Nor does playing longer secure one's finances during old age. Full pension payments start at 55, which is around the time the average former player dies, two decades sooner than non-players.
It is not just the league itself that's implicated here. As the above indicates, there's also the Players Association. Sotoroff quotes former player and coach, Mike Ditka, on this:
It's criminal. There's so much money in this goddam game, and no one gives a s--- about these guys. Bill Forrester's attached to a feeding tube, Joe Perry has to choose between eating and pain pills, and here's this [Players Association chief Gene] Upshaw, with his $6.7 million sallary, saying there's no dough left to help them out.
And Sotoroff goes on to cite an investigation, by MEN'S JOURNAL, which
reveals a pattern of conduct by the Players Association that denies former players the money they need and to which their injuries should entitle them.
All of which raises in my mind a few questions.
What Spirit Animates This Picture?
Assuming that this picture of NFL heartlessness is accurate --and I see no reason to doubt it-- I wonder what are the forces that underly this whole industry's apparent indifference to fairness and compassion for these men. This is not about particular individuals, but a whole organized system. Is something happening here that should be understood as a manifestation of what spirit(s) is being expressed in America today?
I wonder, in particular, to what extent this is simply a reflection of the nature of corporate capitalism, and to what extent this manifests something more specific to our immediate times.
Greed untempered by concerns for justice and compassion has certainly been seen before in the conduct of corporate capitalist industries. The asbestos industry's hiding from its workers what it knew about the dangers of its products to the health of the workers who processed them goes back several generations. And likewise the abandonment by the coal industry of miners with brown lung is an old story, and in many ways reminiscent of this current NFL story.
This kind of thing may not be what Max Weber had in mind when he wrote about "The Spirit of Capitalism," but it does seem to be--or to have become-- a part of that spirit. (The corporation has been aptly described as an organism with a sociopathic character. And in the 11th chapter (entitled "Automatic Pilot) of my book, THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE, I describe how the system is set up so that it is very difficult, in a publicly owned corporation, for any of the human beings involved to make it otherwise than sociopathic, profit-maximizing-at-all-costs organization.)
But I also wonder: is there in this NFL picture some spirit of the times in addition to all that? The resemblance of this story to the recent scandals at Walter Reed Army Hospital is readily noted: is there some filament of cultural energy that makes that resemblance not coincidental but the fruit of an organic, deep connection?
Would this story of the treatment of disabled players have been the same if this were occurring forty or fifty years ago here in America? And would this story be the same if it were in some other country now than the U.S.? For example, do the European soccer leagues treat their professional athletes as uncaringly?
What Master Does the Players Association Serve?
There's another part of this picture besides the industry, and it puzzles me. What's the role of the NFL Players Association. Wikipedia begins its article on the NFLPA thus:
