National Football League strike 1982 - 8 October 1982

An extraordinary and spooky calm has fallen on the ordinary American household. On Sunday afternoons between 30 ans 40 million American males sit awhile and brood awhile and maybe go back and mow another strip of lawn and come in and take a beer and mope, and call up a friend, and commiserate, and are, in general, thoroughly miserable.

For the first time – I think for the first time ever – the men who attract the largest television audience for any sport, the players of the national football league, are on strike, at the very beginning of the professional football season, a time that the true addicts hunger and thirst for throughout the summer.

We are talking of course, not about soccer but about American football and here, let me say again, something I said 10 or more years ago about a game whose appeal is least understood abroad of almost any other American institution. It’s a subject I rarely bring up, even with visiting sportsmen because they tend to go at once into a sermon about the dull brutality, about a form of football they know nothing about. British sportsmen, who know their way around a rugby field, a billiard table, even more surprisingly around a chess board, succumb without a second thought to the facetious view of American football as a mindless bout of mayhem between groups got up in spacemen outfits.

But it would take no more than a couple of weeks of careful instruction, it would take that from a coach or a fan, to realise that American football is an open-air chess game disguised as armoured warfare. It is, beyond any comparing, the most scientific of all outdoor games and like soccer, golf, tennis, cricket and baseball even, the simple elements cannot be picked up by watching a game or two.

The players appear to be trying to get the ball over the opponents' baseline for a try, or touch down, so that they are. Why then, asks the exasperated visitor, does no action last for more than about five seconds? Why the continual wild jumping on men who have the ball and men who don’t. Why the endless scrums, why do half the players seem to be running off in circles where no opponent is, and where the ball is certain not to go? Why? Why? Why ?

No doubt about it, at first glance – and at second and third – it does strike a newcomer as a clumsy and muddled form of rugby. Well, the fact is that while a sudden imaginative impulse is as rewarded as often as in any other sport, just about every move that the players make has been planned and rehearsed beforehand on the field, and in many hours of instruction in front of a blackboard.

The main point is this. A player does not receive a ball by luck or haphazard and then just try and batter his way through the opposition. There is a lexicon of plays, involving five or six men, known to any decent footballer, and they are as premeditated as the Ruy Lopez opening in chess, the Petrov defence, the Sicilian defence, the Queen's gambit.

Most of these plays are memorised, not only for the purpose of using them against a team vulnerable to some and not to others, the plays are also learnt for the purpose of deciding them on the spur of the moment, hence the extraordinary – and to the foreigner bewildering – sight of men running off in circles and tangents with no apparent relation to the ball, or the man who is holding it.

For weeks before a big game the players practice the plays, they are numbered and carry the numbers of teams or players who invented them. They practice these feints and true plays and fake plays, and in the evenings they attend long sessions of instruction in tactics, following the hieroglyphics on a blackboard, now also with stop-motion films and with computers, by which the late Albert Einstein would have been thoroughly confused.

Well, that's as far as I want to go in the obviously doomed effort of clarifying game which is a culmination of chess, physics, optics, mobile geometry and military tactics. I want simply to establish the point that the game at its best rivets the attention not only of small boys and barflies, but of doctors, scientists, intellectuals of every type. About one American male in three and one American female in a dozen knows and loves the game.

And when the crisp nights come and the maples begin to turn scarlet, Sunday afternoon by the telly is as compulsory an observance as Sunday morning Mass to a true believer. For a week or two, when the threat of a strike was mentioned, it was assumed by the learned that it couldn’t happen, but eventually did and the stunned public heard about the issues, and the reasons for it.

It's yet another sign of the times that it would very probably not have happened if this hadn’t been the age of television. The strike is, of course, between the owners of the teams and the players. The owners are paid princely sums, that few princes could afford, by the TV network lucky enough to outbid the others for the privilege of televising the Sunday afternoon and Monday evening games, and so exposing the largest single television audience to the seductions, of such lures, as beer commercials and automobile commercials.

At the moment the owners have a five-year television deal, which puts in their pockets $2,100million dollars. The players have looked at this monumental figure and compared it with the fact that their average annual salary is a measly $83,000 – say £48,000. Imagine.

Now today, this may sound like a very handsome income for catching and running with the ball but it happens to be, by long odds, the lowest average salary in any of the big sports, and the players felt the time had come for what the chiropractors call adjustments.

The owners know they are going to have to make them, but they want to do it on an individual basis. The players are holding out for a lump sum. In the beginning they asked for 55% of the owner's gross revenues, up from nothing. Now they have climbed down a bit they will take a fancy package with stipulated benefits that include, also up from nothing, exactly 50% of the income the owners get from television.

The man who is conducting negotiations of the owners, said, wait a minute, he went off and did a little arithmetic, and added to the claim half of the television income, the cost of the other benefits that the players were demanding. He came back and said, they have moved off the 55% and escalated their demand to 65%. And that's when the owners dug in their well-heeled heels, and the players went on strike.

Since the owners pick up just under $30million for the televising of weekend football, you would expect that the loss of this over several weeks would force them back to the negotiating table with cap, or apology, in hand. That's what the players thought. But then somebody read the fine print in the owners' contract and discovered there was a clause requiring the lucky TV network that had bagged the games to go on paying the required $30million a week for the first two weeks of the strike.

It’s been going on for two weeks now and it's had the effect, so far, of making the players feel that the wounded television network is a comrade-in-arms, a fellow victim. So, in the meantime, the networks scramble for attractive substitutes – and there aren’t any. Replays of old games, where the outcome is known to every fan, obviously lacks something in suspense. The next move was to pay the Canadians for televising their football games, which have slight, interesting variations of the American game.

But this introduces a sagging feeling in the true fan, his team allegiance, his fierce loyal to this quarterback, to that lineback, are missing. How would you feel if you went to Wimbledon to watch Connors, Borg and McEnroe and they brought on, instead, three Japanese chaps you had never heard of?

So the players, not content to sit and sulk and clink glasses with the arrived television executives decided – some teams – that they would organise their own league and play anyway. The All-Star League, they called it. And here the reliable American resort to the law, in all matters of life, love and death, took over.

Not all the members of the striking teams were in favour of ditching the national football league. They looked ahead to the day of settlement, and they heard the rumble of retaliation, so when a majority of the teams in Buffalo, Dallas and St Louis chose to start their own league, a minority said, "Hold, enough" and they went into their best state courts in New York, in Texas, in Missouri and applied for a restraining order. It seemed, then, that if enough teams were available and willing to form another league the process would take months, perhaps years, since a ruling in support of them would have to be granted by each state's court in turn.

But then on Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that these separate applications were not necessary. Under a labour law of the United States, a federal law allows a federal judge to bring to his court identical litigation to that being brought to other federal district courts. The court finds, the judge intoned, that the interest of efficiency, economy, uniformity and convenience support deciding the issues presented by this dispute in one forum. So the restraining orders stopping the formation of a new league were, for the time being, null and void.

Don’t think, by the way, that if either side is stubborn enough this thing won’t go to the United States Supreme Court. Anything – anything – that can be made to suggest that somebody’s constitutional rights are being violated can go to the Supreme Court.

Of course by now, the owners of the one and only NFL, they too are firing complaints and restraining orders, the players' chief negotiator meanwhile says the time has come to take the whole row to the National Labor Relations Board for arbitration. Both sides are beginning to weave a legal tangle. And how all this will end, as Time magazine used to say, knows only God.

One television network interviewed fans of all sorts around the country, and asked them what they proposed to do with their empty Sunday afternoons. Such obvious and desperate expedients were offered as gardening, walking, getting to know your children. One man, an amiable stoic of a middle-aged fan thought for quite a while, sucked his teeth and said with a sigh, "Honestly, I don’t know. Guess I may have to go and visit my mother in law."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.