Book excerpt: Upton Bell takes fans back to…
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Book excerpt: Upton Bell takes fans back to crazy early days of Patriots
QUARTERBACK OF FUTURE: Patriots rookie Jim Plunkett in 1971 after being the No.?1 pick in the draft.
Cover image to "Present at the Creation" by Upton Bell and Ron Borges.
By Ron Borges |
PUBLISHED: October 29, 2017 at 12:00 a.m. | UPDATED: November 17, 2018 at 12:00 a.m.
• Editor's note: Former Patriots general manager Upton Bell has authored a newly available book, "Present at the Creation: My Life in the NFL and the Rise of America's Game," with Herald columnist Ron Borges. Today, we excerpt a portion of the book covering the turbulent start to Bell's tenure working as GM for then-Patriots owner Billy Sullivan in 1971.
Before I left for the annual owners' meetings in Palm Beach in March, I told one of our secretaries not to forget to send the option letters out. There was paperwork stacked everywhere, but I thought everything was fine. It was standard procedure.
The option clause had been put in by my father [Bert Bell, the former NFL commissioner] to protect the club so the player couldn't take off. The commissioner signed every contract then, and I remembered hearing him say on the phone a thousand times, "Make sure that option is signed."
The way it worked was in the final year of a player's contract we had to send notification we were picking up his option, whether we kept him or not. If a player had a two-year contract, the club had an option for a third year, which I could pick up. If it sounds like a perpetual contract, it was, although it really was only a one- year option. That's how Ted Hendricks left Baltimore for Green Bay. He played out the option. He was one of the few who ever did it. They usually signed a new deal, with a new option, instead.
So a two-year deal was really a three-year deal for the club, plus we got compensation for the player if he signed with someone else. Later it was called restraint of trade, which of course it was. That was the whole idea. It eventually led to a limited form of free agency, but nothing like baseball has.
Well, someone forgot to send the letters out. I didn't know it until I got a call from [defensive tackle] Phil Olsen's agent after I got back, thanking me for making Phil a free agent because he wanted to get to the West Coast to play with his brother, Merlin, on the Rams. I was dumbfounded.
His agent, Edwin Masery, also sent me a letter notifying me I hadn't picked up the option and therefore Phil was free. I looked into it and learned Sauer used to send those letters out himself. The secretary seemed confused by the whole thing. Nobody knew what I was talking about.
I got all our contracts ready to send out, and we had all these players now without an option letter. None of the letters had gone out. Thirty players were now free agents. I'd lost my entire team!
When I explained the situation to [my assistant Peter] Hadhazy and Bucko [Kilroy, the director of player personnel], I thought they were going to pass out. Hadhazy suggested we send letters out immediately, but it was too late. The deadline had passed. If we sent them now, at least some players would realize what had happened and try to leave. Fortunately, it never became public. Today it would get out in ten minutes, but very few players had agents then and that helped us.
Peter Hadhazy told me there was nothing we could do about it, but in trying to come up with some way to stop it, I went down to the league office with one of our lawyers to plead our case. Our lawyer said he thought we had one last shot with something called an estoppel. It's a legal principle that precludes a person from asserting something contrary to what is implied by a previous action or statement. In other words, Olsen knew there was an option and we always exercise it, so it was reasonable to infer we would again and he didn't need notification about that. It seemed like a Hail Mary, but sometimes you have to throw one. Or say one. The league said it wasn't too sure. Neither was I.
Billy [Sullivan] couldn't have been better about it. I think he was used to these kinds of things happening, even though I wasn't. He didn't blame me. Carroll [Rosenbloom, the Baltimore Colts owner] would have called the person in and put him in front of a firing squad, but it never would have happened at the Colts in the first place.
Every day for two months I woke up knowing if this got out, I'm a dead man walking. I kept waiting for someone like Will McDonough at the Boston Globe to discover it. Thankfully, Phil and his agent never told the media.
What I decided was we'd send the other players new contracts, most with a small raise. I'm sure some of them wondered why they were getting raises for going 2-14, but none asked. Every day I'd contact three or four more players, feeling like there was a death sentence hanging over my head every morning. Jon Morris was our starting center and the player rep. He was a smart man, so I was surprised he didn't notice, but maybe his option wasn't up.
Commissioner [Pete] Rozelle finally stepped in and declared Olsen a free agent but said the Rams had to give us compensation, and we ended up with their No. 1 pick in 1972 because Olsen was a former No. 1. Today that wouldn't happen. The agent would holler. The union would step in. It would be all over social media and we'd be dead, which legally we should have been. We didn't send the letter. The Rams didn't owe us anything.
Even after it became public, not one player came to me and said, "You screwed me." I didn't con them. I just didn't tell them they were free agents. They just thought Phil was the only one.
Considering how contentious everything is today between the union with DeMaurice Smith as its director and the league with [Roger] Goodell as commissioner, you're probably wondering why the NFLPA didn't demand all those players become free agents or threaten to sue. That's where we got a break. As much turmoil as we were in, so was the NFLPA.
Ed Garvey had just taken over as executive director and the union was going through a merger with the AFL Players Association. The problem was that Garvey was negotiating a new four-year deal with the owners and preparing what would become a landmark antitrust case involving John Mackey. Had Garvey known what was going on, he would have been all over it, because it was a clear example of the kind of antitrust violation he would later use to ease restrictions on player movement. But the union was in a state of flux when Pete stepped in.
The whole issue was never fully explained until now. Today it would be analyzed over and over, but information didn't flow as quickly then. I called it a technicality and all the media wanted to know was that the Patriots' No. 1 pick of 1970 was out the door.
I took the blame but said Olsen used a loophole to get out of his contract. He'd hurt his knee in the College All-Star Game and never played a down for the Patriots, so if he didn't want to be here we didn't want him. What are the reports the next day? Dissatisfied Olsen skips out on team. Billy loved that. So did our fans.
I took the public fall, because what am I going to do? Throw my secretary under the bus? It would look like a first-year person coming in and copping out at the first problem. Imagine the headline: "Bell Blames Secretary." It was a legitimate mistake. Hell, my assistant GM's desk was in the bathroom. You could lose anything in those offices.
Today they call it spin. I called it damage control. Turned out that was just the beginning of a lot of damage control. Damage out of control was more like it. Olsen was the tip of the iceberg.
Every week there was a problem that on other teams would happen once every five years. The next one involved quarterback Joe Kapp, who had been the league's MVP in 1969 for taking the Vikings to the Super Bowl with a lot of machismo and a rag arm. It was amazing what he did, but not as amazing as what was coming.
A month or two after the Olsen fiasco, the league office called asking for Kapp's signed contract. We couldn't find it and one of the secretaries told me Sullivan had it, so I called Billy, because he'd negotiated the deal the previous season.
Kapp had refused to sign a new contract with the Vikings because there was no raise in it, and he played out his option in 1969. He was now a free agent, but no team contacted him until Billy called a week into the 1970 season. Kapp would later charge in a lawsuit that this lack of interest was because of the Rozelle Rule, the compensation rule he dubbed the Ransom Rule. He had a point, frankly.
Billy offered Kapp a three-year contract on October 6, 1970, and paid him $154,000 to go 1-9 as a starter, which made him the highest-paid player in the league and cost the Patriots their 1972 No. 1 pick and defensive back John Charles, who'd been a No. 1 pick in 1967. Kapp signed a memorandum of agreement but not a standard player contract on the advice of his attorney, John Elliot Cook. In reality, he played 1970 without a contract and now the league was demanding he sign a standard one, which Kapp wouldn't do.
Rozelle sent us a letter on May 28, reminding us Kapp could not play or practice without a signed contract. Kapp showed up at training camp out at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, but I had to tell him to leave, although he remained in our control on the reserve list. Kapp sued, claiming an antitrust violation, and four years later won a judgment but no compensation because a jury ruled he had not been harmed, even though he never played another down in the NFL and never got the rest of the $600,000 he'd been promised. In 1977 the "Ransom Rule" was renegotiated to be less restrictive, and a multi-million-dollar settlement was paid to the union. Kapp got nothing. None of that helped me in 1971.
Earlier that spring, I spent a day driving to a team function in New Hampshire with Kapp, and I liked him. He seemed like a throwback player. He was a natural leader. What was clear to me immediately was Kapp was never going to sign that contract. It went on and on until the first day of camp, which was one of the most embarrassing scenes I'd ever seen.
I'm the GM but Billy is meeting with Kapp. I'm not involved and I didn't want to be involved. I would have told him if you don't want to sign, see you later.
We'd been told he couldn't practice if he didn't sign, so all the cameras are outside waiting. At one point Billy and Kapp walk out of Kapp's apartment with Billy carrying Kapp's bag. I was so pissed. We never saw Joe Kapp again, and I was relieved. It was one of the few things [coach John] Mazur and I agreed on. The future was [Jim] Plunkett.
Excerpted from "Present at the Creation: My Life in the NFL and the Rise of America's Game" by Upton Bell with Ron Borges by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2017 by Upton Bell and Ron Borges. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press (800-848-6224) and at nebraskapress.unl.edu
Ron Borges