NFL STRIKE : Television Has Clout to Step In

Who controls pro football? Who runs it? Not Art Rooney, the Halas family, the Mara family. Not Tex Schramm, Joe Robbie. Not even Pete Rozelle.

Television runs pro football. It bankrolls it, promotes it, coddles it, protects it.

It needs it.

It’s the reason franchises are selling for $80 million and upward. It’s the reason sports salaries are in the range once commanded by railroad barons.

It’s the reason athletes are the new royalty in our societies. It’s the reason communities are bidding hundreds of millions for sports conglomerates.

The fiction that football teams are owned and operated by individuals dies hard.

Television tries to maintain the ridiculous posture that it is just a journalist in the equation. That it looks in on a football game just as it might look in on a forest fire or a three-car crash.

Look at the reality: Television wants a game on Monday night? Television gets a game on Monday night. Television wants one on Thursday? Television wants one at 9 o’clock in the morning? Television wants a timeout?

Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and television is Lola.

Sports are almost the only spontaneous entertainment on television today. Sports and Congressional hearings and the occasional talk-show. Everything else is canned.

Pro football filled the biggest void in television broadcasting--Sunday afternoon. Before the NFL, it used to be known as the Sunday afternoon ghetto, an entertainment orphan given over to shows such as Omnibus and boring discussions on literary obscurantisms. It never sold a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of light beer.

Television pays $2.5 billion every five years for pro football. After the bookkeeping, that comes out to about $17 million a team each year. The owners get that before they buy a football. The revenue they get at the gate and from programs and concessions is just gravy, although that comes to a million a Sunday, too.

So where are the real owners, if not operators, of the great game at the bargaining sessions of the current NFL strike? Where’s ABC, NBC, CBS, the cable networks? It’s their money the players want. It’s their show the strikers and management are tampering with.

You think Jim Kelly would be getting $68,750 a game if television wasn’t, so to speak, in the picture? He wouldn’t be getting that a season.

These guys are television performers to the public, a wheel to the gamblers. It’s preposterous to think that Eric Dickerson is underpaid at $630,000 a year until you realize how many cars he sells for Ford carrying a football.

Football owners are somewhat irrelevant. They tend to run the game the same way they did when the league was formed by six guys sitting on a running board in Dayton and offering Jim Thorpe a percentage of what they got passing the hat.

What they really own are the rights to a prime-time TV show.

For television not to be represented at the bargaining table is like MGM not being represented in an actors’ strike in the old Hollywood.

You see, television not only pays for pro football, it glorifies it. It consecrates it. If television were to pull out of pro football, the game would lose more than money. It would lose stature, cachet. It would be in disgrace like a show whose option was dropped. If the Super Bowl weren’t televised, the public would think something was wrong with it. A non-televised event is a sports pariah.

But television is made to stand by like a trussed-up giant while anachronistic forces play out a scenario as old, and old-fashioned, as the Haymarket Riots.

Even strike-breaking, a weapon as ancient and discredited as leeches in medicine is being brought into play. No self-respecting advertiser is going to be caught hawking its products on a scab show, not anyone with a union of its own.

Nobody ever won a strike. All strikes ever produce are inflations. I believe it was John L. Lewis himself, who called plenty of them, who said: “The union leader who has to call a strike is a failure.”

Conceivably, television could be the least headstrong party to the negotiations. It could see the issues in 1987 terms. After all, we are not dealing here with a racketeer-filled union or a Marxist class struggle. This is a falling-out of millionaires, not a lockout at the River Rouge.

Free agency is an inalienable right of every American. Actually, pro football should be used to it. Practically throughout its history, it has had a rival league springing up to contend with, producing the equivalence of free agency or worse. Most of the AFC was founded on free agency.

Minimum salaries and squad sizes, while legitimate goals to negotiate, are silly matters to hold a crippling season-long strike over.

The owners think it’s their game and their ball. Television, whose $2.5-billion ante would buy every team in the league twice over, should really move in to protect its investment. Either that or dust off some reruns of Omnibus and see if sponsors want to cough up billions for that.