First came the absolute shock of the news: “We can now confirm that Gene Upshaw has died at the age of 63 due to pancreatic cancer.” It wasn’t just that for over five decades Upshaw had been the definition of toughness and indestructibility on the NFL landscape, it seems nobody even knew he was ill.

I was sitting next to PFW editor-in-chief Keith Schleiden last February at the NFL Players Association press conference at Super Bowl XLII when Gene Upshaw entered the room, and we were taken aback by his appearance. It’s not that he looked sick, but he was noticeably thinner than we’d seen him before. The adjective I’d choose is “gaunt.” But when I got to speak with him briefly the next day, he said he felt great and that he’d been working out to keep his weight as low as he could. As we quickly hit the highlights of his comments the day before about CBA trouble on the horizon, there was absolutely no reason to doubt he was prepared for the fight ahead.

Gene was a friend, but I wasn’t in the top two or three hundred in his Rolodex. It was a relationship of peers in the same industry who’d shared a few joyous moments, a few very difficult ones and a handful or two of personal exchanges or accomplishments over 30 years that made him someone I knew I could count on and whom I deeply respected. A man I was positive would be a fixture in the NFL for as long as I covered it. While I am a bigger and bigger Roger Goodell fan with each passing day, I actually thought Upshaw would have been a better choice when Goodell got the commissioner’s job.

Now, as a few days have passed since that first horrible 6 a.m. call last Thursday, Aug. 21, I and the rest of the PFW staff have reached out to countless of those who were a great deal closer to Upshaw than us, and all have recounted similar thoughts and experiences — “yes, he looked thin, but I had no idea he was sick.” As incredible, almost inconceivable as it seems, it appears he may have, in fact, first received the horrid diagnosis of pancreatic cancer just four days before he died. We thought we’d seen tough before, yet how many months and how much discomfort must he have endured before facing his reality?

Gene Upshaw at Super Bowl XLII

1982 was one of the lowest points of my time here at PFW. There simply was no map for the first prolonged work stoppage in American sports history, and when the players went back to work, it was a beaten union that had gained little of what it sought. That was the union Upshaw took over from Ed Garvey a year later, and the group that he led out of work again, this time for 24 days, in 1987. As in ’82 the strike was basically for naught, and this time the union was practically bankrupt.

But Upshaw was unfazed. Attaining a reasonable and unfettered free agency for his workers was the only measure by which he could consider himself a success, and so he plowed forward. Working for periods of time without pay but never without hope, he championed the strategy of first decertifying his union and becoming an association and then kicking management’s butts in court with lawsuits made possible by the decertification. Would you have the courage to save your own union or business by first destroying it and then rebuilding it, bigger and better than ever? That’s what Upshaw did for his fellow players.

Near the end, success was unkind to Upshaw. He was devastated by the appearance that his union had failed many of its oldest members and founders in need, and when he would have been better-served by dialogue with his accusers, he lashed out angrily instead. It was the only time in his 25 years as the first African-American leader of a major union in this country that I witnessed him allowing his anger to get the better of his greatness. It was a mistake I am positive he would have corrected had he not been stolen from us so soon.

Gene Upshaw was a man, not a god, so perfection was never an option. But he was a really good man. And for all he did for so many, and the example he set for us all, the world is a much poorer place without him.