The Strikers Are Back in the Huddle

By Tom Callahan

Five years since their last truncated season, the National Football League players have begun another countdown to a strike. They have resolved to walk out Sept. 22, after the schedule's second week, if management continues to ignore their latest call to freedom.

NO FREEDOM, NO FOOTBALL T shirts first appeared on muscle-bound picket lines in 1974, during the second of three N.F.L. work stoppages, which are coming to be routine events. The quarrel is generally over control, but the players always settle for cash.

In 1982, when the union's incontrovertible demand for "55% of the gross" was etched in Silly Putty, seven weekly paychecks were lost along with $200 million in league revenues. For 57 days Havoc hovered over television networks while Despair settled into gambling parlors and living rooms. But the autumn leaves were beautiful.

Now the players, who earn $230,000 on the average, are after a free-agency mechanism more meaningful than the strict compensation system in place since 1977. Over an entire decade of free enterprise, it has brought about the emancipation of a solitary St. Louis defensive back named Norm Thompson. No matter the player, pro football's unique partner-owners have been disinclined to fork over high draft choices for the rights to their brethren's superstar. It is probably fair to say that the owners have competed more strenuously against alien forces like the defunct United States Football League than against one another.

Amenable only to slight adjustment in the free-agent restrictions, management meanwhile proposes automatic rookie and second-year salaries of $60,000 and $70,000 on top of uniform college draft bonuses ranging from $500,000 for the first pick ($400,000 for the second, $350,000 for the third) down to $5,000 for the last. The better to reward veterans, says the Management Council's long-standing director, Jack Donlan. The union is cynical. Says Wisconsin Senate-hopeful Ed Garvey, who broke former Raider Lineman Gene Upshaw into the job of labor leader: "In 1982 I honestly had the feeling there would never be another football strike. It was so painful for everyone. But the same voices are back. The expressions are fixed again."

Throughout the training season, a number of teams have been putting their discards on $1,000 retainer, and last week all 28 owners asserted that in the event of a strike, they would press on with "whatever players are available to play." "I know we'll field a team if it comes to a strike," says Tex Schramm, president of the Dallas Cowboys. "I think we can put on quality football games." Doug Allen, assistant executive director of the players union, understandably disagrees: "Without our players on the field, it will be a ragtag, shoddy product." TV would hardly pay full price ($476 million) for renegades, and the affections of the fans are still frayed from the last unpleasantness.

In 1985 baseball solved a strike in two days, with Commissioner Peter Ueberroth shyly accepting most of the credit. To fuzzy suggestions that he somehow ought to ride to a similar rescue, Football Czar Pete Rozelle responds, "I don't think anyone can go in and wave a magic wand and have it ; settled." Sighing glumly, he adds, "I'm not a knight on a white horse."