They Have Hands That Might Rock NFL Cradle : Suit: During a landmark antitrust trial in Minneapolis, eight female jurors are at center stage because pro football’s owners couldn’t settle on a number between four and six.

MINNEAPOLIS —  The jurors are the stars of the show. There are eight of them, and they’re all women.

And they’re most visible four times a day, when they enter and leave the courtroom.

By order of presiding Judge David S. Doty, the women who are determining pro football’s fate this summer march in from a rear door, moving briskly down the center aisle. And they leave the same way.

After the fifth week of the antitrust suit filed against the league by eight players, Doty still has no other options, he said. As the newest of five federal judges in this district, he must put up with the smallest and least adequate courtroom, a place that was a small weather bureau, in fact, to begin with.

“We’ll have the wedding procedure again,” he warned the lawyers and spectators at the end of a recent day in court, ordering them to rise and wait for the jurors to leave first.

Once more, that brought every eye to bear on the females who have been called in because the males in pro football couldn’t decide whether free agency should begin after four years, as the players suggest, or after six, as the club owners wish.

In this all-out sports-power struggle--a landmark antitrust trial listed as Freeman McNeil vs. NFL--the females are in charge, in other words, because the males couldn’t pick a number between four and six.

It is costing the players, the owners and the U.S. government an estimated total of more than $20 million to get an answer in Doty’s court, where, as the witnesses drone on, the 16 lawyers for the combatants sneak peaks repeatedly at the jurors.

How are they taking this? Are they for us or against us? It’s a daily guessing game, and if you could only divine this jury’s intentions, you would know whether to kick or receive. Whether to press on, or plead for a settlement.

“In a murder trial, generally, anyone can tell who’s winning,” said a veteran court reporter who in the first weeks of the McNeil trial has been in attendance every day. “You just look at jury reaction to the gory details. But in the (McNeil case), the jury doesn’t react to anything. They don’t give you a clue.”

These days, that is, they don’t. Back in mid-June, when the trial began, the owners scored first. That day, one of the nine original jurors, a non-sports fan, resigned and went home.

“They make too much (money) already,” she remarked in an obvious reference to the players, whose salaries, sworn witnesses said one morning, have added up to as much as $7 million--McNeil’s 10-year take from the New York Jets.

In short order, however, other witnesses showed that NFL owners’ salaries have added up to as much as $7 million in one year--Norman Braman’s 1990 take from the Philadelphia Eagles.

And since then, the game has seemed about even.

Strictly on the issues, the players are probably ahead, according to sources close to attorneys for both sides. The NFL’s owners have never won an antitrust case on the issues. They are an incredible 0-14 against the players in the lawsuits of just the last 15 months.

Constitutional lawyers have said that in any other American workplace, McNeil and the seven other plaintiffs in this trial would be free to bargain with competing employers for employment. The NFL, in their view, is plainly out of sync with U.S. antitrust laws.

But all that doesn’t matter now. What matters is what eight women will conclude after spending the months of a pleasant Minnesota summer in Doty’s dismal, cluttered courtroom, where the trial may last until Labor Day.

As its most distinctive feature, the courtroom presents an enormous central pillar that blots out spectators’ views of judge, jury or witness, or, from some seats, all of the above.

But the women of the jury are used to it now. It’s the men--the batteries of lawyers--who look the most uncomfortable.

OWNERS, PLAYERS TOO ORNERY TO SETTLE

In the way that Minnesotans talked about the great blizzard of 1888 for nearly a century, the McNeil case is likely to be remembered by NFL folks as the great pro football gamble of 1992.

At the bitter end of a trial that is possibly the century’s most significant in pro sports, the losers will certainly remember.

And whether they turn out to be the owners of the 28 NFL clubs or their 1,500 players, they didn’t have to lose.

They could have settled during the two-week recess in mid-July, when the owners empowered a small committee to accept the best terms they could get with the players.

Settling would have been better, Denver Bronco owner Pat Bowlen said at the time, than letting “eight women who are basically domestic housewives decide the future of the NFL.”

Bowlen was on the committee of seven NFL men that he preferred to eight Minneapolis women, but they didn’t get it done.

What happened?

They couldn’t clear three obstacles in what is a much more complicated case than it seems:

--The decisive dispute is over free agency. In a business in which the average athlete lasts 4 1/2 seasons, the players want to be free to negotiate with other NFL clubs after they have played pro ball for three or four years. The owners suggest six or seven years.

--The players will agree to five years if the owners agree to exempt no more than one franchise player from free agency in a settlement that provides for an NBA-type salary cap.

--The owners will agree to six years if “the heart of the team” is exempt from free agency in a settlement that provides for a hard salary cap. The “heart” could be three to five athletes.

An NBA-type cap is one that each team can exceed to sign its own players. By contrast, the NFL defines a hard cap as one that does not permit that.

If there is a payroll cap of, say, $33 million a year per club, the Broncos, in the NBA system, could go to $35 million to sign quarterback John Elway. In a hard-cap system, they might have to pay others less in order to pay Elway more and still come in at $33 million.

The principals in the case are all under orders not to speak for attribution.

Off the record, however, owners’ attorneys are saying that a quick settlement in late July was blocked by NFL Players Assn. leaders, who changed their minds after verbally agreeing to most terms.

Meanwhile, players’ attorneys are saying that a settlement was a done deal until the clubs’ negotiating committee added a seventh member, Al Davis of the Raiders, who, they say, convinced the NFL’s other owners that the league would be in serious trouble after the end of any collective bargaining agreement that granted free agency.

Thus an NFL majority decided against taking Bowlen’s advice. Instead, the owners will take their chances in court.

At the same time, the players decided that they will, too. Given a choice, they’d rather leave it up to Minnesota females than NFL males.

So the trial goes on.

A MAN’S LEAGUE, BUT A WOMAN’S CASE

The contrasts and ironies of this strange trial begin at the courthouse doors. On the morning that witness Art Modell, owner of the Cleveland Browns, rolled up in a chauffeured limo and came in the front way, a juror rode up to the back door, as usual, on her bicycle.

She brought her helmet upstairs with her, as well as a knapsack.

Some of the wealthiest males in American sports have come here to argue their complex case, and they’re doing it formally, in dark, tailored $1,000 suits. Watching them quietly each day, and trying their best to make sense of it all are the middle-class jurors, who are considerably less formal in their inexpensive, light summer dresses or pants and blouses.

Under court questioning earlier, only two of the eight admitted to an interest in any sport.

One is a librarian, one a seamstress and two are secretaries. There is also a day-care worker, a data entry operator, and one or two unemployed. Their average annual income is possibly $25,000. At this point, their names are the court’s secret, but most appear to be in their 30s, with the oldest no more than 50, and one or two in their early 20s.

Their favorite moments appear to be the many breaks in the trial ritual. When the gray-haired lawyers gather round the gray-haired judge to whisper earnestly and sometimes angrily, the jurors enjoy themselves in hushed conversation.

These are jurors who like each other. They also listen conscientiously to the witnesses. This won’t be a hung jury.

The trial is one in which McNeil, a former UCLA halfback, and seven other pro athletes are challenging the NFL’s labor system, maintaining that the league has illegally kept them from negotiating with all but one of the 28 club owners.

That could be a violation of U.S. antitrust laws, the jury is hearing, regardless of whether the players make $500,000 a year or 50 cents.

If eight Minnesota women think the NFL system is fair, McNeil and the league’s other good players will be bound to the men who own them, or to their assignees, for the rest of their days in football. If these women decide that the system is unfair, they will set the NFL on the road to unrestricted free agency.

As pleasant-faced Judge Doty remarked one day, “We’re having some of the best lawyering you’ll see.”

Doty seemed to have in mind, among others, Carol T. Rieger, a players’ representative and the only female attorney on the case for either side.

When Rieger cross-examines a witness, it’s hard to tell what the all-woman jury makes of the only woman lawyer in sight. It’s hard to tell what these jurors make of anything. But they’re clearly giving it all a lot of thought. They can see that it’s their case.