Brian's song still heard by present, past generations

BY GREG COTE
MIAMI HERALD

At Wake Forest University around 1964, a student better known for his football prowess showed his softer side in campus theater productions. He was recalled later as having been moved nearly to tears by a reading of the 19th century English poet, William Wordsworth, titled, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.

Barely beyond a child himself, the young man on stage could not have known then that he had only a handful of years yet to live. Or that his own immortality would follow.

This is a story about Brian Piccolo.

For most of us the name resonates, to this day, as the subject of Brian's Song, the wrenching TV movie from 1971 that told a tragic but uplifting story -- his story. It was the tale of a courageous Chicago Bears running back who succumbed to cancer at age 26, and who left such an imprint that a school in Chicago is named for him, and the Bears retired his number.

Piccolo was ours before that, of course, raised in Fort Lauderdale and a sports hero at St. Thomas Aquinas High (then Central Catholic), where today the school's football stadium is named for him, as is a popular Broward County park. The school band plays the theme from Brian's Song at every home game.

In between, though, he was Wake Forest's. On that campus in Winston-Salem, N.C., he still is.

Wake Forest is where Piccolo parlayed what he'd learned on local fields to make it, against the odds, and too briefly, in the NFL. It was at Wake Forest that he led the nation in rushing as a senior and became Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year, and where he grew to become an enduring campus legend.

Now it is Piccolo whose name floats like an angel above this Tuesday's Orange Bowl Classic vs. Louisville, as his college alma mater prepares to play in its biggest football game ever, just minutes from where its former star grew up.

"We're awfully proud of Brian Piccolo," Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe said this week, alluding to the many lean years when the memory of the man was the main thing WFU fans could be proud of. "He's been great for our program as far as recruiting and tradition."

INSPIRED STUDENTS

The Brian Piccolo Cancer Fund Drive still thrives as the premier charitable event every year at Wake Forest, remarkable because it is student-initiated and run, sustained now by a generation of kids born many, many years after Piccolo's death in 1970.

The fund has generated some $750,000 in its 26 years, at the grass-roots level, from the likes of bake sales, not corporate coffers, with every penny going for cancer treatment and research at the university's Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Millions more for cancer research have been raised in Piccolo's name through a fund established by the Bears and through annual donations by the NFL, partly through player fines. But the campus donations are what strike you. These aren't big checks written for tax write-offs. These are dollars and dimes fished from students' pockets and hearts.

The first check, in 1980, was for a modest $3,500. Now the annual checks top $50,000, presented during halftime of an ACC basketball game on campus. Fraternities, sororities and other campus groups join forces throughout the fall to stage fund-raising golf tournaments, dance-a-thons, silent auctions and so forth. This year, fundraisers included a football team strength contest called "Pump Up for Piccolo," a walk-a-thon called "Hit the Bricks for Brian," and a showing of Brian's Song, of course.

A campus residence hall bears Piccolo's name, and all incoming freshmen are shown Brian's Song.

"It's a live presence," Wake Forest administrator Kevin Cox says of Piccolo. "He's still a strong figure on campus."

FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP

Piccolo had been undrafted by the pros despite his Wake Forest stardom (too small, they said; too slow), then was signed by the Bears as a free agent -- and thoroughly overshadowed by young superstar Gale Sayers. But it was his friendship with Sayers that would become the basis of the movie. The two, in 1967, had become the first white and black teammates in the NFL to room together on road trips.

A year later, Sayers suffered a serious, career-threatening knee injury, and Piccolo nursed his spirits through the long rehabilitation.

A year after that, they discovered the tumor in Piccolo's chest. There was nothing Sayers could do.

It began in November 1969 with a cough that wouldn't go away.

A sudden onset of embryonal cell carcinoma, rare and then almost always fatal, was attacking Piccolo, and it would not stop.

Even near the end, though, the sense of humor had not left the man.

Once, at a speaking engagement following his initial surgery, Piccolo brought along a friend who happened to work in the funeral business -- and delighted to tell his audience that, while star athletes traveled with lawyers and agents, he brought along his personal undertaker.

Bears owner Ed McCaskey visited days before he died, but it was Piccolo consoling McCaskey, saying: "Don't worry, Big Ed. I'm not afraid of anything. Only [Packers linebacker Ray] Nitschke."

In May 1970 Sayers gave a speech in acceptance of an NFL courage award given to him for battling back from that knee injury. His friend Brian was near death.

'I LOVE BRIAN PICCOLO'

"I love Brian Piccolo, and I'd like all of you to love him," Sayers said that night. "And when you hit your knees to pray tonight, please ask God to love him too."

Sayers accepted the award in Piccolo's name, saying, "Compare his courage with what I am supposed to possess." He taped his friend's name over his own on the trophy.

The open-hearted absence of prejudice that fostered the friendship with Sayers was something that friends at Wake Forest had observed years earlier.

Ross Griffith, then a tennis player, classmate and friend, recalls that when Wake Forest was between head coaches following the 1963 season, Piccolo had taken it upon himself to help recruit black players. Griffith recalls that Piccolo inviting local black high school athletes to visit campus led directly to three entering in the fall of '64 -- and making Wake Forest only the second racially integrated football team (after Maryland) in the ACC.

The Piccolo legacy embraced with equal pride in Chicago, in Winston-Salem and in Fort Lauderdale glows and grows too in the loved ones he left behind: In Joy Piccolo O'Connell, his widow, a nurse; in three now-grown daughters and eight grandchildren; in his mother, now 97, and in two older brothers.

CONSTANT REMINDERS

"Each day, every single day, something happens," Piccolo's former wife said Thursday of his legacy and the funds it generates for cancer research. "The tributes have been incredible, and it continues. The money raised in his name is unbelievable. We never dreamed it would have gone on this long -- never, ever. We have a young man who donates $41 every year in the name of his brother. We have children who have a lemonade stand and send us $12. Brian was a good person. He cared about people. He couldn't do enough for people. I think it comes back to you."

Joy Piccolo O'Connell told a story she hadn't told before. Her young husband had a receding hairline, was growing bald prematurely and it drove him crazy. He wore a toupee for a while, once to visit a seriously ill child in a hospital -- a child whose own hair was lost to chemotherapy.

"After that, he threw the toupee in the garbage,'' Joy said. 'He said `How could I be so vain?'"

Traci Piccolo Dolby, 39, their middle daughter, was a toddler when her father died. Her memory of him is a warm quilt of others' recollections.

"His personality was such that he drew people to him. He considered you a friend because of who you were, not what you looked like," says Dolby. "Nobody ever thought my dad was good enough to do anything he accomplished. He was the consummate underdog. So many of us can relate to that and are inspired by it."

'IT MAKES ME SO PROUD'

Traci, who also is a Wake Forest grad, spoke Thursday from the den of her home north of Chicago, a framed No. 41 Bears jersey on the wall, the trophy Sayers accepted in his name on the mantle, her young father frozen in black and white in a photo on the desk.

"People only have the most wonderful things to say about him. It makes me so proud, and at the same time a little envious," Traci says. "You can feel like you were cheated. I do have those woe-is-me moments, typically like at Christmas time. I look at my kids, especially my boys, and think how neat it would be to have his influence in their lives. But my mom says there was a reason, and to look at everything we've been able to accomplish in his memory. He lives on through so many people and things. He's all around us."

Traci goes to Bears games and sees a few No. 41 jerseys among the myriad ones bearing the names of Payton and Sayers, Urlacher and Butkus. She always makes a point to walk up to the person and say, "Nice jersey." She always walks away smiling.

This Christmas she received a card from an old family friend who wrote on it, "You remind me so much of your Dad." She cried.

"It was almost like having a little bit of his approval," she said.

What was it about this man that made him so magnetic? Wasn't he just a football player who had a modest NFL career (927 yards rushing in four seasons) before happening to die of cancer? Certainly his relationship with Sayers that spawned the TV movie is a part of the answer.

But there must be more.

Go back, then, to his early childhood, in search of intimations of immortality.

Speak to the people who knew him before Chicago did, and before Wake Forest did. Speak to friends from the Fort Lauderdale days. Folks who remember the deli roast beef specials from the long-disappeared Piccolo's Sandwich Shop near the corner of Broward and Andrews.

When you know the boy before the man, when you know the man before the fame -- then you know somebody.

Dan Arnold, a dentist in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, was Piccolo's teammate at Central Catholic, the last year before it became St. Thomas. He remembers Brian's 1957 Chevy, a glinting metallic green, and "how happy I was just to be ridin' around with him." He remembers a kid "who was friendly to people who weren't the stars, or the handsomest, or the smartest. He was just nice to everybody."

Arnold saw Piccolo's artistic side.

"He was gonna be Frank Sinatra. I'd go over to his house and he'd always have Sinatra or maybe a Ray Charles record on. He'd like to be a performer. He ended up performing on a football field."

His friends have spent years pondering Piccolo's lasting fame. Why it happened.

"The timing of the black and white issue in America, the Bears putting Gale and Brian together," says Arnold. "But also it was Brian finally getting to the pinnacle he was striving for, and having it jerked away from him. It's such a classic tragedy. It will last forever."

Bill Slater may have been Piccolo's best buddy growing up in Fort Lauderdale. They knew each other since first grade at St. Anthony's. Played ball together in high school and at Wake Forest. Bill was there when Brian met future wife Joy in the ninth grade. They would ride motorcycles together, back when you could, legally, at age 14.

'HELL OF A PERSON'

Slater recalls that Piccolo never was a running back until his senior year in high school, and even then he was overshadowed by South Broward's Tucker Fredrickson across town. People didn't like Piccolo because he was a football star; they liked him because he never acted like he was.

"Brian was a nice athlete but a hell of a person," says Slater, now of Wilmington, N.C. "That's what people remember. There were cliques then, but Pic didn't care if you were popular or not, dressed nice or not. You'd ask, 'Why are you running around with so and so?' He'd look at you like you were dumb. It didn't resonate with him. He just never got too enamored with himself. His success in football was far outweighed
by the person he was. He always had a pat on the back for you, and a smile. He didn't have any bad days."

Slater remembers watching Brian's Song on TV.

"I could never watch it again," he says.

Intimations of immortality do not begin with talent or fame. Sometimes they are first seen in one's smile or in a simple kindness we can never forget.

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Twenty Years After National Title, Teammates Rally Around Smith

WOODWARD, Pa. (AP) - Twenty years after Steve Smith helped Penn State win the 1986 national title, the former fullback is fighting for his life.

Smith's body is failing him, ravaged by Lou Gehrig's disease. Former college teammates are coming together to help the former Nittany Lions captain, who went on to play for the Oakland Raiders.

''You talk to Marcus Allen, you talk to Bo Jackson, or any running back that had him as a fullback, you never had to worry,'' former Penn State teammate D.J. Dozier said. ''This man had his block. Whatever he needed to do, he was going to get it done.''

Smith was one of four captains on the 1986 team - the last squad to win coach Joe Paterno a national championship. College buddies use words such as ''team player'' and ''led by example'' to describe his style.

That's why the three other captains from that squad - quarterback John Shaffer, linebacker and Frewsburg native Shane Conlan and defensive lineman Bob White - traveled to a lodge in rural Woodward one recent morning to sign a lithograph depicting a scene from the tense 14-10 win over Miami in the Fiesta Bowl that secured Penn State's 1986 title.

Dozier, who ran behind Smith's blocks, organized the effort. He says a portion of the profits will go to Smith's family to help pay medical bills.

''He was a hard, hard worker,'' Shaffer said of Smith. ''He was unbelievably talented, able to do whatever needed to help the team win.''

Now Smith needs help to take care of his most basic needs.

Lou Gehrig's disease is a degenerative nerve disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, which gradually destroys the ability to control movement. Typically, patients lose their ability to move or speak, but their minds remain unaffected.

According to the federal National Institutes of Health, most ALS patients die from respiratory failure within 5 years of the onset of symptoms, though about 10 percent of ALS patients survive 10 years or more.

Reliant on a ventilator, Smith cannot talk. He has been fed formula through a feeding tube since May. He can't leave home, given all the medical machinery.

''Despite the situation, he's holding steady,'' said his wife, Chie Smith, who was reached at the couple's home in Richardson, Texas.

''His spirits are much better than his body is,'' she said.

Smith pounded away at opposing defenses while at Penn State from 1983-86, running for 1,246 yards and 11 touchdowns. Fullbacks back then ran the ball more often than in today's multiple receiver-focused offenses.

''It was a great tandem on the field,'' Dozier said.

Pro scouts noticed. The Raiders drafted him in the third round of the 1987 draft and he spent much of his time in silver and black blocking for the talented tailback tandem of Allen and Jackson.

Chie, then an Oakland Raiders cheerleader, noticed Steve, too. They fell in love and got married on Dec. 8, 1989.

Smith moved to Seattle in 1994, where he played two seasons for the Seahawks before a back injury cut short his career, and he retired in the summer of 1996.

His forte was blocking, though Smith ended his NFL career with 1,627 yards and nine touchdowns on 429 carries. He also caught 131 passes for 1,250 yards and 13 touchdowns.

''It was always fun going up against him,'' said Conlan, a Penn State linebacker who played for the Buffalo Bills. ''He was always trying to get better.''

Smith's first diagnosis came in July 2002. A second opinion a month later, and a finally a third opinion -- on Sept. 11, 2002 -- confirmed their initial fears: He had Lou Gehrig's disease.

Weighing 260 pounds at the time of his initial ALS diagnosis, Smith had lost 100 pounds by this past May. Chie Smith said there was concern her husband wasn't getting enough nutrition, so he was put on a feeding tube, from which most of his nutrition now comes. That has helped, and
Smith has regained 15 pounds.

His days are spent on a recliner or on a hospital bed at the house.

''Pretty much, the word would be he is 'paralyzed' from illness,'' Chie Smith said.

Smith's wife cares for him full time. There are also two teenage children to raise -- 16-year-old Dante and 15-year-old Jazmin -- and ALS groups have said it takes as much as $250,000 a year to care for a patient.

Dozier, a partner in the Cambridge Sports marketing company he helped start in March, was approached by others at the firm to take part in a project to create artwork to remember the 1986 season. He soon got to thinking the venture could help Smith. A percentage of profits from the $399 lithographs will go to the former fullback.

One thing hasn't changed - Smith's smile. Chie is sure her husband's mind is alive and well, even if he cannot speak. He still follows Penn State football.

''He watches them all,'' Chie Smith said. ''I can usually just tell from his expressions, watching him enjoying the game.''

http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/16338279.htm

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Former Steeler’s Family Wins Disability Ruling

By DAMON HACK
New York Times
Published: December 14, 2006

The final years of Mike Webster’s life were spent shuttling between flickers of clarity and binges into dark places, between homelessness, lawsuits and loose strands of stability. Webster, the Hall of Fame center with the Pittsburgh Steelers who retired in 1991, often had to be told by his son Garrett when to eat and when to shower, Webster’s mind having become so clouded after 17 seasons at the nexus of conflict on an offensive line.

Seven years after Webster filed a disability claim with the National Football League, his family won a federal appeals court ruling yesterday against the league’s pension plan, which had denied Webster an active football disability pension and paid him a lesser benefit.

In a 3-0 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a 2005 trial court ruling that Webster was totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling will result in an award of $1.5 million to $2 million to Webster’s four children and former wife.

Webster, who won four Super Bowls with the Steelers and also played for the Kansas City Chiefs, died of a heart attack in 2002 at age 50.

“It seemed like we battled everyone — the N.F.L., even the players’ union, which should be the first ones to support our case,” Garrett Webster, 22, said yesterday in a telephone interview. “There is a sadness that my dad’s not here to celebrate this, but there is also a happiness that other people’s voices can be heard, not just N.F.L. players but regular people with brain injuries, construction workers, police officers, firefighters, so when things happen to them, people can recognize the signs of a brain injury.”

Bob Fitzsimmons, the lawyer who filed the disability claim on Webster’s behalf and served as co-counsel, said: “This was Mike Webster’s personal battle that he would not give up on, and he was right. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the end, but I’m most happy for him and I’m sure he’s appreciating the victory.”

According to the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle N.F.L. player retirement plan and supplemental disability plan, which are jointly administered by a pension board of three team executives and three representatives of the N.F.L. Players Association, retired players receive benefits based on years of service and the timing of injuries.

After Webster retired and filed his disability claim for his head injuries, the league gave him a disability plan for players who develop injuries six months after they retire, which falls under a degenerative disability plan.

The Webster estate moved to reclassify his disability as occurring at his retirement, which would place him in a more lucrative active disability plan. Fitzsimmons said the active disability plan paid roughly twice what the degenerative disability plan paid.

“We hired several physicians and they all said Mike had been disabled since March of 1991,” Fitzsimmons said. “Despite all of that evidence, the pension board said no. Just because Mike showed up at a few autograph signings, people would say, ‘He isn’t injured, he was engaged in gainful employment.’ ”

The court ruling came at the expense of the six-member N.F.L. pension board, which had voted, 6-0, to keep Webster at the degenerative disability plan.

“All six trustees of the plan saw it differently,” an N.F.L. spokesman said of the court ruling. “The judges decided to overrule their unanimous decision.”

Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the players association, said if the six-member board was presented with a similar situation with another retired player, it would follow the same course of action it took with Webster.

“These benefits have no face,” Upshaw said in a telephone interview. “The trustees must follow what the plan said and it’s very seldom that there is disagreement on this. We all feel badly for what happened to Mike Webster, but, obviously there are a lot of players who go through similar circumstances. But you don’t just award a benefit to someone going through a tough time. That’s not how it works. He wasn’t denied benefits. It was the question of when those benefits should have started. We took one position, they took another, and the courts told us their position.”

Garrett Webster said he was too young to remember many details from his father’s games, but he does recall going into the Steelers’ locker room and meeting various players. More fresh are the memories of the years he helped try to get his father on his feet when football was over.

“Normally it’s the parent waking up the son to go to school,” Garrett Webster said. “With us, it was me waking him up to tell him to take me to school. There were times it did get to be too much for me, but there is no way I would trade what I went through. I loved the moments when we sat in a car and shared a pizza or sat in an apartment with no furniture and watched a movie because we didn’t have anything else to do. Those memories made me grow up faster, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

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NFL Hall of Famer Mike Webster's Estate Wins Benefits Ruling

By Cary O'Reilly

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The National Football League's retirement plan wrongfully denied disability benefits to the late Hall-of-Fame center Mike Webster and must pay his estate, a federal appeals court said, upholding a lower court ruling.

Webster, who anchored the Pittsburgh Steelers' offensive line from 1974 to 1988 as the team won four Super Bowl championships, died in 2002 at the age of 50. He suffered brain damage from head injuries sustained during his 17-year career and was homeless during some of the 1990s, sleeping in his car and at a Pittsburgh bus station, according to court papers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, on Dec. 13 affirmed a Baltimore federal judge's 2005 ruling that the league's retirement plan must pay benefits reserved for players whose disabilities began while they were still playing football.

``This is a big win for Mike's children, who deserve a fair accounting from the NFL for the injuries their father suffered,'' lawyer Cy Smith of Zuckerman Spaeder in Baltimore, who represented the estate, said in a statement.

The unanimous ruling will result in the award of at least $1.5 million to $2 million to Webster's estate, and sets a precedent for other players who have argued that the league's Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan is unfairly restrictive in paying disability benefits, Smith said.

Lawyers for the plan argued that the onset of Webster's permanent disability occurred after he retired from the league in 1991, entitling him only to reduced benefits.

Brain Damage

Webster was diagnosed with brain damage in 1998, court documents show. Unable to work, he applied for assistance from the retirement plan and was awarded ``degenerative'' benefits worth about $600,000. After Webster died, his family went to court to get higher ``active'' benefits.

``The court overruled the unanimous decision of all six of the trustees of the plan, who spent a number of years'' considering Webster's application, said Douglas Ell, an attorney at Groom Law Group in Washington, who represented the league plan. He said he didn't know whether the plan will appeal.

The lower court case is Jani v. The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan, 04cv816, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Baltimore). The appeal is Jani v. Bert Bell/Pete NFL Player Retirement Plan, 05-2386, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit (Richmond, Virginia).

Last Updated: December 14, 2006 11:40 EST

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Former Colt Cook finds you can go home again

By Edward Lee
Baltimore Sun Reporter

November 6, 2006

For a guy who used to shake up opposing quarterbacks, former Baltimore Colts defensive end Fred Cook found himself a little dazed and confused Saturday night.

"I got lost last night," said Cook, who drove 14 hours from his home in Mississippi to Baltimore. "Baltimore's changed a lot. It seems like there are new highways here. I don't remember Interstate 395."

Cook, who hadn't visited the city in almost a decade, can be forgiven, and judging by the number of Colts fans who lined up outside the Baltimore Football Alumni Tent yesterday before the Ravens' game against the Cincinnati Bengals, he was.

Bill Dunn of Perry Hall, 47, brought an RC Cola can with Cook's playing card printed on the side of the can. Jeff Laumann brought 10 of Cook's trading cards to sign.

"I was just a kid, but I remember all of the cheering for 'The Sack Pack,' " the Pasadena fan, 36, said of the nickname given to the defensive line of Cook, Mike Barnes, John Dutton and Joe Ehrmann. "I liked the whole defense."

For Cook, his return had been delayed by Mother Nature. He had planned to visit Baltimore last year, but those plans were changed when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast.

Cook, who lives in Pascagoula, Miss., lost two cars to flooding, but he downplayed his losses, focusing instead on the suffering around him.

His elementary school was destroyed. Bodies began to pile up as cemetery owners waited for the waters to recede. The son of a female friend, an ex-Marine, committed suicide.

Cook said he found himself suffering from depression and intense migraines.

"There was so much sadness," said Cook, who said he recently lost 70 pounds as his body battled blood poisoning. "The wind and water was not prejudiced. It took the rich and poor, the young and old."

Returning to Baltimore seemed to refresh Cook, who was greeted with a hug by former Colts teammate Bruce Laird.

"It's a pretty strong fraternity," said Laird, who was a defensive back. "Although you don't see each other as much, anytime you do get together it's like you never left."

Cook, who looked trim and fit, said he missed suiting up. "It brings back old memories of cold Sunday afternoons," Cook said. "It has revitalized me."

edward.lee@baltsun.com

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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Most players wait until they have to be carted off field

By Dave Goldberg, AP football writer
November 5, 2006

As usual, Tiki Barber's retirement announcement got all the attention in the nation's largest media market.

As usual, low-profile Curtis Martin flew under the radar when he declared himself done for the season — and maybe for his career.

The status of the two marquee New York running backs illustrates one of the facts of life in the NFL: Most players have to be dragged off the field because they are hurt and/or can no longer play. Barber's announcement, in fact, got as much attention as it did because it was so unusual for a player at his peak.

More common is the attitude expressed by guard Pete Kendall, Martin's teammate with the Jets.

"If you're going to last 10, 11 or 12 years in this league, I think there is something in you that says, ‘I'm going to play this out as long as I can, as long as they let me,' " said Kendall, who is 33 and in his 11th season.

To understand that attitude, you have to put yourself in the strange, brutal world of NFL players.

Barber is 31, an age when most running backs are on the downslide. By that standard, his retirement announcement is no surprise.

But because he was used primarily as a punt returner and third-down back during his first five years — 6,696 of his 9,502 yards rushing have come in the last 4 seasons — the NFL's current rushing leader presumably could play another couple of years, solidifying what now are marginal Hall of Fame credentials at best.

He doesn't want to do that.

Like Jim Brown and Barry Sanders before him, Barber wants to go out on top. "I've seen backs go from 1,500 yards a season to 500 just like that," he said. "I don't want to be like that."

He also says he wants to be known as more than a football player. So the networks already lining up for his services will probably have to offer him more than just a talking-head sports job. He talks about lunching with Condoleeza Rice and interviewing Osama bin Laden's ex-mistress during his current offseason TV gig.

The subtext, however, is that football hurts.

Barber mentioned getting an e-mail after his announcement from fellow Virginia alumnus Barry Word, who had 705 carries for New Orleans, Kansas City and Arizona from 1987 to 1994. Word's message: 12 years after he left the NFL, he still feels the pain.

That's what Martin feels.

He is 33, two years older than Barber, and his credentials are already established: 1,000 yards rushing in each of his first 10 seasons, something accomplished only by Sanders, and a total of 14,101 for his career, fourth on the career list behind Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton and Sanders.

But he also demonstrates what Barber said about players crashing quickly.

In 2004, at 31, Martin led the NFL in rushing with a career-high 1,697 yards. Last season, the injuries hit and he dropped to 735, a career low with an average of just 3.3 a carry on a 4-12 team.

But he still wanted to come back despite surgery on his knee and a continuing bone-on-bone condition (it hurts just thinking about that). Finally, last week, he conceded that his season is over and probably his career.

"I don't know if it's even possible to come back," Martin said.

The fact that he still would like to come back next year is what you hear from most players at the end of their careers — even those who don't need the money. Most veterans who have reaped the benefits of free agency either by moving or re-signing for big bucks are pretty set financially.

Mark Schlereth, for example, spent 12 years as a guard and played on Super Bowl winners in Washington and Denver. He underwent surgery 29 times — 20 times on his knees — and once said the only time he wasn't in pain was the seven seconds that each play took.

Yet he hung on until 2001, when he finally realized that at age 35, there wasn't much of a market for his services.

"The truth of the matter is, after going through the 15th operation on my left knee, it became painfully obvious that I couldn't sign a six-day contract for $42 worth of Tupperware," he said when he retired in 2001.

And this from a guy who, as Barber will, went from the field into a TV studio.

Some guys play even after they "retire," as Junior Seau is doing this year.

After two injury-plagued years in Miami, the 37-year-old linebacker announced his retirement in August in San Diego, where he had spent 13 of his 16 NFL seasons. Four days later after the ceremonies there, he signed with New England, unable to resist another chance to play, especially with a winning team.

He did it at the behest of another guy a lot of people thought might retire, 33-year-old Rodney Harrison, a former Chargers teammate who missed most of last year with a devastating knee injury. As with Seau and Martin, injuries are what happen to 30-somethings in the NFL.

"When a championship team calls, you've definitely got to answer the call and definitely look into it," Seau said. "That's what I did."

Now both Seau and Harrison are starting for the Patriots, who are 6-1 and improving every week.

It's not impossible that both might be in Miami on Feb. 4. Perhaps attempting to tackle Tiki Barber in his final game.

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Joe Ehrmann on ESPN and NFL Films

Friends of Joe Ehrmann and Building Men and Women for Others,

This Friday, November 3, at 8:30 PM EST, Joe Ehrmann will be featured on the NFL Network in a 12-13 minute segment titled "NFL Film Presents." The show was originally aired on ESPN October 31 and will continued to play on ESPN and affiliates. The response has been terrific and will only help Joe and Building Men and Women for Other create a Tipping Point in America where a youth's physical, academic, social, emotional, moral and civic competency are no longer viewed as being beyond the scope of sports and coaches responsibilities.

Also please NOTE Joe's new web page (see below).

Peace,
Joe Ehrmann
www.buildingmen.org

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Heavy pressure: NFL players struggle with weight game

Since the 1980s, NFL players have packed on the pounds, but is the league's emphasis on weight harmful?

By Carlos Frias, William M. Hartnett
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 29, 2006

Brad Culpepper got benched.

He was playing pretty well. He wasn't injured and he hadn't broken any of the Chicago Bears' team rules.

Except one.

He didn't weigh enough.

"The coaches would look at you and how much you weighed to see if you were going to play," said Culpepper, the former Florida Gator who played defensive line for the Bears and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Culpepper thrived in a Tampa Bay defense that stressed speed and strength, but then he went to Chicago, where the Bears were slaves to the scale. Like many NFL teams, Chicago had a minimum and maximum weight for each position.

One Friday morning — weigh-in day — during the 2000 season, Culpepper barely hit 265 pounds, and coaches determined he was too light to line up Sunday for a Bears team that would finish 5-11.

"Things like weighing in on a Friday were illogical to me," Culpepper said, "and it didn't make me a better football player.

"What did I do about it? I retired the next year. I'd had enough."

Culpepper was a victim of the numbers game. BIG numbers.

In the modern-day NFL, size does matter — at least if you want to keep earning a paycheck.

By compiling a database of NFL rosters dating to 1920 — nearly 40,000 players — The Post tracked the size of players decade-by-decade and team-by-team.

From 1920 to 1984, there were never more than eight players in any season who weighed 300 pounds or more. This year, there were 570 players who weighed 300 or more listed on 2006 NFL training camp rosters, nearly 20 percent of all players.

Other super-sized findings:

- Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, the average player is nearly 25 pounds heavier, averaging 245.

- Over the same period, the average offensive lineman is 62 pounds heavier; defensive lineman, 34 pounds.

- Running backs weigh 17 pounds more and quarterbacks are 26 pounds heavier.

Coaches, players, analysts and doctors say there are many reasons for the increases in size: the natural progression by generations; better nutrition; supplements; illegal substances, including steroids, which the league began testing for in 1987, and untested drugs like human growth hormone; workout regiments that now begin in high school.

But what has maintained the trend toward bigger and bigger players is the league's copycat tendencies — what works well for one team will soon be tried by many others.

NFL is league of copycats

Mark Schlereth experienced a range of poundage in his 12-year NFL career. He was a member of "The Hogs'' offensive line for the Washington Redskins and also played in a Denver Broncos system that demanded leaner, quicker blockers.

Schlereth, now an analyst for ESPN, gives three reasons why NFL teams started pumping and plumping their offensive linemen through the '80s and '90s.

Larry Allen. Nate Newton. Joe Jacoby.

Between them, they played in 22 Pro Bowls and packed on more than 1,000 pounds as 300-plus players.

"Whatever is in vogue, that's what the league goes for," Schlereth said. "The league saw these incredible athletes, who were huge men, and decided this is the way to go — bigger is better."

That mantra trickled down to the college and high school level, where massive linemen no longer were born but bloated up on extra cheeseburgers and shakes.

Aspiring prep tight ends, defensive ends and linebackers "ate their way to being offensive linemen,'' Schlereth said.

In 1980, offensive linemen outweighed their teammates by 45 pounds. In 2006, the difference is about the weight of one Olsen twin — 81 pounds.

Schlereth fought to keep up. In Denver, he was issued a minimum weight of 285 pounds and fined $100 for each pound short on weigh-in day.

Sometimes, just before stepping on the scale, he would guzzle a gallon of water or slip a small weight plate into his jockstrap. Players who needed to shed pounds also took extreme measures, like pulling on rubber suits to run in the heat.

"To me, it's all relatively stupid and ridiculous," said Schlereth, who now weighs 205 pounds, less than he did in high school. "On one hand, the NFL says it doesn't want things like ephedra (a banned supplement used for weight loss), but it's OK to have a guy in a rubber suit running and passing out trying to make weight."

Culpepper had to stuff himself to push 280, eating between meals and making late-night runs to McDonald's and Wendy's.

"You know how you feel after Thanksgiving dinner? I felt like that every day," said Culpepper, now a personal injury attorney in Tampa who also has slimmed down to about 205.

Eight months after retiring, Culpepper shed his football fat suit, weighing in at 195 pounds and running his first marathon in 3 hours, 50 minutes. His waist size dropped from 40 inches to 33.

More weight does not guarantee wins

NFL offensive linemen started to get bigger than their defensive counterparts in 1975, the first year the O-lines outweighed the D-lines.

This season, the average weight for an offensive lineman is 312 — 23 pounds heavier than the average defensive lineman.

The push for poundage led to earth-shaking moments for gargantuan players. In 1999, the Detroit Lions made Wisconsin offensive tackle Aaron Gibson, who at one time weighed 440 pounds, the 27th overall pick in the draft. Gibson mostly played in the upper 300s, but in 2002 he became the league's first 400-pounder at 410 with the Dallas Cowboys.

That same year, Buffalo selected 370-pound OT Mike Williams fourth overall.

Both are now out of football.

"Truth is, bigger isn't better. Better is better," Schlereth said.

Research supports Schlereth's claim.

Since 1980, the two teams with the highest winning percentages — the San Francisco 49ers and Denver — had the lightest offensive lines.

Of the five teams with the biggest offensive lines over the past 25 years, only one franchise — the Raiders — has won more games than it has lost.

When Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian kept hearing coaches talk about the importance of size, he decided to put the theory to a test, comparing winning percentages to the average weight of players on each team over about 10 seasons.

"We found higher weight had no bearing on winning — none," said Polian, who was the general manager in Buffalo when the Bills played in four Super Bowls. "There was a lot of noise about 'Big is the answer.' We tested it. It's not valid."

The offensive linemen who played for the perfect 1972 Dolphins, including two Hall of Famers, averaged 251 pounds, 13th of 26 teams. Size apparently means little this season, too. The Dolphins average 321 on their interior line, the fourth highest in the league, but they're 1-6.

Polian now is with a team that might spur a reverse copycat trend. The Super Bowl contender Colts average 302 pounds of protection for Peyton Manning — 30th in the league.

Still, it's hard to resist the big guys.

After April's draft, Dolphins coach Nick Saban said he wished he could have worked a trade to move up and pick Haloti Ngata, a 6-4, 340-pound defensive tackle selected 12th overall by the Baltimore Ravens.

"I always say it this way: They have weight classes in boxing for a reason. The heavyweights don't fight the lightweights," Saban said. "What's the reason for that? Because if a big guy is just as good as a little guy, the little guy doesn't have much of a chance."

Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas has done pretty well for a little guy. The six-time Pro Bowler is in his 11th season and he doesn't like it when comments about his success end with "for a guy his size."

Thomas is listed at 228, but said he plays closer to 220 and "sometimes lighter."

He remembers his second year with the Dolphins, when several trainers suggested he get bigger so his body could hold up.

"I tried to put on weight and I was sluggish," Thomas said. "Now I don't even worry about that because I know it doesn't matter."

Football becomes a 12-month job

NFL teams started encouraging players to train year-round in the 1970s.

Former Dolphins coach Don Shula, who was an NFL defensive back in the '50s, said he and his teammates did little more than play some pickup basketball and run in the off-season. Hall of Famer Art Donovan, one of Shula's teammates on the Baltimore Colts, was huge for his day at 270 but not exactly a specimen. The Colts called him "Fatso."

Shula's Dolphins and Tom Landry's Cowboys were among the first to start mandatory off-season workout sessions five days a week, three hours a day. Soon, the copycat syndrome took over in the rest of the league, especially after the Dolphins and Cowboys played in a combined seven Super Bowls.

"That's where players really started to take off as far as size goes," Shula said.
"The other teams saw the progress that you were making, then everybody started to do it so that they wouldn't be left behind."

Shula believes the push for size also led to a change in overall strategy. Bigger players on defense meant tougher yards on the ground, so more teams added advanced passing games to their offenses.

"You had to find new and better ways to do things," Shula said. "You couldn't do the old stuff that perhaps was successful for you, the ground game that didn't involve the drop-back passing."

Steroids also became a factor in the late '70s and early '80s.

Shula said steroids were "probably a part" of the boom in size, especially since testing did not begin until 1987.

"Without a doubt that happened, people looking for a magic pill to get as big and strong as they could be," Shula said.

Supplements and untested drugs like HGH are likely factors in continued growth. But ESPN's Chris Mortensen, who has been covering the NFL since the '80s, said the steroid ban has changed the frames of some of the players whose careers require packing on and maintaining the pounds.

"The bodies are different," Mortensen said. "They're not Popeye bodies. They're obese bodies."

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Concussions a dirty little secret in the NFL

By Tim Dahlberg, AP Sports Columnist

Questionable is a word used a lot around the NFL. It's there every week in the injury reports that bookies and bettors like to study so much, usually stuck somewhere in between probable and doubtful.

Ben Roethlisberger, who was last seen sprawled unconscious on the field in Atlanta, is questionable this week. The Pittsburgh Steelers said so, meaning their star quarterback may or may not play Sunday against the Oakland Raiders.

Questionable. It's a word that can be used to describe many things.

Let's begin with the judgment of anyone involved with the Steelers who actually believes it is a good idea to rush back Roethlisberger after two concussions in four months.

Head injury one Sunday, starting nod the next. You don't need a degree in neurology to figure out something is wrong with this equation.

Concussions forced two other quarterbacks out of the game in recent years. Troy Aikman and Steve Young retired early because of the cumulative effect of concussions, and they're hardly alone among NFL alumni.

Current players aren't faring much better.

Quarterbacks Charlie Frye and Steve McNair recently left games with concussions and so did Minnesota receiver Troy Williamson.

Carolina linebacker Dan Morgan's season is over, and the horrifying image of Chiefs quarterback Trent Green having his head slammed to the ground in the first game of the season is an indelible one.

Concussions, it seems, are the NFL's dirty little secret. It's not just that they happen so often, but that the league doesn't seem to be doing much about it.

Sure, the NFL says it has had a committee of doctors studying them since 1994. But experts in the field say the league's studies are flawed, use suspect data, and don't stand up to peer review.

So when the NFL says no evidence has been found that brain function declines as a result of a concussion, the news is greeted with skepticism in the medical community.

"What the NFL allegedly finds is totally at odds with scores of publications that are out there," said Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurologist and leading expert in brain injuries at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "The stuff the NFL is putting out is just not the way the thinking is in the community of sports medicine and specialists with expertise in this area." Among those is a recent study by the University of North Carolina, which reported 10 percent of retired NFL players say concussions have had a permanent effect on their ability to think and remember things as they've gotten older.

Hall of Fame linebacker Harry Carson of the New York Giants is one of them. He estimates he had a dozen or more "bell-ringers" in his career, though he wasn't aware they were concussions. Carson said he has long had memory problems because of postconcussion syndrome.

For others, it's even worse.

Former Steelers lineman Terry Long died last year at the age of 45 from a brain inflammation that resulted, in part, from repeated head injuries. Fellow Steelers center Mike Webster was diagnosed with football-induced dementia before he died at the age of 50.

Coaches, though, seem to regard them as minor irritants.

Vikings coach Brad Childress offered his own diagnosis the other day after Williamson was injured.

"He does know what time zone we're in right now, and he can read a clock. So he's going to be OK," Childress said.

Football, of course, isn't alone in having to deal with brain injuries. Keith Primeau had two years and $6 million left on his contract with the Philadelphia Flyers but retired earlier this year when even the most mundane skating drills caused him problems due to past concussions.

And David Eckstein and Jim Edmonds of the St. Louis Cardinals struggled for much of the season after concussions.

Still, the NFL, filled with violent helmet-to-helmet tackles and players with bad intentions, stands out.

In boxing, a fighter knocked out is automatically suspended for 60 days. In the NFL, a player knocked unconscious has returned to play in the same game.

Roethlisberger didn't go back into the game last Sunday, though he wanted to. He also wants to play this Sunday.

"If I get cleared I'm going to beg and plead to be out there," he said.

Hopefully, no one will be listening. Hopefully, the Super Bowl champions, 2-4 so far this season, will resist the temptation to put him in.

Roethlisberger has no business playing Sunday. There's a good argument to be made he shouldn't play again this year.

Big Ben has only one career -- and only one life.

It's up to those around him to make sure neither is cut short.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Last Updated: 10/26/2006 6:46:32 AM

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Bob Mann, Packers' first black player, dies at 82

Packers' first black player dies at 82
Mann 'never had any problems' in Green Bay from 1950 to 1954

By Mike Vandermause
October 24, 2006
Packers.com

As the first African-American to play for the Green Bay Packers, Bob Mann will go down as a trailblazer in team history.

Mann, who played for the Packers from 1950 to 1954, died Saturday in the Detroit area. He was 82.

Mann was a 5-foot-11, 175-pound end who led the Packers with 50 catches, 696 receiving yards and eight touchdowns in 1951.

Off the field, he built a reputation as a quiet man with an even temper and dry sense of humor.

Art Daley, who covered the Packers for the Green Bay Press-Gazette in the 1950s, remembers when Mann was forced to stay in a different hotel than the team on road trips because of his race.

Daley recalls Mann telling him, "All it is is politics."

One of Daley's favorite stories about Mann involved teammate Dick Afflis, a guard who later became better known as pro wrestler Dick The Bruiser.

According to Daley, the Packers were staying at a Baltimore hotel that didn't allow black guests. After a team meeting, Mann was forced to go to another hotel and was joined by Afflis, his 252-pound teammate.

"They walked out of the hotel together and got outside and called a cab," Daley said. "The cab came up and the driver said, 'I can't take him because he's black.' Afflis grabbed the cab driver by the shirt and he said, 'You take him where he wants to go.'"

Mann was an honorary captain at a 1997 Packers game at Lambeau Field. In an interview with the Press-Gazette at that time, Mann said: "I never had any problems. Everyone treated me well."

According to Daley, hotels in bigger cities and in the South had restrictions based on race at the time, but no such edicts existed in Green Bay.

"He had a lot of fun," Daley said.

Mann was an honorable-mention all-America player on Michigan's national championship team in 1947.

He signed with Detroit after college and along with Melvin Groomes became the Lions' first African-American players in 1948.

Mann led the NFL with 1,014 receiving yards in 1949, and his 66 catches ranked second to the Rams' Tom Fears, who set an NFL record that season with 77 receptions.

The Lions traded Mann to the New York Yanks in 1950 for quarterback Bobby Layne, a future Pro Football Hall of Famer. Mann was released by the Yanks and signed by the Packers.

"He was on the small side, but he was a very nifty and productive wide receiver," Packers historian Lee Remmel said.

Mann said his biggest thrill was being inducted into the Packer Hall of Fame in 1988.

"That was the highlight for me," Mann told the Press-Gazette in 1997. "Coming back for that was my greatest memory, although I had a lot of them as a player as well."

Mann finished his Packers career with 109 catches for 1,629 yards and 17 touchdowns. He was released midway through the 1954 season and retired.

Mann, a native of Newvern, N.C., earned his law degree after retiring from football.

He headed Robert Mann & Associates in Detroit for more than 30 years. His office was located just a few blocks from Ford Field, where the Lions play.

"Bob was a great example to everyone," Pro Football Hall of Famer Lem Barney said in a Lions press release announcing Mann's death.

"He not only was a great football player but a man who gave of himself to the city and the entire community."

Mann is survived by his wife of 50 years, Vera. Funeral arrangements are pending.

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NFL Must Remember Those Who Paved the Way

By Michael David Smith
FootballOutsiders.com
October 7, 2006

Dave Pear was in pain when he called me this week. Pain is something he's felt a lot of in the quarter-century since he retired from professional football.

Pear, who played nose guard for six years in the NFL, suffered a herniated disk in his neck in 1979. He has lived with pain ever since that injury, which would force him to retire a year later. Pear played hurt in Super Bowl XV. On the Raiders' official Web site, his efforts are credited as a big reason the team won. That was the last game he ever played.

Pear called me this week to let me know that he disagreed with the kind words I had for Al Davis in last week's column.

"I continued to play with a herniated disk in my neck," Pear said. "Al Davis encouraged me to play. He told me I was an all-pro and that I could play better hurt than the other players could play healthy. With that injury, I went from all-pro to being cut in two years, and during that time I continually asked Davis for help, and the response was that I wasn't injured, I was a hypochondriac.

"I went to see Al in his office and said, 'I came to you as an all-pro two years ago and now I'm leaving to have a neck operation and I've lost my job. I broke my neck playing for you. You can't turn your back on me.' He told me he would call me. That was 25 years ago and I still haven't heard from him."

I don't know what happened in closed-door conversations between Pear and Davis. But I do know, and my conversation with Pear made me even more acutely aware, that the NFL has a real problem with retired players who suffered serious injuries and now feel that the league has turned its back on them.

"It's just wrong," Pear said. "If I sound bitter, it's in the sense that the NFL goes on TV and tells us what good they do with the United Way, and they spend money trying to help other causes, and they do that to take the focus off themselves and the way they treat their former players."

Pear is far from alone in feeling that way. Former Buffalo Bills safety Jeff Nixon urged his fellow ex-players to withhold NFL Players Association Retired Players Chapter dues to protest what he called a lack of attention to issues relating to retired players in the most recent collective-bargaining agreement negotiations. Chuck Bednarik, the Philadelphia Eagles Hall of Famer, said of his pension two years ago, "It stinks. It's nothing." Former Colts and Chargers safety Bruce Laird started a blog where he posts articles about retired players who have gone through tough times since leaving the game.

Many ex-players who are doing well financially have taken it upon themselves to provide the assistance that the league and the union won't. Former Green Bay Packers lineman Jerry Kramer has organized fundraisers to, as he says on his web site, "provide direct financial assistance to those retired players who are disadvantaged or indigent due to the inadequate pension and disability compensation the league provides to older players." Former Miami Dolphins and Cleveland Browns quarterback Arthur Roberts, a cardiologist, provides free heart screenings to ex-players. Mike Ditka hosts a golf tournament in Chicago each year to raise money for indigent retired players.

At his Hall of Fame induction speech in August, former New York Giants linebacker Harry Carson said the league needs to do more to help retired players. "I would hope that the leaders of the NFL, the future commissioner, and the players association do a much better job of looking out for those individuals," Carson said. "If we made the league what it is, you have to take better care of your own."

The league and the players association maintain that they do plenty. In July they jointly announced a host of improvements to current and retired players' benefits. NFL player benefits total $700 million a year, and benefits have been improved for both current and retired players four times since 1993. Retired players receive almost $60 million a year from the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle Retirement Plan. The union's Players Assistance Trust, the NFL Alumni Association's Dire Need Fund and the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Enshrinee Assistance Fund all give more than $1 million a year in financial assistance to retired players. Harold Henderson, NFL executive vice president of labor relations and chairman of the NFL Management Council, called the NFL's package "the most extensive benefits package in professional sports."

But Pear, like many other ex-players, says those benefits need to be distributed more equitably, so that former players who paved the way for the current generation of multimillionaires and are now living with serious football-related injuries can reap some of the rewards from the $6 billion a year industry that pro football has become. Players who retired before salaries exploded with the dawning of free agency in 1993 say it annoys them that people assume that they're rich just because they once played pro football.

Many retired players blame NFL Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw for their inadequate pensions. Pear, his former teammate, said, "Gene Upshaw has definitely sold out his players." But under labor law, Upshaw works for the current players, not the retired players. You can't blame the players who helped build the league for feeling that they deserve a bigger slice of that $6 billion pie, but you also can't blame Upshaw for making the current players his top priority.

So if the union's priority is the current players, who can help retired players? I believe individual teams should do more. Before he joined the Raiders, Pear was the first member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to make the Pro Bowl. I'd like to see the Bucs do something to honor him, and I'd like to see every NFL team reach out to its former players, the ones who played before MRIs and eight-figure signing bonuses. Most of those players still love the game, but many of them wonder whether the sacrifices they made to play football were worth it.

"I don't want to sound like it's sour grapes, because football was my passion. It was something that I loved to do," Pear said. "But it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth toward your former employer."

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Lawyer helped make NFL what it is today

Ed Glennon fought to get free agency and other rights forplayers. The owners thought it would doom the league, but instead it strengthened it.

by Jay Weiner, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
October 14, 2006 – 5:46 PM

Last summer, during a routine hearing on an NFL labor relations matter, U.S. District Court Judge David Doty halted the proceedings. He acknowledged a Hall of Famer in his Minneapolis courtroom.

No, not NFL Players Association President Gene Upshaw, the former Oakland Raiders guard, who was sitting in the spectators' gallery.

It was the sports law Hall of Famer, if ever there was one, sitting at the union's counsel table, Ed Glennon, 82, the legal warrior in the cool khaki suit.

Doty wondered aloud if Glennon had anything to add to the discussion underway about the NFL's new collective bargaining agreement.

"I wanted to make a nod, at least, to history," Doty said.

Slowly, Glennon walked to the lectern in the middle of the cherry-wood-paneled courtroom. The other seven lawyers fell silent, reverent, leaning in to hear his soft words.

"Things have come a long way," Glennon said.

He should know.

Representing a bunch of brave players, Glennon challenged former NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and his feudalistic owners, in Minneapolis federal court in 1975.

In so doing, Glennon outlawyered a Washington, D.C., attorney named Paul Tagliabue in the famous John Mackey case. Tagliabue would go on to succeed Rozelle.

But Glennon would change the face of the league, too.

The Vikings, who are enjoying their bye today, have been led this season by a host of players who were acquired via free agency, such as kicker Ryan Longwell, offensive guard Steve Hutchinson and running back Chester Taylor.

They came to Minnesota because of a system that might not have existed but for Edward M. Glennon.

Big cases

It started with Mackey in 1975, when the NFLPA was broke and powerless.

"They had to beg for things," Glennon said of players then.

Mackey was Glennon's first sports law tour de force, even though he would try other major NFL cases in Minneapolis federal court.

A one-time railroad lawyer, he'd already established himself as a wicked trial attorney for Lindquist & Vennum, the respected Minneapolis firm.

"Watching Ed Glennon in the courtroom is like watching Leonard Bernstein conduct a symphony," said Ed Garvey, the former NFLPA executive director, and a Glennon protegé. "It's a thing of beauty."

There, in 55 days of testimony, from February to July in 1975, examining 63 witnesses, dealing with more than 400 exhibits and generating 11,000 pages of transcript, Glennon grilled NFL legends about something known as "the Rozelle Rule."

Under that provision, Commissioner Rozelle rendered the movement of a player from one team to another virtually impossible. There was, per se, no free agency.

Rozelle alone determined what compensation a team would get if it should lose a player to another team. If very average players tried to jump from one team to another, the new team would be forced to award high draft choices as compensation. This discouraged movement.

A working-class kid from Chicago who worked his way through the University of Minnesota Law School as a waiter, Glennon took no prisoners when it came to NFL legends.

"To me, an enemy is an enemy," Glennon said recently. "He's an enemy until one of us is dead."

Garvey said: "There's this sense that lawyers argue in court and then they go out for a drink. Ed's not that type. If you're on the other side, then you're on the other side. It doesn't mean you have to be nasty all the time, just when you're awake."

Glennon beat up on Chicago Bears owner and coach George Halas, who said lifting the Rozelle Rule would harm "competitive balance."

He lashed into Pittsburgh Steelers coach Chuck Noll, who backed the league's argument that free agency would topple the economics of the league.

In the end, U.S. District Court Judge Earl Larson sided with Glennon and ruled the Rozelle Rule violated federal anti-trust law.

The union had a victory that would keep on giving.

"If the Mackey case had come out the other way you would have a very different NFL today, characterized by labor instability and a less successful business model," said Prof. Stephen F. Ross, director of the Penn State Institute for Sports Law, Policy & Research.

Rozelle's iron fist limited player freedom. But, in making the league's internal rules more flexible, Larson didn't bring about the death of the league, either. To the contrary, Ross said, the advent of free agency has benefitted fans, players and owners, driving salaries, revenues and competitive balance in a league that now prides itself on parity.

Glennon gleefully watched this offseason as the Vikings signed all their free agents.

"People say the players get too much money," Glennon said. "I say, where should it go? Should it all go to the owners? No. The dumbest owner in the world could not lose money in the NFL."

Tomorrow, he'll turn 83, but Ed Glennon still knows his enemies.

©2006 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Hero of Colts faithful, going strong at 82, reflects on career, life in Baltimore

by Ron Cassie, The Baltimore Examiner
Oct 16, 2006 5:00 AM

BALTIMORE - He admitted he still loves the notoriety.

“Anybody who tells you they don’t like a little attention is either a liar or a fool,” Artie Donovan said during an afternoon at the old Colts’ home behind the Valley Country Club in Towson.

He’s been slowed by a hip replacement, but at the age of 82, is as gregarious, irascible, opinionated and funny as ever. The hair is thinner and no longer red, but his eyes remain as green as an Irish hillside.

He’s as restless as ever, too.

“Hell, I got nothing to do any more,” he groused. “My riding mower broke down, and now I can’t even cut the grass. I’m bored.”

Adds Dottie, his wife of 50 years: “He keeps saying he needs a job — ‘I need a job,’ ‘I need a job’ — give me a break.”

The couple travels and makes local appearances. Artie also gets together with friends and former teammates Jimmy Mutscheller, 74, and Sisto Averno, 81. But he passes most of his time at the club that he and Dottie have owned for four decades. They live behind the club’s mansion in a house they built in 1967, but they turned the day-to-day operations of the business over to their oldest daughter, Debbie, two years ago.

“We do about 80 weddings a year here,” Artie says. “And you know, someone will always ask if I’m around. So, I end up after the reception, waiting at the end of the bar like an old hooker, looking for someone to come up, say hello and buy me a drink.”

From the Bronx to Baltimore

Artie, as every Colts diehard knows, grew up in the Bronx.

“3034 Grand Concord,” he said. “We lived in six-room apartment house. Twelve cousins on the same block. After church on Sunday everybody would hang around and shoot the breeze for an hour. That’s what I miss. Now, as soon as Sunday Mass is over, everyone hops in their cars and takes off.”

At least, he says, the rattling train and light-rail tracks near his current home remind him of his childhood. “The subway station was right underneath our building.”
He is the grandson of a middleweight boxing champ and the son of the renowned boxing referee Arthur Donovan Sr. — who was the third man in the ring for Joe Louis’ famous 1938 knockout of Max Schmeling, and has long enjoyed his homecomings in the Big Apple.

“Before the 1958 [title] game [against the Giants], I was walking around New York with a teammate,” Artie said. “And someone shouts at me from across the street, ‘Hey Donovan, I hope you’re better than you were when you played at St. Michaels. The Colts are going get their butts kicked tomorrow.’ I told my buddy, ‘These are my people.’ ”

By now everyone in this town has an “Artie” story. Maybe they bought their first legal beer at his old liquor store or got yelled at by him for goofing around at the club’s swimming pool. Maybe they shared a beer with him at linebacker Bill Pellington’s Iron Horse or Kusen’s old bar on 33rd Street, where the old Colts went after practice.

“I was at Buckingham Palace with my wife, watching the changing of the guard,” Artie said, recalling one unexpected encounter with a Colts fan. “And a guy comes up, some stranger, and whispers in my ear, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be at Pellington’s having a hamburger?’ I said, ‘I sure would.’ ”

But only Artie told Artie stories the best. Like the ones about him drinking beer and eating cheeseburgers during his numerous hospital stays.

“Even when I’m in the hospital now, people bring me so many cheeseburgers, baloney sandwiches and Schlitz, I can’t possibly eat and drink it all.

“Once, Gino Marchetti and I were in the hospital together,” Artie recounts, warming up to the subject. “He had an emergency appendectomy, and I had a leg infection I couldn’t get rid of. Well, he comes into my room in a wheelchair to watch the Colts play the Packers and says, ‘Artie, let’s switch. I’m sick of sitting in this thing.’

“Of course, a bunch of people come to watch the game with us, and they bring a case beer and sandwiches. But at 10 o’clock the nurse kicks them all out. So, it’s just the two us, and we finish the beer ourselves and have a pretty good buzz going by the time the game ends. I tell Gino, ‘Hey, I can’t get out of this wheelchair,’ he says, ‘Well, Fatso, I can’t get out of this bed.’ So we end up waking up the next morning just like that.”

Naturally, his former teammates have their favorite tales — mostly related to his off-the-field activities.

One of Johnny Unitas’ favorite receivers, Jimmy Orr, recalls a time in San Diego in 1970, when some of the old Colts made the trip to watch the Colts play the Chargers. “They had a great time, went sailing, came to the game and drank beer all day. Art’s roommate on this trip, Dick Szymanski, told me that when he woke up the following morning, Artie had the television on, sitting upside down on its stand. He was warming up a cheeseburger on top of it.’

Donovan says Orr got the story completely wrong.

“It was a pizza.”

A man for all seasons

The Baltimore Colts joined the NFL in 1950 but survived for only one season — Artie’s rookie year — before folding. They were re-incarnated in 1953, and when the Colts won the 1958 and 1959 titles, Donovan and guard Art Spinney were only holdovers from the 1950 squad on the roster.

Veteran Baltimore broadcaster Vince Bagli was there in 1953, when the 6-foot-2, 275-pound future Hall of Famer arrived at training camp in Westminster.

“Well, he was fat,” Bagli said. “And we wondered if he could play.”

Donovan went to Boston College, but Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) is where he perfected his defensive line skills.

“There are thousands of guys who play football in New York City, but everybody plays three-on-three basketball,” Donovan said. “That’s where I got my quickness. That, and playing paddle ball. Nobody at Westminster ever beat me at single-wall paddle ball.

“But it was [Colts’ head coach] Weeb Ewbank who made me into a great player,” Donovan said. “He taught me about peripheral vision and how to watch blockers.”

He was all-NFL in 1954, ’55, ’56, ’57 and ’58, playing alongside Marchetti, Don Joyce, Ordell Braase, Ray Krouse, Tom Finnin and Gene ‘Big Daddy’ Lipscomb. Marchetti, like Donovan, was a decorated WW II marine. Donovan fought in several Pacific battles, including Iwo Jima; Marchetti saw action at the Battle of the Bulge.

Artie shrugs. “We were tough.”

Before the big pro salaries, Donovan made ends meet hustling as a Shenley liquor salesman, as well as helping to manage the club with Dottie. Artie proudly notes that Dottie, a trained pharmacist, took hotel and restaurant management classes at Cornell in the summer.

“She works two days a week at Hopkins,” Artie says now. “I drive her to the shuttle bus, give her five dollars for lunch and then pick her up. She looks cute in her uniform getting off the bus.”

“I know,” said his daughter Kelly, a lawyer. “I’m like, that’s too much information, dad.”

With his own children — Kelly, Debbie, Chrissie, Artie and Mary — he was always strict about work during the summer — and curfew.

“We all started flipping hamburgers in the [club’s] snack bar when we were 12,” Kelly said. “And about curfew he would always say, ‘Nothing good happens after midnight.’

“To our friends, he was just ‘Mr. Donovan.’ But one of my friends told me when she went to college everyone was so impressed that she knew my father.

She was like, ‘He’s just Mr. Donovan.’ Dad was never the type to be too impressed with himself — or anybody else for that matter — and never acted like he was a big deal.”

A horseshoe love affair

The theory is that blue-collar Baltimore of the 1950s fell in love with Artie’s crew because they represented the average hard-working breadwinner, who reveled in the fact that the Colts were world champions in 1958 and 1959.

It’s dismissed by Donovan.

“Ah, they loved us in 1950, when we went 1-11,” Artie said. “We won one game in the middle of the year and the crowd ran down and carried us off the field on their shoulders.”

Donovan’s take is matter-of-fact, “It’s just always been a great football town.”

Bagli, also the co-author of ‘Sundays at 2:00 with the Baltimore Colts,’ insists there was a special bond between the players like Artie and the city.

“[The old Colts] genuinely cared about each other, and they liked and genuinely cared about people,” Bagli said. “And that’s how Artie is. He’d see you in church and give you an elbow and smile when he walked by.

“I never saw him turn down an old lady for a hug or a youngster for an autograph. He’s just a big-hearted guy.”

It’s an enthusiasm for the game, fans and life that hasn’t waned since he was a 26-year old rookie in 1950.

Recently at the Ocean Pride restaurant, where the old Colts meet once a month to discuss Players Association issues and charity events, a dad hesitantly approached Artie with his three children.

He sent his oldest, Brandy, 9, up first, with a cold Schlitz in her hand as an offering for an autograph. Artie, resembling an out-of-uniform Santa Claus, smiled broadly and immediately starts a conversation with the girl, and then corralled her two brothers in as well.

“I just always figured it was easier to be nice to everybody,” No. 70 said. “Do you know what I mean? It takes too much energy to be scheming or to try to manipulate things.

“I’ve been lucky, that’s all — always had someone looking out for me.”

On Sept. 16, 1962, before an opening-day contest against the Los Angeles Rams, Donovan took the Memorial Stadium field for the last time as the Colts retired his jersey in front of 54,796 emotional fans. He thanked the city of Baltimore that was good to him and made his mom, Mary Elizabeth O’Keefe Donovan, proud.

“My mother loved coming to Baltimore,” Artie said. “I used to pick her up at the train station and we’d got out somewhere to eat, like Dickman’s, at Mount Royal and Maryland, a nice white tablecloth place and everyone treated her like gold.

“In New York, she was the boxing referee’s wife. But in Baltimore, she was Artie Donovan’s mom.”

Baltimore Examiner

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Tackling life after the game

After financial, family struggles, an ex-Buffalo Bill finds hope

From the Baltimore Sun
By Rona Marech
Sun reporter

October 14, 2006

HAGERSTOWN -- Inside the Hagerstown Rescue Mission, up the stairs, into the dormitory, next to a bed with a thin tan coverlet, atop a dark locker -- this is where Donnie Green keeps his memorabilia. He has three tiny plastic helmets, one for each of the National Football League teams he played on: the Buffalo Bills, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Detroit Lions.

Behind those -- he has to groan and stretch to reach it -- is a blue, loose-leaf binder filled with photographs and articles. He turns the pages matter of factly, betraying little. Here he is in his No. 74 Bills jersey, staring out seriously, his fists clenched. Here he is coolly sitting on the bench, helmet pushed back. Here he is at Purdue University, a bright-eyed first-year student with a broad smile. He is watching a game in a fedora, his hands lifted over his head, victorious.

He pulls out a fan letter. "It sure is a pleasure to write to one of the greatest players who always gave 110 percent," it reads.

Green played for the NFL for seven years in the 1970s, most famously as part of the Bills' formidable offensive line that helped O.J. Simpson run a record-breaking 2,000 yards in a season. He and his fellow linemen were dubbed the Electric Company because they "turned the Juice loose."

But that was long ago, before Green's gait slowed and his brawn softened. Before family troubles. Before drugs.

In 2003, financial and emotional woes sent Green from his home in Annapolis to this Western Maryland shelter where men can find temporary housing or join a longer-term, religion-based recovery program. He arrived with little but some suitcases of old clothes. It didn't take long for him to find God -- truly find him and not just in a wishy-washy way, he says. Three years later, he's hopeful. He gets paid to work as a night watchman at the Rescue Mission. He's more peaceful.

And yet he's still here, a lumbering, gentle presence carrying a Bible and talking religion and trying, still, to figure out what to do next.

"I just take it from day to day," he said. "I'm really thankful God gave me another chance."

Green's predicament, some former players bitterly complain, is all too common. Men who played in the NFL prior to the 1980s were paid a pittance compared with current players, and until 1993, they retired without substantial pensions, health insurance or other now-standard benefits. Many suffer from ailments stemming from old injuries and years of play. And they're often too proud or embarrassed -- especially after all the athletic success and reverential treatment -- to seek help when their luck turns. Recent pension increases and changes in care coverage for retired players are inadequate, many who were in the business say.

They often know the saddest stories: Jackie Wallace, who played with the Colts among other teams, was found living under a New Orleans overpass; Mike Webster, once a Pittsburgh Steeler, was frequently unemployed and homeless in the years before his death.

"It goes on and on. There are hundreds of players who are hurting," said Bruce Laird, another former Colt who recently founded The Baltimore Football Club to assist ex-players. "We are working with the union to try to make them understand that these are the players who made the game, and they need help."

Joe DeLamielleure, a Hall of Famer who played right guard alongside Green on the Bills, calls it a "disgrace." "Why does the most lucrative business in the world have the worst pensions?" he said. "You know where Donnie is living? ... And Donnie Green isn't a dumb man, not an ignorant man. He's not a man who's lazy. He's a good man. For him to have to do this is absurd in my book."

At his peak in the NFL, Green said he never made more than $65,000. At 58, his monthly pension payments are a little more than $400.

It was only seven years of pro football, to be sure, but that was what Green had devoted his life to from the time he was a 219-pound eighth-grader in southeastern Virginia. High school coaches were already checking out the mountainous teenager, and he ended up playing football and basketball at Crestwood High School in Chesapeake before heading off to Purdue University on a football scholarship. He left school when he was drafted by Buffalo in 1971.

"God put something in me, to do the best I could," Green said. "I wanted to be the best offensive tackle on the planet."

On a snowy evening in 1973, Simpson -- running behind the Electric Company -- made history by rushing past the New York Jets defense and finishing the season with 2,003 yards.

Afterward, Simpson introduced each of his linesmen by name. Green, who has a gold capped tooth in the middle of his mouth, offers his molasses smile at the memory. "I was in the zone, really. I thought no one could stop me," he said. "I just kind of knew I was bad."

Then his smile fades, and he turns serious again. "I was never no big glamour guy," he said. "It wasn't a big-headed thing. I'm thankful God gave me the opportunity to participate in a sport at that level."

It lasted five years with the Bills and one each with the Eagles and the Lions, and then, suddenly, it was over. Green was hard-working and huge (a mean 6 feet, 8 inches and 272 pounds his rookie year), but that was no longer enough.

For a while he drifted, moving from Virginia to D.C., from job to job. He coached for a year, he was a teaching assistant, he drove a truck, he worked in a hospital supply room.

"My head was different then," he said. "I kind of wanted to chill out, duck out of the public scene for a while."

There were the family struggles, too -- two ex-wives, four kids and alimony problems he now blames on himself. And though he says he never was hooked, he was using drugs, more out of boredom than anything else. At a low point, he sold a gold bracelet inscribed with the words "we did it" that Simpson once gave him.

"People always used to say I was too nice. I used to do things I didn't want to do," he said. He lifts his baseball cap, touches his head. "I don't know what was wrong with me... I lost my motivation."

DeLamielleure saw his old friend around that time at a reunion and was struck by the beaten streak in his face. "To me, it was look of 'Oh, my God, how'd I get here, and what am I going to do about it?'" he said.

Green chose to move. After he lost his lease, he flipped a coin and decided to relocate to the Hagerstown shelter he had visited before with a minister friend.

He was embarrassed that first night, Green said, sleeping on a cot on the first floor with the other transients, but then "something just sparked in me."

He prayed at devotionals every morning and evening. Like everyone else, he was given a work assignment, first in the kitchen and later, for pay, at the front desk. He studied the Bible.

"The Lord lifted me from all that mess," he said.

Green is even bigger than he used to be, and the ferocity he once displayed on the field has been all but vanquished from his sincere, still-unlined face. He walks a little unevenly and is a little hunched. People in Hagerstown figured out his past story anyway -- if nothing else, his size always gives him away.

Yet he's a humble man, said Bruce Shank, the executive director of the Rescue Mission. He believes Green is ready to venture from the simple brick building where he's lived, perhaps to work with young people.

But Green isn't quite ready. He went to Chicago this year after a friend offered him a job managing a restaurant. But he returned to the shelter 18 days later. "I don't feel God is leading me to go now," he said.

Instead, he continues to work as a night monitor. He phones family and old football friends, he lifts weights occasionally, he puts on big, brown glasses and reads the Bible over and over.

Sometimes, he lingers on his regrets. He wishes, he said softly, that he had never tried drugs. Occasionally, he wonders if it would have been better to pursue basketball. Those athletes were paid more back then, and it's a "prettier sport," he said. "I got tired of all the banging."

He still likes to catch games on the weekends, though. Not to root for a favorite team, but more for the satisfaction of watching the machine hum. "I just like seeing the guys do their jobs," he said.

"Football was just a phase in my life," he said. "It was great, I know. Now it's over."

He puts away the notebook filled with pictures of that younger, trimmer man; the stranger with the pads and the hard squint. He doesn't leaf through it much any more.

"I don't know, it's kind of in the past," he says. "I'm kind of dealing with things now." He shakes his huge head a little, eyes soft, and shrugs one shoulder.

"Yeah," he says for emphasis, before falling silent.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.green14oct14,0,7857402.story
Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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Convene in Canton? Take a hike, NFL

By JOHN P. LOPEZ
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 8, 2006, 11:03PM

Former NFL great Deacon Jones does not consider himself the voice of a football generation or some kind of revolutionary leader.

But Jones three years ago was among the first of what could become a significant number of past NFL heroes spurning annual Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Canton, Ohio, over what they think is unfair and exploitive treatment by the league.

"I'll starve to death before I let them (mistreat) me like that," said Jones, a Hall of Famer who was a star defensive lineman for 14 NFL seasons. "I don't know if I started a movement, and I didn't plan to do that. I just said this is what I have to do.

"I can't let you (mistreat) me. If you don't support me, I can't support you. I haven't asked any other player to do anything. It's on their own if they choose not to go."

But many more enshrined players indeed are missing the Hall of Fame event or threatening to skip it beginning next season.

Feelings of abandonment

For decades, one of the images the NFL has proudly projected has been the new Canton class framed by rows of enshrined legends in the background, all wearing their gold Hall of Fame blazers. More of those seats will go empty, as pre-1977 NFL players believe they have been abandoned.

"We want some equity," Hall of Famer and 14-year NFL great Ted Hendricks said. "They'll keep saying they (pay homage) to us, but they don't."

At the heart of the loosely organized Hall of Fame boycott is the NFL's subpar pension plan for players who began their careers before 1977, when federal courts ruled the league was violating anti-trust laws.

Those who began their playing careers after 1977 have earned much better pension and insurance benefits. And those whose careers began after 1995 enjoy superb benefits, including 401(k) and annuity plans

Saying no to hypocrisy

But while the NFL rakes in $6 billion a year and thrives as a league, pre-1977 players receive poor pensions and no health insurance.

Many players consider it hypocritical to support the NFL's annual tribute to the past. In their minds, it is more style than substance. The NFL, many former players believe, has forgotten the past and the players who lifted the game to unprecedented heights.

"Until this (stuff) gets right, I can't do that. I can't go there and smile," Jones said. "My conscience beats me to death.

"It hurts. I'm in the Hall of Fame. My recognition will go on forever, and I've done all right (financially). But there are a lot of guys who put a lot into this game, and it seems like the league just rolled on past them, doing nothing for them."

Another particularly painful issue for past players is the Hall's exploiting their names and legends. Until last year, Hall of Fame players were expected to pay their own travel and accommodation costs for the trip to Canton. Players also were expected to sign autographs for hours, earning $3 per signature.

Some players scraping by on pension checks of $800-$1,200 a month and having to pay for their own health insurance felt insulted that the NFL would use them in such a way but not listen to their calls for better benefits.

"A lot of the guys really were upset about that because we did all the work and we had to pay our own way," Hendricks said. "The autograph sessions were a calamity. There we were trying to help, but all the dealers would grab up all the tickets, and two weeks later they'd be selling stuff on eBay for quite a bit more than $3."

When Roger Goodell took over as NFL commissioner for Paul Tagliabue, who fully backed NFL Players Association executive director Gene Upshaw's stance regarding pension benefits for pre-1977 players, some believed their voices might finally be heard. Upshaw was reported to be on his way out as NFLPA chief.

But last week, Upshaw reportedly agreed to a five-year extension on his NFLPA contract, which pays him $3 million a year. Prospects dimmed for pre-1977 players.

The ranks of legendary players returning to Canton figure to thin as a result.

"I'm watching the pioneers of the game cripple up and die with no dignity and no money for their family," former NFL defensive back Bruce Laird said. "To see their struggle and then hearing the same stuff from the league ... I tell the players now, 'This is going to be you. As soon as you leave the game, they're going to forget you.'

"It used to be at the Hall of Fame (ceremonies), the whole back was just full of players. It wasn't full this last time, and you're going to see less next time."

Said Jones, who attended 19 consecutive Hall of Fame induction ceremonies before beginning his boycott: "What would I tell (Goodell)? Every year when I was going to the Hall of Fame, we had the big luncheon.

"I would get two hours with the commissioner in the same room, talk to him personally. I used that opportunity a lot. I talked about the problems we have.

"Talking to Gene Upshaw — that's a waste of time. (Goodell) is aware of the problem. They're all aware. We've discussed it for 19 (straight) years. ... They refuse to give us any power. I'm afraid nothing's going to change."

All the NFL's greatest generation wants is representation on the NFL's Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle Retirement and Disability Plan board. All those players desire is a seat at the table.

Until they get that, they will — and should — leave the chairs empty at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.

_______________________________________

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Pre-1977 NFL players fight for better pension

by John P. Lopez
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Oct. 7, 2006, 11:07PM

It was the NFL's greatest generation, a battered and bloodied assortment of football pioneers from blue-collar cities, Midwest farmhouses, bayou swamplands and every other corner of America.

The mantra these players forged: Play hard. Make no excuses. Tape it up and get back out there.

Their football souls were like coarse-grit sandpaper. They were proud and tough. And they always played hurt.

Today, many former NFL players fighting for better pension benefits and representation on the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle Retirement and Disability Plan board are swallowing their pride. They are because they hurt in an assortment of ways.

They feel cheated and victimized by an NFL pension plan that pales in comparison to similar plans in the NBA and Major League Baseball for players of their generation.

No matter the NFL's stance, to see what this generation of players did for the league, compared to what they get from the league, it is clear they are being cheated and discarded.

The sorry pension benefit plan for pre-1977 players is, as former Oakland Raiders great Howie Long said last year, "the deep, dark secret nobody wants to talk about."

Gone and forgotten

That prideful unspoken mantra, making no excuses, for years kept older-generation players from complaining about the treatment they received since their glory days ended.

But as bodies continue to fall apart and medical bills stack higher, with numerous players succumbing to dementia, hip and knee replacement operations and other life-altering conditions, the league's greatest generation wonders why it has been forgotten.

"We've been (left out) on every hand," said Deacon Jones, an eight-time Pro Bowl player in 14 NFL seasons for the Los Angeles Rams, San Diego Chargers and Washington Redskins. "I don't know why we are the victims all the time. We didn't do anything but play hard, play hurt and do whatever was asked of us.

"Every event I go to, I see some guys' bodies fading away. By the time something's done, these guys will be gone. It's like they're waiting for our generation to die out, so they don't have to answer these questions anymore."

Former Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini, 57, who had a sterling 13-year NFL career, earns just $1,202.32 a month in pension benefits.

Having been afforded no health insurance by the NFL in retirement, Pastorini must meet an annual $5,000 deductible because of pre-existing conditions that include back, neck and knee problems.

NFL Hall of Fame safety Paul Krause, who played 16 NFL seasons (1964-1979) for the Redskins and Minnesota Vikings, gets $300 a month in pension. Hall of Famer Leroy Kelly, a 10-year star running back for the Cleveland Browns (1964-1973) gets $800 a month.

Hall of Famer Joe DeLamielleure, who played 185 consecutive games during his 13 NFL seasons with the Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns, receives $800 a month. None has received NFL health insurance benefits.

The NFL built its $6 billion a year industry on the likes of Ollie Matson, Dick Butkus, Ted Hendricks and some 1,400 other pre-1977 players whose heroics are featured in grainy NFL Films productions. It was 1977 when the NFL was found to be violating antitrust laws, and benefits improved.

For those whose careers began before 1977, bits and pieces of their bodies are strewn from New York to Los Angeles to Houston. The NFL Players Association says it won't forget the foundation its predecessors laid.

Words mean little

In its mission statement, the NFLPA says, "We pay homage to our predecessors for their courage, sacrifice and vision."

But hundreds of former players believe that is where the paying stops. Just words.

"It's like you walk away in shame," Pastorini said. "I played the game as hard as I could. I was on the picket lines for the players association. Maybe I didn't agree with everything, but I was there for the players and the future players.

"It's really amazing how (executive director) Gene Upshaw and the players association turned their backs on the rest of us. In my opinion, Upshaw has been bought off. And if it wasn't for us, he wouldn't have that job he has."

Through NFLPA director of communications Carl Francis, Upshaw chose not to respond to questions about the NFL pension plan for pre-1977 players.

"We've addressed it so many times. We'll just let it take its course through the collective bargaining agreement," Francis said. "We're addressing the issues in our own ways."

In the past, Upshaw, who earns $3 million a year as NFLPA chief and recently received a five-year extension to his contract, has said he does care about former players.

But he also has called those calling for better benefits, "misinformed" and "ungrateful."

Hendricks, primarily a pass-rushing linebacker who intercepted an astonishing 26 passes in his 14-year career, said former players have confronted Upshaw at Hall of Fame meetings.

"He told us he doesn't represent us," Hendricks said. "He talked about how much money he was going to make the next few years. It was like he was pushing our faces in the mud and rubbing it around."

For modern-day NFL players, Upshaw has indeed worked wonders. Benefits are improved in large part because of 401(k) plans, annuities and better benefits that came as a result of recent collective bargaining agreement deals.

But their benefits still fall short of other leagues. A player retiring after 1998 with 10 years of experience would be eligible for an annual pension of roughly $51,000 at age 55. MLB players with 10 years of service would retire with $175,000 per year in benefits starting at age 62.

Getting mixed messages

But when the NFLPA upped pension benefits for pre-1977 players after a recent CBA agreement, Upshaw hailed the increase as unprecedented. Players were unimpressed with those benefits, many going from $100 a month to $200 a month for vested players.

"Yeah, he's got some window dressing he can put out there, but when you look at it, it's pathetic," said former Colts and Chargers (1972-1983) defensive back Bruce Laird. "Everybody is happy for what the union has done for the active players. They've done some wonderful things. If I played in 1995 and saw Gene Upshaw, I'd kiss his (backside).

"But for us? We're not sitting here with a cup in our hand asking for money. We want to be represented in the union. You can't have it both ways. You can't tell us you don't represent us and then say you do when you give us a raise that means nothing."

Inevitably, the majority of pre-1977 players voice most of their frustrations with Upshaw. They speak of not having a voice and getting conflicting, often contentious messages from him.

And Upshaw has told retired players the NFLPA does not represent them.

Labor law dictates that Upshaw must represent only active, dues-paying members of the union. But Upshaw, a Hall of Fame offensive lineman from the same generation of pre-1977 players, also has taken bows for funneling funds to former players.

Yet according to Laird, Upshaw also has told retired players, "You didn't hire me, and you can't fire me."

Another contradiction: When asked about gaining representation on the NFL's Retirement Board, a six-member committee that rules on benefit protests and disability claims, retired players have been told they indeed do have representation on the board. Their purported voice? Gene Upshaw.

"That's a joke," Laird said.

The conflicting messages seem endless, like the emotional and physical pain former players are feeling.

Poor performance

Without question, the Retirement Board's record for being sympathetic to retired players' claims has been less than impressive. Of 3,500 players represented, barely 130 (0.37 percent) have earned full disability, according to a 2005 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette study in the wake of Steelers great Mike Webster's death.

With no representative on the board, former players feel abandoned by the game and deceived by Upshaw.

"It's an impossibility to have ourselves heard," Pastorini said. "There are a lot of disturbing stories out there. Great players are falling to pieces.

"Upshaw makes me sick. He was a teammate of mine (at Oakland in 1980), and I didn't like him as a teammate. I like him less now."

Recently, many players have tried to tackle the issue themselves, so to speak. Former Packers great Jerry Kramer has founded the Gridiron Greats Relief Fund, initiating a series of memorabilia auctions at jerrykramer.com in hopes of helping destitute and needy former players.

Mike Ditka, a Hall of Famer and legendary Chicago Bears player and coach, has become among the most active advocates for financial relief.

Ditka also established a fund, but when Ditka penned letters soliciting each NFL team for a $100,000 donation in order to begin allowing former players "dignity," the response was embarrassing. One team sent a $5,000 check. Another sent $10,000. That's it.

Not nearly enough

Hendricks and Jones, too, are involved in fundraising efforts, attending dozens of charitable efforts every year, autographing memorabilia for auctions and hosting golf tournaments every November.

But considering financial demands, what players are doing for themselves makes a minuscule impact.

Matson, perhaps the league's first true superstar tailback and a Hall of Famer, has lived in a full-time nursing facility in Los Angeles the past two years, suffering from symptoms of dementia and other ailments. He receives $1,200 a month from the NFL pension plan, although Matson's investments post-NFL have kept the family from financial straits.

"These were the guys who put the NFL on the map and made it the game it is today," said Bruce Matson, Ollie's son and a Houston dentist and cosmetic surgeon. "What dad gets from the NFL, you couldn't even buy groceries with in L.A."

And while the past scrapes together money for groceries and prescriptions, the NFL sits atop a mountain of gold. Franchises are valued at an average of nearly $820 million apiece, according to Forbes magazine. The league's television and multimedia deal will bring the NFL $24 billion over the next eight years.

Remember football's greatest generation? The NFL apparently stands for Not For Long.

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