Montana and Bradshaw

Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw are taking a lot of heat from the media because they decided to skip out on the NFL's little pre-game party. Apparently, fans are supposed to be outraged that these guys wanted the NFL to come through with a little more coin, instead of just participating in the festivities because they "owe it to the game."

This is nonsense, and if you feel this way, well, you're an idiot.

The NFL is a business, and the league never takes its eye off the bottom line, not even for a minute. Nobody knows that more than guys like Bradshaw and Montana. Maybe Bradshaw would like to ask the NFL what it owes the families of guys like the late Mike Webster. According to the NFL, the answer seems to be not much. Mike Webster is in the Hall of Fame, and is one of the greatest centers ever to play the game, but 17 years of football left him with brain damage, and the last years of his life were hard ones.

While Webster's an extreme case, he's far from the only example of a life cut short by a pro football career. The statistics about illness and disability rates among former NFL players are sobering, while recent studies on early death rates are downright alarming. Many retired players feel the league and the union don't do enough to help retired players who are facing serious health and financial issues, and some of them, including Joe Montana, are becoming increasingly outspoken about this issue.

I know it's hard to sympathize with guys who made big bucks during their playing careers, but in many respects, the retirees have a legitimate beef. At the very least, Mike Webster's case suggests that the benefits process can be a bureaucratic mess. Furthermore, while the NFL has a fairly generous pension plan (although baseball's is much more lucrative), depending on when you retired, you must have played for three or four seasons in order to receive pension benefits, and therein lies the rub. According to a 2002 survey conducted by the NFL Players Association, the average pro career was 3.3 seasons, with running backs (2.57 years), wide receivers (2.81) and cornerbacks (2.94) all having average careers too short to allow them to vest in their pensions.

While the NFL loves to sing about the great partnership it has with its players, the truth is that it has gotten away with murder in comparison to other professional sports since it broke the NFLPA during the 1987 strike. Perhaps the most egregious example of how the league abuses its players is way it treats injuries suffered by players in NFL Europe. Those injuries are considered "non-football related," which means that an NFL team who delegates a player under contract to an NFL Europe team doesn't have to pay his salary if the player gets hurt.

The NFL just signed a $24 billion TV deal, has satellite TV and radio deals, and will broadcast some games on its own cable network beginning next Thanksgiving. Furthermore, the NFL never stops eagerly seeking ways to maximize revenues in other areas. The avarice of NFL owners is such that the unthinkable appears to be happening-- the usually somnolent Players Association has awakened, and is now threatening a strike or decertification after the collective bargaining agreement expires in 2007.

With all this as background, does anybody seriously want to contend that Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw owe you, me, the NFL or "the game" anything? Why is it never the owners who are expected to "give something back"? The NFL has never given anything away to anyone, so if Montana and Bradshaw refuse to play along with the league's sappy Super Bowl pre-game antics without cash on the barrel head, more power to them.