COMMENTARY : The Sands of Time Run Out on NFL

Where’s Tags?

Seriously, where is he?

Where is the most high exalted commissioner of the NFL? We hardly hear from him anymore. Is he hiding under the desk? (Pete Rozelle hid under the desk his last few years. It was hell on his tan, but he got a lot of reading done.) Is he in the instant-replay booth, wondering who turned out the lights? Is he in the Giants’ end zone with Jimmy Hoffa?

Hey, Tags, oley-oley-in-free.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

I know these are tough times for commissioners. Fay Vincent got bounced on his keister last month for having the gall to suggest that Atlanta is east of the Mississippi River. The NHL’s John Ziegler got the bum’s rush before that. Maybe Tags is nervous if he takes too high a profile, he’ll be the next to go. So Tags is taking such a low profile that he’s under the radar.

This is a mistake.

If I’m Paul Tagliabue, I’m calling a news conference. I’m getting up in front of the whole country and saying:

“I stand before you knowing the number one threat to the harmonious future of the NFL is the lack of a labor agreement between players and management. I am therefore devoting all my energy to personally seeking an agreement that will be fair to both sides. I call upon Gene Upshaw to meet with me in this spirit of progress and fairness. . . . Gene, if you don’t want to come to New York, I’ll be glad to go to my hometown of Washington.”

Because the Apocalypse is coming. The NFL is going to hell in a handbasket.

Only a fool (or a guy looking to bill hours) would think that the NFL isn’t going to continue to lose every lawsuit the players file. The NFL always loses in court. The NFL is the Red Klotz of jurisprudence. Tags ought to know this better than anyone. All you have to do to scare Tags out of his wits is sidle up and whisper in his ear, “Al Davis.”

Don’t you see? Keith Jackson is more than just an isolated incident. Keith Jackson is a precedent. By next February, every NFL player whose contract has expired is going to be a free agent. No compensation. No restrictions. This is not some lunatic liberal speculation. This is the writing on the wall.

Some 280 players will be affected.

Free agents.

Free to make their own deals.

Free.

At last.

The draft is going down, too, which means even more players will be free to make their own deals, and go wherever they want.

There is a word for this: anarchy.

So the NFL commissioner has to stand for more than the national anthem. He has to do more than testify at trials and meet with team owners and warm some seat in The Squire’s Box--and pet Coco. He has to lead. Get out in front in a vigorous, public way.

Fay Vincent was sideswiped for exercising too much authority, for not being political enough. Paul Tagliabue is so deep in the back room he may as well be Marlene Dietrich.

He has to start dealing with Upshaw. And Upshaw, who is swaggering around like Ravishing Rick Rude, ought to start dealing with Tagliabue. Because all it takes is one reversal on appeal. And anyway, Upshaw doesn’t want anarchy. He’s a football guy. He believes in structure and order. He doesn’t want the NFL so discombobulated that it blows apart at the seams. The NFL is the golden goose. Both sides realize that. . . . I think.

Everyone points to the NBA as the model to follow. Now there’s labor peace, they say. Look what a great job David Stern did, getting the players to agree to a salary cap--even though you have to be Carl Sagan to understand it.

What people fail to remember about this labor peace is that it would never have happened if the players--in the person of Larry Fleisher, who had enough vision to look down the road and not just up the street--weren’t willing to be the party of the second part. The players cooperated with the owners. This is not what’s happening in football, or in baseball.

While football is under siege from without, in the courtrooms, baseball is crumbling from within. Forget the Orioles, who are packing them in like coach class to Tokyo; they’re the blip on the graph. The rest of baseball suffers from excruciatingly long games and poisonously hostile labor relations.

If you think the NFL ownership has taken a hard line, showing its whip hand by holding off expansion and the World League, baseball’s owners are threatening to go whole hog with a lockout--which doesn’t exactly create a bull market for franchises.

It’s always struck me as comical when owners talk about the wildly escalating salaries, like they weren’t the ones stupid enough to give them. Then they’ll howl about arbitration. Hey, the reason the arbiter awards $1.8 million to the .220 shortstop is because you gave him no choice by voluntarily giving $2.6 million to the .240 shortstop. No commissioner, not even a stooge puppet with a wooden head, can keep the owners from the consequences of their stupidity.

The answer for baseball isn’t a lockout. Just as the answer for the NFL isn’t a stubborn series of doomed appeals to a higher court. The law is on the side of freedom. That’s because justice is blind and doesn’t sit in a sky box.

Baseball’s first step is to get a commissioner, not Battlin’ Bud Selig, who’s currently occupying the desk. Football already has a commissioner, a smart, decent man who doesn’t seem the type to make this into the Alamo. And if he’d get a little distance from the owners’ vision, and take the bold step of leadership--knock on Upshaw’s door and personally negotiate rather than litigate--he could keep both sides from drawing their lines in the sand.