Goodwill, squandered

By Adam Cancryn 


The NFL players received rare backing from fans during the league's months-long lockout. But one greedy ploy perpetrated by four individuals threatened to stamp out all of that support.


Work stoppages, and their ensuing negotiations, are tricky things. They are a kind of antithesis of the sports the owners and athletes and lawyers are wrangling over: secretive and confusing, full of complicated concepts and undefined goals and the sense of never knowing what the score is, much less how to go about finding out.


Faced with those variables, the solution for most fans is to simplify. A strike or a lockout is a battle between the rich people in the spotlight and the rich people in the shadows over the finances of a leisure activity. It’s absurd, and the anger that wells up in those fans is unsurprising. Also unsurprising is that that anger is almost always directed at the players. They are wealthy, famous and powerful, simply because they can throw a ball harder, jump higher or run faster than the rest of us. And now they want more money, power and fame, the thinking goes.


Pretty quickly, the narrative shifts from Players v. Owners to Players v. Fans, Goliath v. the Philistines that just want to see him fight, not sit at home while his attorneys negotiate the purse for his match against David. Meanwhile, the owners use that leverage to cut a larger slice of the pie for themselves, one supplemented by higher hot dog prices and more luxury suites.


That has not happened this time around. In the court of public opinion, the NFL players have enjoyed rare support. Whether through effective PR or just a better general understanding of the issues, the players have captured fans’ support and thrust the owners into the spotlight.


Yet right on the verge of an agreement and a return to the game they love, four players tried hard to annihilate that hard-won goodwill.


Like all things lockout related, the situation is murky. Either Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson decided to hold the new contract hostage, or their agents did it for them. But semantics, at this point, don’t matter, not in the court of public opinion.


The bottom line is that four individuals, two of whom have profited immensely by selling fans sports drinks and sneakers and everything in between, tried to hold up an agreement that returns professional football to fans’ lives. They tried to hold up an agreement that employs thousands of people, most of whom have no source of income without their job as a fringe player, coach’s assistant or ticket agent.


And for what, another $10 million on top of the $11.3 million Vincent Jackson will play for this season? Another $10 million for the two most visible and popular players in the game, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees? Another $10 million for Logan Mankins, the face of the unselfish, self-sacrificial “Patriots Way?”


In all likelihood, the NFL lockout will end today and if not, in the near future. Football will return in time for a full season, the fans will fill the seats and the players and owners will continue to split the league’s $9 billion in revenues.


But this last episode, this epilogue tacked onto the long and arduous process, will not be forgotten. The next time the NFL players wonder why they’re made out as the villains, they need only to look back at four players’ greedy, last-ditch maneuver.


The players engineered a masterful drive this summer, pinning the owners yards from their own end zone as a nation full of fans cheered them on. Yet in one egotistical and tone-deaf play, they nearly threw it all away.