have to do that, but it does it, and I do it. And [active] players pay for it . . . We can't do everything these [retired] guys want done for them. There are too many of them out there, and more guys would start coming to us. We'd go broke. Dave Pear, Dave Pear, Dave Pear. It isn't just Dave Pear. There are a lot of guys." What should somebody like Pear do? I ask. Upshaw neatly arranges his sheets of paper. "Once he took that pension that was it: He can't get a disability [benefit]. That's not only the rule of the retirement plan -it's the law." I ask if he's certain of that. "Yes," he answers. "It's not just the NFL; it's the law." But it's not the law, says the attorney Upshaw himself retained. Lanny Davis, in a separate interview, says the NFL could grant both a pension and a right to a disability payment. "It's discretionary," Davis says, "which is the way it is with most corporations. [That's] my understanding from talking to [union attorneys]. The point that I think is more important to Gene is that everyone in the league and [union] is open right now to thinking how to help these guys." Davis seems to want to play peacemaker, but Upshaw remains furious over the retired players' criticism of him. He pulls out pages from union files that show the specifics of the charitable donations made on behalf of the Pear family by the Players Assistance Trust. "Dave Pear says we haven't helped him and

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other players," he says. "We're gonna be paying out another million or so in '07 to retirees. And take a look at this sheet." The PAT made several mortgage payments in 2006 of roughly $2,000 a month for Pear and, at times, took care of his energy and water bills. In total, the PAT provided $20,046 in charitable support that year to Pear, before halting the payments in 2007; Upshaw explained that the union wished to alternate in helping players. "Does Pear or anybody else ever say thanks for the help?" he demands. "I can't believe he expects me to be thankful," Pear says. "I wouldn't have needed a dime of that money if they'd just paid me what I deserve in the first place . . . I know I'm not the only one out there. I ache for all these families of players in my shoes. When somebody gets a little help, I cheer. It's just that it's coming so slowly. Most of us probably will be dead before it happens." While Heidi prepares dinner, Dave Pear digs his cane into the floor and moves toward their bedroom. He has just thought of something he wants to give to their 24-year-old son, Adam, and their 20-year-old daughter, Alexandra. The items are a reminder of all that went wrong for him -- though, in their hands, who knows? Maybe they can hawk them and make a nice piece of change, he says. He pulls his secrets out of an envelope and hoists them the way a precious metals salesman would show off gold ingots. "Two tickets to Super Bowl XV," he says. "We all got tickets. I completely forgot about selling these two." He grins. "I'll let the kids sell them or do whatever with them. Bet those memorabilia collectors would like them, huh? I got a lot of memorabilia that can go to the kids one day." He reaches into his closet and pulls out a white Raiders road jersey with the black numeral 74 on it. It is his Super Bowl jersey. Never been laundered, he says proudly. He rests the jersey on the bed. A surprise catches him then, a bolt of pain shooting up the back. He winces and takes another pill. He lies on his bed, closes his eyes and drapes the jersey over himself, a makeshift blanket. He just needs a couple of moments, he says. "Hope the kids will like the tickets," he says. "It's the Super Bowl. Everybody likes the Super Bowl." Michael Leahy is a Magazine staff writer. He can be reached at [email protected]. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

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What the Independent Retired NFL Players Want By Bernie Parrish It was reported that the NFL owners‘ lobbyist, Covington & Burling, has been paid $655,000 from the June 26 hearings until Dec 31, 2007 and another $900,000 (approx.) since then to lobby against retired player pension and disability issues. Rumor has it that Covington & Burling‘s lobbyists have promised Congressional staffers future jobs with Covington & Burling if they will sabotage the retired player‘s pension and disability issues behind the committee scenes. I understand you folks (the Congressional Committee staffers) are asking ―around‖ again about what the retired NFL players want including justice. Here is what we want (it‘s virtually the same as what we wanted two months ago!): 1A: Retired players do not want to be represented in any way by Gene Upshaw‘s replacement or the NFLPA. Upshaw stated it is illegal for the NFLPA to represent retired players in collective bargaining and then continually violated the ―law‖ he cited by representing retired players to their detriment. Denying retired and disabled players has been a mission of the NFLPA under its current leadership. We want to see NFLPA officers and Executive Committee members and the NFL owners prosecuted by the Dept. of Labor and Dept. of Justice for violating the labor law that Upshaw and the owners have flaunted while making their collective phony ―best effort‖ benefit increase of $1.63 per day pension increase. Empowered in his dictatorial role by the owners‘ promotion of the scam - a clear RICO violation by the way - that included giving Upshaw a $10,000 per day increase in compensation. NFL Commissioner Tagliabue and owner Robert Kraft called it a ―partnership.‖ So that there‘s no misunderstanding, the retired players simply want nothing to do with Upshaw‟s replacement or the NFLPA or their “partnership.” What we do want and intend to obtain by whatever means it takes: 1) Adjust the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan to match Major League Baseball‘s retirement plan. [In addition fixing the benefits of the 350 players, who - on the bad and misleading advice about Social Security from the NFLPA - took their pensions early.] 2) Completely re-write the disability plan using the input of retired players and attorneys Bob Fitzsimmons, John Hogan, Mercury Morris, Brent Boyd, and others who have dealt with the duplicity the Groom Law Group has written into the currently corrupted plan. Our industry is unique, having unique problems and the solutions should meet those unique problems; especially those that deal with the injuries sustained by the players who play the game that extend into the problems those injuries cause throughout player‘s lives. 3) Establish a means for the retired players to protect their interests and control their own Retirement Plan now and in the future so future corrupt union leaders cannot exploit the active players‘ and retired players‘ divergent interests. One easy option is to give the retired players a vote in the union (which gives active players a vote for life in the union) both on a one-man-one-vote basis. A unique industry must have unique solutions. Another, even better solution is to form and operate an independent retired players “organization” without any ties or involvement with the NFLPA or its leadership or the active players. 4) A GAO audit of the retirement plan finances and operations, as well as the union‘s financial operations, the operation of the league office and all its multitude of legal entities, and especially Players Inc. And a 121

GAO audit that shows the true income and the true percentages of the benefits and compensation that goes to the active players, the retired players and the owners. This is needed for several reasons including the establishment of a baseline from which to operate in the future. There have been NO audits of the NFL owner‘s corporations and the alleged 60% players‘ share is closer to 35%. The current players don‘t have a clue; none of them could read an audit or a balance sheet if they had one put in front of them. 5) Award the retired player‘s retribution in retirement benefits and disability benefits owed them as a result of the leadership of the NFLPA acting in collusion with the NFL office and owners. Sever all ties between retired players and the active players and their union, as well as give the retired players control over their own Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan which currently owns the disability plan. We want no relationship whatsoever with Groom Law Group or any of those who have administered any part of the fiasco of a retirement or disability plan in the past. Retired players were far better off before NFLPA‘s Gene Upshaw arrogantly broke the law, after citing it, recognizing it and then unilaterally representing retired players in collective bargaining when nobody asked or wanted him to (except the owners). This is our plan and we must administer it. The Player Reps have consistently shown they are inept, totally unqualified and have no real interest in the retired players or their welfare. 6) The owners opting out of the CBA means nothing to correcting these problems because any solutions and/or changes that involve the CBA - if Congress chooses to use the CBA - can then be made using the NFLPA‘s infamous ―side letter‖ agreements. But the changes should be legislated and need not have anything to do with the CBA since it‘s always been illegal to collectively bargain for retired players to begin with. 7) A sports Commission (3 man) or Commissioner who answers to a Congressional Subcommittee for at least five years - then moved to the jurisdiction of the Dept. of Labor - should oversee the Retired and Current players organizations, including league antitrust abuses by NFL franchise owners of the players and the public of everything from employment to stadium construction, TV contracts and franchise location issues and illegal gambling (a yearly $80 billion to $380 billion bookmaking industry) promoted surreptitiously by the league office and NFL/Covington & Burling lobbyists.

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They're lining up on his side Football has been hard on Willie Wood, the former USC and Packer great. But as he battles severe disability, players of his era rally to him. By Greg Johnson Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 17, 2007 WASHINGTON - The body that made open-field tackles on legendary running back Jim Brown now struggles to get out of bed. The sure hands that snared 48 interceptions during a 12-year career fumble a Styrofoam cup. The sharp mind that got him into the NFL Hall of Fame now tricks him into believing that he is back in training camp for another season with Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers. Willie Wood, 70, is paying the steep price for being a football hero. Two knees and one hip have been replaced. Doctors have performed four major surgeries on his back and fused two vertebrae in his neck. And last year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. "He used to go down low and really hit the big guys to take them down," said Willie Davis, a defensive end from Grambling who played alongside Wood in the Packer heyday of the 1960s. "It was probably very tough on his body. He has almost every element you'd expect from football injuries." Yet Wood isn't facing his uncertain future alone. A posse of aging NFL and college teammates is using its financial resources, business savvy and, when possible, their fading football celebrity to ensure that their friend, who came dangerously close to losing his longtime home, isn't stripped of his dignity. "You don't plan these things," Bob Schmidt said when asked why he signed on early this year as legal guardian for a guy he played football with at USC nearly 50 years ago. "You just do what you have to do." Schmidt, 68, already had plenty to do, what with starting up a new telecommunications company and his family obligations -- he has 11 children, four of them adopted, and eight grandchildren. "The whole concept of team camaraderie is something that anyone who has been on a team treasures," Schmidt explained. "And the issue is basically taking care of people, who, for whatever reasons, have not succeeded as they wanted after football." Wood's band of brothers is typical of players from his generation, said Jennifer Smith, executive director of the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund, which helps retired players cope with medical and financial crises. "It's a brotherhood in its simplest form," Smithsaid. "It freaks you out at first to hear these big guys saying 'I love you,' and to see them hugging each other. But it's just genuinely that simple. It speaks to a generation of players from a different era." The dominant free safety of his era, Wood is now recovering from a fall and subsequent surgery at an assisted living facility. He desperately wants to return to his home in the nation's capital, but it is questionable whether his battered body and brain will grow strong enough to make that three-mile trip. 123

With frustrating frequency, Wood has begun to initiate conversations that lead nowhere. Schmidt tells of one recent episode: "He asked me, 'Bob, where am I?' He said that, for a minute, he thought he was at St. Norbert College, in northern Wisconsin, where the Packers practiced. I told him that we're in Washington, D.C., on Thomas Circle. And, after a while, he said, 'Oh, OK.' " In the fall of 1957, William Vernell Wood became one of the first to break the color barrier at quarterback in what is now the Pacific 10 Conference. In 1959, Schmidt -- a transfer from Notre Dame who had become homesick for California -- was ready to wrest the job from Wood. It was no contest. Wood easily won the USC quarterback derby, but also won an enduring friendship. Besides Schmidt, Wood's posse now includes Brown and fellow football greats Calvin Hill, Sam Huff and Paul Hornung, all of whom attended a dinner last year that raised about $50,000 to help Wood pay down his considerable debt. One former teammate dashed off a $5,000 check. Another, Herb Adderley, Wood's Packers roommate for nine years, got Wood to autograph some football memorabilia last month and then sold the items, raising $3,000 in what he called "pocket money" for his longtime friend. A football charity founded by Mike Ditka -- the Chicago Bears' great who squared off against Wood on the football field -- also has contributed financial support, and Gridiron Greats, which former Packers star Jerry Kramer founded, helped Wood to qualify for $50,000 a year from the 88 Fund, an NFL program that provides financial assistance for players who've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia. The issue of pro football old-timers who are struggling to survive has drawn significant attention over the past year, including several congressional hearings. This, in turn, led the National Football League and the NFL Players Assn. to establish a $7-million program to assist those who face medical and financial problems. Yet some former players -- including members of Wood's posse -- say it isn't enough. Three times in the past year, irate NFL veterans have testified before Congress about alleged shortcomings in the league's retirement and medical disability program. Adderley and other former players have sued their former union, alleging improper financial dealings. Kramer and Ditka have been vocal in their demands for a more-responsive medical disability plan. Players association Executive Director Gene Upshaw last month countered the criticism with a website that bills itself as a "truth squad" that will "do its best to debunk" what the union characterized as "serious misstatements of fact" by many of those former players. Schmidt said that the relatively small percentage of aging former players who are receiving medical disability benefits "screams that something is wrong. I think we're going to see this issue getting to a lot better focus during the coming months." Meanwhile, he is trying to ensure that Wood gets what he needs. "Willie is still the most gentle, wonderful human being you'd ever want to meet," Schmidt said. "Willie is [still] the fun-loving guy. . . Everyone loves Willie." That wasn't always the case when Wood was helping break the color barrier. After playing quarterback for an all-black high school in Washington, he came to California in 1956, having been recruited by Coalinga Junior College (now West Hills Community College) in the San 124

Joaquin Valley. He led them to a 7-2-1 record. The youngest of Wood's three children, Willie Wood Jr., 39, remembers what his father said of his Coalinga reception: "As a black man, he was told that he wasn't allowed to eat in restaurants or even go to stores on their Main Street." Yet, after that successful season, the junior college "held a parade for him down that same street," the younger Wood said. A year later, Wood transferred to USC and began taking snaps, a development that upset some students and alumni, according to Ron Mix, who played on the Trojans' offensive line. Wood and Mix were elected co-captains during their senior year, an unlikely development at a time when "99% of the fraternities on campus would not allow either of us to become members," said Mix, who is a Jew. Trojan teammates "judged us only as individuals," Mix said, but the response elsewhere occasionally was chilling -- such as the time a mailman delivered a hefty parcel filled with anti-Semitic and anti-black brochures. "The material contained cartoons depicting stereotypes of Jews and blacks going after white women, Jews counting money, blacks stealing," Mix said. "I never showed it to Willie." On another occasion, Wood was excluded when a prominent USC alumnus invited several Trojans to dinner. The alumnus "said that Willie had not been invited because the club did not allow blacks as members or guests," said Mix, who went on to play for the San Diego Chargers and, like Wood, is in the Hall of Fame. "I told the man that I would not go. Sadly, our teammates went anyway. I called Willie and we had dinner together at the hotel." Former Packer teammate Davis said that Wood's reaction to the racism mirrored his own response. "You realize that football is your first reason for being there," Davis said. "And you considered everything else a bit secondary. Did I have a few situations that upset me? Yes. But that's when you have to say to yourself 'Why am I here?' " Schmidt said he has "never heard Willie utter sour grapes about anything. Even now, with all that has happened, Willie never utters a cross word." Wood also played defense at USC. During his senior year, in addition to running the offense, Wood intercepted five passes, made four unassisted tackles, assisted in eight others and fielded three punts. Yet Wood was ignored by every pro team in the 1960 player draft. Undeterred, he wrote letters to head coaches seeking permission to try out as a free agent. "Vince Lombardi was about the only one who gave him a shot," said Adderley. Wood's pro football debut came in Baltimore during the Packers' first exhibition game of the 1960 season. Lombardi played him at right cornerback and Colts receiver Raymond Berry "took him to school all night," Adderley said. So much so that Wood feared Lombardi would cut him right there in Baltimore in order to save the airfare back to Green Bay, Adderley said with a laugh. 125

Instead, Lombardi put Wood at free safety. Wood thrived at the new position, often altering the flow of a game simply by appearing in the right place at exactly the right time -- he had an interception in Super Bowl I against the Kansas City Chiefs that he returned 50 yards to the five-yard line. "Willie didn't have a lot of speed, but he had the intuition," Adderley said. "He knew to get to a certain spot on the field because he had studied what to do." Wood's fierce competitive nature on the field extended to his teammates. Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Nitschke, no shrinking violet, once sheepishly admitted that, "next to Lombardi, Wood scares his own teammates more than anybody else does." "There was never a tree too big for Willie to chop down," Davis said. "Some of the duels between him and Mike Ditka. . . I still recall the animosity that sometimes arose between the two of them." Said Adderley: "He had to scuffle all of his life. That neighborhood he came from in D.C., he had to struggle to get out of high school and get to USC." After his playing career ended in 1971, Wood became a regular at charitable events in Washington and also started his own mechanical services business. In 1980 Wood became the first black coach in the Canadian Football League and later led the WFL's Philadelphia Bell. He yearned for an NFL coaching job but he never made it back to the league he helped to make great. Meanwhile, his first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife died in the late 1980s. A while later, Wood's business began to slump; then his body began to pay the price for his hard-hitting style. "He decided he wasn't going to work anymore, but at that point, his health concerns started to happen," the younger Wood said. "He was going to shove off into his golden years, and play golf, but he couldn't play anymore." Wood never stopped doing what he could do for others, his son said: "People never got the feeling that they were imposing on him. At the same time, he wasn't the kind of guy you would try to take advantage of. He was very secure in his own skin. He had a 'submarine' type of presence, if that makes sense, in that he commanded respect without having to say or do anything." All of which makes it hard for friends and family to watch Wood's current struggle. During the September autograph session, Adderley said, "There were times that he forgot how to spell his name, and had to be told. . . after signing about 10 items, he had to take a break, and he would fall asleep in between signing." Adderley returned the next weekend, when Wood was able to sign about 75 items, but said "it was more of a struggle before he had to stop." Wood's large circle of friends includes USC Coach Pete Carroll, who heard about Wood's defensive prowess and athleticism from former Minnesota Vikings head coach Jerry Burns, who was the secondary coach for the Packers when Wood played. "Burnsie told me Willie Wood had the best hands he ever saw, so good, he could catch kickoffs like this," Carroll said, extending one arm to simulate catching a ball with one hand. "So I used to practice doing it so I could do it like Willie Wood." 126

When USC traveled to Landover, Md., to play Virginia Tech three years ago, Carroll made time just before the kickoff to chat with Wood, who was attending the game with Schmidt and other USC alumni. Burns "always talked about what a great guy he was and how cool he was and a great player and a great kid," Carroll said. "So when I had a chance to meet him I went out of my way to." Wood's posse has been able to keep financial problems at bay. "A lot of people have rallied around Willie," Schmidt said. "Unless we're [hit] with some extremely difficult circumstances, Willie is going to be OK financially." Yet former Packer Davis, another member of the Hall of Fame, knows Wood's struggle is now more than financial. "Almost everything about Willie's situation today is difficult for me," he said. "It's heartbreaking. . . Willie, to this day, is a very independent guy. He would probably be the last one to ask for something. And yet he would give you anything that he could afford to give. "To see him suffer is very devastating to me." Kramer knows the Willie Wood he hung out with all these years is slowly disappearing. Kramer won't let go of the memories of Wood, who enjoyed returning to Green Bay long after his playing days, and in particular, hanging out at former Packer Fred "Fuzzy" Thurston's downtown watering hole. Wood's habit, Kramer said, was to commandeer a table and share a bottle of his favorite California chardonnay with friends. And, if the mood hit, he'd sing along with Ella Fitzgerald on the juke box. "Willie is a soft, gentle, polite, nice, caring person to be around," said Kramer, who enjoyed his share of such mellow nights at Fuzzy's No. 63 Bar & Grill. A few months ago, Kramer and Smith, the Gridiron Greats executive, visited Wood at the assisted living facility. Smith smuggled in a bottle of Wood's favorite wine, a CD player and a few jazz discs. "The wine brought a smile to Willie's face," Smith said. "Jerry and I opened the bottle, popped in the jazz CD and sat by his bedside drinking wine with Willie. Jerry tried to jar Willie's memory about some old times." Wood struggled to track the conversation and needed help to get out of bed but made one thing clear. Said Smith, "He wanted so desperately to go home." [email protected] Times staff writer Gary Klein contributed to this report.

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