ArenaFan Exclusive Interview: Kyle Rowley
Adam Markowitz
Saturday March 10, 2012
On Saturday afternoon, ArenaFan.com had a discussion with Kyle Rowley, who was one of the players that did not play for the Pittsburgh Power in Friday night's 40-26 win over the Orlando Predators at the Amway Center in Orlando. The following is a transcript of the interview…
Adam Markowitz: Kyle, the first question that all of the fans would like to know is exactly what went down last night before the game between the Power and the Predators?
Kyle Rowley: To tell you the truth, I'm still trying to figure that out myself. Basically, we were on our way to the game, stopped for our pre-game meal, and we were fired in the middle of our pre-game meal. Ownership kind of came in from behind and read off a piece of paper that you are terminated immediately effective immediate. You are all terminated from the Pittsburgh Power. At that point we walked out of the restaurant.
AM: Were you given papers by the league? Are you officially on reassignment?
KR: Well I take people at their word. [Pittsburgh majority owner] Matt Shaner read the letter to us all, saying that you are all fired effective immediately. That's really all I heard. That's all I wanted to hear. Or needed to hear. I could go into great detail about why I think that is, and why that could have been. And I encourage you to ask me.
AM: Okay, we'll go ahead and go there. What are your thoughts as to why, whether it just be Matt Shaner, your ownership, or the league as a whole decided to take this route on Friday night?
KR: I believe the league as a whole decided to take this route because they are dead set on not allowing the players to have a voice in what goes on in Arena Football. In the last few months, we have organized, and I think the numbers are above 90% Union support, and they're hell bent on breaking us up.
AM: So would you say that the league, in your opinion, is trying to break the Union essentially before it can get a CBA in place?
KR: Yeah, I think that's the goal. Honestly, a lot of my teammates were held out to dry or hung out to dry last night. They're trying to string me up as the ring leader. If they look at all the facts of the matter, they don't even have the option of doing that. I've been in this league longer than they could even think about being in this league, or Arena Football, I should say, and the ironic thing is that the starting quarterbacks in this situation, I applaud all of them across the league. Most of them have stepped up for their teams and the reps in the Union basically stood up for their players.
If we got what we wanted at the negotiation table, all of the quarterbacks in the league were looking at taking a big pay cut in order to help their teammates out. So what I'm basically saying is that I was trying to help my teammates out against my own best financial interest. It's not like I'm some gritty union leader. I'm a registered Republican who happened to find himself in a union because my teammates weren't being treated fairly.
If you really look at the situation, what's a quarterback gonna do when his teammates need help? He's going to step up or he's going to lose his entire team. I'm all about winning football games, so I wasn't about to let our whole locker room fall apart and let my teammates suffer anymore and let the league treat them – and I'm not saying all of the owners in the league – but whoever is behind this whole movement to keep each player down, it's just not right in my eyes. Sometimes you've got to fight. If there are people throwing punches, you don't want to throw punches, but eventually you have to.
AM: Do you think the financial constraints on especially the two quarterbacks last night, Andrico Hines and Collin Drafts, do you think that the finances had to do with the fact that they were playing last night, or was this something a little more calculated?
KR: I'm going to say this: I'm not very happy with the guys that ended up on that field last night. I don't think they stood up when they should have stood up because they're all on record. A lot of them looked me in the eyes and said, 'Hey man, whatever the Union does,' and I'm not their ring leader, but we all looked each other in the eyes and say, 'You do what you've got to do, and I'm with the Union.' That's what union is about. I will say this: I forgive them. Because the league put them in that situation, and they did it on purpose.
When they thought that there was a threat of us striking, they basically tried to pick us off one by one. Basically, owners were going in and dividing their locker rooms strategically. They're dividing their own locker rooms on purpose strategically. What kind of football organization would divide their locker room on purpose just to save a couple bucks? Most of this wasn't about money. It was about working conditions. It's crazy to me.
AM: Aside from the fact that the quarterbacks are making more money – This is pretty well documented that the quarterbacks were going to make $1,675 and the rest of the team was going to be making $400 – How else do you think the feel that the owners or the league are trying to divide their locker rooms?
KR: Yeah, exactly. It's not hard to see. First of all, I just want to say that we haven't been paid a cent up to this day, so everyone is working for free right now. We get a paycheck at the end of the week. But yeah, when you pit your quarterback against your own team, you put the leader in a position where they need to step up for their teammates, or they lose all credibility with anyone.
Every quarterback in this league that stepped up to rep their teams, they were literally fighting against their own financial best interest for the purpose of winning football games and helping their teammates out. So you can't string me up for this. You can try. But I've been in this league five times longer than the Pittsburgh Power. I've got more credibility than anyone who wants to try to take a swing at me. You can go from every player I've ever played with, every coach I've ever played with, every owner I've ever played for that when I say something, I stand up for that. You can't get around that.
And if you want to go through my entire career, we can do it. I'm a guy that played for $200 when there was no free housing in the af2, just trying to get to the AFL. And then when I was in the AFL in 2010, I had four franchise offers on the table, but I decided to go to Spokane without a franchise offer because I thought they had a better roster and I'm about winning football games and winning championships. We got that done. When it comes to 2012 and I'm faced with the decision to help out my teammates at a loss to myself or just kind of go with the flow and hope that my teammates don't get what they want, I stepped up in favor of my teammates. If we had gotten what we wanted, all of the quarterbacks were willing to make probably about half of what they were going to make. Anything they say otherwise is just crazy talk.
The first Union proposal before I even signed on board was to take all the quarterback money, that's it, and just spread it out. And I signed on for that. So what does that say about what these quarterbacks around the league were fighting for and what all these players around the league were fighting for. We were united in the locker room maybe more than ever. Unfortunately, sometimes against ownership. We knew they put us in a very precarious situation. We looked each other in the eye and said, 'We're not cool with this.' We can either talk behind each other's back or be up front and talk about the same situation and how crazy it is. We decided to unite and try to spread the money out. That was the first proposal. Just spread it all out. Quarterbacks are saying to just spread this all out and win football games. They denied that proposal. That's when I had to get involved.
AM: That's a lot of fantastic stuff there, Kyle. In the second quarter of the game last night, I could not catch which assistant coach it was, but there was an assistant coach on the Pittsburgh sideline that was clearly on his cell phone and was waving his arms, jumping up and down on the field trying to get a timeout. He called the timeout eventually, and PJ Berry, Lonnie DeWalt, and Michael Washington ran on the field out of the locker room. What happened in that situation?
KR: I can only speculate. I feel for my guys that ended up out there on national TV against everyone in the league, against all of the guys that were taking them at their word. I feel for them because they were put in a very, very tough situation. These last two days for us – you think they were trying because we care about the game. All of the players across the league, especially the veterans care about Arena Football and care about the survival of this league. Actually, we were fighting for it, because if the conditions kept staying the same or even getting worse, which they were, the league is going to start losing credibility, and it is going to start losing all of its quality players. You can believe it or not, but we were fighting for the best interest of the league. When they publish our salaries and we show up to restaurants with basically food stamps, that just doesn't bode well for this league if they're going to try to pitch it as a professional league. We're not stupid.
AM: Do you feel the conditions now in the AFL are better, worse, or relatively the same from when they were when you were in the Deuce?
KR: I feel that in the Deuce, more guys looked you in the eye. Coaches looked you in the eye. We all kinda knew we were there to get out of there. The AFL is a different situation. I think they market it as a different situation. It's like they took the af2 model, and they took it for devious reasons. You call it a one-entity system and that’s the best economic model, but when you use that model to not allow the players to have a voice – when I can't go to my owners and get a straight answer or even know if it is a straight answer because they have the ability to always say, 'The league mandates it. The league mandates it.' When you're told that over and over again for three years, what do you expect me to do? I gotta go to the league for my guys. Or the guys gotta go to the league for themselves. And you can't just do that as an individual.
No one in our league has ever sat at a table with these guys. They send surveys around and pretend to listen. So we united because they were united, only it was like, 'You have a one-entity system, I guess the only way we can talk to you is if we can get a one-entity system, which happen to be a union.' By the way, I'm not even an advocate for unions, and it sort of makes me cringe to say I'm in one. But that was the only route they gave us if we wanted to keep playing Arena Football and maintain our dignities in the communities that we play in and uphold the history of the league.
AM: Are you and the Power still in Orlando? Is the team still together that came down on Thursday?
KR: What has happened is the league or our owners, whoever was behind this decision has effectively split up our team. I'm with the guys that decided to hold their ground. I'm literally in a van right now with [AFLPU President] James Baron, who has volunteered to drive us 17 hours home. I think we're all chipping in for gas and trying to see where the funds are coming from because we haven't been paid for the two months that most of us have been in Pittsburgh. That's the situation right now.
My other teammates I believe were allowed to stay in the hotel. We were kicked out. They were allowed to take their flights. We were not allowed to take our flights. So they have effectively split up the entire team. Now what they are doing is trying to draw people over to the other side by offering contracts that say if they resign from their union, they'll allow them to play Arena Football again. That's a threat. The guys in the van understand that, and I'm putting everyone in such a shady position because those guys on the other side that chose to play last night, we're not happy with them. We love them and we shed blood, sweat and tears with them for a month, and we expected to play a football game.
This needs to be heard: We were going to play the game. While we were going to use whatever leverage we had, the little leverage we had, the only leverage we had, which is a strike, all 44 players, and if they go against it, they are blatant liars at this point. James Baron and Ivan Soto said to my team, and I'll say this as a fact. We are playing a game tonight. You can bank on it. I'm negotiating to play. We have the best interest of this league at hand, and we do not want it to have a black eye opening night. However, we are going to use all of the leverage that we have because it is a smart thing to do, and it's the only way we can get the league to come to the table in any significant way without just throwing out more token offers.
I want to talk about the offers they've thrown out just in case you are confused about by 25% number that they have thrown out. Any bonus that they've thrown out, I'll explain it like this. If I score a touchdown and toss a ball to a kid in the stands, my bonus has just been negated. That's how much money they have offered us. If my sock falls down three inches, my bonus that they offered in their new proposal is gone. That's what they're talking about. They can throw out 25% all they want, but 25% of a dollar is a quarter.
We're not idiots. We want the league to be what the league pitches itself as, as a professional league that respects its players like all of these other professional leagues do as partners. In professional sports, the players are the product and the worker, and that's why they get paid the way they do. We weren't looking for any type of great financial gain or movement. What we really wanted were better working conditions and really just to see the numbers and see what made sense. They guarded those with their life, and they fired us all across the league in order to not show them. I just think that's appalling that someone that's put 10 years of moving away from my family on the line for this league to be treated like this and to try to string me up as a poster child for some greedy union crap, it's not gonna fly, and I'm gonna make sure of it. All of this is going to get out there. My teammates are the team that has been there with me. They just want to be treated fairly.
I need this message to be very clear. No one was going to strike on Friday. The league made such a stupid decision, it's crazy. Whoever called that shot, it's ridiculous. I'll go further with you if you want. The inside, inside scoop is that it became as clear as day that some of the guys on the team were leaking information to management and decreasing our leverage. That became painstakingly clear.
So what we had to do was smoke them out. We sent a couple – and I'm talking about it happened in a matter of minutes – I sent a text to a few of my teammates that said the league's not negotiating, we might need to do it during the National Anthem. We were simply posturing to get our leverage back because we knew that some of our players had taken it away from us. Within a minute, and I'm being literal about that, the owners showed up at the restaurant reading off an already ready and typed out transcript that all of our jobs have been taken from us effective immediately. Now we've got a little leverage back. We don't want it to be this ugly, but sometimes it is pretty easy to see who is on the other side. If I give you a popsicle, and the other side comes back with a blue mouth, I know you have a popsicle. I don't know how else to put it. That's what happens. And for anyone that wants to tell the story otherwise, and if they were in that meeting room with Ivan when he said that 'I will guarantee we will play Arena Football tonight,' they will be on record as straight up liars for the rest of their lives when it comes to this situation.
AM: Is it safe to say that the players that were on the field may have been amongst the ones that were going behind the rest of the locker room's back?
KR: I want to be very clear about this. Those guys that had names on the back of their jerseys last night, those are my teammates and I love them. They were put in a very strange, awkward, unfair, and I think premeditated, illegal position. I've already forgiven them. But yeah, I do think that the guys who played, those are obviously the guys that were working both sides. When you say something and when you write something, you've got to stand up for what you do, and what you say, and what you write. No, those guys didn't do that. Yeah, those are the guys that were doing it – and by the way, I'm not saying all of them, it was one of them – and whoever that was, they can come out and say it, and they are still forgiven. And all practice aside, it might not be in Pittsburgh, but that just is what it is. I'm going to tell that story to the grave because that's the truth, and I can do that because it's the truth.
AM: There were some pretty scathing words from one of your owners, Matt Shaner, that were in the Pittsburgh Tribune -- I believe it was last night that these came out -- specifically seemingly targeted at you. Do you think this is part of, more or less in your words, make you the ring leader in all of that, or is there something more there?
KR: Matt can make whatever decision he wants. He's owns the team. I actually respect the fact that a business owner can do what he wants. I hate to say this, but he shouldn't have taken that bait. That's just a crazy thing to do. When you're in negotiations, you've got to understand that the other side has got to play whatever card they have. That's the only card they gave us. We played it and they took it. They shouldn't have done that. We didn't want it to go down like that. What we wanted that card to do was to bring them to the table so we could look them in the eyes and see what works for this league. Guys are starting to drop out of this league just to keep their own dignity. We wanted them to come to the table and look us in the eye, and what they did instead was fire everyone in the entire league.
AM: So the entire league was released yesterday by how you understand it?
KR: The entire league has been fired. And then one by one, they have been called, text messaged, or had notes dropped under their door that if they resign from the Union as a condition of employment, they can come back and play Arena Football. But what that really is saying is just a threat that you'll never play Arena Football again unless you go against every player that you've looked in the eyes and gave their word. I want to say this: Arena Football is going to thrive. Arena Football is going to be bigger than it ever has been in the next five to ten years.
We're going to smoke out all of the liars and crooks and the players will be respected in the future of this league. And if there's got to be some casualties – if they think I'm going to be a casualty of this league, I'm not. I'm going to fight for this league until I die, and I'm going to play quarterback in this league again. If you want to make me out to be a casualty, you're going end up being a casualty in the end. I will play football again. I've got too much respect that I've built up over the last ten years to go out like a coward and to let some cowards smoke me out. I can't get smoked out because I stand for the truth.
And all these guys in this van with me are trekking 17 hours back to Pittsburgh stand for the truth, and what they said to their players, what they said to their owners, and what said to their coaches – And I want this to be heard, too. I communicated as the leader of this team with the coaching staff the entire time. I said, 'Listen, I was put in a weird situation. I want you to know that I have signed up with the Union because most of the guys have done so already. I need to lead them. If they want change, I'm going to lead them to that change.' Also, I went to the owners, maybe even usurping Coach Siegfried's authority. I then said to him, 'I just want you to know, I've gone to the owners and let them know that I signed up for the Union, but that I still have my eye on the prize, which is an ArenaBowl.' They looked me in the eyes when they flew out to Spokane and said, 'That's our top priority.' I said 'I've gone to the owners and have explained that I am going to lead the guys to get a fair deal, and I want you guys to know that my top priority is still winning an ArenaBowl trophy for you. But I'm going to fight for the guys, too. I hope that you're going to throw some punches back there to make this fair for everyone so we can walk into a restaurant with cash from now on instead of a food stamp with a League logo on it.'
That's just not gonna fly. Things are going be changed, or I'm not going away. And I don't care if I'm the only one. But guess what? I've got seven guys in this van and a whole league waiting on what we say, because we went down, and they're all ready to go down. And if it has to be that way, then shoot, the people that are left standing are going to be the ones that stand for something. Everyone that's not standing for something is going down. And the League is going to stand in the end, and it's going to thrive because we did what is right.
AM: Have you all in the van been in contact with the members of the Predators that did not play last night and stood with you all?
KR: Yeah. The guys from the Predators that stood with us outside on the corner of the street last night, we love you guys. We've got to fight you when we're on the field, but we respect everything you do. We're all brothers. I'm not some union hack. When you're put in a situation when you're dealing with your pay and, 'We're gonna put you in a house that we can pull out from underneath you whenever we want in order to get you to do what we want,' well, we have to band together. And you can call it a union. Call it whatever you want. But we call it fighting for what is right.
I'm a registered Republican. I cringe to even think that even people know that I'm in some kind of union, but this Union stands for what's right. We're not trying to take down the league. We're trying to allow this league to thrive, but not at the expense of the dignity of every player in this league. That's not gonna fly. It's not gonna fly.
I want to say this to Mr. Shaner: You may have been handcuffed by the league. I forgive you. But we will no longer be treated like this. I will play Arena Football again, and you will take back that remark that you made about me. I never told you I thought I was smart. I'm not a dumb (expletive) or a little (expletive) or whatever the (expletive) you called me. I hate to use that language, but I'm quoting him. The last text message I sent him was about keeping open the lines of communication. It was about making sure that we don't let our egos, both sides – and I put this in front of a camera – making sure that we don't let egos on both sides get in the way of the tradition of this league, and that we make sure that we all try to work out a deal. That's on record. That's on camera. His response after he fired me was, 'How smart are you now you little (spelling of an expletive)' I'm sorry I said it, but I was quoting him.
Please Note: To see the picture of the text message that is being referred to, Click Here
AM: What do you think is going to happen around the rest of the league tonight and for the rest of the weekend?
KR: I think that the league is going to apologize to our guys and everyone across the league. I know that the gentlemen that own teams are going to step up. I know the gentlemen coaches around the league are going to step up. I know the gentlemen players around the league that wound up on the wrong side are going to step up. Everyone's going to apologize to all of the players that have been casualties that are clearly only fighting to feed their kids or to buy a new stick of deodorant. They're going to apologize, and all of the guys that are in this van are going to be playing football again. Everyone that is out of a job right now is going to be playing football again if they want to at this point.
AM: Do you think there are still going to be some players that are holding out in spite of the fact that there has been some sort of an agreement, or do you think we are going to see full teams for the rest of the weekend?
KR: I have nothing to do with negotiations. I'm a player that was standing up for his teammates, so I can't answer that. I am hoping that Arena Football is played every weekend and every game that is scheduled gets played. I'm going to fight for this league until I die. This has been the last 10 years of my life. I've put my heart and soul into this. I want Arena Football to be played. I'm the one that said, 'Screw a chance of playing in the NFL. How about we stand on our own as our own league and grab some dignity for ourselves and stand alone as our own product?' These are the best Arena Football players on the planet. I see NFL players come every day down, if you want to call it down, and they fail. They get cut from our teams. They can't make our teams because they don't know how to play this game. These are the best Arena Football players on the planet, and they demand respect.
AM: The players that are in the car right now and the other players for Orlando, have you all either been told formally that you are free agents or are under the impression that you are free agents?
KR: This is what I know. Everyone has been fired, and if they go against their brothers, they can play football again. That's the deal on the table right now. That's the only deal on the table right now. That's the only deal on the table league wide. I want you to understand that. This is not just about Orlando and Pittsburgh. League wide. You can't play football unless you backstab another player at this point. And that, by the way, unless you go against your federally protected right, you cannot play football this weekend. You cannot play Arena Football this weekend. Sometimes you've got to go through a little pain to grow. This is going to be a little bit of pain. Anyone who is not down for that is going to get out of the way. And the League is going to thrive after this weekend. This is going to be a black eye, but sometimes, you have to get a black eye before you start throwing punches and doing what's right.
