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#1682275 10/26/19 08:00 PM
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Bernie Parrish, an All-Pro defensive back for the Cleveland Browns in the 1960s who in retirement tried to organize N.F.L. players into a Teamsters-backed union and wrote a book critical of the league, died on Wednesday at his home in Springfield, Mo. He was 83.

His nephew Marc Parrish said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer.

The Browns were one of the best teams in the National Football League when Parrish signed in 1959. They were led by Jim Brown, arguably the greatest running back in league history. Parrish, a defensive leader, had 29 interceptions in seven full seasons with the Browns.

On the field, he called the defensive signals when he and his fellow cornerback Walter Beach throttled the Baltimore Colts’ passing attack in the Browns’ 27-0 victory in the 1964 N.F.L. championship game.

Through most of his career, though, Parrish felt that the league exploited its players physically and financially, and that most of them were too intoxicated by the N.F.L.’s aura to rebel. He was not.

As a vice president of the N.F.L. Players Association, he fought with Commissioner Pete Rozelle over pensions. In 1965 he called for Rozelle to be replaced by Paul Brown, the brilliant Browns coach from 1946 to 1962. That angered the team owner, Art Modell, prompting him to suggest trading Parrish.

“I’ll stick to my guns and fight for a new commissioner,” Parrish told reporters. “Paul Brown is the answer to our problem.” (Rozelle stayed in his position until 1989.)

His union activity, Parrish said, led to his being forced out of Cleveland. The Browns waived him early in the 1966 season. When no other N.F.L. team signed him, he joined the Houston Oilers of the rival American Football League and played in 11 games. He retired in early 1967.

He then quickly turned to organizing a Teamsters effort to lure N.F.L. players into a proposed union for all major sports. He believed football players deserved stronger leadership than they had been getting from the players association, which is technically not a labor union. He spent months pitching them with various proposals, like a minimum player salary of $15,000 (the equivalent of about $117,000 today); what would have been an early form of free agency; and increased league contributions to the players’ pension fund.

“Baseball contributes $4.1 million annually to the pension plan,” Parrish told The Philadelphia Inquirer in December 1967. “This figures out to $8,200 for each player. The N.F.L. contributes $1.38 million, or $2,156 per active player. It should contribute $5 million.”

But the Teamsters’ effort was thwarted in early 1968, when the players association registered as an independent union with the Department of Labor.
ImageParrish was highly critical of the N.F.L.’s leadership in his 1971 book.
Parrish was highly critical of the N.F.L.’s leadership in his 1971 book.

Parrish tried to exorcise his frustrations about football in a 1971 book, “They Call It a Game,” which he said was intended to drive his enemies, Rozelle and Modell among them, out of the sport.

“The con men who sell the National Football League like cosmetics,” he wrote, “cannot dismiss me as a liar or a hippie or a frustrated marginal player.” By then he had gone to work for the Teamsters, running its health and recreation camp in St. Louis.

Parrish criticized the sport’s hierarchy, accusing league officials of subjugating players to the point of blacklisting some of them. He called the union weak. And he said reporters were biased toward the N.F.L.

He also suggested that games could be easily fixed.

In his review of “They Call It a Game” in The New York Times, the football writer Paul Zimmerman wrote that he had hoped that Parrish would produce evidence that football executives had rigged games or admitted that professional football was “a gigantic swindle worked on an unsuspecting public.”

But Parrish, Zimmerman wrote, “has produced nothing strikingly new to back up his contention that pro football is a bad, bad business.”

Bernard Paul Parrish was born on April 29, 1936, in Long Beach, Calif., and grew up in Gainesville, Fla. His father, Charles, was a salesman, and his mother, Margaret (Fitzpatrick) Parrish, was a homemaker. They divorced when Bernie was 6.

Parrish was 8 when, he wrote, his dreams including becoming a baseball star who hit .400, an All-Star football player and winner of a world championship “at whatever I liked best.” Some of that came true.

Attending the University of Florida in Gainesville, he played halfback and defensive back on the football team and excelled even more on the Gators’ baseball team, where he was an All-American second baseman and batted .433 as a junior.

After leaving Florida in 1958, he pursued baseball, signing with the Cincinnati Reds. But after two subpar seasons with lower minor league teams, he returned to football. The Browns had taken him in the ninth round of the N.F.L. draft in 1958, and he left the Reds’ Topeka team to join them at their training camp.

Parrish played for winning Browns teams under Paul Brown and Blanton Collier. In the last regular season game of the 1964 championship season — a 52-20 rout of the Giants — Parrish intercepted a pass thrown by quarterback Y.A. Tittle in the final game of Tittle’s career.

After his playing days, he followed his time with the Teamsters to work as a real estate developer and had stakes in the oil business in Texas.

But he was still engaged in how the N.F.L. treated its players. He kept lobbying for better pensions, and in 2007 he and Herb Adderley, a former cornerback for the Green Bay Packers, filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the marketing subsidiary of the players union of denying retired players tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees.

After a jury awarded the retirees $28 million, the union agreed to settle for about $26 million.

In 2010 Parrish testified to the House Judiciary Committee about the N.F.L.’s questionable handling of players’ brain injuries. Soon afterward he started to show a decline in his cognitive skills from what he believed were concussive hits to his head when he played.
ImageParrish participated in a halftime ceremony during a 2017 game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals in Cleveland. He suffered cognitive problems later in life that he believed came from football-related head trauma.
Parrish participated in a halftime ceremony during a 2017 game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals in Cleveland. He suffered cognitive problems later in life that he believed came from football-related head trauma.

He filed a lawsuit in 2012 accusing the league of negligence in handling concussions, saying he suffered from symptoms of head trauma that began in 1963, when he was kicked in the head and knocked out. After he regained consciousness, the team sent him back onto the field. Despite blacking out during games from 1963 to ’65, he would routinely continue to play.

His suit was consolidated into the class-action lawsuit involving more than 5,000 impaired former players that was settled for an estimated $1 billion. He eventually opted out of the group settlement but received one on his own, his nephew said.

In the last few years, his cognitive decline accelerated rapidly, his nephew Marc said.

Parrish is survived by his wife, Ruthie (Semolke) Parrish; his daughters Teresa and Summer Parrish, Nina Cox, Amy Dailey and Holly Meadows; his son, Bernard Jr.; 13 grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; his brother, Charles; and his sister, Martha Kessler.

For many years, Parrish had been a leader among retired players seeking better benefits from the league and union as their bodies and minds deteriorated. During a 2007 interview on NPR, he described the approach of the league and union toward retirees.

“Delay, deny and hope we die,” he said.



Last edited by sk8termom; 10/26/19 08:10 PM.

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RIP Bernie.


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I'm glad someone else but me remembered him.


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I remember him ... Praying for his family ...


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A man of strong convictions who wasn't afraid to fight for what he thought was right. He also was a superior athlete. RIP!

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Rest in peace, #30, Bernie Parrish. Parrish and Blanton Collier apparently came up with the coverage scheme that stymied Johnny Unitas and his receivers, Ray Berry and Jimmy Orr in the '64 NFL Championship game ...

With no playoff needed to determine either conference champion, the teams had two weeks to prepare for the big clash.
•That provided Blanton Collier with a delicious opportunity since he basically in­vented film analysis when he served on Paul Brown's staff from 1946-53. As Terry Pluto put it, You give Blanton Collier a film projector, a quart of ice cream, and some time, and he'll come up with a Picasso of a game plan.
•The coaches exchanged five game films. That provided Collier with a gold mine of footage to compile a dossier on every Colt on each side of the ball.
•Players like secondary captain Bernie Parrish came to Blanton's house and watched with him as he dissected the Baltimore passing attack ...

*The main defensive plan Collier concocted involved the coverage of Unitas's receivers. He and Parrish noticed that opponents played off Raymond Berry and Jimmy Orr, afraid of getting beat deep. That allowed Unitas to throw his precisely timed down-and-outs and slant-ins. Parrish wanted to get right up on the receivers to bump them and mess up the timing.


Above excerpt from article at:

http://goldenrankings.com/nflchampionshipgame1964.html


(Incidentally, the link is to a really interesting article, IMO. Worth reading, if you have the time and inclination.)




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Thank you Bernie for the good play thru your time here.Remember watching you play. RIP.


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Saddened to learn of this. Grew up watching, him play hard. Sorry to see all the decline, but thanks fore all the good you brought to us fans.

RIP, Bernie.


"Every responsibility implies opportunity, and every opportunity implies responsibility." Otis Allen Glazebrook, 1880
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