The Last Headbangers by Kevin Cook

Author:Kevin Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

9

“Knock Their Dicks Off”

That winter, in Mackey vs. NFL, the players’ union beat the Rozelle Rule in court. That meant the commissioner could no longer order compensation—usually high-round draft picks—for teams that lost free agents. The Rozelle Rule had effectively tied players to the teams that drafted them. With its demise, NFL players were free to sell their services to the highest bidder—a right the NFL Players Association promptly gave up in the next round of bargaining with owners. In March 1977, in exchange for what amounted to a pocketful of beads ($13.65 million over ten years), the union accepted a new version of the Rozelle Rule. Thirteen million seemed like a fortune at the time, but turned out to be a pittance compared to what NFL players might have earned as true free agents. The players would beat NFL owners in court again in 1987, only to settle for modified free agency and a salary cap.

Though the NFLPA proved weaker in the long run than its baseball and basketball counterparts, its members felt fatter and happier as the ’70s progressed. Steelers captain Andy Russell’s pay went from $12,000 his rookie year to $100,000 in 1976, worth about $400,000 in 2012 dollars. Jack Lambert held out and won a $200,000 contract. Franco Harris was also at $200,000, plus a white Thunderbird he got for endorsing a Pittsburgh Ford dealership. Terry Bradshaw was at $400,000. In the bicentennial year a growing NFL made room for eighty-six new players by adding two expansion teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Seahawks would go 2-12 in their first season while Tampa Bay proved itself the anti-Miami by going 0-14. The league’s new television package was worth $107 million, a 70 percent boost in only two seasons. To put that number in perspective, it was 328 times the value of the NFL’s original TV contract signed in 1962, a huge sum but a pocketful of dimes compared to the growth that lay ahead. The $107 million that delighted NFL owners in ’76 was less than one-half of one percent the size of the roughly $40 billion TV deal the league would sign in 2011, when the NFL’s televised rights surpassed the GDP of Lebanon and Kenya, outstripping the market capitalization of the vast majority of the S&P 500. With rising TV ratings, expansion, ever-bigger and faster players, and new rules that favored offense, the league was taking on its modern form.

In the spring of ’76 the Competition Committee banned spearing ballcarriers who fall or slip and make no move to get up. The “Ben Davidson Rule” was named for the Oakland defender who’d famously speared Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson in an apparent attempt to cut Dawson in half. “I was honored,” recalls Davidson. “Getting an illegal move named after you—that’s pretty Raider, huh?”

Stabler was Oakland’s best-paid player at $200,000 a year (up from $37,500 in 1974). It stood to reason that Pittsburgh’s stars earned more—the Steelers were back-to-back champions and the Raiders were .

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