Bill Dwyre - Bucking the system - Former Rams great Jon Arnett boycotts team reunion in protest over NFL's treatment of needy retirees
Normally, Jon Arnett would have been in Los Angeles last weekend to celebrate his pro football heritage. Yup, right here in the city that has no pro football, isn't in the club and may never again know the secret handshake.
Arnett chose to stay away in protest.
"I am anti-Rams, and anti-NFL," said Arnett, an All-American running back at USC who played in the NFL for 10 years, seven with the Rams. "The league has 32 owners, and I think they are a bunch of whores."
These sentiments came from somebody who, in his prime, was Walter Payton-esque in his ability to make other players look silly trying to tackle him. He played in five Pro Bowls and is in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Arnett is 72, lives in Lake Oswego, Ore., after many years in Palos Verdes, and still is active in a food distribution business that brings him to Los Angeles at least once a month. He is not an old guy who has lost it. He has a daughter who is a junior in high school, and the only thing he has retired from is the L.A. freeways.
Arnett boycotted a Rams reunion, a celebration of 70 years of team existence that was organized nicely by Merlin Olsen and Robert Klein and brought together hundreds of former players for a Saturday night dinner and plaque presentation that afternoon that commemorated the reunion. The plaque went up in the Coliseum's peristyle end, on a pillar across from a plaque for Rams hero Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch.
Arnett meant no disrespect to Olsen or Klein or any of the former Rams. He even wrote them an e-mail, saying that a sciatic nerve injury made it difficult for him to travel.
"I pretty much used that as a valid excuse," he said.
Arnett's wife, Jane, did not join him in the boycott. She came, and her mission was more than social. She made the rounds, greeted old friends and took down some names of former NFL players, Rams or non-Rams, who she was told might be unable to get proper medical insurance or medications.
"Jon and I have watched this happen, watched retired players who just don't have enough," she said. "It is so sad. I hear from wives, and the stories they tell are heartbreaking. One wife of a former player -- somebody whose name you would know immediately -- is in so much pain and can't afford to do anything that their life is miserable and his wife didn't know what to do. She went to a counselor and he told her to leave him. She's not going to do that. She loves him."
