I've had a lot more free time lately. My second book will be out in September, just in time for the season to start. I just finished proofing it and there is really no more heavy lifting I need to do. I was reading Jeff Pearlman's Football For A Buck, on the history of the USFL, when I noticed something that caught my eye. Dan Fouts, who was in the midst of another standoff with Gene Klein over a new contract, was ready to jump to the USFL.
The book suggests it was when San Diego was possibly going to get a USFL franchise and that ultimately it was Fouts' love of his teammates and his frustration over having come up short in the playoffs that caused him to stay. In this interview, he does talk about rooting for the USFL to succeed so that he and other players would have some leverage in negotiating their own contracts. Like so many things, I look at "the business side" of the NFL differently now.
I own Gene Klein's book and have to thumb through it to see whether he made mention of this. However, I do get why Fouts especially would need to stick to his guns when it came to contracts. No one gave more of their body to the Chargers. He had every right to demand some financial security. But the 12 year-old me would never have felt like that. What's even more frustrating is that after 1983 things got so much worse for the Bolts. A lot of the guys Fouts had gone to war with would soon be gone, and even Don Coryell would be shown the door eventually.
It's no secret Dan Fouts is the reason I became a Chargers fan. From the five minutes I spent with him in 2013, I get the sense he hears that a lot. It's great to hear him talk about Herbert and Harbaugh here. I saw a Twitter thread talking about players who spent their entire career with one team. Of course, it's much rarer these days. But I also started thinking about why that is. Dan Fouts was really limited in terms of getting fairly compensated by the Bolts. We all love to talk about greedy players and agents, but forget what it was like for the players or how much of their health they risked for the game.
I say this every year, but I tend not to write about the Chargers when there isn't anything going on. Mock drafts, camp reports, I don't get into. My only skill set in writing about the Chargers, besides hopefully doing a decent job, is being able to impart wisdom based on everything I have experienced following this team all these years.
That being said, I'll be back when the spirit moves me.
RIP to Bill Walton, Willie Mays, and Donald Sutherland
JIC,
RLW
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