The Chris Moeller Archives

The Body Briefcase

Sports uniforms mask a great reality. They come in all designs and colors. The different colors and creative logos become such a rich tapestry in each professional sport that you start to really believe these teams are entities separate and distinct from each other when in fact they are part of a whole. The athletes are actually one single group of employees in the same industry with the same set of bosses.

Often, it's the athletes themselves that get most confused about this, and yet, at times, an athlete shocks you with his or her intelligence and shrewdness. In the National Football League, a standout employee named Le'Veon Bell refused his service this year to the league. It was the last year of his current employee contract, and Bell plays a position-- running back-- that puts him through a sort of meat grinder physically. All football players endure it, but at running back, the grind is particularly harsh. His team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, gave him 406 touches during the 2017 season, which was more than any team gave any other player in the league. He was naturally expecting more of the same workload this season, and with the Steelers and everybody else not necessarily planning to reward him financially, at the age of 27 this coming summer, at such a physically-brutalizing position, Bell vowed to keep his body as (relatively) healthy as it can be this year in anticipation of his next contract, presumably the last and most lucrative of his career.

Bell is betting on himself, as the rest of us working stiffs must also do at one time or another during our working careers, and many of Bell's colleagues have understood what he was doing. His sacrifice took $14.5 million in guaranteed money out of his hands this year and put it back into the hands of the Steelers and the NFL. Veteran running back Jonathan Stewart said, "At the end of the day, it's just a business and your body is your briefcase. If your body is banged up, if something happens to your body, then your briefcase isn't worth anything... He's banking on himself, which a player should always do." Bell's bosses had offered him a contract this year that put him financially with the top group of players at his position, but Bell's talent and achievements have been above that. And when a group is being exploited, it often requires that a member of that group make such a sacrifice to draw attention to the exploitation.

But for many of Bell's Steelers workmates, the grumbling, private and public, started early in the holdout this summer. They complained to the local media that Bell was being less than loyal-- to the uniform. This was the breaking of a long and sacred tradition for players on any team not to comment publicly about the contract situations of other players. His head coach and work supervisor, Mike Tomlin, a former player, was asked about the effect of the holdout on the team, and replied, "We need volunteers, not hostages." This past week, when the deadline passed for Bell to join the team and still be eligible to participate in the postseason, and Bell still refused to cede, a group of his teammates ransacked his locker and looted his possessions. His nameplate was ripped off. One, linebacker Bud Dupree, posted a viral video about the pair of Bell's Air Jordans he was taking for himself.

It's already been an NFL season during which another player, safety Vontae Davis of the Buffalo Bills, retired from the business at half-time of a game. This was also an unprecedented action. In doing so, Davis said his body no longer possessed what it needed to continue playing. He had missed much of the 2017 season due to injury, and it was clear to observers that he had been struggling during the first two weeks of 2018. One play, one sideswipe, one collision, that's all it takes, but Davis' teammate, Rafael Bush, said, "I think I did lose a little respect for him as a man"-- and then pronounced that because Davis had quit mid-game, he had been disloyal, yes, to the uniform.

In the second half of the Bills game, Davis' defensive unit only gave up three points, and likewise, the Steelers' entire team has thrived without Bell-- a 7-2-1 record so far, and currently a six-game winning streak. Just as importantly, a new running back has stepped in and thrived. James Conner is 23 years old, three years-- and three seasons--- younger than Bell, bound to the Steelers with his individual contract for several more seasons, and ready to be put through the meat grinder Bell has already endured. He's on track for 349 touches this year.

When Bell took to Twitter this week and asked his followers what they were thankful for during this holiday, Steelers rooters en masse snidely responded to the question with the words "James Conner." It turns out that maybe Bell was disposable. According to many fans, he was. And that's his point exactly. He gets that it's a business. Fans will be fans. They're loyal to the uniforms. They root for laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say in his standup act. But with the Collective Bargaining Agreement coming up in 2021, and a strike or work stoppage being a certainty, according to the executive director of the players' association, the raiding of Le'Veon Bell's locker sends the exact opposite message of player solidarity. His co-workers should be showing the utmost respect for a player that's making a sound financial decision, one that benefits all of them, but too few are. League-friendly writers of this most loyalty-inspiring sport will now take to slamming Bell in the media, downplaying his "market value," and it's a distinct possibility that he'll face the full Colin Kaepernick treatment this off-season, if the teams collude to make Bell an example case to suppress any changes in the next labor agreement that might fully guarantee contracts, offer lifetime health benefits, and/or find parity pay with other professional sports.

Le'Veon Bell understands his power though. Athletes, professional and amateur, have only barely begun to tap into it collectively. As a 20-something wielder of extraordinary cultural influence, he's another Kaepernick or Eric Reid. He's Northwestern University's former quarterback Kane Coulter, who co-founded the College Athletes Players Association, and the University of Missouri football players, who boycotted a major college game a couple years ago over systemic racial injustice on the Columbia, Missouri campus. Bell is placing himself at the very front of the major issue facing his industry, and the biggest one facing the future of any North American sport-- the players' physical protection. Upon the topic, league officials have evaded, obstructed, filibustered, and outright lied. They will continue to do those things. The players are not of 32 different teams, as the bosses would have us believe, they are of one team. Bell is refusing to volunteer up his body to simply be chewed up and spit out, and he needs to desperately care for that talented and vulnerable body because nobody else will.

posted by CM @ 8:24 AM