On my links, I include "where I go to make sure I'm not dead". This would be Legacy.com. I check it every day or so because sometimes, people you know don't always get much press when they pass away (especially figures in the Christian community).
This obituary caught my eye, then made me upset.
So, a generation ago, a solid member of a pro football champion, Jerry Kramer of the Green Bay Packers was making good money for 1967, at $27 to $28K a year. And then, as life after football continued, Kramer himself watched a gross inequity grow and grow between the players of the 1950s and 1960s, who saw the NFL through the AAFC, battling baseball for popularity, the 1958 Championship Game, the AFL's arrival, the likes of Joe Namath heading to the AFL, consistently bringing the best in pro football during the two decades that really set the NFL in a position to be the pro sports juggernaut that it is today (breath!), and the players of, say the 1990's and this decade, when average salaries reached and well exceeded $500K annually, and with a salary cap for each team expected to be $109 million for 2007.
So Kramer began to do something about it. Read about it here.
Kramer was fortunate that his career was with a championship team and he was able to earn the raises he received. BUT, make sure you read the portion of the article discussing Kramer's NFL personal pension history. If at age 62, Kramer's monthly benefit went to $158 monthly, had bad could it be for others?
Well, then we find the average joes of the old days of pro football, like George Webster. What? Never heard of George Webster? Don't have his Topps card?
Webster died April 19th, as the above obituary link says. It also chronicled his frustrating and futile attempt to "prove" his disability was due to football injuries. If you lost the use of most of one hand, one knee, one ankle, and one foot, how would it impact your employment? Your ability to provide for a family? Heck, your ability to do whatever, job-related or otherwise?
Yet, he was never "ruled" to be eligible for football-related injury benefits. So, in spite of playing 10 seasons in the NFL, the league's retirement board decided his impairments didn't happen on the field, and later, the stinking U.S. Supreme Court agreed.
Then he loses a leg, and five years later, passes at the young age of 61, his monthly "disability" benefit less than 20 percent of what it should have been.
The average NFL career is only four, maybe five seasons. He played ten, yet all of these medical problems weren't created or exacerbated by being on the football field.
I know, I hear you:
1) He should have invested his money better!
2) Didn't he lose lots of money in the court proceedings that he could have had to live on?
My argument has nothing to do with any of that. My argument is this:
Rookie Mark Anderson, DE for the Chicago Bears, was a Round 5 choice in 2006 and came on big with 12 sacks for Da Bears. The average fifth round rookie salary for 2006 was $131,000. He'll probably make more than that in 2007.
Good for him!!!
The league must answer this: if 32 teams can spend over $3.2 BILLION dollars on player salaries alone, imagine how much money the league itself has, and makes.
But they have a retirement board who looked at Webster and balked at paying him an extra $39K a year, most of which probably would have been eaten up by medical bills.
The NFL can't afford a few million dollars to take a little better care of the men who carried the league to the point where they began to emerge as the top dog in pro sports?
Each team drops that salary cap to $108 million dollars, and the league cough up $10 million more, and I suspect the George Websters still with us could be a little better taken care of. Use most to increase pensions, and invest some, too!
$42 million dollars from a league whose current TV deal is worth $3.75 BILLION dollars annually? And there are other revenue streams, too?
Pittance to them.
More power to the pension.
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