"The New York Jets" is hardly the phrase you begin a story with if you want to inspire a reader to embrace the day with any sense of purpose, let alone joy, so you might be fooled into considering this an apology for cowboy-sneezing on your Friday. But if you've read as far as "Friday," then seeing "The New York Jets" was insufficient deterrent. At that point, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.
So, to the New York Jets: Thursday was a big day for them. They learned first that the boss is angry enough at his employees' opinions of their workplace that he is challenging their right to say anything about it at all. Later in the day, they lost comfortably to a team wearing the sort of all-gray uniform that belongs in a 1935 preseason game between Mudville and Boghouse Flats. The good news is that they, and therefore we, can take the weekend off.
The day began with an ESPN story from the company's two-headed owner hellhound Don Van Wickersham revealing that a number of owners have filed a grievance against the NFL Players Association over the union's annual ranking/report cards of working conditions at each of the league's 32 headquarters.
This is mostly one more testament to the ability of complaining old rich guys (and a few women) to get up in their own feelings over the help. These owners would surely prefer to make their teams out of AI, or just re-litigate workers' rights going back to the Industrial Revolution if that proves more workable, but hey, sniveling is where you find it. It's what they do when they're not complaining about their feet giving them trouble or Matlock being a woman now.
Two things are noteworthy about the latest Van Natta/Wickersham opus. One is the tag line with which an anonymous polo-shirted oligarch dismisses the grievance with a cavalier, "the only owners who don't care for [the report cards] are the ones who get the subpar grades." And the other is one of those owners, Woody Johnson of the Jets, a consistent resident at the bottom of both the workplace lists and the standings, putting voice to whine, citing the process as "totally bogus" (and the word "bogus" is always a generational hint) and saying that a grievance might be filed to that effect.
And now that grievance has indeed been filed. It comes across as you might think it would, which is as a bunch of disgruntled sclerotics complaining that their mandate for absolute employee servility is being ignored by those uppity tool belts. Johnson, at least, stood out for being the one owner quoted as having his feelings damaged by the process.
According to the story, Johnson said he took issue with "how they collected the information (and) who they collected it from." He goes on, like a park statue that has gained the ability to explain why it dislikes large and well-fed flocks of pigeons:
"(It) was supposed to be according to the agreement we have with the league. It's supposed to be a process (where) we have representatives and they have representatives, so we know that it's an honest survey.
"And that was violated, in my opinion. I'm going to leave it at that, but I think there are a lot of owners that looked at that survey and said this is not fair, it's not balanced, it's not every player, it's not even representative of the players."
This is not a grievance to be taken seriously by any thinking human, of course; again, you knew as much back when you red The New York Jets several paragraphs ago. But it is one more brick in the wall of the upcoming CBA negotiations, and an indication of how the league's owners intend to approach it. They're piling these demands for either silence or obsequious gratitude on top of their demand for an 18-game schedule, plus whatever else they can bully out of the players. The idea of improving conditions in those workplaces, which has already occurred to a number of owners on the radical notion that happy players might perform their often inhuman tasks with greater joy and therefore better results, apparently is beside the point. The point, the only one that Woody Johnson ever has, is: "Don't you know who I am? I'm rich because my dad made a bunch of money and left it to me, and I will not be questioned by the likes of the troglodytes we use as our proles for hire."
If the owners actually took this seriously, they wouldn't let Woody Johnson talk about it. For one thing, they'd ask him if this is his view or that of his children. For another, they'd trot out someone like Arthur Blank of the Falcons, who at least gets good grades for his team's working environment. His team isn't much more dynamic than the Jets—they're better, but so is everyone else—but at least he doesn't come off as a creosote-eating "you were mean to me, so no Christmas for you" Johnson type.
In short, this is just the owners assuming that pre-negotiation "let's ask for everything we can get now because next time we're going to want to make salaries optional" stance, and this is their way of letting the Woody Johnsons in their membership feel like they're part of the process. As we saw again on Thursday night, this is not true on the field. The Jets scored the first time they got the ball against the gray-flannel Patriots and dispersed their other seven points and 170 yards of offense over the remaining 53 minutes. Did this happen because the midweek tapioca was running in the team dining hall, and has been for 15 consecutive years? Is it just a matter of being outclassed on a Thursday night by an opponent dressed in 53 cardigan sweaters? Woody Johnson is surely looking into that this morning. The sense of urgency is palpable.
A man has to have his priorities, and Woody Johnson's are clear. If the owners win this grievance, he would hand out championship rings to the rest of the family and stage a parade through their summer home's banquet room. A Jets loss, by contrast, is just another Jets loss. You learn to settle, is all we're saying, and nobody settles more often and more abjectly than the Woodster. Maybe he could spring for gray uniforms for his guys—or just have the equipment guys use cheaper detergent so that the uniforms gray up on their own.
