Papa Gene : As a Pro Bowl Guard and More Recently a Representative, Upshaw Has Been Unshakable on the NFL Players’ Behalf

Gene Upshaw, the labor leader who ran the campaign that won free agency for pro football, was both captain and player rep of the Raiders during their winning era.

And as they tell it now, they have never known a more inspirational leader than the old pro who has spent the last 10 of his 47 years struggling against the NFL’s 28 club owners.

Former Raiders remember that five days before one Super Bowl game, Upshaw, then a veteran Pro Bowl guard, stood up in a team meeting and told the coaches: “Don’t look so worried--we’ll be ready. I’ve heard that you want a curfew starting Friday night, but we’re changing all that. We’re starting the curfew tonight.”

Then he glared around the room to see if anyone disagreed. Nobody did.

And presently, the well-rested Raiders won the game.

“Gene knew he could (set curfews) because he always knows what football players are thinking,” Richard Berthelsen, his chief counsel, said the other day.

That, in fact, is what Upshaw is all about. His interest in the attitudes, ambitions, and preferences of his associates has been there since long before he joined the NFL Players Assn. as executive director in 1983.

Exhibit A: His friends say that during Upshaw’s playing career, he knew every other player in the league. He remains the only one who has played in Super Bowls of three decades, and from first to last, he had two priorities: winning and cultivating relationships.

“Gene is a born politician,” said his former Raider roommate, Art Shell, now the club’s coach. “We used to call him ‘Governor.’ ”

Said Doug Allen, the NFLPA’s assistant executive director: “I remember the day that Gene went down a list of nearly 1,000 players and told me how each of them differed on a (controversial matter).”

Exhibit B: After a week on the road earlier this year, when Upshaw returned to his Washington office and picked up 47 telephone messages--from his lawyers, his wife, friends, co-workers, newspaper reporters, player Freeman McNeil and Commissioner Paul Tagliabue--he placed the stack on his desk in the order of priority.

And returned McNeil’s call first.

“In this shop, nobody ever comes before a player,” Upshaw said.

With that commitment and some realistic, well-defined goals, plus perseverance and the help of an efficient organization, Upshaw has in recent months forged three historic achievements:

--As an AFL-CIO vice president, Upshaw has emerged as one of the most powerful labor leaders in America.

Said AFL-CIO chief Bill Robertson: “Our three bright lights are Richard Trumka of the Mine Workers, Ron Carey of the Teamsters and Upshaw.”

--Along the way, Upshaw, one of hundreds who have fought the NFL over the years, became the first to bring the league to its knees. Pro football’s club owners, united and unbending, had held off free agency for three-quarters of a century before Upshaw dropped them this year--in the courts and at the bargaining table--freeing hundreds of players.

--Upshaw can already look back on a lifetime of extraordinary success in two prominent, very different careers. Of the thousands who have played pro football since Jim Thorpe and Red Grange, Upshaw is one of only 165 in the Hall of Fame.

And of the thousands who have led labor unions since Samuel Gompers, Upshaw is one of the few who have been spectacularly successful.

Said Tagliabue: “The (explanation) is that Gene showed the same level of ability at the NFLPA that he had shown on the field.”

THE UNION LEADER WHO KILLED HIS OWN UNION

Only 5 1/2 years ago, Upshaw and his players hit bottom. The union had gone out on a strike that the NFL’s club owners broke with what they called replacement teams. The players called them scab teams.

Then, after voting to end that strike in time for the sixth weekend of a torn season, the NFLPA learned that the owners had decided to teach the players another lesson, locking them out--without pay--for still another week.

“(The owners) rubbed their noses in it,” former commissioner Pete Rozelle said.

Or, possibly, Upshaw hit his low point a few months later in a St. Louis courthouse. That day, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled that although a 1982 bargaining agreement had lapsed, the players were still bound by its provisions--meaning that the NFL, standing on its old antitrust exemption, could deny them free agency indefinitely.

Depressed but unyielding, Upshaw called his staff together in Washington the next morning to consider a new game plan.

He could have signed with the owners on their terms, and resumed the NFLPA’s age-old bargaining for incidental perks, such as more meal money. He could have started another court case in a different district, and hoped for a better result. He could have resigned.

He didn’t have to destroy his own union.

But he did.

“If the owners can hide behind antitrust for as long as we’re a union, then we won’t be a union anymore,” Upshaw said.

The surprise action to decertify the union provoked doubts, but is regarded today as one of the boldest moves ever made by a union leader.

“It was brilliant strategy,” Robertson said from his AFL-CIO office. “The NFLPA (campaign) was well plotted, and it was carried off very well by Upshaw and Berthelsen and Allen, and their people.”

Said Rozelle, who wasn’t involved in the negotiations: “To my knowledge, (the owners) had never considered a situation where the union would cease to exist. Under labor law, they could have stonewalled (Upshaw) indefinitely. Decertification changed everything.”

What it changed the most was the courtroom status of the players. They became free agents there first. For in American labor law, if neither side can raise an antitrust shield, all are equals.

The only thing missing for a while was confirmation by a federal judge and jury that the shield had indeed disappeared. In time, that was provided in Minneapolis, in Judge David Doty’s district court.

It wasn’t all as easy as it sounds now.

“Our plan wouldn’t have succeeded without Upshaw,” Berthelsen said. “It took all the personal leadership and courage that Gene could muster.”

As the NFLPA’s case proceeded slowly through the courts, the owners fought Upshaw every step of the way with imaginative tactics on many fronts:

--Needing a union of some kind to preserve their annual college player draft, the owners continuously sought to undermine and overthrow Upshaw’s organization. On three occasions in two years, the NFL strongly backed three former players who set out to organize pliant new unions.

--On the propaganda front, the NFL pursued divide-and-conquer policies. When Upshaw commanded the loyalty of 93% of his membership, for example, Tagliabue visited with the players of three teams and then said at a news conference: “The sentiment I heard most often was, ‘Save us from our union.’ ”

--Most threatening of all, the owners struck at Upshaw’s revenue base, the NFLPA’s licensing arrangements for trading cards and other products. They offered large cash sums to players who would abandon the NFLPA and sign exclusive licensing permits with the league.

Upshaw’s career was on the line. The union had so much at stake that if the owners had won, Upshaw, almost certainly, would have been forced out.

“But he didn’t waver once,” Berthelsen said. “Weaker people would have settled sooner, for less. Gene’s leadership was decisive.”

AN UNKNOWN FROM AN UNKNOWN SCHOOL

On Texas’ gulf coast, Kingsville, population 25,000, is the big town between Corpus Christi and Brownsville. Upshaw used to know it well. Thirty years ago, the oldest of three sons of an oil field roustabout, he hitchhiked the 24 miles from his birthplace at Robstown to start a new life there at Texas A&I.;

“My father gave me $75 and sent me off to get an education,” Upshaw said. “He also wanted me to play college baseball, and hopefully sign a pro baseball contract sometime.”

But on the way to baseball practice one day, Eugene Thurman Upshaw II stopped to watch football practice. And soon the football coach came over and asked him why he was standing there.

“He gave me a uniform, and three days later he gave me a scholarship,” Upshaw said.

At Texas A&I;, he began as a 6-footer weighing 205 pounds.

“I grew to 6-5 and 260 in one semester,” he said. “That’s five pounds more than I weigh today.”

Still big enough now to deal as an equal with active players, Upshaw, who runs and lifts weights to stay in shape, looks, acts and seems younger than his years.

He is apparently a born leader.

“You could always talk to Gene,” Rozelle said. “He handled himself very well.”

Upshaw had had his first brush with the outside world during the college bowl season of 1966-67, his last year at Texas A&I.;

“I was an unknown from an unknown school when they invited me to the Senior Bowl,” he said. “I played with guys who had never heard of either me or (Texas A&I;), but it was a thrill to play with the best players of my generation--Bubba Smith, Gene Washington, Bob Griese, Steve Spurrier, Floyd Little, Mel Farr, Nick Eddy, George Webster, Alan Page.”

Six months later, Upshaw was invited to a bigger show, the Chicago All-Star game, with the same players. And one day Griese and Little called a players-only meeting.

By then, the unknown from the unknown school was everybody’s friend. He was elected captain, unanimously.

“I’m sure he was a humane captain,” the AFL-CIO’s Robertson said. “Gene is a man of common decency who doesn’t try to intimidate people. He has the sense of compassion that the great labor leaders all have.”

In his management style, his associates say, Upshaw is unpretending, open-handed and open-minded.

“I don’t think of myself as a (labor boss),” he said. “My philosophy is that the NFLPA only has one boss: the players. I have a great (lawyer), Dick Berthelsen, and a great assistant, Doug Allen, and I’d be a fool not to give them the flexibility to be as creative as they’ve shown they can be.”

An employee who watched Upshaw visiting with the building’s letter carrier one day said: “Gene is the only one I know who treats everybody the same.”

That is a result, no doubt, of Upshaw’s background.

“My earliest memory is picking cotton in the Texas heat,” he said. “My brothers and I were out in the fields every day, from dawn to night, well into our teens. You don’t feel like pushing people around when you remember the years you spent tearing up your hands picking cotton.”

THE GOOD LIFE IN A VIRGINIA LOG CABIN

Upshaw and his wife, Terri, had scheduled a surprise New Year’s Eve birthday party at their home in Great Falls, Va., for a friend and 70 guests.

Upshaw at the time was in the midst of the NFLPA’s complicated, final negotiations with Tagliabue and other NFL lawyers. He knew he might have to miss his own party. Sure enough, he was called to New York, leaving Terri to make the 11th-hour arrangements herself.

Less than an hour before the first guest arrived, Upshaw reappeared.

“He walked in the door, put on his party hat, and had a better time than anybody,” Terri said. “With all this (negotiating), our family has had a tough time of it for years. I’ve never known when he’d be home, or how long he might stay.

“But I’ll say this: When he’s here, he never talks shop. He doesn’t even think it, unless the phone rings. When he’s here, Gene gives the children and me 100% of his time.”

The children are Justin Andrew, 5, and Daniel James, 2. Eugene III, 21, from a previous marriage, is in college in Florida.

The Upshaws’ residence at Great Falls has to be seen to be believed. Rising on 2 1/2 wooded acres, it is a three-story, seven-bedroom mansion built around a log cabin.

Said Gene: “The guy we bought the place from was born in a log cabin. He wanted to remember his roots.”

THE JOURNEY TO PEACE RUNS DOWN HIGHWAY 63

During Upshaw’s playing career, he was one of the most reliable blockers in league history.

And so in a Raider huddle one day, when quarterback Ken Stabler seemed stumped for a third-down call, fullback Mark van Eeghen spoke up.

“Let’s take it down Highway 63,” van Eeghen said.

“Great idea,” Stabler said. “Let’s go.”

They got the first down.

*

For 16 years, 63 was Upshaw’s Raider uniform number, and Highway 63 was the area that Upshaw cleared when he blocked ahead of a running back.

The thing that defined Upshaw as a player, though, was his studied determination not to take his talent for granted.

“Every year when I headed for training camp, I never had a job, the way I figured it,” he said at his Washington office. “I always went in fighting for a starting position.”

He has run the NFLPA about the same way, fighting for his job every morning, striving for peace in his time.

When a peaceful solution was reached this year, Upshaw, though applauded by most NFLPA members, was second-guessed by some for one major decision: He had agreed to a hard cap on player salaries that will kick in eventually at 58% of most NFL revenues.

On some clubs, accordingly, salaries that would in time have gone through the roof have been blocked back for at least the rest of this century.

That’s really all his critics can find to complain about. But they are complaining. Their goal was free agency with no brakes on owner spending.

“That would have been unhealthy for us and them,” Upshaw replies. “Both sides made major compromises--and for (both) it was win-win. The NFLPA wants the NFL to be successful (because) we’re all better off if both sides are making a lot of money.”

Relying on the recommendations of the two NFLPA attorneys who were most closely involved in the settlement, Berthelsen and Jim Quinn, Upshaw played a role so influential that he is getting recognition as the most successful labor boss that sports has had.

Still, for the NFLPA, the road down new Highway 63 was rocky, with three particularly deep potholes:

--To begin with, as the leader of a football players’ union, Upshaw was negotiating with uniformly prosperous club owners who could have resisted a settlement indefinitely. Indeed, without some key compromises, they would be resisting still.

--He was also battling some of the toughest individuals who have ever owned sports teams. They had more than money. They had the will and the strength to hold NFL players in a state of servility long after baseball and basketball owners had thrown in the towel.

--And, finally, Upshaw and his people, Berthelsen and Quinn among them, talked the NFL into free agency, a condition that many club owners had promised to oppose forever.

Upshaw’s legacy is that, for better or worse, the league will never be the same.