Chairman Inouye, Subcommittee Chairman Dorgan, Ranking Member Stevens, Subcommittee Ranking Member DeMint, Members of the Committee and distinguished guests, my name is Mike Ditka.  I played for the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys from 1961 to 1972.  I also was an assistant coach for the Cowboys and the head coach of the Bears 1985 Super Bowl championship team.  Since 1992, I have been involved in broadcasting of NFL games as a color commentator and analyst, as well as other business ventures.  I have been fairly successful and, at the outset, I’d like to clarify that nothing could interest me less than the size of my own NFL pension.  I am here today on behalf of many other retired NFL players who have not been as fortunate as I in the years since their retirements because the injuries they received playing the game of football prevented them from making a living.

 

For some time, now, I have been involved in charitable efforts to aid disabled and economically challenged NFL retirees through nonprofit organizations such as the Gridiron Greats and the Mike Ditka Hall of Fame Trust.  For some time, these and other organizations have picked up the slack left by an NFLPA that does not do enough for disabled retired players and an ownership that seeks to avoid doing anything at all, both of which seem to have handed the operations of the Plan to an aggressive litigation firm charged with delaying or denying every legitimate claim that players bring forth.  What these charities do, all they can do, is place a band-aid upon the huge wound these other groups are, at best, ignoring by minimizing it’s gravity and keeping it’s true extent secret.  We will continue to do this work as long as the problem exists.  But we will also continue to point out the responsibility the other parties I’ve mentioned have for perpetuating and worsening this problem, and their corresponding duty to shoulder the burden of fixing it before those who suffer under the current system conveniently die and reduce the excess financial burden upon the Plan’s funds.

 

I’d like to address the question of disability pensions under the Bert Bell Retirement Plan.  It is hard to say what is more disturbing:  what we know, or what we don’t know.  What we know is bad enough.  To start with, the Plan provides disability benefits to too few players (no more than 200 or so, although this statistic often goes up or down in statements by the Plan’s lawyers).  According to the Plan, there are more than 7000 retired players who are entitled to receive some kind of retirement benefit.  (The actual number is probably significantly higher, but I’ll use 7,000 here to describe the Plan as generously as I can.)  This means that, at most, 3 or 4 percent of retired players are receiving any kind of disability benefit.  And this is in a game that pushes most players out of the league within a few years – often due to injury (the average playing career is around 3.5 years).  It is a collision sport, not merely a contact sport, which is probably the most violent public spectacle since the gladiatorial games.  So the idea that only three or four out of every 100 retired players are entitled to ANY kind of disability benefit (not just the top level, but any kind at all) just clashes with common sense.

 

On top of that, look at the number of retired players who have received disability benefits for brain injuries caused by multiple concussions.  Again, according to statements by the Plan’s lawyer in Sunday’s Charlotte Observer, there have only been four – ever, in history!  One of them was Mike Webster.  And the Plan’s representatives claim not to know the number of players who have applied for disability due to such injuries.  Anyone who has played the game, especially in the recent past when it was often played on a concrete parking lot covered with a quarter-inch layer of indoor-outdoor carpeting called “Astroturf”, will tell you that NFL football often results in concussions and that players commonly receive multiple concussions over the course of their careers.  Again, the idea that only four men who have ever played pro football have had disabling brain injuries just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

 

Why don’t more players receive the disability benefits they need?  There are lots of answers, starting with the bargaining process between the union and the NFL.  Gene Upshaw described his attitude towards the retired players last year, when he told a newspaper that retired players “don’t hire me and they can’t fire me.  They can complain about me all day long.”  It’s possible that the union leadership doesn’t push harder for fair disability benefits because they think it might mean less for current players.  But part of the job of union leadership is to explain to current players that they could be ex-players next week or next month, as a result of injuries or salary cap decisions.  It’s actually in the interests of current players to push hard for fair, generous disability benefits – and to get that money from both the team owners and from current players.

 

Look at it this way:  the Plan says that retired players receive only $20 million per year in disability benefits today.  The players’ share of revenues under the salary cap system is about $4 billion a year.  Tripling the disability payments to $60 million – an increase of $40 million – would be only 1% of the players’ total share.  If the players and the owners each gave an extra .5% of the player’s current share for disability pensions, they could easily cover this amount.

 

Another big barrier to fair disability benefits is the way the Bert Bell Plan is run.  We’ve heard the same stories from too many retired players to chalk this up to complainers, the way the Plan would like to have it.  All claims are reviewed by two office staff who possess no relevant skills for reviewing disability claims.  If they deadlock, the claim is denied.  None of the members of the Retirement Board have any medical training, and several of them have close ties to the union president – including the agent who negotiated Mr. Upshaw’s $7 million contract.  The Plan will delay decisions over and over again – Mike Webster’s case took four years before he had a final decision.  Often these delays are so that the Plan can request multiple reports from doctors in the same specialty or closely related ones – “doctor shopping” is the right word for it.  We all know that if you ask for enough medical opinions, someone will eventually find that there is no disability, or disability at a lower level.  And the Plan spends extraordinary amounts on its attorneys -- $3.15 million last year.  In fact, that’s almost one sixth of what the Plan claims it spent on all disability payments.  Once again, those numbers just don’t add up. 

 

All of this suggests that, under the Bert Bell Plan, the main emphasis is on minimizing the benefits paid out, not on making sure it’s done fairly.  The website for the Plan’s lawyers has boasted about how many times they have defeated claims by retired players.  But the number of lawsuits suggests that something is broken in the Board’s procedures.  According to the Plan’s attorneys, it has been sued by almost one quarter of the retired players whose claims were denied.  This is not the sign of a healthy process.

 

If you want to get an idea of how the Plan really works, take a look at the Mike Webster case.  Here was a guy who started almost 250 games for the Steelers, and played every offensive down for six straight seasons.  He wasn’t called “Iron Mike” for nothing.  He played when the head slap was legal, and probably had thousands of serious hits to his head and dozens of concussions.  He couldn’t work after he retired, and was hired by the Kansas City Chiefs as a favor.  His friends told the pension plan’s investigator that he wasn’t right mentally and never held a job.  But the Bert Bell Plan told Mike that his brain injuries weren’t the direct result of playing football, and told him that he wasn’t disabled until years after he retired.  They ignored the opinion of their own doctor, and refused to look at the evidence from Mike’s doctors.  And it took so long to decide his claim that he died in 2002 before the Plan had made a final decision.

 

After he filed suit, the first judge who looked at the case said that given the overwhelming evidence, the Bert Bell Plan had probably acted in bad faith.  Did the Plan pay Mike’s children then?  No.  They appealed.  And this time it was three judges in a Court of Appeals that said the Plan had ignored the unanimous medical evidence.  They said it would require a “leap of faith” to agree with the Plan.  And so the Plan paid hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees to fight the case, and also paid for the time that Mike’s attorneys spent pursuing it.  That helps explain why the Bert Bell Plan ran up a $3.5 million bill for attorneys last year – money that could have gone to injured players.  And even today, just a week ago, representatives of the Players Association claimed that Mike Webster was actually working after he retired from football.  That’s not true, and they know it.

 

I’ve talked about some of the things we know about the Bert Bell Plan.  But it’s just as important to point out what we don’t know, and what I hope this Committee can help find out through the hearing and oversight process.  Right now, the Plan gives out virtually no information about the number of players receiving disability benefits, how many people get each type of benefit, even the total dollars paid out each year for disability.  The information that gets handed out by the Plan– only in response to Congressional and media scrutiny – is fragmentary and unreliable.  What we really need is full disclosure by the Bert Bell Plan of all the key information behind the disability benefits, so that the retired players, and the union, can negotiate for better procedures, changes in the way the Plan is administered, and more money for disabled retirees.  I hope that this kind of necessary disclosure is one result of this Committee’s work, and I look forward to working with you so that the great men who built this league can lead lives of dignity after their retirement.