What was a tense relationship between the NFL and its player’s union a year ago turned, quite frankly, into a love fest at the Sports Lawyers Association annual meeting in Toronto. Both Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and League Counsel Jeffrey Pash credited the union for working with the league, with both sides making concessions.
But leave it to the venerable warrior, Hall of Famer Gene Upshaw, to provide a somewhat emotional salute to Tagliabue, who has announced his intention to resign.
“Through all the negotiations last year, we never lost communication,” said Upshaw, the NFLPA’s executive director. “The other thing I could count on with Paul is there were never any surprises.
“As personal as the relationship has been between Paul and I, it has also been extremely professional. I am convinced that it was the nature of that relationship that caused them to come back one more time during the negotiations, leading to the new CBA.”
Tagliabue, who was honored at the Friday luncheon, was far and away the marquee speaker at the conference.
Among the key opportunities and challenges that the next commissioner will face were: “The health and strength of the game at all levels; the strength of other forms of entertainment; the evolution of the electronic media; and the pace of demographic change.”
Tagliabue suggested with the first point that the NFL needs to continue to create opportunity among youths to play the game. He also elaborated on the final point, noting that there will be tremendous growth in the population in the coming decades, especially with regard to Hispanics and Asians, and that the NFL must be ready to appeal to those segments of the population.
Tagliabue ended on a humorous note after he was asked about the role Canadian football will play in the growth and health of the NFL.
“In time, I see a Canadian and a Mexican and a European league in a round-robin championship series. Of course, some people think that that is a good indication that I should be retiring.”
Don Fehr, the long-time head of the MLB Players Association, was not about to be an optimist.
So after he painted a rosy picture of Baseball’s growth since 2003 (from $1.8 billion to a projected $5 billion in 2006), he promptly suggested that the overall financial success of the game will not translate any time soon into a new collective bargaining agreement.
One of the chief reasons for this, he noted, was because “Baseball is not Football. What you do locally in Baseball (in terms of maximizing revenues) does matter,” said Fehr. And this exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots. Consequently, Baseball will always have a struggle when it comes to revenue-sharing between teams, salary caps and the impact it will have on the players.
