When the Game Ends, DeMaurice Smith Fights for the Players

DAVID GREENE, HOST: Welcome to Sports in America, everybody. And I want to talk this week about a moment that a lot of NFL players still remember. It is the moment when they are drafted, when they get on the phone with a coach of one of the teams in the NFL, and find out where they’re going to land, Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gonna have a stellar career, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to stay with that team very long. But it is an incredibly special moment. And we have reached that time of the year when it is NFL draft time. The draft is taking place in a city that is near and dear to me, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is very cool. And we’re gonna talk about it with Nick Baumgardner, who is senior writer and NFL draft analyst at The Athletic. Nick, as a draft analyst, do you look forward to this moment in the NFL calendar every year?

NICK BAUMGARDNER: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really is like, of all the different jobs I’ve done in sports writing over the years, you know, I’ve been a beat writer and columnist, etc. All the different stuff. Like, I never looked forward to stuff like I feel like I do the draft. The draft for me is like, this was a thing that I watched more than anything when I was a kid. I don’t know why, but like, I remember it being on ESPN, like the full day, where you get like the 20 minutes in between picks, and it’s just this long thing. And to me, it always felt like the sort of end slash beginning. End of an old season, beginning of a new season, right? It’s like right in the middle spot there. And that’s exactly what it is now. So I’m always excited. I always get excited for it. Even though sports writers, we don’t get excited for much, but you know, this is one thing I think that gets most of us going.

DG: You know, it’s funny, I, what you just said might be the most compelling thing about the draft for me. I have always, I’ve always felt like it’s over hyped. I have a lot of friends who love it. And like, I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. All my Steelers friends are like writing back and forth. Like, what should the Steelers’ strategy be? And should we take a quarterback in the first round or not? And I just like, as an actual piece of theater, like I don’t really get into it. But as a place on the calendar, I very much do. Because it is, especially for all of us who didn’t have very good playoff years, and the Steelers had a mediocre season and knocked out of the playoffs before they really began. It’s like, okay, this is turning the page. It’s the next chapter. We’re gonna get to minicamp soon, and it’s all starting again.

NB: Yeah, I mean it’s like the perfect break in between, and exactly you have like a couple of weeks and the rookies are there and the weather’s gonna be nice, and winter’s over. And it’s to me it’s always been this like signal point of like the NFL has never really had an off-season as a true hardcore NFL fan. There’s always something to dig into, and their only calm period is like maybe a couple of weeks right after the draft, when everybody in the league feels better about themselves than they did when the year ended.

DG: Right.

NB: There’s nobody that comes out of that draft, even the team that had the worst draft. They’re like, hey, well, you know what? Some of those guys might work out. Maybe we’ll be a little bit better.

DG: We did something!

NB: The draft for me is always when everybody’s like, okay, we finally got it aligned, and then we get to see. And it’s really where you get to find out which teams know what they’re doing and which teams are just sort of along for the ride, I guess.

DG: It really is placing bets, isn’t it? I mean, I sometimes compare this moment to like when publishing houses sign on book authors. Like, probably most of the books that you’re publishing are not gonna do that well, not gonna make money, but like the few that do and become blockbusters, like that’s what makes the business work.

NB: 100%.

DG: And it’s like, I feel like NFL teams are just, they know a lot of these guys are not necessarily gonna be great or even good, but it’s like looking for filling holes, but also those stars to be that could make or break a franchise over the next decade.

NB: Yeah, like building an NFL team to me is like the most, it’s one of the more underrated pieces of why the NFL is so popular. Because I think building an NFL team, if you compare it to other sports. An NHL team might be the one to compare it to because that’s pretty complicated. But all the other sports are pretty cut and dry and straightforward. You need to find an NFL Team, you know, 11 on offense, 11 on defense, and at least 11 that know what they’re doing special teams-wise, whether that’s an extra or whatever. And they have to have very specific roles. Very specific attributes and abilities, and they have to have backups, and they had to be the best of the best, and it has to be something that every year you’re looking at, well, what’s the new trend here? What was the other counter that, okay, offensively we did this, now defensively the league is trending this way. So, to me, it’s always a never-ending puzzle, and it’s like the biggest, most complicated one, I feel like, in sports. So the draft is always like also the centerpiece of your roster building, and that to me is always fascinating.

DG: Yeah. Well, how does the process work for people who have not watched this and might be, I don’t know, getting into it for the first time?

NB: Yeah, so like for scouts in general, the process on like the 2026 NFL draft started in May of 2025. So it started a couple of weeks after the last draft ended.

DG: Yeah, full-time job.

NB: Right, they will have been on to the 2026 class, probably by mid-summer, those scouts are going to have an early board on who they like, who they don’t like, what their early preliminary stuff is off their junior tape. And for the most part, they kind of have an idea of who’s coming. They follow recruiting and everything else, just like everybody, all fans do. That trickles into the start of the season. They go around, they visit these kids, and then it becomes, like, it was interesting when you mentioned that it’s a little bit like betting. To me, my head goes to like horse betting, where it’s like, a great horse bettor is someone who’s like, they understand everything about these horses, and that’s where the scouts, they call elementary school teachers, right? They call uncles, aunts, cousins, people that you, you know, that you barely knew, to find every single rocked overturn. So the scouting process then goes through the rest of the season into the combine, and when they get these guys in front of them, is when they start doing the whole, like, I know every secret in your life, and I’m going to start asking you questions to see if you’re going to reveal these things or try to hide these things.

DG: That really goes on?

NB: Oh yeah!

DG: Like, there’s psycho psycho analysis happening? Wow, I didn’t know that.

NB: You know, so the combine, that’s when they bring them all in for like, it’s like 15 minutes. Everybody gets like a set amount of time, and then they start peppered them with everything to see, you know, if you’re going to be upfront about this or not about that, and see if you trip up on other things. They’re trying to throw them off and put as much like mental strain on them as possible to see who can sort of like handle the ebbs and flows of the NFL. And, you know that eventually rolls into, you know, meetings into April and then, then the draft starts. And really, I think the draft, too, people don’t really understand as much about. They are flying by the seam of their pants on some of these things, with how the board is unfolding just as much as everybody is at home. That’s the theater. I agree with you that the presentation is never really, it’s hard to present a draft and make it super exciting. But I think the theater is like, these guys in these war rooms, they’re reading mock drafts, just like we are. They don’t know what the other teams are doing.

DG: And who’s gonna be available when their number comes up?

NB: Exactly. So it gets a little hectic there and can be pretty crazy.

DG: So, Fernando Mendoza is the name we keep hearing about over and over again, likely going to be the quarterback. I mean, he’s from Indiana, and the Vegas Raiders are probably going to take him. That feels like one of the least kept secrets in all of NFL draft day, but like what is guaranteed? Like, do the Raiders know that they have their future quarterback for the next decade? I mean, no one knows what even a great college quarterback is gonna do in the NFL.

NB: No, it’s impossible to fully predict what a guy is going to do. The best you can do with a quarterback, and it’s this way with all positions, but I think your wiggle room or your margin for error is just smaller with the quarterbacks. The best that you can hope for is you just have to break the player’s game down at the most incremental level, right? Where it’s like, okay, are his feet correct? Does he have proper drops on every drop back? Is a three-step drop on a, if we’re calling something that requires a three-step drop, is he actually coming back and stepping three times and dropping and landing it on three seconds? Or is it like two and a half and a spin and a backpedal and something he made up and something different? So then we go into you know, release, processing all the things, everything. Is he maintaining contact with the ground when he’s throwing, so his accuracy is on time? You just have to peel everything back and then start stacking guys based on, like, he can do all these things, but not these things. And he can do less and more, right? So it’s a giant puzzle with the quarterbacks. And the best you can do is just put all of these little things together and present it if you’re a scout to your team and say like… Well, you know, I’m sure when the Bengals presented Joe Burrow, who’s one of the cleanest prospects I think we’ve seen in the last probably 15 years, you know, their final presentation was, you know, we looked under every single rock to try to find things that he didn’t do well, and there just weren’t that many. We found all these other things and that is what’s going to make an elite prospect an elite prospect and guys that are a little bit lower than that, whereas Mendoza is going to have more, “Hey, we found more things that he’s not maybe ever going to be great at, but we think we can counter those things with all the things he is good at, plus we can give him some help in this area here.” So you’re projecting as best you can, and that’s why those guys get paid. It’s just an endless amount of film study and character study and all those things that just go on all year.

DG: And I mean, people make such a big deal about whether you’re going to be a first-round pick, but I mean, the biggest lesson to me is like Tom Brady, the GOAT was six… Was he sixth round?

NB: Sixth round, yeah, might have been a comp pick too. I think he was like one of those throw-in picks that you got like late, yeah.

DG: Yeah. I mean, that’s incredible. That, that just said, like, I think about, you know, the Steelers, we have Will Howard on our roster, Ohio State. He, I think, was six round in the last draft, and I’m the one, the Steelers fan who’s just like, let him play. Like, we didn’t see him in a game last year. And it’s like, what if he’s the next Tom Brady? Like you just don’t know.

NB: Oh, it’s such a fascinating question. And I think the NFL is at such an interesting point. The saying in scouting and in the NFL, really in general, is the NFL is not a developmental league. This is not like baseball, where we can take a guy who we project this guy in five years to be really special. We’re going to give him a bunch of at-bats in the minor leagues, and he’s going to be ready to go. You don’t have the at-bats in football, and you don’t have five years like they have to be ready to go, and that’s still true, and that remains true. But I think the way that NIL and college football has changed. The way these guys decide when they’re gonna go out, when they are not gonna go out. There’s no ability to predict anymore. This year’s quarterback class was supposed to be loaded. It’s not anymore. Next year’s might be, we’ll see. Maybe those guys will stay another year, and who knows? And so it becomes this thing where you can’t kick the can down the road anymore. You have to find ways to get the younger guys either on the field, get them a longer look, find a way to, like, if you are taking a guy in the sixth round, you need to find out if the guy can start. Like that, you need to figure out one way or another, you know, whether or not he can do it. And if he can’t, you need to move on to the next one. Like, I think that that needs to be more of a thing with teams in a sense of urgency there, because I think you’re probably, you are missing on guys all the time. Jalen Hurts was a third-round pick. We see guys slip through the cracks. Brock Purdy was the last pick in the draft. That’s, you know. I promise we will see that again. It’s just a matter of who, and you know how many teams take advantage of it.

DG: Yeah, I know you have a Detroit Lions podcast, right?

NB: Yes.

DG: Are you a Lions fan?

NB: Oh yeah, I grew up with them. So I covered them a little bit here. I don’t cover them anymore. So I think I can be more of a fan now. And they were my like first love team, I guess. Them and the Detroit Pistons, I would say, as a kid.

DG: Nice. So, as a Lions fan, like what are you hoping for on draft day? What’s the best-case scenario for, you know, for you as a fan?

NB: So for me, usually it’s always like, just do something that makes sense, please. Just don’t, don’t do something….

DG: (Laughs) That’s like we have to set the bar very high but, like…

NB: Right, but like I feel like when you ask the average fan, they’re always kind of like just…

DG: Don’t be dumb!

NB: Yeah, do something that I can understand. Do something, then I can that I could be okay. I get what you’re doing here, I get where you’re going. Like, you know, Brad Holmes of the Lions has pretty much nailed that in the last however many years he’s been the GM, but in years prior, it would just be like I don’t know, like there’s some of them where you’re like I can’t, I cannot get behind this, like I don’t know what you are trying to do here, it doesn’t make any sense.

DG: We didn’t need a punter in the third round! Like, maybe we could have used that on our next QB 1.

NB: And that was always my thing too. It’s not just the first round, but please do what makes sense all the way through.

DG: Yeah. You know, one player I think back to, Nick, is Damar Hamlin. I was a big fan of his in college because I’m a big Pitt Panthers fan…

NB: That’s right!

DG: And he got drafted. I wanted him to be a Steeler. He gets drafted by the Buffalo Bills, but, you know, what’s crazy to me is, you know, you’re a young player. You’re coming to the NFL. You have all these dreams. You still don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know where your life and career is going to go. And for Damar Hamlin, it’s like he couldn’t have predicted that he would be in this horrific on-field accident where he nearly dies, which we’re going to hear about in a couple of minutes. But yeah, I mean, draft day is a big moment, but you just can’t predict anything if you’re one of these young players.

NB: No. It’s the craziest thing ever because it’s like you’re being handed this lottery ticket, but you don’t know if you can quite cash it yet, and it’s conditional on all these other things. And these young guys get their identity tied up in this football, and it is very… It’s intense. It is an intense moment, and it’s one of those things where the guys all that have been drafted, it’s the craziest process you’ll ever go through. They all say it. It’s extremely intense. Everybody telling you that your life is set when you don’t really know.

DG: Yeah, well, coming up next, we’re going to hear more about Damar Hamlin. We’re also going to talk to the former president of the NFL players union, DeMaurice Smith, and hear a lot about sports injuries and the league and player safety. Nick Baumgardner, you were the perfect person to bring in for that conversation. He’s senior writer and NFL draft analyst at The Athletic. Enjoy draft day, Nick!

NB: Thank you, David, as well. Go Steelers, right?

DG: Oh, I appreciate that. Go Lions. We’ll be right back with more Sports in America.

Welcome back to sports in America. I’m David Greene.

BROADCASTER: Welcome to the Monday night kickoff, and welcome to as I said earlier…

DG: The Monday night football matchup on January 2nd, 2023 between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals was just supposed to be a standard late season game. There didn’t seem to be anything major on the line. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the game had stakes. It would help determine seeding for the AFC playoffs, home field advantage, bragging rights. But in a sport as dangerous as football, the stakes can intensify in a second.

\[MUSIC\]

DS: You know, the backdrop of it is it is my job to know the risk.

DG: At the time, DeMaurice Smith was the president of the NFL Players Association, the union for pro football players. So one of the most important parts of his job was simply to ensure players’ safety. And he wasn’t particularly worried about this game. I mean, so much so that he wasn’t even watching.

DS: By the time that Monday night game happens, and we’re watching it, as far as a football field being as safe as it possibly can be, I’m comfortable with that.

DG: It was early in the game, just the first quarter, score was 7-3, the Bengals had a narrow lead, and the Bills, who had never won a Super Bowl in their 60-plus year history, were hungry, including their defensive back Damar Hamlin.

\[CROWD CHEERING\]

DG: So when Bengals receiver Tee Higgins made a catch and got a Bengals first down.

ANNOUNCER: Wow, here’s Higgins wide open.

DG: Damar wasted no time and took him down. It looked like a pretty standard tackle until Damar tried to stand up and he collapsed.

ANNOUNCER: And now another Bill’s player is down.

DG: That’s when union president Demaris Smith got a call that made him reach for the remote.

DS: So when a person goes down like that, when it first happened, you know, like you said, it was just a routine tackle. What started to terrify me was just the length of time.

DG: Damar Hamlin is still collapsed on the field, laying motionless on his back. Within 10 seconds, a swarm of Bill’s team trainers and physicians are on the field.

DS: As a watcher of the game, you know for the likelihood by the time these commercials are over, that’s going to be over. Right?

ANNOUNCER: A big piece of this defense for Sean McDermott back after this.

DG: Not this time. The first commercial break ends, and Damar Hamlin still hasn’t gotten up.

ANNOUNCER: As they brought the stretcher out, they have that backboard out. Damar Hamlin is the one who was in on that stop on Tee Higgins.

DG: 30 seconds passed by.

ANNOUNCER: So we’ll take another break here in Cincinnati.

DG: In a minute.

ANNOUNCER: There’s just nothing to say right now. We’ll take another break and come back.

DG: Than two minutes.

ANNOUNCER: Okay, Lisa, we’re gonna take a break. They have been administering CPR through these past two breaks that we’ve taken

DG: His teammates start to kneel around him on the field. They’re praying.

DS: And then you start to see the faces of the players, that’s when I knew. That it was something horribly different.

BROADCASTER: You can just see the worried looks on their faces.

DG: Damar Hamlin is taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

ANNOUNCER: And they are intensely working on Damar Hamlin.

DG: Leaving behind hundreds of distraught NFL players and staff.

ANNOUNCER: We’ll send it away from here, just nothing more to say at this point.

\[MUSIC\]

DG: With Damar Hamlin’s health, his life really still uncertain, the leaders of the league had to decide how to move forward. So DeMaurice, the head of the players union, immediately called the NFL commissioner.

You actually got on the phone with Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL. Tell me what that conversation was like.

DS: I called Roger after, it seemed like hours, but man, it was probably at least 20 minutes. Looking at the faces of these players, you know, call this, this game needs to be over. And I remember that was our first telephone call. The players then were told to go to the locker rooms. A player, one of the players, calls me from the locker room, tells me what he saw on the field. You know, if you’ve been around NFL coaches and NFL players, you get back into the room at halftime. I’m sure there was a moment of prayer, but you know, when you get into that locker room, the coaches are now talking about what we’re gonna do when we come back out. And that player’s telling me, you know, the quarterbacks are warming up, and they’re throwing. And he didn’t think that we should go back out, and I hung up the phone, called Roger back, and we have a rather spirited conversation about me thinking that this game should be over, and he said well you know we’re not going to push the players. We’re not going to make them go out, we’re gonna talk to the coaches, we’re talking to talk to team captains. That’s when I said this is not a coach’s call, this is not a player’s call. I’m a player guy, and this isn’t a player’s call; this is a leadership call. We don’t know, but this was the most terrible event that I’ve seen on a football field since Darryl Stingley, you know, who was paralyzed on a football field. What are we doing?

DG: Yeah.

DS: And, you know, we hung up, and well, right before we hung it up, I said, hey, look, you don’t blame this on me. I mean, this should be a Roger Goodell question, but if you want to make it a D Smith, you know, head of the union says that the game needs to be called, man, I, you know, fine. I mean, I get enough hate…

DG: Whatever it takes.

DS: Per day, whatever it takes. And, you know, as the story unfolded later on, you know, the game gets canceled, and they move on.

DG: But it took so long.

DS: It took far longer than it ever should have been. And I think the beauty of football, as much as you and your buddies are gonna be screaming your heads off, and the fans around you are gonna be losing their minds, and we’re gonna see people do crazy things on a football field that only humans can dream of doing. Man, the thing that makes football fantastic, like all sport, is it’s still humans playing it. And what makes it great is we’re watching the better part of humanity coming together to play a game that we find entertaining. But the minute we lose the humanity of that, I think it ceases being sport.

DG: It turned out that Damar Hamlin had experienced cardiac arrest that night. The blunt force of his tackle caused a rare cardiac event called commodio cortis, which actually stopped his heart on the field. He was resuscitated, and since then, he has made a full recovery, and he is back to playing football for the Bills. But that night in January 2023, no one knew whether he was actually gonna survive. The players didn’t know if they had just witnessed their friend die right there on the field. It took about an hour for the NFL officials to finally postpone the rest of that game. Then, three days later, they canceled it indefinitely.

What does it tell us about the NFL that it took that long to make a decision? Because, I mean, thank god Damar Hamlin has recovered miraculously and is back to playing football again. But like, there was a good chance he could have been dead that night. And you have the league commissioner thinking like… Hey, maybe we should play some more football?

DS: You know, I think that there is a narrative that the game must go on. And if you allow the people who are stuck, for good reasons, coaches, players, you know, to a certain extent, the people who are putting the game on, you know, the television executives. You know, there is a certain world life theory of that, you know, this game is just going to go on. We’re going to put it on. If it starts to rain, we’re going to figure out how to do it in the rain. If it starts to snow, we’re gonna figure out how to do it there. I do believe that there is this construct that starts to develop that this game just should go on, no matter what. I think it’s the job of the executives and the leaders to make a decision of when it shouldn’t. And I can’t explain it. You and I both know if there were a clap of thunder that would have happened, there is a protocol that clears the field and whatever, and how many minutes have to go by, you know, when you don’t hear thunder that makes the game go on. Well, that happens because people have given a great deal of thought before that happens of what we’re going to do

DG: Right. They haven’t contemplated a guy lying motionless on a football field.

DS: And you know what? I have. Thankfully, Damar Hamlin lived, and hopefully we learned that when something like this happens, first and foremost, obviously, is the safety of the player, but there’s some times when games should stop.

DG: That was one of the scarier moments of DeMaurice’s time as the leader of the NFLPA, the guy who has got to protect 300-pound dudes who are smashing into each other for a living. His time as head of the union also included tense legal battles and contract negotiations, including the bitter 2011 lockout that threatened healthcare for the entire NFL. These experiences inspired him to write an autobiography about the job called “Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game.” But football had a place in DeMaurice’s life long before he wrote a book on running the union.

You sort of grew up with football, though. I mean, you played a little bit of running back when you were young, right?

\[MUSIC\]

DS: My coach, my high school coach, I literally still see my high school coach.

DG: Oh, very cool.

DS: Oh yeah. I mean, you know, I mean those people who coach you, you know, and I think particularly in football at that young age, I mean, hopefully if they are a good coach, they left a indelible impression on you, right? And because they saw you at a point where you go from that kid to man part. But yeah, I mean, I’m sure Coach Beckett would tell you I was one of the worst football players he ever, he ever saw. (Laughs)

DG: But even if he thought that, what indelible impression did he leave on you?

DS: You know, where I grew up in Prince George’s County at the time.

DG: Which, for our listeners, we should say is a suburb of Washington, D.C.

DS: From over Washington, D.C., now a historically Black community wasn’t always a whore’s historically Black community, was really one of the first places where African-American families moved from D. C. Because they could afford to buy a house. And so over the years where I started elementary school, high school, by the time I got to 10th grade, the racial dynamic went from probably 20% African-American to 50% African American in Prince George’s County. And as you can imagine, in a private school, it was a large private school. I mean, we had our fair share of issues, and that guy was just a spark plug of energy from Bluefield, West Virginia, grew up in the coal mining towns. Football was his ticket out of going into a coal mine. And he instilled that part of sports can be anything you want it to be. It can be your ticket out, it can be the things that bring you together, it can be the things that develop your lifetime friends, but it could also be that thing that could easily turn into tribalism and factions. I think sometimes sports and coaches do a great job of teaching toughness and accountability. And sometimes they don’t include that for whom and by whom and for why.

DG: Who to be tough for, those words, I just think about your whole career, and it feels like that’s something that you’ve definitely held with you.

DS: Yeah, I mean, look, I love the game of football. I really do. And you know, you’ve been here for a long time. You know, this place eats, breathes, drinks, Washington football. I was that way as a kid. Got to, you know, my dad had season tickets, so I was going to those games at RFK, you know, and the stadiums moving and rocking and all that stuff’s great. So I grew up absolutely loving football, but I really thought that by the time I became executive director, I had to love the players more. And as you know, NFL football is a great thing for many reasons. It is a sometimes not so great thing for many reasons. But football, unchecked, will get more out of the players than players get out of football. And I always thought that I needed to make sure that philosophically, from a frame standpoint, I had to like the game like fifth and love the players first.

DG: When DeMaurice Smith grew up, he didn’t get into football or sports at all, at least not at first. He became a pretty successful trial lawyer. DeMaurice became a partner at some major law firms in Washington, D.C., and he worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which put him into consideration for a role as U. S. Attorney himself.

So you had the chance, maybe, to be a U. S. Attorney in the nation’s capital, which feels like that would have been your craft?

DS: That’s the gig, right?

DG: That’s it.

DS: Yeah.

DG: And you decide instead to consider taking this job leading the NFL Players Association.

DS: Never saw it coming. Never saw it coming, even when I got the call, I was working on the transition team for the Department of Justice for President-elect Obama. He had just been elected president in November. I was on the Transition Team for the Department of Justice. Came back to my office one night, there was an answering machine recording about, “Hey, would you be interested in a new career?” And I was like, eh, delete. They called back, delete, and a former partner of mine, a guy named Tom Hyde. I got in touch with him one day, and he was like, hey, this recruiting firm has called us, and they’re interested in whether you’d be interested in being the executive director of the NFL Players Association. I was like, okay, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I mean, I’ve got another gig that is very cool, and other than my stellar career as a kick returner in high school, where the literal goal was to run out of bounds as quickly as possible. And then the first meeting that I had with the players, with that executive committee, I’ll never forget, the meeting was at the Fairmont Hotel in D.C. Walked up the street, walked in the meeting, I mean, it’s packed, there’s probably 40 people in this meeting. And, you know, the outside lawyers I’m cool with, I know who they are, the internal lawyers, I’m a lawyer at a big law firm, that doesn’t really get ya. When you walk into a room, and it’s… Brian Dawkins and Kevin Mawae…

\[MUSIC\]

DS: And Drew Brees and Jeff Saturday and Domonique Foxworth and Kevin Carter, Keenan McCardell.

DG: These big players, were you a little starstruck?

DS: Man, starstuck? I was just, duh. (Laughs) I mean, it’s one thing seeing the people that you love to watch on TV. And it is quite a different thing to see them in a sport coat and tie in front of you. I don’t know what, you know, I would never wanna face those guys on a football field, but I found facing them in a room more intimidating than facing the best trial lawyer on the other side of the courtroom. I really did.

DG: Because of their physical presence, just being big humans, or because you know how tough they are on…

DS: It’s like the collection of all of these dudes in the same room at the same time left me with, “Holy crap, this is really important.” It’s defining, right? And I dig it, but man, these are 23 and 24-year-olds. I mean, most players retire at the ripe old age of 26. When I walked into that room, and you know, come on, man. I mean, there’s like five first ballot Hall of Famers in that room. And they are taking this thing so seriously that it was just one of those gulp moments. And they sat down, well, I sat down. They were sitting down. And, you know, the outside lawyer, I think, one of the outside lawyers said, you know we’re interviewing these candidates, the lockout is coming up in 2011, you’ve been identified obviously as a candidate, we know all about and the players know about your background and your resume, why don’t you just start off with telling them why you want the job? And honestly, I said, “I don’t. You guys called me.”

DG: Wow, that’s a gutsy thing to say, but I love it.

DS: It was more nerves than, you know, when I told the story, you know, like my dad tells the story to my grandkids in the next few years, it’ll be, I just knew in a moment that I had to say something, something, something that would make them respect me. I mean, that’ll be the way I tell the story in 10 years. No, it was just, you know, first of all, it was true. And second, I didn’t really over-prepare for that meeting because I just thought, eh. But you know, I said, I’m not. You guys called me, and I do know that you have a lockout coming out in less than 18 months, two years. The owners are bragging that they’ve got $4 billion in a war chest. You know, I did take a look at your LM2. You guys have about $200 million in the war chest. You have a history of failed strikes. The owners are always far more unified than the players. And if they lock you out, I mean, I would just kind of handicap this thing that you guys have a less than 10%, 20% chance of absolutely getting railroaded.

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DG: A little context here, if you weren’t paying attention to the NFL in 2011, this lockout that DeMaurice is talking about was basically when the NFL team owners and the players’ union could not agree on a new contract. They were arguing over fundamental labor issues like safety protocol, revenue sharing, and salaries for rookie players. This failure to come to an agreement resulted in all 32 of the NFL team owners locking out their players for 132 days. It was in the off-season. So it didn’t affect any regular-season games, but it did stop free agency moves and training camp, and basically all team contact with players.

Well, so you took the job, and you sort of lived through the lockout, which you’re, you know was a defining moment in your career. It struck me that you were such a determined fighter for those players to fight for their health, against the risk of injury, to fight for their pay. I mean, what was driving you inside to take that, that approach?

DS: You know, I think just, you know, three simple things. One, they hired me to fight. You know? I mean, and I’m kind of used to that. You know whether it’s you know, big pharma, oil companies, defense contractor companies. I mean, I’ve represented all of them. So from a professional standpoint, you know why you’re being hired. Beyond that, though, man, I know NFL is the number one sport in the country, and I know that people love it and dig it. And we, you know, the beginning of the season, everybody, as you know. It’s how quickly can the season get here? So when you’re in a lockout like that, and you’re a raid against, you know, Jerry Richardson and Jerry Jones and, you know, Dan Snyder, and the Rooneys and the Maras and the McCaskys. And these guys, in their, you know, sitting there in their billions, have decided, yeah, we wanna take 20% of the salary away from players, and we wanna make them play two extra games for free, and we want to take away their pensions. I mean, there is just something about that dichotomy, that the gall of it, that just gets my blood going. And to be in a situation like that where, yes, you’re hired to go in there and be the warrior, but this idea that when you sit down with the wives of the players, and you know that lockout is coming. And I’m intellectually preparing the players for the lockout, and that’s my job, but when you sit down at the wives’ meeting, that, you know, I think Drew Brees’s wife put together, and a few other players put together. And there’s a room full of 150 wives. And that’s in March, right before we get locked out. And you explain to them one more time that the NFL is gonna cut off your health insurance. I mean, we had 15, 20 women who were due to give birth. They’re players who have kids who have special needs. They cut off the health insurance for everyone. Man, there’s something that either you get wound up about going to war for the right side when a group of billionaires cuts off the health insurance of a group of people. Man, if that doesn’t get you to a point where you wanna keep up and strap the helmet on and go, and I mean, go. I don’t know what does.

DG: This is Sports in America, and we’ll be right back with more from DeMaurice Smith.

Welcome back to Sports in America. I’m David Greene, and let’s get right back into our conversation with DeMaurice Smith.

What do you tell people who just don’t see the NFL and its players as like a traditional workplace where you’re fighting for labor rights the way you would in a factory? That these guys have the chance to make millions of dollars, they’re more sympathetic workers out there who you might want to fight for.

DS: I was a lawyer, or I still am a lawyer. If someone told me that there was a 100% chance that when I walked into this courtroom, someone would meet me at full speed in my face and try to knock me out, I can tell you as a lawyer that I would not walk into that courtroom. I just wouldn’t. I’ve tried cases, I’ve tried murder cases, I’ve tried fun cases, I’ve tried rape cases, I’ve tried against gangs. I’ve tried against killers. I never had to worry about the 100% chance that I’m gonna be injured. And I never have to worry about the fact that someone on the other side, you know, was, as a part of the trial, that they were trying to physically hurt me. That’s the people that I represent. So at the end of the day, my job isn’t really to make you love football. If you had that job, would you want a guy like me trying to make the game safer, trying to make your job safer, trying to ensure that you got enough healthcare protection and that the game was as safe as possible? Would you want a guy like fighting a bunch of billionaires? And you know what? Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, you know, they go, “Hey man, I never really thought about it that way. ” And we’re good. One percent of the time, they’re like, “Well, yeah, they’re still spoiled athletes.” And I was like, “Okay, what would you do differently?” And they were like, you know, “D, man, would play for much less.” And I would say, “Hey man, there’s only one problem. You can’t play.”

DG: (Laughs) And I hope they take that as a fair point.

After about four months, the lockout came to an end when the NFL and the union agreed on a 10-year contract. The players notched some pretty big wins, including enhanced safety protocols, a 10% raise for rookies, and a 12% raise for second-year players. But that was not the last contentious moment that DeMaurice had to endure in his 14 years as head of the NFL Players Union.

\[MUSIC\]

DS: You made news. You know, I think it’s been four or five years now, but there was an email exchange that became very public with Jon Gruden, who was, you know, former Super Bowl-winning coach, commentator who made some very racist comments. I would, do you mind sharing sort of what, what that was, and how you reacted?

DS: Yeah, I mean, he wrote an email. Well, there was an email with several people on it, and he referred to me as “Dumb-Maurice Smith has the lips the size of Michelin tires.” And either New York Times or Wall Street Journal reported that.

ANNOUNCER: The Raiders head coach under fire tonight, ESPN is reporting head coach Jon Gruden used racially insensitive language toward NFL Players Association executive director.

DS: You know, again, it wasn’t the first time someone has used a racist term for me. I’m absolutely positive it’s not the first time people used it behind closed doors, or on emails, or on text. But you know, that one became public. And the, you know, honestly, I had more anger towards just the fact of how casual that conversation was on that email.

DG: As if it was something, the kind of thing he would say, you know, every day and…

DS: Yeah, and the kind of thing that the other people on the email were used to hearing. And to me, it’s that sort of casualness of it that I just found the most offensive. I mean, there were other people on that email chain who were friends of mine, or at least I thought were friends of mine. I mean, people that I talk to every week. And, you know, that actually was the most you know, telling it’s the wrong word, I guess. That was the thing that framed it up for me the most. You know, you can sit around and have conversations and drinks and hang out at the bar with a guy for years. And to have someone say that on an email that he’s on, right, forget Gruden for a second, because I probably met Gruden three or four times. I mean, we never had a cross word. But the other guy on the email is somebody that I’d known for 10 years. And look, maybe he picked up the phone and called Gruden and said, “Hey, that was an offensive remark, never send that again.” Maybe he did.

DG: I hope he did.

DS: I hope you did too. And James Baldwin had that line, man, “I can’t see into people’s hearts, but I can see what they do.” Maybe he did. Whether it’s my daughter or my son or anybody that I’ve ever coached, anybody that I’ve ever led as a, you know, titular head of any organization, I hope that I’ve been enough of a father and a leader to instill into those people that first, the email obviously is completely unacceptable. But if you get caught up in something like that, man, just step up. Just be that moment where you reach out to somebody person to person, and you just say, “Hey, look, I got that one wrong.” And I’ve done it before. It doesn’t feel great, but for the sake of all of the things that we have in common. I think you have to do that.

DG: Yeah. I want to ask you, I mean, given all of that, how did that sort of shape your reactions during an event that made a lot of news in the NFL, which was when Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 as a protest fighting for racial justice?

DS: The first thing that I thought of was that is just incredibly brave. And it was something that. I always wanted our guys to understand that football is a great game, but it is a job. You are not removed from your community and your city and your state and your family and your country. You’re performing in it. And football is a great thing, but man, it can be the most enabling bubble that I have ever seen in my life. And so, for a person to make a decision that they are going to respond with what’s going on in their world while they are engaged with the business in the game of football. I thought it was the gutsiest, bravest thing that I’ve seen. You know, now the flip side of my brain was immediately switched to, man, this is going to spin into the sun if he doesn’t grab this narrative and explain it. My head of communications called me. He said, this was the second time he’s done it. It was in a pre-season game now, it’s going to be a thing immediately. And I gave the first interview about what Colin was doing. One, because I was proud of him, but two, explaining why he’s doing it, so that that narrative was there. And obviously, from the point that he knelt, and at the time when we joined him in his lawsuit for being blackballed in the National Football League, and represented him along with his outside lawyers in that antitrust case, we were there fighting for that. And I thought that that wasn’t just a fight for Colin. That was a fight for every player in the National Football League. And to this day, representing Colin, being a part of that fight, being the executive director during the anthem protest, hands down, the best time that I ever had being an executive director, bar none.

\[MUSIC\]

DS: And I think that’s the great part of sports is it can bring us together, it can be this convener. Oh, and that’s lovely, and it’s great. But at the end of the day, why are we convening, and who is convening? And who is cheering? It’s people of all races, all religions, politics, the way you view the world, what you’re thinking about. I’m not any less of that person. When I walk into Commander Stadium. I was never one less of that person as a kid when we walked into RFK. Why do people think it’s okay that I have to cease or the players have to cease being the human three-dimensional person that they are? And that’s what makes sports beautiful.

DG: You tell us that the NFL is not a distraction, and I want it so badly to be a distraction on a lot of like every Sunday. Sports are this rare thing that still brings us together, and we don’t necessarily have to think about who voted for whom sitting around us. But you do say that the NFL is not a distraction; it is a mirror of our society. Why do you see it that way?

DS: I think it’s a mirror and a window. I think it’s a mirror because it does reflect in that moment, I think that it reflects both as a mirror does. It reflects who you are, and it reflects the things that are great about you, and it reflects the blemishes and the scar tissue, the imperfections. I think it’s a window in the sense that it’s aspirational because we can see players doing things that we can’t and we can see them acting as a team and we see them supporting each other, and those things are great and those are great lessons.

DG: I really enjoyed this. Thank you a million times and congrats on the book.

DS: Thank you, brother.

\[THEME MUSIC\]

DG: Next time on Sports in America, things are gonna get a little Bananas.

ANNOUNCER: Zeigler, with the bat literally still on fire.

JARED ORTON: People thought it was the biggest abomination on Earth, that we would come into this historic, beautiful, amazing city and stadium, and we were bringing the circus coming to town.

DG: Jared Orton is the president of the Savannah Bananas, and he and his team are completely reinventing what it means to go to a baseball game.

JO: We want them to walk out at the end of the night, put their hair on the pillow, and say, “That was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.” That’s what we’re aiming after.

DG: We’ll learn all about how the Bananas came to be. We’ll try to keep up with all their wild rules and learn what it really means to put the fan at the forefront of the sporting experience.

ANNOUNCER: You can dance, and you can jive. These boys certainly can.

DG: We’re going Bananas next time on Sports in America.

This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Greene.

Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler. Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our theme music is composed by Emma Munger. Our talent booker is Britt Kahn. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeartRadio app, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

And we also want to hear from you. How about you drop us a line? You can write us at sportsinamerica@whyy.org. That’s sportsinamerica@whyy.org. Thanks everybody, and we’ll see you next time for Sports in America.

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Host: David Greene
Executive Producers: Joan Isabella, Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Talent Booker: Britt Kahn
Engineer: Mike Villers
Tile Art: Bea Walling
Theme Song: Emma Munger
Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.

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