Commissioner Tagliabue with Dan Harris, ABC News
September 1, 2002

ABC: All week long the biggest story has been the labor problems in baseball.  Why don’t we hear about more of this with football?

PT: We’ve worked very hard with our players to make them partners and with our players union to make them partners.  At least for now, we’ve succeeded.  We have a good system in place, we’ve got a lot of revenue sharing on the part of the owners, which supports equitable salaries for players all over the league, and we’ve been competing with others instead of competing with each other.

ABC: You can just sense by watching thirty seconds of TV coverage that there is serious vitriol, real enmity between the players and the management in baseball, and you don’t get that in football.  So it’s more than a strategy.  There’s something softer there too, I imagine.

PT: Maybe it’s that Gene Upshaw and myself, and some of the owners, have realized that if you shoot yourself in the foot, you can be your own worst enemy.  We’ve tried very hard for fifteen years to avoid that.  We’ve got trust, we’ve got respect for each other, and we bring each other in on our problems early and try to resolve them together.  I think that’s the solution.

ABC: There was a football strike.  When was that?

PT:  We’ve had several.  The last were in 1982 and 1987.

ABC: So, since ’87, has there been a concerted effort not to go through this again?

PT: Yes, I think so.  We had our own controversies.  We had our own strikes and work stoppages in the ‘80s.  We learned from that and created a partnership where we try to share a vision of the future, try to grow the revenue, try to be the best there is in sports -- out-compete everybody else, but not fight each other.

ABC: Does the salary cap play into this?

PT: Yes it does.  The salary cap is geared to our television.  All television revenue is shared equally among the teams.  That gives every team the ability to pay solid wages to the players.  And then a cap can work on top of that.  Players also have free agency.  So we have a balance between free agency, which allows players to go out and get their value on the marketplace, and a cap. 

ABC: Let me break that down to its component parts.  You talk about revenue sharing, salary cap, and free agency.  Let me just pick out again salary cap to start out with.  How does that work to avert tension?

PT: The combination of the salary cap and free agency -- it’s hand and glove.  You really wouldn’t have one without the other.  That is the tradeoff in collective bargaining, and that’s why the system works, because there’s something in it for the players and there‘s also a guarantee that every club will spend up to the cap and create equitable wages and high wages around the league.

ABC: But in football you don’t get the Alex Rodriguez syndrome so much.  You don’t get people who are overpaid to that level.  Does that make things easier?

PT: I don’t know if it makes it easier.  I think football is the ultimate team game.  And the players understand that all the players in the trenches are working awfully hard, to put it mildly, and everyone should get a good strong wage.  So there is less of a gap from top to bottom and more of an emphasis on high minimum salaries.  And the system works.

ABC: I was imagining that since you don’t have these huge, big-time players who can become monsters in some ways, that that might make the relationship between labor and management easier, when you don’t have people making more than the GDP of small African counties.  Does that make things less complicated?

PT: I don’t think it’s a factor.  I think that the key for us is that the agreement we have has good balance between a salary cap, which is flexible, free agency for the players, the ability of the players to get really strong salaries, but also recognition that this is the ultimate team game and everyone is working very hard in the trenches and everyone is entitled to get a salary that’s within a range that basically flows from our system.

ABC: Do you think there is something structural about football in that it is, to use your term, a team game as opposed to baseball where there is a lot of emphasis on individual performance at the plate or on the mound?

PT: I think there are two structural elements.  One is the equal sharing among all the teams of all the television revenue.  The Green Bay Packers, in a very small city, get the same television revenue as the New York Giants.  Point two is that every team basically spends within the same range on players, and no matter where you’re playing, you can get a great salary.  So that creates balance around the league both on the field and in terms of player economics.

ABC: In terms of the balance on the field, I’ve heard the argument made that that can make the game more exciting to watch.

PT:  I think it makes the game more exciting for more fans.  The more teams you have that are competitive, the more teams that you have that are chasing the championship around the country in a country the size of ours with almost 300 million people, the more the passion spreads, the more the interest spreads.  And that’s been a key to our success certainly in the last two to three decades.

ABC: Not to be obnoxious, but football is not without its problems.  You’ve got the violence problems with your players, both on the field and off, as well as some unruliness among the fans.  Where are we with that.  Have you addressed it?

PT: Every sport has its controversies.  We’ve had our labor controversies in the past and I think we’ve addressed them.  We’ve worked very hard with the players to make sure that they perform well on the field and also in the community.  And we have some pretty high standards of sportsmanship that prevent too much nonsense on the field.

ABC: It’s been argued before that a lot of football players get hired despite some violent background or criminal records.  Is there more that should be done on that or any truth to the allegation?

PT: I don’t think they get hired despite that.  Our teams search the backgrounds of players and most teams today look at a player’s ability to control his temper, the ability to be a focused football player, as a key thing. Our teams want players who can play football, not players who can do things that are gratuitous on the field and off.

ABC: Getting back to the lack of labor strikes in the last years.  What would you say to the people over at baseball in terms of what they can learn from the lessons you’ve learned and applied.

PT: I think they’ve done a terrific job this time through getting an agreement and they’ve got to build on that.  That’s where we were 10 or 15 years ago.  Everyone’s trying to get the same thing done.  You just need to, at least in our case, focus on the other competition, not take anything for granted, make your sport the best, keep the young talent coming into the game, and the fans will love you for it.  I think that’s where we are right now in football.

ABC: Your advice is to stop focusing on the internal battles and focus as a unit on the external battles.

PT: That’s what we learned in the ‘80s and it’s proved to be real important in the ‘90s and on into the 21^st Century.

ABC:  The other thing that has helped your league is marketing and mythmaking.  It’s been going on for decades.  Can you talk a little bit about what the strategy is there?

PT: The players in football make their own myths.  We have a sport that is athlete against athlete but it’s also athletes and the elements, as we saw last year with the “Snow Bowl” involving the Patriots and the Raiders, and then you go back to the “Ice Bowl” which involved the Packers and the Cowboys.  The myth gets built up in the nature of the game.  All we try to do is keep the players in the forefront, keep the owners in the background.  We also have a league which requires teams to be owned by individual owners.  We don’t allow corporate ownership of teams with other business ventures.  We want players, owners, commissioners all to be focused on the game and the players, and then the fans will do the same.

ABC: So if I had to list the component parts for a peaceful, steady, solid existence in a league, it would be the lack of corporate ownership in the teams, the revenue sharing, the salary cap, and the free agency.  It’s those four that are the primary ingredients?

PT: And I’d say respect for each other when you’re in collective bargaining and when you’re trying to identify problems to solve.

ABC: Which is sort of an intangible, but it means that when you’re on opposite sides of a big board table, there aren’t daggers.

PT: It’s intangible, but respect is real.  Respect grows out of credibility, it grows out of trust, it grows out of an ability to work together and to make good and once you make your word to live by it.  But most of all, it requires you to sit in the same room a lot and try to solve your problems on a common basis.

ABC: When you read the newspaper, seeing the baseball strike this week did you think there but for the grace of God, or what was going through your mind?

PT: My sense in the last month is that they’ve been doing what one has to do to solve these problems. Hit the road together, peel the problems back like you’re peeling an onion, cry a little bit, and then compromise and reach a solution.

ABC: So were you thinking “Thank goodness I don’t have to get to this point all the time?”

PT: Thank goodness I was there ten years ago, and since then we’ve been trying to keep this from an eleventh-hour type of crisis.