Stop-Action in the N.F.L.

By Tom Callahan

The players and owners go head to head for control of the game

Since this is not exclusively football season anyway, and there are certainly other events on the mind, and the weather is not even quite football weather yet, the National Football League strike still seems as much a novelty as a catastrophe. Without baseball, summer might as well be canceled; lazy days depend on it. But doesn't pro football occupy only a narrow space, somewhere between church services and Sunday supper, in the fabric of American life? Then why has the country been on red alert since last Tuesday? If the owners can afford to lose $38 million a week, and the players $7 million, quarreling over control of the game, who cares, except a few bookies, broadcasters and bankers, unless, maybe, 80 or 90 million husbands and wives?

With the cancellation of last Thursday night's Kansas City Chiefs-Atlanta Falcons game--which would have marked the start of the third week in a 16-week regular season for the 28 N.F.L. teams--play stopped. TV's most popular game show was pre-empted indefinitely. The players huddled to plot union "allstar games," the first conceivably to be telecast Oct. 10 by Ted Turner. The owners huddled to try to thwart that and to consider retooling with renegades and scabs (though a few coaches, like Philadelphia's Dick Vermeil, said they were disinclined to soldier on in the company of the French Foreign Legion). As usual, the first problem was getting both sides into the same huddle.

The issues are complicated (see box). Though both sides seem to be talking about the same amount of money--$1.6 billion, larger than the budget of a dozen states--the philosophical difference on how that money should be allocated is a gulf without horizons. Union Head Ed Garvey is insistent that the players be paid out of a union-managed fund, and the owners, through the person of tough-guy Labor Expert Jack Donlan, are adamant that the policy of individual negotiations continue. Those charming fellows on the periphery of sport known as "player agents" are behind the owners this time 100%, less their customary commission, probably. Donlan says that management stands ready to part with just about as much money as the union wants, but none of the control. The question is whether the players will buckle or Garvey will change the world.

Not rumpled enough for a labor leader, never managing to appear as weary and wise as his baseball counterpart, Marvin Miller, or as old, Garvey, 42, has been taken as a lightweight villain around the sport for twelve years. "Garvey wants power," says Gene Klein, who owns the San Diego Chargers. "He's trying to put himself in the position of czar. He fell on his face before, and he'll fall on his face again." Knowing his is a face that does not exactly warm the cockles of football fans' hearts, Garvey has frequently turned over the podium to Players Association President Gene Upshaw of the Los Angeles Raiders, Stan White of Detroit or Tom Condon of Kansas City. Other players have eagerly appeared on local TV, among them Brian Baschnagel in Chicago, Aaron Kyle in Denver, Mark Murphy in Washington, Jimmy Cefalo in Miami and Beasley Reece in New York. If nothing else comes of this, the stereotype of the big dumb football player may have been thrown for a lasting loss.

When asked to comment on the issues, most owners have demurred under threat of fine. Never known to cringe from league pressure, Los Angeles Raider Boss Al Davis unhesitatingly told the Washington Post: "The idea should not be to defeat the players. I see one owner [Klein] saying the season is over. . . and others talking about getting new players to play under the banner of the N.F.L. To my way of thinking, that's not the way to approach the problem. The players are the game. We own it, but they play it." Davis thought Commissioner Pete Rozelle should join in the argument, and he also brought up the subject of binding arbitration. By merely mentioning binding arbitration during the baseball strike last year, Baltimore Orioles Owner Edward Bennett Williams stirred activity that led to the settlement.

Presuming an eventual football settlement, players began informal drills at high schools and on hillsides to stay fit or just to stay together, avoiding mayhem. If injured, they are on their own. "We're told we can't let them into our facilities for medical treatment," fumes Davis. "That's just stupid." Only a handful of players openly opposed the union in the strike's first days, but a few went along grumbling. "Austria is neutral," said New Orleans Place Kicker Toni Fritsch, an Austrian. New Orleans Player Representative Russell Erxleben polled his membership about dropping the wage-scale demand, perhaps a small crack in solidarity. Though negotiators were finally promising to meet over the past weekend, the players were not heartened by the news that the owners were assured of two weeks' TV money, to be repaid to the networks next season. be repaid to the networks next season.

Most of the N.F.L.'s wealth and worries flow from television, and the strike represents a crisis for both industries. Renegotiations and readjustments between the league and the networks and between the networks and their advertisers could be devastating all around. At 30-sec. rates ranging from $80,000 on an NBC Sunday afternoon to $150,000 on an ABC Monday night, advertisers had been prepared to spend $400 million this year for the attention of pro football fans.

Each network had a different plan to try to hold on to the audience: ABC showing movies, CBS rerunning games from last season and, in the nearest alternative to live N.F.L. football, NBC reprising the Canadian Football League it dropped nearly 30 years ago. (In Canada, there are always twelve men on the field, it is never fourth down, and signaling for a fair catch is not only unmanly but futile.) The first reactions of advertisers to all three ideas were polite but unenthralled. Then the National Collegiate Athletic Association authorized one college football game for each Sunday of the strike and invited individual universities to negotiate independently with ABC, CBS or Turner starting this week. Two weeks ago, in an Oklahoma court, the N.C.A.A.'s control of college football telecasts had been ruled a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The N.C.A.A. won a temporary stay, before all of a sudden turning into a flexible organization.

There is another industry quivering because of the strike: gambling. Largely because it has been so well televised, pro football has become the national gambling medium. People who wager on nothing else may bet on office football pools. Wagering on professional football is said to provide half the annual income of the legal bookmakers. The Barbary Coast Casino and Sports Book in Las Vegas handled more than $1 million worth of N.F.L. bets on each of the two weekends before the strike, says Owner Michael Gaughan. Vic Salermo, operator of Leroy's Sports Book, frets that the strike will cost him 40% of his business if it is prolonged.

All stadium concessionaires, innkeepers, restaurateurs and airlines shudder at the thought. In Green Bay, Wis., where it is a little early in the year for shuddering, the loss is most telling and most personal. Green Bay (pop. 89,000) is the smallest true N.F.L. city, and the Packers are the property of 1,700 Wisconsin stockholders who kept the team from failing in the 1950s by buying stock at $25 a share. Mayor Samuel Halloin notes with pride and pain, "This is not a situation where a few wealthy individuals own the team." For every game canceled in Green Bay (four are scheduled there, four in Milwaukee), Mayor Halloin estimates that local businesses will lose $2 million.

Bartenders everywhere are pensive skittery. At the Moon Shadow Saloon in Atlanta, they are showing Three Stooges tapes on Monday nights. Elsewhere in town there will be no more "happy hours" at Copperfield's until the games come back on TV. But this victory for temperance will not be celebrated by churches everywhere. "We are very disappointed," says Father Douglas Eberly, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Mesquite, Texas. Through selling nachos, hamburgers and hot dogs at the Cowboys games, his congregation has raised $60,000 toward the construction of a parish hall, which parishioners call "the church that nachos built." Charities will also suffer. In Michigan, the Kiwanis Club and the Boy Scouts of America, who help with the concessions at Pontiac's Silverdome for a percentage, could lose as much as $50,000 a game.

Pontiac, which has a $55 million stadium and a 28.2% unemployment rate, is more depressed than ever. "It will probably mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars," says Earl Kreps of the Chamber of Commerce, "not just in Pontiac but all of southeastern Michigan." The city-owned Silverdome will lose $275,000 for every missed game. The city of Miami had the foresight to purchase a $300,000 strike-insurance policy in July (premiums: $12,000). That should about cover a season's losses in parking fees and concession sales. In San Francisco, Mayor Dianne Feinstein said, "We lose a lot more [than money] in terms of the momentum of pride and sup port for the team." James Trutko of the Cleveland Growth Association mourned the lost opportunity to "show Cleveland off to the nation Monday night," when the Browns would have hosted the Cincinnati Bengals. "You can't buy that kind of television time," he sighed.

Even the N.F.L. could not buy the kind of television time it was getting last week. The moment that the news of the strike reached television coincided with the first bulletins that President Reagan intended to send the Marines back into Lebanon. By whatever news judgment, maybe impeccable news judgment, the reports were mingled under two equally bold headlines. Footballs are just bags of wind but a lot of people relate to that. --By Tom Callahan. Reported by Brian Doyle/Washington and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago

With reporting by Brian Doyle, J. MADELEINE NASH

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