JIM WATSON / AFP/Getty Images

Gene Upshaw talks with Paul Tagliabue during a hearing on the Clean Sports Act and the Professional Sports Integrity and Accountability Act in Washington, DC, on September 28, 2005.

So he gave in on a salary cap after the 1987 strike and more recently, gave up trying to secure guaranteed contracts, because he knew that unlike baseball and basketball, the sheer number of bodies needed to fill out a 53-man roster made the economics daunting. And he gave a few percentage points of the players’ revenues back to help new stadiums.

But Upshaw got unrestricted free agency in return, and the crazy dollars that flowed to the players as a result. If he left his successor plenty of weighty issues still to resolve, there’s no arguing that he also left the union much stronger and a whole lot richer than he found it. What might be hardest to replace is Upshaw’s style. He could be low-key to a fault.

In the middle of the bitter 1987 strike, the players convened a much-hyped union meeting at a hotel near O’Hare Airport in Chicago to coincide with a Monday night telecast of a game being played the same evening in New York between the replacement players of the 49ers and the Giants. The game on the field was a joke, and the constant smirking between coaches Bill Walsh and Bill Parcells confirmed it.

Back at the hotel, a few of the teams’ players representatives were crowing to scattered TV news crews about how lousy the product looked. At one point, reporters rushed outside as a limo pulled up, expecting to see Upshaw climb out. Instead, a few striking Chicago Bears’ players emerged, one loudly predicting into a cell phone — the size of a boom-box back then — that ownership would crack any day now.

Upshaw knew better.

He knew how much hard, humbling work was ahead trying to hold the union together and keeping the management hawks from feasting on the pieces. And he was right. The players’ solidarity cracked a few weeks later, with the defection of Lawrence Taylor and then a few Dallas Cowboys, and Upshaw eventually took a big hit for accepting a contract with a salary cap.

What we should have known was that he was already at work on a plan to hit back.

In the next half-dozen years, the union would file antitrust legislation and then, in a shifty, but very effective legal maneuver, decertify itself. When a court finally awarded the players free agency, Upshaw re-certified the union and was strong enough to sit down with Tagliabue as the bargaining partner he’d always planned to be.

Like Millen, few of us ever figured out how Upshaw usually got his way. But he left behind a few clues. On the night of that union meeting in 1987, while that pack of reporters rushed out to the front entrance every time a limo pulled up, Upshaw waited until the commotion died down, then slipped in the back entrance at 9 p.m. and quietly went right to work.

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