Kansas City Chiefs - A Sad Loss for the NFL

A Sad Loss for the NFL

Aug 21, 2008, 4:37:49 PM by Bob Gretz - FAQ

When the news came early Thursday morning that Gene Upshaw had passed away it came as a bolt from the blue. It was especially so for folks around the Chiefs and Arrowhead Stadium.

Although he wore the silver and black of the hated Raiders, there are plenty of connections between the Chiefs and the Hall of Fame guard and head of the NFL Players Association.

Upshaw’s death was due to pancreatic cancer which supposedly he found out about just last weekend. Folks from the Chiefs last saw him at the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremonies earlier this month. Although he looked gaunt in Canton, he did not appear to be ill in any manner.

But that would have been his nature to play with pain. After all, he was an offensive lineman, a guy who started 207 straight games for the Raiders. That he was a member of the Raiders was due largely to the Chiefs and one person in particular: Hall of Fame DT Buck Buchanan. Oakland simply had no one who could handle Buchanan in the middle of their offensive line and after watching Buck beat his team’s head in for four seasons, Al Davis decided he had to do something about the problem.

So with the 17th choice of the combined AFL-NFL Draft in 1967, he drafted Upshaw out of tiny Texas Arts & Industries, otherwise known as Texas A&I. From that season, through the next nine years before Buchanan retired after the 1975 season, these two had many incredible battles.

“Here I am a rookie and I’m lining up for my first game against the Chiefs and there’s Buck,” Upshaw said several years ago. “He just sort of smiled at me. He then proceeded to welcome me to pro football. It was a long, long afternoon for me.”

The Raiders had some great victories in those years over the Chiefs. In Upshaw’s rookie season, the Raiders went to the second Super Bowl, where they lost to the Green Bay Packers, just as the Chiefs had the year before. Ultimately, Upshaw would become the only player to appear in the Super Bowl in three different decades with the same team.

The Chiefs won some of those games as well, including the 1969 AFL Championship Game at the Oakland Coliseum. It is part of Chiefs lore that they showed up for that game and the Raiders had their luggage packed and stacked outside their locker room, prepared to leave right after the game for New Orleans and Super Bowl IV.

Upshaw always denied that was the case. “I’m not sure what they saw, but we never took anything for granted against the Chiefs,” he said. “Come on, Buck, Bobby (Bell), Willie (Lanier), Emmitt (Thomas), Johnny Robinson, Lenny (Dawson), Otis (Taylor) all those guys. We had too much respect for those guys. That sounds to me like one of Hank’s (Stram) motivation ploys.”

During his playing career, Upshaw started to build his future off the field with his involvement in the players association. He was at the forefront of the union’s strike in 1982 and eventually took over as the NFLPA’s executive director in 1983. One of his closest confidants in those days was a member of the Chiefs; guard Tom Condon, who would eventually become Upshaw’s agent.

“Gene brought people together,” Condon said several years ago. “Deal with football players and you have a lot of different personalities. Deal with ownership and management and you’ve got a lot of different personalities. He was able to walk among them all and get things done.”

Chiefs head coach Herm Edwards was shocked to hear news of Upshaw’s death. Edwards had seen him in Lake Tahoe just over a month ago at the annual celebrity golf tournament up there. Edwards was the Eagles player rep when the ‘82 strike was called and he played against Upshaw and the Raiders in Super Bowl XV.

“He was a great visionary guy for the league and the players’ rights and benefits,” Edwards said. “He did a lot of things over his time that unified our union. A lot of people don’t see that. The guy was about the National Football League. He was about the integrity of the game. He was all about how players handled their jobs as professional football players and he loved the game. He did everything in his power that the players understood that his is an important league and you’ve got to respect that.

“It’s going to be a big loss. No one is going to fill his shoes, I’ll tell you that.”

Upshaw came out of a small town in Texas, went to a small college in Texas and parlayed that into a playing career that led him finally to the Hall of Fame. As a guy who came out of a small town in Texas and went to a small college in Texas, Chiefs guard Brian Waters uses Upshaw’s journey and accomplishments as a road map.

“Gene Upshaw for me, there’s a lot of things he did that I would like to duplicate,” Waters said. “He played his career, but he wasn’t satisfied with just that. He was on a mission and he took up the challenge of the players and he never looked back. He changed so many things. He forced the NFL owners to respect the players.”

Even Chiefs management was shocked by Upshaw’s passing. Carl Peterson has known Upshaw for years and served with him on several boards involving NFL Europe and youth football.

“His loss is something that will affect not only the players association, but ownership, management, everyone connected with the National Football League,” Peterson said. “He truly made an impact and he did it in a wonderful way.”

You can read more about Gene Upshaw and the Chiefs at bobgretz.com

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

A former beat reporter who covered the Pittsburgh Steelers during their glory years, Gretz covered the Chiefs for the Kansas City Star for nine years. He is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Board of Selectors. He has been the senior columnist for the Chiefs web site since its inception.

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