Free-Agent Summit a Selfish Power Grab

Back in the day, a handful of some of the best football players in the NFL called for a summit. They joined forces to chart a new future. They included Jim Brown, who, to the shock of many, had just retired at the height of a career that made him the greatest running back the game ever saw, and a first-team all-NFL guard named John Wooten.

They got together on a team they called the Negro Industrial and Economic Union -- emphasis on union. They seeded it with a half-million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation and a quarter-million dollar check from the Commerce Department. They used their newly formed organization for business start-ups in half a dozen cities like, recalled Time magazine in 1968, a Los Angeles cosmetics manufacturing company called Magnificent Natural Products Inc. that was the brainchild of a one-time barber. It made half a million within two years.

Those were the days when pro athletes, like a lot of people in all walks of life, had a sense of doing something collectively for others. That was selfless.

The most recent example of pro athletes doing something collectively, which we caught wind of over the past week, was of them doing something for themselves. That's selfish.



Share No wonder Henry Thomas, the agent for NBA All-Star free agents Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, tried to assuage concerns for the second time in a week -- Tuesday to CNBC.com and last Thursday originally to the South Florida Sun Sentinel -- about his clients, along with free-agent supernova LeBron James and free-agent shooting star Joe Johnson, planning to meet before the free-agent shopping period begins July 1 in an effort to coordinate where each would sign, and with whom, to better their chances of winning championships.

"I think we'll all sit down, and before one of us makes a decision, all of us will have spoken to each other and [listened to the] thinking ...," Wade told the Chicago Tribune last week. "A lot of decisions [will be based on] what other players are willing to do and what other guys want to do. So it's not just a 'me' situation here. We all have to look and see what each other is thinking."

Before Thomas could start stamping out that potential firestorm, Amar'e Stoudemire chimed in to FanHouse's Brett Pollakoff shortly after losing the Western Conference finals to the Lakers that he, too, expected to be part of the biggest gathering of Dons since "The Godfather."

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This isn't the kind of clout that some of us have envisioned when thinking about the collective power professional athletes have if ever they brought it to the fore.

Some of us wondered aloud and for a long time when pro athletes would ban together and exercise the immense clout they have as an upper-class proletariat. We thought about the kind exercised by some all-stars from the defunct American Football League, who in the '60s, when New Orleans refused black players for the all-star game it was hosting to stay in its hotels and dine at its eateries, stood up together and forced the league to move the game to a more humane locale, Houston. We dreamed about a what-if -- what if NBA players stood up in unison to their commissioner's virtually unilaterally imposed dress code a few years ago, instead of slinking into their locker rooms and accepting it like kids who'd done something bad?

Instead, what Wade & Co. talked about doing the past week goes against the efforts of the players' union to represent its entire constituency for the betterment of each individual.

This isn't about some broad issue like the right to work wherever an athlete desires, which was the struggle for free agency that was won many moons ago by some players who sacrificed part of their careers to make it happen. This isn't about setting up a viable pension and health plan for retired athletes who wind up falling on hard times. This isn't about getting a fair share of the loot players generate for league ownership.

This isn't anything noble at all.

This is a power grab by players, no doubt, but the wrong kind. It isn't against executive power or ownership. It is for a few players for their benefit, and for the few more players who might be lucky enough to be included as teammates.

What Wade & Co. could do is nothing new. It's something that has haunted labor organizations forever. It's the creation of an upper crust within the union and it hasn't served unions well.

Sports are particularly vulnerable to such a development because of the high wages so many players earn and the low job security extended to most of them. The incentive is to get all you can as quickly as you can and to hell with what it means for those who will follow in your cleat on sneaker tracks.

That's why the union, not just agents like Thomas who represent other athletes, should be loudest to caution against whatever Wade & Co. want to talk about.

After all, players don't need to be splintered; they need to be united, especially now. The current collective bargaining agreement between the players and the league is scheduled to expire on July 1, 2011. It's been suggested that owners who've suffered in the recession want to cut the players' take of league income and want a hard cap on salaries instead of the current system that lets teams go over the payroll cap to keep their own players as long as they pay a tax. They may even want a cut in contract lengths.

The players need everyone to be on board for that looming contract fight. They don't need any jealousies born from favoritism by their brethren who perceive themselves to be the Talented Tenth. But that is exactly what this folly could foster. The winners would be a few, and the losers many.