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(http://www.suntimes.com/sports/telander/425573,CST-SPT-rick13.article)

June 13, 2007

BY RICK TELANDER
Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

This, as you know, is how they do it. They scoff at the whistle-blower.

They attack the rape victim.

They suggest that the complainer is corrupt, ill-informed, two-faced, immoral, lazy, devious, perhaps evil. They roll grenades of disinformation and personal insult down the hall and nod with smug satisfaction as the resulting splatter and noise distracts the public from the real issue.

Which is their own corruption.

It's how for years Big Tobacco kept peddling its wares unimpeded. It's how Big Oil yet pushes onward.

It's why Upton Sinclair needed to write The Jungle about the meat-packing industry. It's why Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about DDT and the chemical industry.

It's why Brian DeMarco, 35, the crippled former NFL lineman for the Jacksonville Jaguars and Cincinnati Bengals has come forward to speak -- at his own dismay and with great reluctance -- about the NFL, the NFL Players Association and the corporate disregard that America's billion-dollar sports behemoth has for the mentally and physically damaged players who literally have sacrificed themselves for its success.

The formerly broke and homeless DeMarco -- along with Mike Ditka, Joe DeLamielleure, Jerry Kramer, Lem Barney and others who administer the ''Gridiron Greats'' charity for down-on-their-luck retired players -- have been attacked by the NFLPA and its defenders as if they were terrorists at a shopping mall.

Dave Duerson, a former Bears safety under then-coach Ditka during the Super Bowl XX era, is now one of six NFLPA trustees who oversees benefits to retired players.

Along with union chief Gene Upshaw, it is Duerson who has waded into the dispute with all weapons firing, tossing out hurtful words and personal attacks and confusing numbers as if anyone who even questions the NFL's dubious largesse must be not only defeated and numbed, but also humiliated.

Duerson the NFLPA's attack dog

While it was the multimillion-dollar-salaried Upshaw who told a Philadelphia newspaper that he would ''break'' upstart DeLamielleure's ''damn neck'' for questioning how he runs things and who infamously stated, ''I don't have to answer to retired players and I won't answer to retired players. They don't pay my salary,'' it is Duerson who saw fit to attack his former coach, Ditka, and the unwitting poster boy in this whole thing, DeMarco.

In several interviews with local TV and radio stations, Duerson has essentially called DeMarco a fraud.

Using an unnamed source, he said on the ''Mac, Jurko and Harry Show'' on WMVP-AM (1000) on Tuesday that ''two weeks ago, he [DeMarco] didn't need a cane.''

Duerson divulged private financial records of former players and spoke condescendingly and tauntingly about Ditka.

He already had stated that Ditka ''didn't give a damn'' about injured players and was anti-union back in his early coaching days, as if that were relevant to the legions of shuffling, broke former players who have too much pride or are too incapacitated to wade through the NFLPA's miasma of forms to hopefully get some kind of financial assistance before they die.

It is smear tactics at its most primal.

''To attack a patient like that is unbelievable,'' says a stunned Dr. Victoria Brander, the director of the Northwestern University Hospital Arthritis Institute and co-director of the Operation Walk Chicago, a nonprofit medical organization that provides hip and knee replacement surgery for impoverished patients worldwide.

''The player was given $9,000 by the union? The medical care for his disabling spinal diseases [DeMarco has a titanium rods and screws in his spine due to injury] is very, very expensive, tens of thousands of dollars annually. Drugs alone can run a thousand dollars a month. Surgeries can be in the hundreds of thousands. It is unconscionable to blame a chronically disabled person.''

One wonders about Duerson and his moralizing stance, anyway.

In 2005 he was arrested and charged with two counts of battery and two counts of domestic battery for striking his wife, Alicia, and throwing her out their hotel room in South Bend, Ind.

Duerson eventually pleaded guilty to one count of battery, paid a $950 fine and was ordered to anger-management classes, which, the judge said, is why Duerson avoided a jail sentence.

One can reasonably ask if this is the kind of man who should be making decisions on benefits for disabled and wounded former employees. And calling others to task for alleged pettiness and fakery.

And one also can ask why it is that the obstreperous NFLPA and oddly silent NFL ownership don't simply embrace DeMarco, Ditka and their ilk and say, We do have a problem here. We're all in this together. Let's work fast to solve it.

Ignoring the big picture
Meanwhile, there are things to think about. Like the game's sheer, unsparing toll on its adherents, a toll that multiplies with time.

Former player Andre Waters committed suicide not long ago at 43, and the autopsy showed he had the damaged brain of an 85-year-old.

The NFL's halt and lame are everywhere, if you want to see them.

''The three greatest centers in recent history -- Jim Ringo, Mick Tinglehoff and Mike Webster -- all have or had dementia,'' DeLamielleure says.

And then there's DeMarco, who considered killing himself a year or so ago, just so the pain would end and his wife could ''finally get some payments.''

''This multibillion-dollar industry is coming after me?'' he says with fear and incredulity. ''Just doing this is so embarrassing. I have wanted to cry so many times. I have nearly broken down completely. And I am afraid for my future.

''They want to see my scar that goes down my back to my ass crack? My X-rays? Videos of my 12-hour surgery, after which the doctor was so drenched in sweat he looked like he'd been running sprints? He broke calipers splitting me apart? They want to live one day in my shoes?''

Never.