Victor Washington sits in the airy kitchen of his cousin's New Jersey home, rubs his legs, closes his eyes and inhales deeply. His body aches. His voice sounds weary. His eyes look tired.

Washington's shoulders hurt, his ankles hurt and his wrists hurt. Washington injured his back when he was playing with the Houston Oilers in 1974. His elbow was damaged in 1976, when he was with the Buffalo Bills. He cracked his right kneecap as a running back for the San Francisco 49ers on the artificial turf at Candlestick Park during a 1973 preseason game.

"I'm trying to think of something that doesn't hurt," the 61-year-old Washington says as he rubs a foot-long vertical scar, a souvenir of his knee-replacement surgery. "I've learned to deal with the pain but it is a struggle every day."

Washington has spent nearly 25 years in legal warfare with the NFL disability plan in what may be one of the strangest cases in the history of the much-maligned benefits program. In 1986, an arbitrator - using the kind of warped logic that would make Kafka green with envy - decided that Washington should get 0 a month for non-football related injuries, instead of the ,000 he would receive if his problems were football-related. The plan's language, the arbitrator said, specified the higher payment for "a football injury." Since Washington suffered multiple injuries, he was out of luck.
"Who would ever know the letter 'A' had so much power?" Washington asks, half laughing, half moaning.

Years of appeals and litigation have followed. Washington, a Pro Bowl pick in his rookie year, suffered yet another setback last month when the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that may ultimately end his fight. In 1998, Washington agreed to a deal that paid him a lump sum of 0,000, a sum equal to retroactive pay dating back to 1993, when the NFL's retirement and disability plan changed. He would also receive ,500 a month.

Plan officials, however, didn't tell Washington that he might have been entitled to higher monthly benefits. The arbitrator's weird decision had been thrown out by a federal court years earlier when former St. Louis Cardinals lineman Donald Brumm challenged it in court. Had Washington known about the Brumm decision, he would have negotiated a better settlement, he says.
"They knew about that decision," says Washington's attorney Susan Martin, "and they kept it a secret."

Washington went to court to have the settlement set aside, and in 2005 a federal judge in Phoenix ruled that the NFL plan had breached its fiduciary responsibilities by not informing him about the earlier court decision. But the NFL appealed, and on Sept. 21, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Washington.

"We cannot see how the holding in Brumm would inform the decision-making process of a reasonable participant in Washington's position," Judge Pamela Ann Rymer wrote in the majority opinion. Martin has filed a petition for rehearing.

The arbitrator's twisted rationale in the Washington case is just one of the reasons why Congress is taking a long, hard look at the NFL's retirement and disability plan. The Senate Commerce Committee conducted a hearing last month, and the House Judiciary Committee - which held a similar hearing in June - sent letters to the NFL and the NFL Players Association last week seeking information about the NFL's health care and pension plan. The Congressional Research Service, meanwhile, has initiated a study to determine what if any measures lawmakers should take to help the league's down-and-out players.

The spotlight on the NFL pension plan has not exploded the way the steroids scandal blew up on Major League Baseball - neither hearing had a "I'm not here to talk about the past" moment - but it is a nagging public relations worry for a league very protective of its image.

It doesn't help that some of the biggest names in football history - including Mike Ditka, Gale Sayers, Harry Carson, Sam Huff, Mercury Morris, Jerry Kramer and Sandy Unitas, Johnny U.'s widow - accuse the league and the Players Association of abandoning the very athletes who turned the NFL into a -billion-a-year enterprise, the biggest star in America's sports-industrial galaxy.

"We turned the brand into what it is now," Washington says. "We made Monday Night Football what it is. We made the Super Bowl what it is."

The former players say the plan is set up to stonewall players debilitated by injuries suffered during their careers. The plan will shop for doctors until it gets an opinion it wants to hear, they charge. Delays are frequent and lengthy. It's often difficult just to get plan administrators to return phone calls. Typical is this comment from former Oakland Raider Dave Pear: "The truth is that the NFL disability process is cruel, evil and deceitful and designed to deny benefits."

Or as ex-Cleveland Browns cornerback Bernie Parrish puts it: "Delay, deny and hoe you die."

Spokesmen for the NFL and the NFLPA declined to discuss Washington's case. Lanny Davis, the crisis-management expert who advised President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and now represents the Players Association, says the critics are mostly wrong - he calls football's disability plan the most generous in pro sports. Union chief Gene Upshaw raised a lot of hackles this summer when he famously threatened to break the neck of Hall of Fame guard Joe DeLamielleure, a vocal critic, but Davis tells the News that Upshaw really does sympathize with the plight of the physicially and financially broken players.

"He acknowledges there are problems and is taking stops to address them," Davis said.
Upshaw acknowledges the program is flawed, Davis says, noting that at last month's Senate hearing, he asked lawmakers to change federal regulations to streamline the disability process.

Upshaw also wants Congress to exempt it from the law that requires an equal number of management and union representatives on panels that review disability cases. The NFL plan's board has three player members and three owner members; Upshaw would like the Players Association to select all six. If the union is going to take get all the blame, he says, it might as well have 100% responsibility for the decisions.

That is one of Davis' central themes. According to the Beltway hired gun, the board's three union representatives voted for the players in many cases involving some of the plan's loudest opponents, including Washington and Brent Boyd, the former Minnesota Viking who ripped the plan in testimony at both congressional hearings. Davis also likes to point out that Upshaw has been at the helm as the Players Association has won increasingly generous benefits from the owners since 1993.

None of that, however, is likely to settle the anger and frustration felt by people like Garrett Webster, the son of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers who suffered from dementia attributed to head injuries and had become homeless before his death in 2002.
"He was a great man abandoned by the league he helped build," Webster said.
Mike Webster's attorneys Bob Fitzsimmons and Cyril Smith, who brought the only successful lawsuit (25 have been filed) against the NFL plan, say the plan sets unreasonably high standards for total and permanent disability and throws too many barriers in front of applicants. The board often ignores relevant evidence, they add. The Groom Law Group, which represents the plan, is unneccesarily confrontational. The staff can be nasty.

"I've done a lot of work for union members and usually a plan will offer guidance to help claims go better," Fitzsimmons says. "This was adversarial. There was a presumption of guilt from the start. They started with the premise that you were not entitled to a benefit."
Washington and other former players say the NFL and its union take a hostile posture because of the growing awareness that football can be very, very hazardous to health.
More than 60% of retired NFL players suffered at least one concussion during their professional careers, according to the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes. Retired NFL players with three or more concussions, the center adds, had a nearly three-fold risk of being diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. According to former players - Boyd, Bernie Parrish and Morris, in particular - just as the tobacco companies battled links between smoking and cancer for years, the NFL and the Players Association are taking a stand against claims that could cost them huge amounts of money.

Former Viking Boyd testified that plan official Miki Yaras-Davis said that his doctors' reports and brain scans would not be considered because "the owners would not open that can of worms" by approving disability for a brain injury. Chris Goetz, a guard who played for the Jets in the early 1990s, told the Daily News one of his doctors, Robert Neviaser, told him the plan doesn't like to pay out a lot of money so it sets its standards unreasonably high. Neviaser denies making the statement.

Meanwhile, Don Bessillieu, a safety who played with three teams during the 1980s, says a casual conversation with his doctor cost him his total and permanent benefits. During a 2005 exam in Atlanta, Bessilieu told Dr. David Apple he'd like to show his support for the troops in Iraq by giving them haircuts. Apple told the plan's retirement board the 50-year-old Bessilieu, who suffers from arthritis in his neck and knees, was able to work because "he is a master barber and wants to go to Iraq to barber the troops." Bessilieu gets ,300 in monthly benefits now; he belives he should be receiving a ,500 monthly award. Apple says he remembers the conversation and didn't expect Bessilieu to lose benefits.
"For me to stand behind a chair for more than a few minutes is agony," Bessilieu says. "I was totally blown away when I heard about that decision."

And then there is Victor Washington. Even if he gets a new hearing and gets his settlement, he'll face another protracted battle to get the NFL plan to pay him what he believes he deserves.

In the meantime, Washington swings between optimism and pessimism.
"I don't have much fight left in me," Washington says. "The only think I have left is my dignity. This is a David-and-Goliath fight.

"They have all the money and I have all the faith."

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