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For once, those camouflage outfits so fashionable among pro football players looked appropriate. Kansas City's Dino Hackett and Paul Coffman brandished unloaded shotguns from a pickup truck, and Buffalo's Fred Smerlas warned, "If the scabs come in, they're dead men." But most objectors were as gentle spoken as Mrs. R.C. Thielemann, mounted on her Redskin husband's shoulders and spying over a practice-field fence, shouting into a bullhorn, "No. 32, you're supposed to catch that thing!"
Identifying the new players by name took some time: with a straight face, the wire services described $8 million Quarterback Jim Kelly's Buffalo replacement as "an insurance salesman with a history of shoulder trouble." Washington recruited four semipro Richmond Ravens, including one on furlough from jail, and the New York Giants thought of commandeering an intact semipro team. "Under any circumstances," said Gil Brandt, the Cowboy personnel man, "the challenge is assembling the best material available. Even with the untried against the untried, the best organizations should still win. And if it goes much beyond a week, some worthy talent may start to come forth. You have to remember one thing, ((Raiders Tight End)) Todd Christensen was cut twice, by us and the Giants, and he's probably going to end up in the Hall of Fame."
Such is the fantasy offered here, for $3,500 or $5,000 a game. Vince Evans, the 1977 Rose Bowl hero from Southern Cal, once started at quarterback for the Chicago Bears. He looks at joining the Raiders now, for however long or little they want him, as "fulfilling a dream," at the same time admitting, "I've exhausted every opportunity." Lionel Vital, a Louisiana storekeeper who tried baseball too, said the Redskins "might be my last shot." Not every man on the picket line could be brought to a boil by the thought of these wistful understudies going on at last. "If Richard Burton got sick the night before playing Macbeth," said the San Diego Chargers' linebacker Billy Ray Smith, who might have meant Hamlet, "why should he worry if Pee-wee Herman replaces him for one day?" Any longer than a day, for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, who knows?
For questions deep enough to put to Yorick's skull, football has nothing on baseball, where the players were inclined to celebrate a historic victory last week, though no one had the slightest idea what they had won. After almost a decade of an all-enriching free agency, available to any major leaguer with six years' service and a lapsed contract, the process stalled in 1985 and mysteriously stopped last year. To the players' cries of "collusion," the owners (prompted by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth) whispered "fiscal restraint," but the arbitrator did not buy the coincidence of all the entrepreneurs closing their checkbooks at once.
Thomas Roberts ruled that the 26 baseball operators conspired to "destroy" free agency, to withhold appropriate movement from Detroit Outfielder Kirk Gibson, California Reliever Donnie Moore and 60 lesser eligibles. Another arbitrator is still hearing the more egregious 1986 cases % of Tim Raines and his former Montreal teammate Andre Dawson, while the on-deck class of Baltimore Shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., St. Louis First Baseman Jack Clark and Atlanta Outfielder Dale Murphy stands by grinning.