Toughness -- on field, in boardroom -- defined Upshaw's career
The first time I met Gene Upshaw was in the early 1990s. I was a young writer for the Boston Globe finishing the reporting on an investigative story started by Will McDonough, who had suffered a heart attack.
The story was about some alleged financial improprieties inside the NFLPA. Another reporter and I went to speak with Upshaw at his offices in Washington.
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| Telling Gene Upshaw what to do was a sure way to get his hackles up. (Getty Images) |
Over the next several hours there was more screaming and shouting back and forth than interviewing. I think Upshaw could sense my fear, like he was a pit bull and I was a tiny French poodle. There were several times I thought Upshaw was going to leap across the table and remove my head from my shoulders.
It's the only time in 20 years of reporting I've ever been intimidated.
Next to Jim Brown, I've always believed Gene Upshaw was the meanest, baddest and toughest mofo football had ever seen.
In the years to come, and over the course of four or five dozen conversations, I found Upshaw to also be one of the most decent people I had ever known. His word was also gold.
Upshaw was charismatic, brilliant and defiant. He was also manipulative, abrasive and often uncompromising. He excelled at the internal politics of leading a union, which is why he lasted decades and would have lasted perhaps years longer had cancer not claimed his life.
Upshaw was known to blast player representatives and then later seek them out, not to apologize -- Upshaw never really apologized -- but to sooth the verbal forearm shiver he had just delivered.
I watched video footage once of Upshaw leading a union meeting in Hawaii. He was the alpha-est of alpha males. To say he commanded a room is like saying Pacino commands a movie screen.
For most of his union career Upshaw scoffed at dissent. He dared people to fire him. He shouted down opposition. There were players in the union who absolutely despised Upshaw, calling him a bully, and there were just as many who saw Upshaw as a brother, a giant both literally and figuratively.
That's the thing about Upshaw. No one was ever indifferent about him. No one ever failed to have an opinion about him.
You saw this at that union meeting in Hawaii in the late 1990s. Upshaw faced stern opposition from a small but powerful group of veteran players who were angered over how the executive board had voted Upshaw a raise without the permission of the rank and file. Debates were fierce and lasted six hours. One player at the time, Tim Irwin, a 6-foot-7-inch, 300-pound offensive lineman, expressed the most anger.
