#nfll

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By Mike Lupica New York Daily News

By late Friday afternoon, then into Friday evening, the fight between NFL players and NFL owners over how to share the money in a $9 billion industry had spilled into the streets of Washington, become every fight you have ever seen between unions and management in this country, no matter what the stakes. Deadlines expire, bargaining ends, the whole thing becomes a pageant of name-calling and lawyers. It makes the bottom of the pile in an NFL game look enlightened.

A lawyer for the players' side calls a lawyer for the owners' side a liar. John Mara, whose family has been in the business of pro football only since September of 1925, looks as angry talking about the two weeks he spent in bargaining sessions as he did when the Giants finished 8-8 two years ago and Mara said it felt like 2-14.

"The union's position on the core economic issues has not changed one iota," Mara says into the microphones, then says the union's position has been to litigate all along.

Mara is decent and principled, as his father was before him. But so is DeMaurice Smith, the head of what used to be the players' union. He is the one who keeps asking why, in an industry breaking records in revenue and television ratings, the players are expected to change the collective bargaining agreement that brought them all to these record numbers.