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(Reuters) – A row between billionaires and millionaires threatens to rob the American public of seeing their favorite sport as a contract deadline between NFL owners and the Players Association fast approached.

How to divide a massive $9 billion in revenues generated by the most popular U.S. sport was at the core of the labor talks for a new collective bargaining agreement to replace one that expires Thursday at midnight.

Without a miraculous meeting of the minds, NFL owners were expected to announce a lockout of the players in the absence of a new labor pact and the business of the professional gridiron league would be put on hold.

For season-ticket holders and sofa-bound fans devoted to watching on TV from home, uncertainty over the future could lead to heartbreak over a 2011 season delayed or destroyed.

For Madison Avenue executives who market the commercials, the Hollywood talent that makes them, the media moguls who pay billions for TV broadcast rights and even the souvenir sellers at the stadiums, the economic effect could be crippling.

The players are largely satisfied with the status quo, but owners want a bigger slice of revenues.

Currently the owners take $1 billion off the top to cover their costs before dividing the rest, with the players’ share of the remaining $8 billion set at just under 60 percent.

Owners have said they would be willing to leave the split as agreed in 2006, but want at least another billion dollars put on their side of the ledger before the share taking — which could cost the players more than $500 million a year.

COURT ACTION

Jockeying between the sides has moved from the bargaining tables to the courts for collisions worthy of pigskin action.

The NFL sued the Players Association saying it was not bargaining in good faith, intending instead to set the stage for its members to sue the league on antitrust grounds.

The union, meanwhile, won a court ruling that the NFL had breached their CBA by structuring contracts with television partners to receive a $4 billion stockpile of cash to help it through a possible lockout.

“When this gets before the U.S. court system anything can happen. Nothing is a slam dunk,” Andrew Zimbalist, professor of economics at Smith College and author of books on sports business, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Labor strife last marred an NFL season in 1987, when a 24-day players strike led owners to use replacement players for three games and one game was lopped off the schedule.

The players, however, won the right to reach free agency after decertifying the union and taking the league to court.

He stood beneath a palm tree on a clear Florida morning, commanding attention as he always has across a lifetime in baseball. Yet the routines of spring training were gone for Dallas Green. There is nothing routine about coping with horror.

Christina-Taylor Green was the youngest victim of the shooting in Tucson last month that killed six people and injured 14. She was 9 years old, the daughter of Green’s son John.

“She embodied what’s good about kids,” Dallas Green said Wednesday, “and what’s good about growing up in the United States.”

Green, 76, is a senior adviser to Philadelphia Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr., and was the manager of the Phillies’ 1980 championship team. A former pitcher, Dickie Noles, compared Green to John Wayne: strapping and stout, an unflappable leader.

“You know, I’m supposed to be a tough sucker,” Green said, “and I’m not very tough when it comes to this.”

Green came to spring training with the rest of the Phillies’ staff, because that is what he does. He is starting to seem like himself again, Phillies people say, taking part in meetings, offering advice, needling friends. But he will never be quite the same.

As he spoke for about 20 minutes, Green thanked the writers and broadcasters for respecting his privacy last month. He apologized for not returning phone calls. He remembered the girl he called Princess, who seemed older than her years, who loved baseball and lipstick and swimming and always cared for her brother.

Green still has the frame of a former major league pitcher, 6 feet 5 inches and thick. He looked tan beneath his wavy white hair, and wore a turtleneck and a windbreaker and dark sunglasses over his eyes. He spoke steadily, his jaw quivering a little, but he never broke down.

A tear fell when Green spoke about his 11-year-old grandson, Dallas, Christina’s brother. Christina loved to play baseball, and she told her grandfather she would someday be the first girl in the majors. Sports do not come as easily for Dallas, who has a form of autism. But the boy — Little D, his grandfather calls him — is playing again.

“John took him to his Little League game the other day, and he missed the first ground ball, it hit him right in the face,” Green said. “But John said: ‘I was proud of him, Dad. He caught the next four and threw them to first.’ They’re a tough family, and yet they’re a loving family. They’re going to hurt for a long time.”

John Green works in baseball, too, as a scouting supervisor for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Amaro knows him well; their fathers worked together, and they played against each other in college. Amaro has two young daughters, and he was with them the weekend of the shooting. They huddled together, Amaro said, reflecting and praying, trying to process the senseless.

“I don’t know that there’s a person in our organization who didn’t feel the loss themselves,” Amaro said. “You feel like you lost one of your own.”

Several team officials attended the funeral in Tucson, including Amaro and Noles, now an employee-assistance counselor for the Phillies. Noles credits Green with saving his life in the 1980s, when his drug and alcohol addiction spiraled. Green would cajole his players, Noles said, sometimes loudly. But they knew he cared.

“I run into former players that played for him all the time and they all say the same thing,” Noles said. “In my role here with the Phillies, they all started calling me: ‘Tell Dallas we’ll do anything. We’ll be there in a minute.’ And some of those were guys he had battles with. That shows what type of leader he was.”

Green handled it all so gracefully Wednesday, acknowledging that every family deals with tragedy. He never sounded angry, just sad. He talked about his fondness for hunting, and said he owned guns. But the weapon that killed his granddaughter defied explanation.

“I don’t have a Glock or whatever it is, and I don’t have a magazine with 33 bullets in it,” Green said. “That doesn’t make sense for me to be able to sell those kinds of things. I guess I never thought about it until this happened. What reason is there to have those kinds of guns other than to kill people? I just don’t understand that.”

Green waited until now to say much because he did not want to be the story. As much as he grieves for Christina, he said, John’s family feels the loss most desperately. John is one of four children of Dallas Green and his wife, Sylvia, who have five surviving grandchildren.

Years ago, Green recalled, Sylvia pushed their local Little League to let their daughter Kim play with the boys. Sylvia won that fight. A generation later, her granddaughter’s Little League teammates attended a funeral in Tucson.

It is a heartbreaking image, unspeakably cruel, one of so many. The more Dallas Green works, the less time he has to be haunted. “You sink yourself into the work,” he said, “and you don’t see a little girl with a hole in her chest as much.”

Baseball helps him cope. It is the life he knows. Away from the ballpark is different. A tough man leans on his wife and tries to remember the good.

“She’s tougher than I am, in a way,” Green said. “But she misses Christina. That was a wonderful little gal.”

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