Scorecard

RIGHT DESTINATION, WRONG TRACK

One thing is clear about the approaching contract showdown between NFL owners and players (page 30): Ed Garvey, the executive director of the players' union, is justified in seeking more money for his members. Even allowing for the fact that rosters are bigger and the season somewhat shorter in football than in other sports, it's an inequity that the average player's salary in the prosperous NFL was only $78,000 in 1980 vs. $108,000 in the NHL, $143,000 in baseball and $186,000 in the NBA.

What isn't clear is why Garvey insists on addressing that inequity by pushing for a fixed share of NFL gross revenues for the players instead of for the sort of relatively unrestricted free-agency system under which salaries have soared in other sports.

Garvey's explanation is that free agency in the NFL simply won't work. As evidence, he notes that, since 1977, when the last collective-bargaining agreement in football was reached, only six of the more than 500 players who have become free agents have changed teams and that a star of the magnitude of the Chicago Bears' Walter Payton didn't get a single bid from another team when he became a free agent last February. Garvey argues that because NFL owners share TV revenues equally and are thus in a can't-lose situation financially, they lack the necessary incentive to bid for free agents.

But Garvey himself is at least partly responsible for the lack of movement he decries. If Payton didn't attract offers from other teams, it had something to do with the two first-round draft choices that any club signing him would have had to pay the Bears under the NFL's stiff compensation rules. Those rules are in force because, after a 1976 federal court decision gave NFL players absolute free agency, Garvey's union negated that victory by agreeing in the 1977 negotiations to compensation procedures that turned out to restrict free agency more than the union anticipated; in return for the concessions on free agency, the NFL granted what amounts to a closed shop and higher NFL contributions to the players' pension plan.

As for Garvey's argument that owners have no economic incentive to win, the facts suggest otherwise. NFL owners tend to be successful businessmen with strong egos who don't particularly relish having sportswriters, golf-course kibitzers and boardroom cronies giving them grief about being associated with losing teams. And, in fact, they do have a financial stake in won-lost records. How well a team performs on the field can affect the price that can be charged for tickets to its games, not to mention the demand for luxury boxes and the amount of concession receipts lost because of no-shows turned off by a team's ineptness. It's partly because of such factors that the profits of NFL clubs vary widely, notwithstanding the equal sharing of TV wealth; according to the union's own estimates, the Rams, for example, had a 1980 profit of at least $7.7 million vs. barely $2.5 million for the Broncos.

One reason Garvey shies from fighting for free agency may be his desire to minimize the influence of certain player agents with whom he has feuded. It may be no coincidence that a group of agents tried unsuccessfully two years ago to establish a rival NFL players' association or that Garvey's union was a major force behind a bill strictly regulating sports agents that passed the California legislature last year. Obviously, agents would wield less power under Garvey's proposed percentage-of-gross-revenue scheme, with its provision for a fixed salary scale, than they would under unbridled free agency.

For all we know, Garvey's negotiating strategy will work and he'll win a revenue-sharing deal that results in deserved higher salaries for his players. But we also wouldn't be surprised if he has trouble gaining public sympathy for so unconventional a scheme and is hard put to maintain rank-and-file unity on the issue. By contrast, free agency is a tried-and-true method of raising player salaries, one that hasn't been honestly tested in the NFL.

THE MASSAGE WAS ON THE HOUSE
When an earthquake registering 5.9 on the Richter scale hit New England one morning last month, Colgate Goaltender Guy Lemonde was asleep in a motel in Brewer, Maine, where the Red Raiders had traveled to play the University of Maine. As the room shook, Lemonde woke up, turned to his roommate, backup Goalie Jeff Cooper, and said, "Thanks a lot, Coop." Then he fell back asleep. Later, after awakening for good and being told about the quake, Lemonde sheepishly explained why he'd expressed gratitude to Cooper: "I thought Coop had put a quarter in the Magic Fingers."

NOT A CLUB FOR JUST ANYONE