Riders wrestle with latest labour deal

Offensive linemen usually get this much attention only from their mothers, but there was Brendon LaBatte Monday, surrounded — as he has been so often over the last several days — by cameras, notebooks, recorders, microphones.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders player rep looked serious, and sounded disappointed, as he outlined the cracks opening ever-wider in the wake of this weekend’s labour agreement.

“A lot of guys are upset about it, saying they won’t ratify the deal,” LaBatte, freshly arrived off the practice field, told reporters before the scrum was 10 seconds old. “That’s essentially where we stand. We’ve either got to try and get guys to see the positives and vote for it, or they’re going to be set in their ways, vote no and shoot it down. Where it goes from there, I couldn’t really tell you.”

Nothing comes easy in football. Not even this.

LaBatte, the conduit between the CFL Player’s Association and his Roughriders teammates, sounds as distressed by the deal as his peers. He carried no false bravado Monday; didn’t offer even the faintest of praise for the agreement.

There’s some angry Tweets out there from players who expected one thing and got another. Football players are a competitive lot, and there’s a feeling they’ve lost to the CFL.

“I knew it would be a tough sell in this locker-room,” LaBatte said.

Players opened negotiations with an optimistic bid, then dropped it, and dropped it, and dropped it, while the CFL stayed steady with a take-it-or-leave it strategy.

The salary cap is up from $4.4 million to $5 million, which is right where CFL teams wanted it, and down dramatically from the players’ opening bid of $6.24 million and a share of revenues.

The CFL’s new five-year, $210 million TV deal is a huge aggravating factor — as is, here in Saskatchewan, the Roughriders’ rosy financial picture.

“I think,” LaBatte said, “a lot of it has to do with the market (Roughriders teammates) play in and the money they see around them all day.”

Veteran defensive lineman John Chick allowed that “I’m still not sure what to think. As far as I know, I haven’t signed off, or anyone else, for that matter.”

Chick said he’ll likely vote with the majority — that, as a player whose career probably won’t stretch on for many more years, he’ll go with whatever the consensus proves to be.

His linemate Tearrius George said he had no idea which way he’d vote when the time came.

“I can’t say. I have to sit down and think, you know what I mean?” George said. “They’ve got us in a hard spot. You’ve got people who have children, families to take care of.

“Sometimes, you’ve got to decide on things that are not what you really want, to get things you need to get done. It’s a hard question right now.”

LaBatte told reporters that he didn’t think Roughriders players would ratify the deal if the vote was held immediately.

Things are serious enough in Saskatchewan that he figures the CFLPA needs to get somebody in here, pronto, to outline for players why they should vote for the deal. That’s not his job, he stressed, and it’s readily apparent that he’s not happy with the deal, either.

He wouldn’t tell reporters how he’d vote, which is in itself not a great vote of confidence, and he said that players across the league are likely “to go ahead and concede” — another choice of words that indicates his own struggles with what’s happening.

“Hopefully we’ve got a lot better game-plan moving forward,” he added, “because I think when push came to shove, it showed we really didn’t have the game plan we thought we had.”

So it’s practice as usual today at Griffiths Stadium. Darian Durant is launching footballs, and John Chick and Tearrius George are lined up across from him, and there’s no picket line to be found. All those labour threats are fading into thin air.

But because real-life dramas seldom end in completely neat and clean fashion, there’s still a vote to be held, and accounting to be done. Then the CFLPA’s rank-andfile will play the 2014 CFL season with paycheques a little smaller than they thought they’d get when this whole thing started several weeks ago.