COMMENTARY

By Dave Goldberg

updated 10:03 p.m. ET March 9, 2006

During a low point of the marathon NFL owners’ meetings, the labor-deal deadlock looked so hopeless that one owner suggested they needed help from beyond.

“We need the ghost of St. Wellington to appear with some of the forefathers,” Indianapolis’ Jimmy Irsay said — “St. Wellington” being the Giants’ Wellington Mara, the last remaining member of the league’s founding generation, who died last October.

Irsay’s plea was right on.

As it turned out, Mara’s son John — who has been running the New York Giants for the past few years — helped broker the settlement among the 32 contentious millionaires who own NFL franchises.

In fact, the key moment in the meeting probably came at the meeting’s lunch break on Wednesday when Mara, Denver’s Pat Bowlen and Carolina’s Jerry Richardson were escorted to an elevator by Milt Ahlerich, the NFL’s security chief. Ahlerich made sure they were the only ones on the lift as they soared from the basement of the hotel to Paul Tagliabue’s suite.

About six hours later, there was a deal, avoiding the unknown territory of a 2007 season without a salary cap and the potential for serious labor problem down the line.

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By all appearances, the union won this round by getting an extra $850 million to $900 million allocated to players over the next six years in the form of revenue sharing. Still, Gene Upshaw, the union’s executive director, wrote Wednesday in an e-mail to the Associated Press:

“It really was not about winning for me. I really believe the only chance we had with revenue sharing was to put it into my deal. They would never have agreed without the hammer. So we all won. And most of all the fans and our business partners won.”

So did Tagliabue, who maneuvered the higher-revenue owners, notably Dallas’ Jerry Jones, into accepting the deal by using some of them to forge it.

“The proposal from the union was a mean mother,” is how Jones put it after both brokering — and then voting for — the accord.

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The players made out in other ways besides money: One big win is a section of the agreement that will keep teams from protecting stars as franchise players for more than two years.

Another is a seemingly innocuous clause that prohibits teams from giving players drafted after the first round a rookie contract of more than four years. That will prevent them from tying up relatively low-salaried players who turn out to be worth far more than thought when they were picked.

But also credit Tagliabue for keeping the NFL the nation’s most successful sports endeavor by once again avoiding the kind of labor strife that has plagued baseball, basketball and hockey.

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