The scene in the Pittsburgh Steelers locker room sounds like nothing I have ever heard about or witnessed in professional sports. Their star running back, 26-year-old Le’Veon Bell, has held out for the entire season, sacrificing a guaranteed $14.5 million contract to roll the dice in free agency this fall. At 3:30 pm on Tuesday, the final deadline passed and it became official that he would not be joining his teammates for the entirety of 2018. A lot of people thought he’d crack, but Bell held out, saving his body in this most brutal of sports for the possibility of a better payday. This was truly—agree or disagree with his actions—unprecedented in the sport—an act of player power in an industry that tends to treat these workers like expendable pieces of equipment. Bell held strong even after his teammates—specifically his offensive linemen—in the first week of the season blasted him for holding out (their aspersions broke a sacred NFL rule of not commenting on other players’ contracts or holdouts).
Then 3:30 pm hit on Wednesday, about 24 hours after Bell walked away from this last opportunity to rejoin the team. After that, the deluge. His—we have to say almost certainly now—former teammates ransacked his locker. They tore off his nameplate. They took his equipment and sneakers. They grabbed everything down to some CD mixes at the bottom of a stack of goods. As Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports wrote, it was “like a scene from ‘Lord of the Flies.’”
One player, outside linebacker Bud Dupree, had himself filmed “thanking” Bell for some Jordan brand cleats, in a video that quickly went viral.
What is so disturbing about this sequence of events is that this is a union workforce—the NFL Players Association is even a part of the AFL-CIO—and it is difficult to…
