Rising tension over NFL pensions

Joe DeLamielleure is hard to spell and hard to pronounce, but easy to understand. He is a Hall of Fame football player who is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

The cause of pensions and disability benefits for former NFL players such as DeLamielleure hit the front pages this week because Congress had a hearing. The issue was simmering long before that, even though it is a tough sell in the public.

The NFL is the richest sports league in the richest country on Earth. It should have offices at Ft. Knox.

The NFL is generally referred to as a $7-billion business, but that understates the big picture. One of its teams, the Washington Redskins, is valued at slightly more than $1 billion; another, the Dallas Cowboys, at slightly less. There are 30 more that start out each season with an equally divided portion of TV rights fees totaling $3.735 billion a year.

And that’s before they sell a ticket, hot dog, T-shirt or park a car. We’re talking cash-to-burn, too-big-to-care money here.

So it’s not a leap for the average fan to assume that players can be, and are, well paid. Which is true. The minimum salary for a fourth-year player was $510,000 last season.

Nor is it illogical to assume that a league this rich would also take good care of the retired players who dug the ditches to build this yellow brick road.

It’s not happening that way, though, and former players such as DeLamielleure, 56, are taking it upon themselves to let that be known.

“These are real-life issues,” he says. “There are guys hurting.”

DeLamielleure fits well in this pulpit. He is blue-collar and mid-America. He grew up one of 10 children in Detroit.

“One bathroom, no lock,” he says.

He says his father was Archie Bunker before there was an Archie Bunker, that the family owned a bar near the General Motors plant and when the workers went on strike, the DeLamielleure family had to scramble.

“I didn’t go to kindergarten,” he says. “No time for that. I was up at 2:30 in the morning, after the bar closed, filling the salt and pepper shakers.”

When he got a football scholarship to play at Michigan State, his father resisted.

“He said I was his best bartender,” DeLamielleure says.

He became an All-American offensive lineman and a first-round draft choice of the Buffalo Bills. He started with the Bills in 1973 and was a leader on the line that helped O.J. Simpson to a record 2,003 rushing yards that year.

He stayed with the Bills through 1979, was traded to the Cleveland Browns and stayed there from 1980 to ‘84, and then finished his career with a final season in Buffalo in 1985. He played in 185 consecutive NFL games in his career and started all but three of them.

By the time he was inducted into pro football’s Hall of Fame in 2003, he had tried several businesses, got conned out of the money he had saved from his NFL career, and had struggled for years, along with wife Gerri and six children -- including two adopted Korean children -- to get by day to day.

“At age 41, I was flat broke,” he says. “But I never once defaulted on a debt, not one.”

He coached at high schools, coached for Sam Rutigliano at Liberty University, coached at Duke and kept scrambling. At age 45, he opted for the NFL monthly pension check, $962.36, and was delighted a few years later to learn that there would be a 20% increase, as dictated by the NFL Players Assn., under Executive Director Gene Upshaw.

“Not a huge deal, but I was happy. I figured that would be about $180,” DeLamielleure says. “Then, when it came, it turned out to be $28. I called the NFLPA eight, nine, 10 times and never got an answer or a call-back. To this day, I have no idea.”

That $28 has stuck in DeLamielleure’s craw.

It is his rallying point in joining the many aging former NFL players who have taken up the cause, for themselves or for their former colleagues, of perceived tiny pensions and hard-to-acquire disability benefits.

Most of them blame Upshaw, the former Oakland Raiders All-Pro lineman, who has run the players’ union for 24 years, collects an annual salary of $4.4 million and is perceived as a friend of management and an advocate for current, dues-paying players only.

Perhaps the loudest anti-Upshaw player is DeLamielleure, who was so publicly critical recently that Upshaw was quoted as saying he was going to “break his ... neck.”

DeLamielleure says now, “If it means I have to take a bullet for guys like Herb Adderley and Brian DeMarco, then I will consider it worth it.” Adderley’s monthly pension is $176.85. DeMarco is badly in need of disability help.

The phrase “taking a bullet” was no figure of speech for DeLamielleure. As incredible as it seems, he took Upshaw’s threat seriously.

So this is where the proud and pompous NFL finds itself.

There is a solution, and it isn’t Upshaw, who has marched the same way in the parade so long that his route is unchangeable.

The solution is Roger Goodell, the new commissioner, whose father was a U.S. senator attuned to issues of social consciousness, and whose lineage of authority began with Pete Rozelle, who would have ended this well before the warts became public.

Goodell has called a meeting of all parties for July 24. Right then, he needs to fix this, to flex his muscles despite any resistance from his owners, to use this moment to start a legacy of his own that might someday get him on a pedestal near Rozelle.

He doesn’t need to do this for the fans, who mostly don’t pay attention or don’t care.

He needs to do this because it is the right thing to do. And because guys like Joe DeLamielleure are asking him to.

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Times staff writer Greg Johnson contributed to this report.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.