Nothing New Today
How time flies. It’s been over 6 months since NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell first announced his tour back in September to hear all about retired players’ grievances. (That story first appeared HERE.) You may remember that this tour was announced with great fanfare and press last year as Roger Goodell’s opportunity to speak and listen to the retired players across the country. If the reports have been accurate, it sounds like the Commish managed to visit a staggering 6 NFL cities out of a total of 32 teams (?!!) before all press releases stopped.
It looks like another lost opportunity, starting from the very first meeting when Disability Attorney John Hogan was invited, then uninvited, then re-invited again to the first meeting in Dallas (read Snowing in Dallas HERE).
So on a quiet news day (other than the fact that Executive Director DeMaurice Smith finally got HIS contract with the NFLPA ratified – yawn!), we decided to roll the clocks even further back for a moment: Way back in 1995, Gene Upshaw was already solidly entrenched as the Executive Director of the NFLPA, Roger Goodell was already working at the NFL being groomed for the Commissioner’s job by then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, Harold Henderson was also working at the NFL then and Tom Condon was on the Retirement Board. (For context, 1983 was the year that Dave was first turned down for his Line-of-Duty Disability Benefits despite their own doctor telling them that Dave had lost 50 – 59% of the use of his neck and spine.) Even Akin Gump’s attorney, Larry Lamade, sat in on the hearing and vote (when Dave finally received copies of the minutes of that meeting, they were redacted more than a CIA waterboarding memo to Congress!). You’ll notice a lot of the other usual suspects also there back at Dave’s hearing in 1995: Sarah Gaunt, Miki Yaras-Davis, Valerie Cross, Doug Allen and Doug Ell. And it looks like they had more guests and advisors than Board members. Why, Gene Upshaw even showed up as a “guest” while Harold Henderson sat in as “acting Chairman of the Board” for Paul Tagliabue (?!!). Maybe it was the free vacation in San Francisco and the terrific seafood… but you’d think that for all the salaries these people were probably collecting as well as the costs of this “meeting in San Francisco,” approving Dave for his benefits would have been an insignificant footnote – relatively speaking – when compared to what they spent on themselves in those few vacation days in 1996. And every year after that.
Click on each page below to enlarge for reading.
Now fast-forward back to the present: Gene Upshaw has left the building, Roger Goodell is now the Commissioner of the NFL, Harold Henderson is still working behind the scenes at the NFL (and apparently now voting on behalf of Roger Goodell?!!), Tom Condon is still sitting on the Retirement Board and Larry Lamade is still with Akin Gump who are still also working for the NFL. (And with 20 years at the NFL, you’d think that Roger Goodell would be able to remember if he was the Chairman of the Retirement Board – but he couldn’t quite remember when asked publicly at one of those retired players meetings – read that HERE). So almost 15 years later, nothing much has changed; most retired players still can’t get access to their earned disability benefits.
The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. And it seems that the very few things that HAVE changed are the ones the retired players went back and fought for themselves, like the Players Inc. lawsuit for $28.1 million.
Well, it’s May 2009 now and the Independent Retired Football Players Summit is meeting in Las Vegas at the end of this month. And the most important issues to retired players will still be disability benefits and pensions (or lack thereof).
