Today we are pleased to speak with veteran attorney/agent Frank Murtha.  Frank has represented football and baseball players, coaches, and franchise owners.  He is currently president of Professional Sports Consultants, Inc., and teaches a Sports Law course at Northwestern University's School of Business.

SLT- Tell us about your early years and your college and law school background.

Frank Murtha- Basically, my father was a teamster’s official from New York. We eventually moved to Chicago and I attended high school at Loyola Academy in the North Suburbs.  I was a baseball player, playing college baseball at Notre Dame. I had an interest in becoming a lawyer, not specifically a sports lawyer. My interest at the time was in criminal law and trial work.

I graduated from Notre Dame a semester early and had a chance to play professional baseball. At that time the Viet Nam War was going on and students were able to defer their draft status as long as they were in school. When I was out of school and playing baseball, the draft board could’t find any good reason to continue my deferment. I had been accepted in several law schools and that Fall I promptly enrolled in Law School after a brief stint in the Braves organization.

SLT- You enrolled in Northwestern Law School. Was there any type of Sports Law Program at that time?

FM- There was nothing in terms of Sports Law at that time. I went there to become a criminal defense lawyer. I graduated from Law School in 1969. I was interested in Criminal Law and Litigation but started working as the House Counsel for the Teamsters Pension fund until mid-1970. After that I had an offer to become an assistant US attorney from Jim Thompson who had been my criminal law professor at Northwestern.

SLT- What was your initial involvement in Sports Law?

FM- Sports Law became a bigger interest when my younger brother was drafted by the Texas Rangers in the mid - 1970’s. Mike Hargrove was one of his teammates and that got me involved in the representation field.

SLT - What was the agent or representation field like at that time?

FM- You had sports agents then; people like Bob Woolf, Jerry Kapstein, and Jack Childers. There were more agents in baseball than in football at that time and not every player had one. At many universities, Notre Dame included, some prominent businessman or alumnus helped players do their contracts. During my time working for the pension fund and working as a US attorney I met an Indiana businessman named Ferris Traylor, who was a Purdue alum who worked with quarterbacks Bob Griese and Mike Phipps.  In June of 1975, when I left the US Attorney’s Office, Ferris called me up and wanted me to work for him for Bob and Mike. At that time Phipps was traded from the Cleveland Browns to the Chicago Bears. Mike Phipps referred me to some more players on the Bears. After some time, my sports agent practice was going well enough, and my law practice morphed into a football and baseball practice. In the early 1980’s my football and baseball practice became full-time.

SLT- 1983 brought the first NFLPA agent certification program. Can you tell us about that?

FM- All it consisted of was filling out an application form and attending a seminar. There were no educational standards; initially no fees were collected. We received a salary survey, but we did not get copies of all the contracts like we get now.

SLT - You must have some pretty interesting stories from those early days as an agent in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.

FM- When Jim Finks was the general manager of the Chicago Bears, and they had just traded for Mike Phipps, Finks handed Phipps a card for an agent by the name of Jack Childers and suggested Phipps use him. Phipps got in touch with me and said that he would be reluctant to use an agent that the general manager had recommended to him. Jack was a good agent, but the source of the recommendation didn’t sit right with Mike!

SLT- The 1980's and early 1990's saw strikes and other labor struggles between the NFL and NFLPA.  Tell us about that period.

FM- From 1982 to 1993 the NFL and NFLPA went 11 years without a collective bargaining agreement. Into the early 1990’s the NFL operated under 1982 wages. There were strikes and impasses and the league still had minimum salaries from the 1982 CBA. In the late 1980’s the NFL owners’ system of free agency, called Plan B, was unilaterally imposed. Under Plan B a team could protect 37 players from free agency. This caused problems for starters when you had back-ups getting raises from free agency and joining new teams because the starters were not receiving the same type of raises. The NFLPA was really twenty years behind Major League Baseball when it came to free agency. Much of this can be attributed to Marvin Miller and what he brought to the baseball union.