The shame of the NFL
MIAMI – This is the darkest side of America’s greatest sports fantasy. It’s Super Bowl Week in the belly of the National Football League’s massive publicity machine – radio row at the Super Bowl media center – and there are countless former players slowly milling around the room from one radio interview to the next.
They used to move smoothly across the playing field. They used to run fast and jump high. Now they shuffle and limp with stiff-legged gaits. Underneath pant legs and long sleeves are grotesque surgical scars. Their fingers are contorted like spiny tree branches; some of them amble along with canes. If you did not know any better, you would think they were disabled war veterans, not former pro football players.
Keith Sims was a three-time Pro Bowl offensive lineman who played 11 years in the NFL, mostly with the Miami Dolphins. I have not seen him in several years. The first time I met him 16 years ago, he was a healthy 24-year-old rookie. Today, he’s a 40-year-old man who can’t stand on his feet for longer than 20 or 30 minutes. “I took four Advil this morning, and that ought to last me until noon,” Sims told me Thursday. “I’ll take four more by then and try to ice down my knees.”
He pointed to the jagged scar that ran down the back of his left leg. Achilles tendon operation. He showed me his disfigured fingers that had been dislocated, jammed and surgically fused so often that he practically lost count on the wear and tear.
“But I’m one of the lucky ones,” Sims said. “I own a Dunkin’ Donut franchise. I can pay my own medical. But I know a lot of older veterans who aren’t as lucky as me.”
As great and profitable as business has been for the NFL owners and the current players – salaries are higher than ever; profits are beyond mind-boggling – there doesn’t seem to be any interest by the league or the players association to put aside enough of that money to adequately assist former players whose disability coverage and pensions are woefully inadequate.
Former St. Louis Cardinal Conrad Dobler is one of those men. Dobler retired in 1981 and has undergone 11 football-related surgeries since then. In 1994, he tried to use funds from his NFL disability insurance by applying to the NFL retirement plan. What followed was a tangled, frustrating roadblock of bureaucratic madness. According to an interview with HBO’s “Real Sports,” Dobler said his doctors believed he had an “impairment of 90 percent” in his legs. But when the pension administrators sent him to see their physician, that doctor ruled that Dobler could work and denied his application. In the “Real Sports” interview, Dobler said he ingests roughly 150 Vicodin a month to numb the pain in his knees. He also told Jon Frankel of “Real Sports” that he has considered suicide.
Frankel: “What’s in store for you in the next five years, 10 years?”
Dobler: “I don’t really know. I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s really good. But you just take it, I guess. Find some way to handle it, and if you can’t handle it, then you make the choice to check out.”
Frankel: “You’re serious?”
Dobler: “Yeah, if you have something that’s not going to get better, and you know your quality of life is going to get worse, and you’re going to be a burden on people around you, they shoot horses, don’t they? Didn’t they make a movie about that?”
I spent the past few days in Miami talking to at least 15 or 20 former NFL players who confirmed exactly what the “Real Sports” story said: Their retirement benefits fall far short of sufficient health-care coverage of all their job-related disabilities. Hall of Famers such as Mike Ditka and Jerry Kramer are so upset with the union that they started the Gridiron Greats Superstar Online Auction (jerrykramer.com) to raise money to assist former players in dire need.
The legends all blame the increasingly arrogant and brazenly insensitive executive director of the players association, NFL Hall of Famer Gene Upshaw, for much of this mess. I can’t blame them.
There was a time long ago when Upshaw was the most powerful voice in the room. He was a reactionary, a revolutionary, a hard-charging, tough-as-nails union activist who was the ultimate anti-establishment fighter.
But now he sounds like a damned tobacco executive, full of mumbo jumbo statistics, bogus corporate misdirection and cold-blooded insensitivity.
This is what he told the Charlotte Observer when questioned about the complaints of the retired players: “The bottom line is, I don’t work for them. They don’t hire me, and they can’t fire me. They can complain about me all day long. But the active players have the vote. That’s who pays my salary.”
All I keep thinking is how much he sounds like a bloated glutton who doesn’t want to share even the most insignificant crumbs from his lavish buffet.