For the NFL's Retirees: Know Pain, No Gain

Mike Ditka is mad.

Of course, that's not unusual. When Ditka was coach of the Chicago Bears, he seemed perpetually peeved. But now his anger is about something more serious than a bad call or a dropped pass. He's irate about pro football's treatment of former NFL players struggling to survive with broken bodies and battered brains.

"I took cortisone injections three times a week and had four hip replacements after I quit the game, but that's football and we chose to play hurt," Ditka says. "We paid the price and thought the game would pay us back, but the league and the union sold us out. . . . It's criminal. There's so much money in this . . . game and no one gives a [bleep] about these guys."

Ditka sounded off in "Casualties of the NFL," a profoundly depressing story in the September issue of Men's Journal. When a House subcommittee held a hearing on the issue in June, there was a flurry of media interest in the fate of crippled former players. But this piece, by Paul Solotaroff, is a comprehensive portrait of a sport that cripples its players, mentally and physically, and then, in far too many cases, seems to find some petty reason to deny them disability payments.

"Strap a helmet on, run headfirst into a wall, then do it again 35 times. That's what I did every Sunday afternoon," Daryl Johnston, a former Dallas Cowboys fullback now working at Fox TV, told Men's Journal. "When I broke my neck doing what I was trained to do, the league and union told me to get lost. The second I couldn't play I was dead meat to them. It was, 'So long, see you later, and don't call us.' "

Of course, some NFL players make millions of dollars a year and retire rich and healthy. But they're the lucky ones. The average NFL career lasts 3 1/2 years and ends, frequently because of a crippling injury, before the player ever makes serious money. And these injuries are not just busted knees and shattered backs, which would be bad enough. Now, evidence is rapidly accumulating that concussions and other head traumas are causing Alzheimer's-like dementia in former players who are still young.

"Post-mortem exams of Andre Waters (suicide at 44), Terry Long (suicide at 45), Justin Strzelczyk (car crash at 36), Mike Webster (heart attack at 50) -- showed staggering brain damage in men so young," Solotaroff writes. ". . . Stunningly, no one in the sport has stepped up to address the scope and depth of the injuries -- not the teams, not the owners, and certainly not the one organization charged with looking after the athletes, the NFL Players Association."

To Solotaroff and many of the ex-players he quotes, the primary villains in this story are the Players Association and its executive director, Gene Upshaw, who makes $6.7 million a year, far more than any other sports union leader.

"In a game expected to take in $7 billion this year and that exceeds all others in causing bodily harm, fewer than 3 percent of the men who played in the league succeed in getting disability benefits," Solotaroff writes. "Worse, the players union turns away ailing vets despite a pension fund with $1 billion in assets."

"Bill Forrester's attached to a feeding tube, Joe Perry has to choose between eating and pain pills," says Ditka, "and here's this Upshaw, with his $6.7 mllion salary, saying there's no dough left to help them out. That's greed talking and nothing else."

Upshaw did not testify at the House hearing on this issue, nor did he speak to Solotaroff. I called to get his reaction to this story but Players Association spokesman Carl Francis said Upshaw is on vacation.

"You can't say that the system is a failure because three or four guys -- or even 10 guys -- were denied benefits," Francis said. "We've always been committed to helping retired players to improve the quality of their lives and we will continue to be committed to improving benefits for retired players."