From NFL.com: NFLPA executive director and Pro Football Hall of Famer Gene Upshaw has died. Upshaw, who was 63, had been fighting pancreatic cancer.

Holy crap. I try not to spend much time following the whole boardroom/ union vs. management/ collective bargaining side of sports, but Gene Upshaw was a figure hard to miss, and this comes as a shock. A week didn't go by without Upshaw in the news and I never saw a word about him being sick. He was a pretty remarkable guy, going from a guard with the Raiders to sitting the across the negotiating table eyeball-to-eyeball with the most business-savvy executives in all of sports. And he took mountains of crap for that very thing. The NFLPA got ridiculed mercilessly for picking an ex-player to run the show while the baseball players chose Marvin Miller, the guy who took on US Steel. So every time a veteran gets cut, fingers would be pointed at Upshaw for cutting lousy deals with the league, but in reality he swung a deal that got the players 64.5% of revenue, contracts with guaranteed money up front, and most important of all, kept the peace, avoided a repeat of the ridiculous 1987 strike fiasco, and kept the games going. Which is all any of us really give a damn about.

Who knows what this means going forward. The pundits all say labor storm clouds are on the horizon. There are unresolved issues like revenue sharing between the owners, stadium financing debt and a rookie salary cap, whick Upshaw once supported and recently opposed. So we're left to wonder who his replacement will be, and whether he'll be more of the same or if he'll be the Sonny to Upshaw's Vito and big changes are in order. The way things have been under Upshaw, you hope not.