Opportunity fumbled as most players dodge league meeting
NFL owners and players met in New York yesterday to discuss what has become a roiling issue over players’ right to express themselves and owners’ rights in the workplace.
According to Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and others in attendance on both sides, the league’s policy on the national anthem “did not come up.’’
This leads to an obvious question: “What?”
Only 11 of the 32 owners found the time to attend and only about a dozen of over 2,100 players under contract to NFL teams showed up even though this was their day off. While the league may have extended invitations to certain invitees from the NFL’s working class, one of them, the guy who started this all, chose not to attend. Neither did about 2,000 of Colin Kaepernick’s brethren.
And Kaepernick lives in New York, for pity’s sake.
So just how big an issue are we talking about here, folks, if more than half the owners and nearly all the players are too busy to meet to discuss what has become a national debate? All this Sunday afternoon angst and presidential prevaricating (not to mention fulminating) and barely 25 people show up? What would the owners’ reaction have been if 2,500 showed up?
That failure, which I put on the players, is exactly why NFL players are in the position they’re in and major league baseball players are in the exceedingly more advantageous position they are in when it comes to the multibillion-dollar business of professional athletics and player rights.
Baseball players show up, or when told to, don’t show up, until their grievances are met.
The two sides agreed to
meet again to “discuss’’ the issue later and try to come up with a joint resolution of future action players might take to speak their mind on social issues in ways agreeable to management and the league’s customers. Which means what? While Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a memo last week stating the league “prefers’’ all players stand during “The Star-Spangled Banner” and confirmed its policy says all players must be on the sidelines and “should’’ stand, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones escalated the rhetoric when he threatened to order his coaches to bench players (or worse) if they refused, a position supported by President Trump but not likely by James Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights protecting individual freedoms, or Thomas Jefferson.
When Jones took that position however, he changed the dynamic in a way sports’ greatest labor leader, Marvin Miller, never would have tolerated. Now the issue was not about social justice. It was about workplace rules.
There is no way of know- ing for sure what Miller would have done when he was heading up the most powerful union in sports, the Major League Baseball Players Association, in a matter like this because it never happened.
But you can be sure that had Jones threatened baseball players for legally exercising a right the very flag they were kneeling under protects, he would have taken action to make clear that was not a place this conversation was going to head.
Had Jones made such a threat in baseball, in short order there would have been players on their knees from Fenway Park to Petco Park. And there would not be a scattering of them, as there were last Sunday around the NFL. Everyone would have been down on one knee because Miller taught his players a lesson football labor leaders have never been able to impart: Only in solidarity is there power.
He would have told them Jones’ threat at the president’s insistence was now a different issue. It was about the rights their CBA has given them and to ignore such a threat was intolerable.
We can debate until the cows come home whether the players’ position is irksome or not. We cannot debate, although President Trump has done a good job of deflection, that it was ever a demonstration directed at the military or patriotism because it was not. It was an effort to raise awareness of social injustice important to many players and even the players’ harshest critics cannot deny it has accomplished that.
So where do the two sides go now? That depends on whether the Constitution and common sense prevail. The CBA and the league’s operations manual protect the players from the kind of threat Jones made. That’s a losing proposition and Goodell knows it.
But the message has been lost now, drowned out by the president and his grandstanding vice president. NFL players now have to find a way to get their movement back on message. If 2,100 of them had shown up on Park Avenue yesterday instead of 12, it would have been a start.