The Hall of Fame guard made that clear last year when he went toe-to-toe with a group of retired players, led by fellow Canton residents Joe DeLamielleure and Mike Ditka, who came after him with clubs and pitchforks over the league's pension and disability system, and he's making it clear again now, in the wake of last month's decision by the NFL owners to opt out of their collective bargaining agreement with the players 2 years early.
The owners' 32-0 vote might turn out to be nothing or it might turn out to be the first shot in a long, bloody labor war. Either way, the 62-year-old leader of the NFL Players Association intends to see it through to the end.
"I'm staying until this battle is over," Upshaw said in a recent interview with the Daily News. "I have to. We're not changing generals in the middle of the war. That's what they do over in Iraq. Every other week, there's a new damn general over there.
"We're going to be here and we're going to see this through, and then we'll see where the chips fall. But I'm not leaving until we have a deal."
Upshaw has been at the helm of the NFLPA for a quarter century. Took it over when it was a powerless, apathetic organization that couldn't even afford office furniture. Steered it through the rough seas of a 6-year court battle that eventually brought true free agency to the league. Since 1993, he has overseen a decade-and-a-half of labor peace that has made lots and lots of money for both the players and owners.
League revenues, which hit $7.6 billion in 2007, are rising at the unfathomable rate of $500 million per year. The average value of an NFL franchise right now is $957 million and climbing. The league's salary cap has more than tripled in the last 15 years.
Just 27 months ago, faced with the threat of losing the cap that has been in place since '93, the owners, at the urging of outgoing commissioner Paul Tagliabue, approved by a 30-2 vote a CBA extension that, among other things, gave the players 60 percent of the league's revenue pie. Now, the owners say the deal isn't working for them and needs to be modified.
"Clearly, the economics are not working for the owners," Tagliabue's successor, Roger Goodell, said last month after the opt-out vote. "We have been investing more in stadiums, and the cost of generating revenue is becoming more significant. And it's not a secret what we're going through from an economic standpoint that creates more risk in the marketplace."
There's no reason for football fans to panic yet. All the early opt-out vote did was shave the final 2 years off the CBA, which will expire in March 2011 now rather than 2013, with the final year of the deal being uncapped if a new agreement isn't reached by March 2010.
That still leaves a lot of time for the two sides to work out their differences. But there already is an ominous, getting-ready-for-war tone in the rhetoric coming out of both camps.
"Until we went to Atlanta [for the opt-out vote], I would've said that [a work stoppage] was possible but very unlikely," said a high-ranking executive for one NFL club. "But after going to Atlanta, I'd put it at least 50-50 right now. Because the reality from our side is, most teams are doing very mediocre [profitwise]."
No one other than Upshaw and Goodell are identified in this story because owners and management have been told not to comment on the negotiations.
"We're not trying to hit a grand slam home run here," the executive added. "We're just trying to get things back in line. If Gene is willing to work with us and help move the pendulum back closer to the middle, it'll get settled. If Gene takes the attitude that, 'This is bullbleep. They're making money and I'm not going to give up a penny,' this will be a big war. It won't be a little war, it will be a big war."
Said Upshaw: "The easiest thing for them to say right now is that the player costs are too much and that they're paying the players too much. But let me make one thing crystal clear. We're not going backward."
How is it that a deal the owners overwhelmingly approved just 2 years ago suddenly has become so onerous that they're willing to risk the league's first work stoppage since 1987? Well, Upshaw has been wondering the same thing.
How is it that a deal the owners overwhelmingly approved just 2 years ago suddenly has become so onerous that they're willing to risk the league's first work stoppage since 1987? Well, Upshaw has been wondering the same thing."All of the economic arguments they're making now [about why the deal is bad], where were these 32 billionaires when it came time for the CBA to be approved [in '06]?" he said. "Did they all go out to lunch? They approved this deal, and now they're saying the deal's not working."
The truth is, the owners hardly were in love with the deal in '06. But if they rejected it, there would have been no salary cap in '06, and they weren't ready to deal with that scenario then.
So they agreed to a player-friendly deal that included increasing the players' share of the league's total football revenue to 60 percent. They also reluctantly acquiesced to Upshaw's insistence on a club revenue-sharing plan by which the league's higher-revenue teams would supplement the lower-revenue teams.
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