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A KICK UP THE BALLARDS

By Guest Columnist Ron E. Hatstand

Please don't misunderstand me. Jim Ballard seems to be a top bloke, he's a model professional and a great athlete to boot. I'm very happy that he's been signed up by an NFL team. Admittedly, I'd have liked him to go to any team other than the Bills, but he deserves to be in the NFL nonetheless.

What really annoys me is the way the whole situation has been handled. My gut reaction is that the Claymores have been well and truly shafted in this whole affair. Jim's been on the protected list, touted as our starting QB for 1997, he even modelled for the Claymores shop catalogue for goodness' sake, but now he's no more a Claymore.

Now, I understand fully that the purpose of the WLAF is a feeder league for the NFL, while at the same time building a European fan base and an infastructure for the game over here. Players will come and go, they already have done. I wasn't unhappy when Siran and LaChapelle and Matthews and James Fuller left at the end of the season, because that's the way it goes, we knew they wouldn't be around after 1996 and it was made clear upfront. All these players deserve their chance, good luck to them.

The difference with the Ballard situation is that he's been taken away from the Claymores very, very near to the start of a new season, and that will no doubt affect the team's preparations for 1997. At the end of the 1996 season, Jim proved himself to be a good leader of the offense, a good distributor of the ball and an accurate passer. He formed good combinations with every one of the Claymores wideouts. Hanging on to a player like that from one season to the next is invaluable in the World League, where so many other changes happen in a single season. Having Ballard, a competent quarterback who knows the offensive strategy, from the word go in 1997 could have given the Claymores a big advantage over all of the other World League teams with new quarterbacks. With all due respect to whichever quarterback wears the Claymore in the Amsterdam ArenA, the odds are stacked against them performing as well as Ballard would in the early weeks of the season.

I don't blame the Buffalo Bills for this situation. Their primary interest is to field the best possible team they can when the NFL season winds round in the autumn. They've made a good choice by taking Jim, albeit as a third-stringer. Neither do I blame the Claymores, who were merely trying to generate some good PR via one of their star players. My opinion, and I must stress that this is only an opinion, is that the people to blame are the NFL and the WLAF. The ties between players and teams from season to season in the WLAF are already tenuous, the protected players list is one of the only ways of ensuring continuity. It isn't worth the paper it's written on, though, if NFL teams are allowed to come in not so far away from the start of the WLAF season and take protected players.

What I think the WLAF and NFL need to realise is that if they want to create truly loyal fans of the Claymores, Monarchs or whoever in Europe is that they and their teams must be shown some respect. They're real people, just like the fans of the Packers or Bills or Dolphins. A monstrous show of disrespect came when they shut down the WLAF in 1993. The current situation doesn't exactly pull the carpet out from underneath us in the same way as that did, but there's certainly been some tacks loosened in around the skirting board.