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A6—Havre Daily News, Havre, Montana, Tuesday Evening, September 21,1982First regular-season NFL strike in historyPlayers ready to hold out (lt;one day longer than management”By BEN WALKERAP Sports WriterNEW YORK (AP) - Striking players and team owners both say they are willing to lose the rest of the National Football League season if it means winning at the bargaining table.Fans, dismayed by the first regular-season strike in the sport’s history, are about to be barraged with Canadian and college football, along with movies, as television networks scramble to fillthe air time.Gene Upshaw, president of the 1,500-member NFL Players Association, announced the strike Monday after the union’s executive committee voted unanimously in favor of a walkout. The strike began about eight hours later, after the Green Bay Packers beat the New York Giants 27-19 to complete the season’s second week.“At the conclusion of tonight’s game, the league will be struck,” Upshaw, a Los Angeles Raiders guard, said Monday. “No practices, no workouts,no games will be played until management engages in good-faith bargaining.”He later added the players were ready to hold out “one day longer than management ”But Jack Donlan, executive director of the NFL Management Council, countered that team owners were prepared to “go as long as necessary, including the entire season, to prove their point.”He made his remarks after a Monday night meeting of the owners’ executive committee, held in New York.The first game to be affected by the strike will be Thursday night, when the Atlanta Falcons were scheduled to play in Kansas City against the Chiefs. ABC, which was to televise the game, announced it will instead show Peter Falk in “The Cheap Detective ’It’s the second time in just over a year that a strike has interrupted American professional sports Baseball players struck last summer for 50 daysin a dispute over free agency. NFL players staged two training-camp strikes, in 1970 and 1974.The football strike centers on money and how the NFL s billion-dollar income should be distributed.Players, who originally sought 55 percent of the gross revenues of the NFL’s 28 teams — estimated at $3.6 billion over five years — changed their stand last Friday and asked for 50 percent of the clubs' $2.1 billion television contract, plus a minimum-wage scale based on length of service. The proposed contract would run for four years, as opposed to the five-year pact offered by the owners.Donlan says owners are “unalterably opposed” to guaranteed percentages and wage scales for the players. They have offered a package containing $10,000-a-year bonuses for veterans, plus base salary hikes.Both sides have reached basic agreement on how much a new contract should cost — $1 6 billion. The length ofthe contract, where the money comes from and how it will divided are the sticking points.Ed Garvey, executive director of the NFLPA, said he hoped the strike “will force the owners to start bargaining in good faith.”Mark Murphy, a member of the union’s executive committee and a Washington Redskins defensive back, said it was “vital” for NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to step into the talks Rozelle so far has not participated in the bargaining, and Donlan said Monday night that the commissioner should remain on the sidelines.Negotiations between the management council and the players union broke off Friday and no further talks were scheduled “I knew it was coming,” said George S. Halas Sr., the Chicago Bears’ 87-year-old owner and the last surviving founder of the NFL “I’m sorry to see it, of course,” hesaid Monday as he signed the team’s last prestrike paychecks. “And so are the players — or so they will be.” Owners, players and fans speculated on how long the strike would last.“That could be the season,” said San Diego Chargers owner Gene Klein, a member of the owners’ executive committee.Russell Erxleben, the New Orleans player representative, advised the Saints Monday night to be prepared to sit out the whole season.He said he expected his teammates to soon “scatter like quail.”Some fans were angrv with the strike.“I resent the fact they’re playing with my days off,” said Randy Turley, a credit supervisor from Plum Boro, Pa. “I don’t sympathize with either side.” At the Packers-Giants game, a rain-soaked crowd of 68,405 booed the two teams as they met at midfield for a pregame solidarity handshake. A banner at Giants Stadium invoked thememory of former New York football greats with the words, “Tittle, Hufff, Gifford and Robustelli ... Real GiantsDon’t Strike.”Some players remained hopeful that the strike could be resolved quickly, possibly in time for this week's games,“I hope those two gentlemen (Garvey and Donlan) find a nice, dark room somewhere and lock themselves in and get the thing settled in a hurry because the American people don’t need a football strike,” said Cris Collinsworth of the Cincinnati Bengals. “It means too much to people to have football on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. And I know what it means to me.”Added Matt Blair, the Pro Bowl linebacker of the Minnesota Vikings, “I’ve got a feeling we re going to play Sunday.”At least two members of the Los Angeles Rams, tight end Mike Barber and offensive guard Bill Bain, said they would not strike.
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