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If you’re not a football fan, you may not know Upshaw. He played for the Oakland Raiders and was the director of the National Football League Players’ Association for 25 years.  He had his critics and I agreed with some of their complaints. He was closer to the owners than a union chief should be.  He didn’t fight hard enough to get guaranteed contracts for injured players. And he did almost nothing for the retired players who helped make football the most popular sport in America, but were paid a fraction of what today’s stars get. 

I still feel that way.  But after he died, I took a longer look at his life, and I see him differently now.  

Upshaw was born and raised in Robstown, Texas, in a crowded home with no running water.  When he was seven, he helped the family by picking cotton for a penny a pound. 

Like all Texas boys, he played football.  But he couldn’t keep up with his younger brother, who was taller, stronger and just plain better.  Gene didn’t make his school’s varsity squad until his senior year.  But once Upshaw’s growth spurt shot him up to 6-foot-5, his career took off.  In 1967, the Oakland Raiders picked him in the first round.

One of the Raider running backs called Upshaw Highway 63, because all he had to do was follow the number on Upshaw’s back, and he could run forever.  Upshaw never, not once, took himself out of a game. 

In 1983, he became the first former player to run a professional sports union. After two NFL players’ strikes in the eighties, it looked like football was headed the way of baseball, basketball and hockey – suffering endless cycles of strikes and lock-outs, instability and fan disgust. 

But Upshaw had a bold move in 1991 that changed everything.  He settled on a contract that gave the players 60-percent of all revenue and unlimited free agency. It also gave the owners a much needed salary cap.  The deal had no precedent in pro sports – and the TV gods loved it, because it promised lasting labor harmony. It brought the NFL riches never before imagined. 

For his efforts, Upshaw took in $6.7 million a year – about twenty times what he made as a player.  And he did a lot better than the egomaniacs who all but ruined hockey and baseball.  It means something to me that he quietly slipped personal checks to the widows and orphans of former players.  He ran his office with a staff of only a half-dozen or so.  As Gary Smith reports in Sports Illustrated, Upshaw fetched his own coffee and copies, he booked his own hotel rooms and rental cars.  The guy even fixed his own office toilet. 

He ignored pain when he played, and he ignored it this summer, too.  When the doctor told him he had pancreatic cancer, Upshaw took it stoically.  He didn’t tell the press, he didn’t tell his office.  His doctor believes Upshaw simply decided to show the world, “’This is how a man dies.’”

Just three days after his diagnosis, for the first time in his life, he took himself out of the game.  For good.  Only then did I look at all four quarters of that contest, and realize few men have ever played the game better than Gene Upshaw.

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