Gene Upshaw was a man of both words and deeds, which is what made his sudden, silent passing on Wednesday night so stunning to anyone who knew him.

Upshaw was one of the greatest offensive linemen to ever play the game, a first-ballot inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Yet his post-football career would very likely have led to the same conclusion because his leadership of the NFL Players Association brought them free agency, 60 percent of the NFL’s gross revenues to his members, greatly enhanced medical and retirement benefits and a partnership with the league’s owners that was hard won. For that alone he could have eventually won a spot in pro football’s most hallowed halls.

Gene Upshaw

It was a job he performed with the same hard-nosed belligerence he used to make himself one of the best offensive guards in football history, a combination of a billy goat’s persistence coupled with a willingness to talk tough and act tough.

“Owners?” Upshaw once asked during one of the work stoppages that plagued pro football in the 1980s before the present CBA was hammered out between Upshaw and then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue in 1993. “Without the players, all they own are a lot of tight pants and some jocks.”

Ownership felt, and underneath it still feels, otherwise. Upshaw understood that, but he also understood, as he used to say during the hard days of open warfare with the NFL Management Council’s former head Jack Donlan, “We are the game.”

He was proven right, although it was a decertification strategy and federal court cases that followed (orchestrated by an attorney named Jeffrey Kessler) that turned the tide. Yet the fact is, as even one of his longtime opponents, Mike Ditka, conceded last week, were it not for Upshaw’s pugnacious willingness to take on ownership at a time when most players cowered at the thought, they would not have what they have today — which is a ton of money and the freedom to change jobs every few years if they want to.

Yet for all his boisterous good humor and willingness to speak with both a menacing glare and words to match, when Upshaw passed away late in the evening of Aug. 20 at his home near Lake Tahoe with his wife, Terri, and his three sons at his side, he went uncharacteristically. Gene Upshaw went out of this world quietly, few even knowing he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer only four days earlier. He had told nearly no one about his situation.

That it was dire was clear to him. Pancreatic cancer is, in almost all cases, a death sentence and a rapid one. Not even Shell was aware of Upshaw’s illness until he learned of his passing. The union had spent the previous week contacting media members about attending a Sept. 4 press briefing with Upshaw and his staff at a hotel that sat in the shadow of the Meadowlands, where the Giants and Colts would be opening the NFL season that night.

Timing is everything in life, and Gene Upshaw knew this was the perfect spot to begin what would have been his final battle against the power structure of the National Football League. Owners are in an uproar despite the fact they make so much money that one of their members, the Green Bay Packers, could afford to offer Brett Favre $20 million not to come to work this season. They say they cannot continue to pay players 60 percent of total gross revenues but still want a tightly fitting salary cap. They say free agency needs to be tinkered with (making it less free, of course), bonuses need to be reclaimable if they guess wrong on a player, the players need to be made to understand how lucky they are to have the opportunity to risk their lives, their health and their future happiness and sanity to play in the NFL.

Upshaw was having none of that. The last time he and I spoke, he seemed reinvigorated and, frankly, spoiling for a fight — if that’s what the league’s new commissioner wanted. Yet he remained optimistic because he knew deep in his bones that “We are the game” was still true.

What he also knew, perhaps more importantly, was that NFL owners were getting obscenely richer each season under this system because labor peace had been guaranteed longer than in any other sport. He knew he’d helped to create a system that allowed his members to be relatively free while also giving the owners a system to protect their most valuable commodities — such as quarterbacks.

Then again, he also watched teams pervert the franchise-tag system, which had originally been designed to prevent a guy like John Elway from leaving his team behind. It was never supposed to be used, for example, to control a placekicker’s movements two years in a row, as has happened since.

So, if they wanted to be reasonable, Upshaw was ready to do that because it is what he had been for the past 15 years, to the point where some of his critics accused him of being in bed with ownership. On the other hand, if the owners wanted a fight, he hadn’t forgotten how to do that, either, because he’d been fighting all his life, fighting since he came out of Nowhere, Texas, to become a Hall of Famer and a sports union leader second only to the legendary Marvin Miller in importance and long-term impact on his game.

Gene Upshaw won’t get to make that last stand because this week he was handed a fight he could not win. The fight was over before it began, and like that, he was gone. A loud voice for pro football players silenced.

Not to hear that voice again is deafening.

Longtime Boston Globe football columnist Ron Borges now writes for Pro Football Weekly, ESPN.com and his own Web site, www.ronborges.com.