The 2011-2012 NBA season is barely two weeks old and already the machine is in full effect mode. League headlines have been an almost daily occurrence. The retirement of promising young Portland star Brandon Roy; Jeff Green’s season-ending, contract voiding heart ailment; Nets owner Mikhail Portokohov’s campaign presidency; Kobe’s divorce; Lamar Odom‘s dis; Dwight Howard’s free agent status; Chris Paul’s on again off again on again trade situation and the stench of collusion it stirred. Gone is the budding chatter about players forming a new league. All that remains of the ‘we stand together’ mantra that the Players Association successfully engineered and executed (yep, I said it) for nearly five months is the sporadic spatter of the sullen superstar here and there. Meanwhile, the owners have quietly retreated to their respective behind the scenes sanctums and resumed business as usual.
If pro leagues were valued purely on their capacity to produce drama, the NBA would be far and away the most profitable of all. Baseball seems to have weathered the steroids era rather nicely. Even the Barry Bonds blemish that was supposed to send the slugger to prison has faded to a suspended sentence. As for football, its new concussion policy has contained any conversation of major reform for the time being. For its part, the NBA hasn’t faced a health crisis since the cocaine ’80s. It’s last credibility scandal — the shady referee imbroglio starring Tim Donaghy — never really gained much ground in part because the main accuser was the NBA’s version of Jose Conseco, which is to say unlikeable and untrustworthy.
But what the NBA has lacked in genuine threats to the credibility of the game and health of its labor force, it has more than made up for in pure, unadulterated theater. Remember this time two years ago? Gilbert Arenas, Javaris Crittendon (who is now facing murder charges), a gambling debt, some guns. Remember the half-hearted investigation into the league’s culture it triggered? The “shocking” revelation of widespread gambling among filthy rich 20 something, egomaniacs with way too much time on their hands? And then came Lebron’s ill-advised “Decision” followed by a Finals performance that will now require James to essentially win a title each of his remaining years in the league to live down. But even before “The Choke”, Lebron had detonated his legacy. Remember Cleveland fans burning his jersey? Remember Dan Gilbert went nutzo and started calling him names? Remember Jesse Jackson weighed in with a quietly incisive plantation owner/runaway slave analogy that made everyone uncomfortable? Remember all of that? That all seems so long ago now that such juicy story lines are primed to play out over the next eight months, story lines that will no doubt provide a palliative for a fall in which 30 NBA owners held the game hostage and in doing so revealed the extent to which professional basketball mirrors organized crime.
The other night I watched NBA insiders David Aldridge and Mike Fratello defend David Stern‘s decision to void the New Orleans Hornets-Los Angeles Lakers trade. They both sat in their comfortable NBA TV studio chairs paid for by the league, looked viewers straight in the eyes and said David Stern made the right decision. Of course they acknowledged that he could have handled it better. They, like the rest of the orthodox basketball community, have to offer at least a pretense of objectivity. But that’s it. Once they’ve feigned journalistic integrity, they go on to trumpet the party line and say something empty but authoritative like, “The reality is” or “The bottom line is”, two classic signals that some jive is about to be offered as fact. The local media guys poured me another glass of kool-aid while I was watching the Nets and Knicks preseason game Saturday. Both Jim Breen and Ian Eagle, the Knicks and Nets respective color commentators offered their unsolicited thoughts on the trade situation. And in both instances they sided with the commissioner, urging Joe Sixpack to see the trade from the league’s standpoint. Stern was acting in “the best interests” of New Orleans. He was protecting the team from itself. And anyway, said Eagle, the deal had not been consummated so, really, Stern wasn’t voiding anything. He was merely performing the normal functions of an owner whose right it is to reject a deal, which, added Eagle, happens everyday in the league. By the end of his spiel I’d lost my appetite.
Sports reporting in our culture is by and large pathologically parochial and narrow. In politics there is at least a whiff of a progressive and conservative media — a left and a right — and an overarching system of accountability that encourages inquiry and ensures a diversity of viewpoints. The closest things the sports journalism establishment has to balance and perspective are Bryant Gumbel, William Roden, Dave Zirin, Bill Simmons and, every once in a while, Michael Wilbon. The rest of the MSM’s sports reporting establishment — and I’m sure I’ve missed a few names — either doesn’t care to expose or explore the broken fundamentals, is too cozy with the very people it’s supposed to be holding accountable — a running theme in our society, I might add — to do its job, or just doesn’t see the problem. Throughout the lockout I thought and continue to think the real issue with professional sports is that they’ve gotten too big to remain “leagues” unto themselves. They need to be de-monopolized. Whether its ticket sales or capital costs, they are an affront to their base and a drain on the public. And yet the public — not even elected officials — have a say so in these billionaire cliques. Unlike in Spain and Germany, the public can not buy an ownership stake in an enterprise that is so deeply intwined with our collective social and economic lives. We, the fans, can only sit idly by, watching, waiting, hoping.
The late sports chronicler, David Halberstam once characterized the the 1999 lockout as a “struggle between short millionaires and tall millionaires.” With at least 13 owners carrying net worths in excess of a billion dollars, this latest lockout demonstrated the growing divide between even the wealthy and super wealthy in our society. In a less lucrative pre-millennial league the players had enough power to strike a deal that was favorable to them. In the new NBA and despite what any of the sports reporting establishment insists, the new super-rich ownership class successfully rammed a deal down the players throats because they could afford to do so and they had the media in their pocket. In view of the prevailing economic and political principle under which we live — that is, me first, screw you and if I can’t have my way everyone suffers — justice was served. But in view of the disproportionate bargaining power between the parties — the average owner has major financial holdings and revenue sources independent of the NBA while the average player has a four-year career window and hundreds of new competitors each year — the chips were stacked heavily in the owner’s favor from the outset. And already the owners have used the league’s new amnesty provision to waive more than $170,000,000 in player contracts, slashing the so-called $300,000,000 2010-2011 deficit by more than half in one week. While the waived players are still paid their ridiculously large salaries, the teams can write their salaries off on their 2011 tax bill and still subsidize the loss through a higher ticket and concession costs. Go figure.
I want to hate the NBA. I want to be able to disregard its existence. I want to be able to organize an occupation against the greedy cabal holding the game I love captive. I also can’t wait for Christmas. I check ESPN compulsively. I devour everything having anything to do with the league. The contradiction is unbearable at times. I’m like a jilted lover who keeps circling my ex’s block, that or the broken hearted sap who takes his cheating partner back even though he knows nothing’s changed. I’m a sucker and I know it.
Just yesterday I found myself in a locker room surrounded by a junior high school basketball team. They were getting ready for their game. I was getting ready for a workout. The way they were talking about the trades you’d think they had money on the line. They couldn’t have been more than twelve yet they knew who was going where and for how much. When, out of nowhere, one kid yelled, “Son, if you don’t know who Dwight Howard plays for I don’t know you no more!”, I had to listen in.
The other kid — chubby and a little bashful looking — chuckled confidently. “I know who Dwight Howard is.”
“Who he play for then?”
For a moment I worried that the kid really didn’t know, that he was just bluffing.
“The Orlando Magic,” he shouted back.
I was relieved for him. But his inquisitor wasn’t finished. The test had only just begun. “What number does he wear?”
Shit, I thought. I couldn’t even recall Howard’s number on the spot. Too much pressure. No way Chubs would get it right.
“Twelve,” Chubs replied.
“Oh yeah?” said the now visibly frustrated inquisitor, “What’s his nickname?”
Chubs blinked. The Inquisitor pounced. “Superman! Son, you don’t even know Dwight Howard’s nickname!”
“You mean Superman Two, right?” I said. “Because he’s not the first.” I looked at the only other person over the age of 18 in the locker room, a middle-aged guy quietly changing in the corner. “Ain’t that right?”
He nodded affirmatively. “Shaq’s the original.”
Others on the team chimed in. Dwight Howard was a biter, one said. “He copied the foul line dunk from Julius Erving, too.”
I couldn’t help but smile. These New York City kids knew Dr. J by his “government” name. How ironic. As I was walking out of the locker room the conversation shifted to Blake Griffith, last year’s Rookie of the Year and Slam Dunk Champ.
“Yo, that dunk wasn’t even all that.”
“He shouldna won.”
“Mcgee shoulda won.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “That’s the same thing I said!”
They looked at me strangely. I’d overreached. I turned and walked out.
When I was a kid my friends and I argued over whether Michael Jordan really beat Dominique Wilkens in the 1988 dunk contest. After all, just as the 2011 contest was held in Blake Griffith’s hometown of Los Angeles, the ’88 contest was held in Chicago. As kids we knew Jordan got away with an extra step, Larry Bird a push off under the basket, Dennis Rodman rib shots. Still, we followed the game religiously. I suppose that is what it means to be in love. It’s not rational. It makes no sense. We put up with crap that under no other circumstances would we find acceptable. Year after year we come back hopeful and excited. And, in a way, it’s because, for some of us at least, the game signifies our childhood and the emotional residue that connects us to a time when the most important thing to know was your favorite player’s nickname.
My feelings of betrayal are bound up in a mix of nostalgia and idealism. I still approach the basketball season with the excitement of a kid. The NBA machine knows and exploits this–why else would it schedule its opening shebang on Christmas Day? In as much as the league relies on and rouses up my deep sense of loyalty, I believe I am entitled to rely on this one thing not being pure unadulterated bullshit. It’s one thing for Reggie Miller to push off to get an open shot; it’s something else when a group of filthy rich people use their influence to hold a season hostage and enlist an army of media minions to make their grievances look legitimate. That I should not have to abide.
Despite what any general manager says in a press release announcing a team’s latest transaction, sports are not purely business. They are social and emotional institutions that both benefit from and depend on public engagement and support. If they were pure businesses, the Knicks would have been bankrupt years ago. If they were pure businesses, individual jerseys would not hang from the rafters alongside championship banners. Sports belong to all of us. For any small group of wealthy elites to have the power to control access to and enjoyment of something so vital to so many people is fundamentally wrong. I will never believe otherwise. Even as I anxiously await the start of what is already looking to be the most interesting season to date on and off the court, I will continue to preach my gospel.
And with that, let the games begin.
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I did find some type of satisfaction when I saw a 40% filled “Palace” when I watched on NBA TV Cleveland play at Detroit this past Friday. But that’s the catch — I was still tuning in to something I swore that out of pure disgust I would stay away from. At least until college b-ball was done in April. But instead I just had to tune in to see a product of my favorite college basketball squad play his first NBA competition. (For the record, he’s raw, and he dropped 20+, and you know who I’m talking about) The point is, I watched the Celtics vs the Raptors yesterday and I will keep on watching even though I know I’m watching some spoiled, rich, athletic grown men play a children’s game while making [at least] tens of thousands of dollars per game. So who’s really at fault?.