On the Other Side of Picket Line Is One Last Chance for Glory

You gritted your teeth, took a deep breath and walked across the picket line. In one step you went from hero to villain. You magically transformed yourself from an ex-jock, admired at least around the neighborhood, to a superscab, loathed from sea to shining sea.

You’ve finally made the big leagues. In your dreams, you would dash onto the field between two lines of cheerleaders, pumped up by the cheering crowd. Now you’re ducking into a back door while being pelted by eggs and abuse. At least, just as in the dreams, your adrenaline is pumping.

In the papers you read where Raider tight end Todd Christensen is referring to the strikebreakers as “talentless, heartless, gutless Benedict Arnold-like vermin.” You have to admit, the man has a way with words.

And maybe he’s right. You might feel the same way if you were on the picket line, losing thousands of dollars a week. But you’re not. You’re just a guy who wants to play football, and this is probably your last chance. You haven’t completely convinced yourself that what you’re doing is right, but while the internal debate rages, you’re going to play some ball.

It wasn’t an easy decision to join the strikebreakers. Fast, but not easy. The management guy who phoned to invite you to camp broke down your defenses by resorting to an unfamiliar tactic in the football world--he treated you as a human being. Told you the team really needed a guy with your talent. Funny, this was the same guy who gave you your walking papers during training camp, who didn’t even glance up when you handed in your playbook and walked out the door, suddenly a non-person.

You should have been out looking for a real job these last couple of months, but a job doing what? You went to college for five years and majored in football, with a minor in knee surgery. You didn’t get into the academics as much as you would have liked because football took up most of your time and all of your energy.

Yours was the only major that guaranteed a post-grad employment rate of about 1%. But once you accepted that scholarship, you kissed off your chances of becoming a nuclear physicist as a side profession if pro football didn’t work out.

You got drafted by a pro team and had a tryout, or so they called it. A few days in camp, a few live plays, the coaches never knew your name and they cut you one morning before breakfast. Even a condemned man gets a last meal, but no way could you stop by the team cafeteria on the way out.

They might as well have taken a rubber stamp and stamped “FAILURE” on your forehead. It was a long ride home on the Greyhound. Suddenly, after 15 years, you were no longer a football player. You should have turned in your muscles along with your playbook. Back home, biceps bulging, you felt silly, like a retired carpenter who still walks around wearing his tool belt.

You took the offer because you need the money, sure. Mostly, though, you need the football. For 10 years, your world was the pain and accomplishment on the field. The best feeling in the world was sitting at your locker after a game, bruised and bleeding, remembering the guys you knocked down.

You figured you had a shot at making the pros. You failed not because you were gutless, talentless or heartless, but because you didn’t really get a shot, or so you tell yourself. In the right situation, you know you could have played with those guys. Then you’d be out there walking the picket line, throwing eggs.

The real players think you’re breaking their backs, busting their union. They appeal to your sense of brotherhood for the united grid guys of the world. But you’ve been bounced out of that union. You tell yourself that the players aren’t real union men, anyway, that they cross picket lines constantly. Baseball and basketball players crossed picket lines when their officials went on strike, and football players would do the same.

But you’re rationalizing.

You don’t hold out much hope of running this gig into a job, or even a fair tryout, once the strike ends. It’s tough to look good when you’re playing alongside a bunch of rent-a-thugs. The coach spends a lot of time covering his eyes with his hands and massaging his temples. Maybe he’s meditating. Ten minutes after the strike breaks, you’ll be back on the iron dog, the Greyhound.

You flash back to college, Saturday afternoons, leaving the locker room. There was always a mob outside, kids begging for autographs, alums slapping your back, girls smiling. You felt like a giant.

Now you try to become small, shrink back into your seat, as the van drives you and your new teammates back out across the picket line, through the angry faces and TV cameras.

You try to ignore the action outside, think about the evening ahead. You’ll go home and relax, maybe watch TV, but skip the sports news. You won’t worry about being bothered by phone calls because you don’t seem to have as many friends these days.

Mostly, you’ll take it easy, get to bed early, get your rest. You’ve got a big game Sunday.