Turf Wars
The Fight for the Soul of America's Game
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
An NFL insider’s explosive account of the ruthless power struggles between owners and players over the future of football.
During his fourteen years as the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith was a front line advocate for football players through some of the most tumultuous crises in NFL history: Colin Kaepernick’s protests, Deflategate, a lockout, two collective bargaining agreements, and more. But after witnessing the league’s troubling response to discrimination and racial unrest, both within the league and beyond, Smith realized it was time to pull back the curtain and speak truth to power.
Drawing from his years of unprecedented access and unparalleled knowledge of America’s favorite sport, Smith documents his years leading the NFLPA and explains how the NFL distorts the truth, telling partial stories to insulate itself and grow its $20-billion-a-year brand—and the players’ battles to protect themselves.
From contract negotiations to battles over suspensions, Smith shows us how the union fought to protect players from the greed, racism, and dishonesty the league is built on. He also takes readers inside closed-door meetings and unreported conversations and confrontations with the industry’s most powerful figures such as Robert Kraft, Jerry Jones, Tom Brady, and Roger Goodell.
Turf Wars puts every NFL crisis—both familiar and lesser known—within a broader cultural and historical context, framing the league’s extraordinary rise as a mirror to America’s own history. Revelatory and profound, Turf Wars is a book about the soul of football: its degradation, and how to save it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith, former executive director of the NFL Players Association, debuts with a no-holds-barred look at his tenure at the helm of the labor union. Smith was far from an obvious candidate; a former federal prosecutor, he was favored to be named the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., in 2009. To his surprise, given what he considered his lack of relevant experience, he was asked to apply for the NFLPA position. Smith researched what that entailed, concluding that NFL teams' owners "ran roughshod over every federal, state, and local law that would otherwise protect its labor force." Here, he describes his 2011 decision to temporarily dissolve the NFLPA so that players could sue the league for antitrust violations, and notes that throughout his 14 years with the union, he witnessed a shocking indifference to athletes. For example, when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed in 2023 after a tackle caused his heart to stop, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell dithered before calling off the rest of the game. Such heartlessness was typical, in Smith's telling, and caused him to view the "greedy billionaires" running the league as "the same kinds of people who have traditionally accumulated power in the United States: rich, narcissistic, insecure." This insider account hits hard.
