End Zone

The NFL Players Association retirement board consists of three representatives for management and three for the players. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt represents management, along with Arizona Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill and Baltimore Ravens president Dick Cass. Kansas City-based superagent Tom Condon (he represents Kansas City tight end Tony Gonzalez, Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning and San Diego running back LaDainian Tomlinson), Atlanta Falcons broadcaster Jeff Van Note and former pro safety Dave Duerson represent the players.

"We have $1.1 billion in the pension fund, and they think it's great," Dobler says.

But few get disability payments from the fund.

"We have no health insurance," Dobler says. "Most of us can't get health insurance. That's the only reason I work — because I get health insurance from my company."

Dobler operates a business called Superior Health Care Staffing; from his office near Metcalf and West 97th Street, he deploys nurses to jobs throughout the Kansas City area. Even though he's insured through his business, those payments cost more than he will receive from his pension, he says.

Dobler folds his walker when he reaches the SUV and climbs behind the wheel. He steers the vehicle through morning traffic. As his right hand slides across the wheel, a crater becomes visible between his thumb and index finger. Dobler's hands are a mess. He doesn't have any knuckles in one hand; the other is permanently bent, as if holding a glass.

"I don't have any nerves here, either," Dobler says, extending the right hand. "I have no meat here, either."

Dobler pulls into a handicapped parking spot. He slowly gets out of the SUV and opens the back door. He unfolds his walker and clanks across the pavement into the medical center.

"The 8,000 of us will be thinning out every year," Dobler says. "That's less and less they have to deal with." The NFL has enough money, he says, to hold out against players' claims indefinitely.

"It's deny, lie and watch 'em die." Fred Arbanas' career nearly ended before it began. In 1961, the Dallas Texans drafted Arbanas out of Michigan State University. The young man was stacked with 240 pounds of muscle. He would later be called the prototypical tight end.

In his first exhibition game, Arbanas caught a pass up the middle. Denver Broncos safety Goose Gonsoulin leveled him.

"I got cracked in the back in sort of a whiplash-type deal," Arbanas recalls. "And that was it."

Arbanas collected himself and hobbled off the field. He had hurt his back once before, during his junior year at Michigan State; he played every game of his senior season, his back frozen with Novocain. His back began to heal in the offseason, but the injury with the Texans required surgery.

"I got a staph infection and damn near died," says Arbanas, who is now in his fourth decade as a Jackson County legislator.

The staph infection that nearly killed a young man now haunts an old man. The 68-year-old Arbanas recalls lying in the hospital bed running a high fever before the stitches in his back burst open. Pus and fluids of various colors ran down his legs to the floor.

"The kid's dying in here!" his hospital roommate screamed to the nurses. "Come help him!"

That's why he's putting off knee and hip replacements.

"I've been getting shots in my right knee, and, in fact, I got my third series of three — I got that today — and then I get shots in the right hip," he says. "If I went in and got staph now, they'd have to take both shoulders out and they'd have to take my left hip out until they got rid of the staph. If I lived through it."

Four years after Arbanas moved with the Texans from Dallas to Kansas City, the Chiefs downed the Buffalo Bills 31-7 in the American Football League Championship, earning the right to play in Super Bowl I. Arbanas entered that January 1967 game with a dislocated shoulder he'd suffered in the victory against the Bills.

"The Super Bowl was, like, two weeks later, and they had to freeze my shoulder," Arbanas says. "Before the game, they gave me four shots in the shoulder, and they taped my shoulder up tight. And at halftime, I got more shots.

"You didn't realize that if you froze something up, then you were probably going to have to pay 10 times for it later in life."

He's had shots ever since: cortisone in his right hip, something else he can't quite name in his knee every six months. "It's sort of a lubricant fluid that they put in there."

Pain and stiffness force Arbanas to schedule most of his meetings in the afternoons and evenings — it's just too hard for him to get going in the morning. He says his colleagues understand. He takes arthritis medication twice a day but refuses to take pain pills.

Arbanas won't talk about the amount of pain he suffers on a daily basis.

"I don't want to go into that part of it," he says softly. "In fact, I don't even like talking about this stuff because it just gets me upset."