Dave Pear's Blog

EDITOR’S NOTE: Now that some of the dust has settled from the fallout of George Martin’s 2-year tenure as Executive Director of the NFL Alumni, there are a lot of questions still left unanswered. Attorney John Hogan was an active advocate from the earliest stages of what started with the best of intentions. We’re also going ahead with including John Hogan and Dave’s discussion on Disability from the recent IFV Conference held in April in Vegas. The video is at the bottom of this post.

An Open Letter to the NFL and Retired Players Regarding the Alumni

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As big a deal as the League and Commissioner Goodell made of the Saints’ bounty program, you’d think it was something that no one ever knew about over the years and years that it’s been going on at all levels of the game. This story’s been in the headlines for the past couple of week and Roger Goodell finally issued his ruling earlier this week. It didn’t take long for new stories to come out that covered the underside of the story. Here are two of those headlines from FOX Sports’ Alex Marvez and A.J. Perez.
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We’ll be discussing these along with many other legal and medical issues that affect retired players at our upcoming Conference April 20 – 22 in Las Vegas. Be sure to register HERE and book your rooms and flight.

NFL suspends Saints coach for one year

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A copy of NFL Alumni COO Ron George’s Memo to Chapter Presidents arrived in our Inboxes this morning. Here it is in its entirety:
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From: Ronald George
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012
To: Chapter Presidents
Cc: George Martin; Joe Pisarcik; Randy Minniear
Subject: FoxSports Article
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Dear Chapter Presidents,
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Below you will find links to two articles written by FoxSports.com that were posted today.
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Duerson Apparently Did Not Review Andrew Stewart NFL Disability Claim

Posted with the express consent of Irv Muchnick:
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Published September 10th, 2011
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On August 16, FoxSports.com’s Alex Marvez broke the story of a lawsuit against the National Football League’s Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle Retirement Plan, in federal court in Maryland, by retired player Andrew Stewart. I discussed the case on my Concussion Blog – click HERE.
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The premise of Marvez’s piece aligned with an important investigative angle of this blog: that the Stewart suit might reveal more about the work on the disability claims review board of Dave Duerson. But it turns out that, while Stewart’s attorneys have made a lot of progress in getting scrutiny in open court of the board’s inner workings – a very good thing – Duerson himself did not participate in the deliberations of Stewart’s particular case in August of last year.
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The three NFL Players Association representatives on the board for Stewart’s review were Andre Collins, Robert Smith, and Jeff Van Note. “I do not know why Duerson was not on the Board that day,” Stewart attorney Michael Rosenthal e-mailed me.
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According to John Hogan, who represents many retired players from his disability law practice in Georgia, retirement board members occasionally designate others as proxies, and that is probably what happened here. The whole process is mysterious and secretive, which is why we need the drip-drip-drip of additional cases to break down the NFL and NFLPA’s limestone wall. (The judge in the Stewart case has set a trial date, though he has not yet ruled on whether to permit live testimony. But the court seems to be leaning that way.)
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As I’ve said many times, perhaps the most tumultuous litigation for the football-concussion system isn’t by professionals. Rather, it involves youth athletes and the financial exposure of public schools for disabling injury and wrongful death. Without tackle football mania at the grassroots, the $10-billion-a-year NFL cannot recruit, inculcate, and thrive. We already know of one lawsuit in New Jersey by the family of a kid who died from a second concussion after being cleared to return to play – with the help of NFL and World Wrestling Entertainment witch doctor Joseph Maroon’s “ImPACT concussion management” software.
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Irvin Muchnick is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (2009) and WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal (2007). He is a widely published magazine journalist and has appeared on forums as diverse as Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor,” National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” and ESPN’s “Up Close.” Muchnick is lead respondent in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case for freelance writers’ rights, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick.
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BeyondChron contributor Irvin Muchnick has launched his new website and blog “Concussion Inc.”. You can also find Irv on Twitter at http://twitter.com/irvmuch.
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So this was filed last Friday by the NFLPA:
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(We’ve uploaded the legal documents to Scribd for easier viewing and to make it downloadable. You can click the link to go over to Scribd’s site where you can enlarge it for easier navigation (hit the ESC key to close). You can also click the DOWNLOAD button to save a PDF copy for printing and reading later)
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NFLPA Workers Compensation Filing 3-25-11
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And then Judge Crotty ruled on it Monday, March 28th with a very short and clear order. Just what part of ‘You-can’t-make-your-employees-pay-for-YOUR-Workers-Comp’ does the NFL not understand?

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We’ve arrived in Las Vegas to prepare for our First Annual Independent Football Veterans Conference. In a short span of two months, we’ve been fortunate in being able to assemble a terrific lineup of speakers who will help to cover a focused range of topics that are most relevant to retired football players today: From legal matters to pensions as well as information on some of the latest discoveries and treatments for those injuries most of you have been carrying for years. You can read about the topics we’ll be covering along with a Speakers’ List over at our new 2011 Conference website – just click HERE. And you’ll also find our finalized schedule there.

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