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Coaches struggle for simple benefits
Posted: Tuesday December 21, 1999 08:43 AM
Got a comment or question for Dr. Z? Click here. I was talking to Larry Kennan, the president of the NFL Coaches Association, the other day, but my mind was drifting back more than 30 years, to the 1960s, when I covered the early days of labor management in pro football. Do you remember those days? Detroit All-Pro tackle John Gordy was the newly formed Players Association's president. Alan Miller, a former Patriots halfback, was its chief counsel. Cowboys GM Tex Schramm was the heavy on the owners' side, as he remained right up through the 1980s. There had been some early attempts to form a Players Association in the late '50s -- Frank Gifford and a bunch of guys very timidly asking for things like extra laundry money -- but it never got anywhere. The demands of the Gordy group were ridiculously modest, looking back on them. I remember a request for payment during the exhibition season as one of the major ones (players collected only per diem in the preseason in those days), but the real issue was the right to organize into a union that would be recognized by management. Of course, no one would call it that. Heaven forbid. To members of the football community, who were and in a large part still are, conservative in nature, it was a dirty word. Unions meant Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters and guys walking around with hunks of pipe in their pockets, not our kind of people at all. You'll notice that the current coaches group still refers to itself as an association. And that's what the real battle was about. Carroll Rosenbloom, the Colts owner, threatened to "shut down pro football" before he'd let the players organize. Most of the other owners wouldn't have put it so crudely, but they were in Carroll's corner. Now this isn't the 19th century we're talking about, the early days of the labor movement when union organizers were lynched in some places. This was 1966. Organized labor was an established fact in America. Rosenbloom dealt with unions every day in his textile business. But football was his toy, and rich people don't like their playthings messed with. He was a benevolent despot. He treated his players well -- why, some of them made as much as $25,000-$30,000 a year. What the hell did they have to organize for? Well, the Players Association won the battle, but it took a series of victories in antitrust litigation (with current commissioner Paul Tagliabue being the front man and chief legal strategist for the losing side) to get them over the top. And now it seems that we've rolled the clock back, and the coaches are struggling for recognition and some basic benefits, much the same as the players did so many years ago. All this came back to mind when I received a release from the Coaches Association that Peyton Manning and Drew Bledsoe had teamed up to record an instructional video on how to play quarterback. "The proceeds," the release mentioned, "will go into a special fund to benefit former NFL assistant coaches who are facing financial difficulty and who are not eligible for pension and medical benefits." Good, I thought. It always helps to have some big names on your side. But when I heard the list of demands that Kennan and his three-year-old association were putting forth, I couldn't help wondering why they hadn't already been taken care of. Like full pension and retirement, for instance. The league's standard for full benefits is 65 years of age and 15 years of service. Fine, except that it's a young man's profession. "If all the 478 coaches in pro football decided to retire," says Kennan, a 15-year veteran and former offensive coordinator for four teams, "only five would qualify. There are only 27 who are even 60. Practically nobody lasts much longer. Officials, referees and the like can retire with full benefits at 62. Players can start collecting at 45." What the coaches are asking for, and it certainly seems modest enough, is a combined number of age plus years of service that reach 75 -- for instance, 55 years old plus 20 years of service. Right now a coach who retires at, say, 55 will get some benefits, but less than half of the full ride. Plus no severance, although officials and players collect it. Everything just shuts down for them. "All the perks we've had as coaches just stop," Kennan says. "So do medical and dental coverage. The crux of the problem is that coaches basically have contracts done by 31 individual owners, but there's no uniformity to them. We need a leaguewide program." Naturally, the league, run by Tagliabue, the ex-management lawyer, has been dragging its heels. Clear violations of basic rights have been noted -- and filed for further study. What violations? What rights? Well, how about the right to organize? Three clubs -- New Orleans, Dallas and Cincinnati -- have forbidden their coaches to join the association. The league has been notified of this. The league has made a noise like an oyster. To me, this seemed like a clear labor-rights violation. I called the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) on this one and spoke to Dan Silverman, the director of Region 2, in Manhattan, and a veteran of many years of labor disputes in professional sports. "If it's written into the contract," he said, "it's a violation. It's what was known in the early part of the century as a Yellow Dog Contract, conditioning employment on a pledge not to join a union. "As far as prohibiting the coaches from joining, well, we'd have to look into that, if the association brings it to our attention. It all depends on whether or not they're legally considered employees or supervisors." Ah, legalese. Here we go. If those three clubs could claim that the coaches are supervisors, then, legally, they could keep them out of the association. Now we all know that people who work for wages are employees, but the definition of "supervisor" is a weird one. Here it is, as set down in the National Labor Relations Act, and you can judge for yourself if coaches are supervisors or employees: "The term 'supervisor' means any individual having authority, in the interest of the employer, to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action, if in connection with the foregoing the exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment." Wading through all that legally written gobbledygook, it seems to me that while head coaches might be considered supervisors, the assistants perform the functions of a supervisor under orders, which makes them employees. Which makes Jerry Jones, Mike Brown and Tom Benson NLRB violators, just as Carroll Rosenbloom actually was so many years ago. According to Kennan's figures, coach salaries have been lagging way behind all other revenues in the sport. "In 1982 the average player earned $150,000 a year, the average coach, $50,000," he says. "That's a 3-1 ratio. Now the averages are $1.1 million for a player, $130,000 for a coach, which makes it 8-1." He didn't mention the huge growth in the value of franchises or in the TV contract, but those increases are way ahead of coach pay raises as well. Kennan served for a year as the association's unpaid president. He has been drawing a salary for less than a second year. He says that 80% of the coaches allowed to join are dues-paying members, as are 2/3 of the head coaches. I was curious to see which head coaches were pro association and which weren't, but he wouldn't tell me. So I did some checking and came up with a rather incomplete list, but it was the best I could do. Strongest members: Bill Parcells, Mike Holmgren, Jimmy Johnson, Vince Tobin, Steve Mariucci, Dick Vermeil, Mike Shanahan, Wade Phillips, Jim Mora. Non-supporters or fence-straddlers: Brian Billick, George Seifert, Norv Turner. The Manning and Bledsoe video will help support the association, and that's one thing that the early Players Association organizers never had, the support of the big names. But the struggle, although less volatile, has some eerie reminders of the past. I just hope that the coaches come out of it as well as the players did.
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