Not being a buddy of Jerry Reinsdorf, I can only guess at why he’s trying to cast out so many of his professional athletes.
All the sports legalese about salary caps and free agency figures into it. But I’m willing to put Jerry Reinsdorf in the best light and say that he was thinking like a sports fan. Every time he wastes his time and money on an underperforming muscle-bound stiff who measures “respect” by the number of zeros after a dollar sign, Reinsdorf hates himself in the morning.
If you feel the same way you should appreciate Reinsdorf. All you can do is turn off the television and avoid the ballpark. He can ship live pitchers 1,900 miles away to San Francisco.
He broke up the White Sox, who were nothing but an expensive mediocrity. He would have broken up the Bulls if he could have gotten away with it. That’ll have to wait ’til next year.
I would guess that Reinsdorf didn’t really get much satisfaction from shipping half the White Sox pitching staff to the West Coast. He vented his frustration, but he didn’t change anything about professional sports.
My friends in the sports department say Reinsdorf really is a fan. So he probably knows as well as anyone that professional sports have utterly lost their charm.
Here’s what Jerry Reinsdorf can do to bring some charm to pro sports in Chicago. Reinsdorf can reverse the worst decision he made last year and bring the Women’s National Basketball Association to town.
Last year Reinsdorf thumbed his nose at the idea of women playing basketball in the home of the Bulls. When you have Michael Jordan, why bother with a bunch of vertically challenged no-names who can’t slam-dunk and won’t fill the skyboxes in the rafters of the United Center?
So the WNBA looked elsewhere, and set up teams that are connected to NBA franchises in Los Angeles, New York and six other cities. The league is about halfway through its first season.
Women’s pro basketball hasn’t done well in the past, but with a boost from the mighty marketers of the NBA, the WNBA is averaging nearly 9,000 fans per game. The Phoenix Mercury get 14,000 people per game. The games are on national television three nights a week.
The first season of the WNBA has been a smash. Not that you can tell in Chicago, because there’s no team in Chicago.
Reinsdorf blew it. He just blew it. And not because more people are going to WNBA games than anybody predicted. He blew it because he had a chance to get credit for bringing a professional sports team to Chicago that would have people talking about fun instead of money.
The WNBA has avoided all the things that have made people hate professional sports. On the court and off, WNBA players act like they want to show people a good time. They know the attention might not last. They’re playing for survival, and survival means making people want to come back for more.
Of course, I’m going mostly by what I’ve seen on television, because the nearest WNBA team is in Cleveland. But I know what’s going on in the WNBA. It’s what I saw when I took my kids to see the Northwestern women’s basketball team play Wisconsin last winter.
The kids weren’t crowded out of the best seats by men in suits guzzling $5 beers. The parents didn’t take out a mortgage to pay for the tickets. The fans had a chance to cheer for athletes who were just like them in every respect but one: their superlative grace and strength and dexterity in competition.
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We saw a fast, fun game. And when it was over, the fans came out of the stands and crowded around the edge of the basketball court, and the players ran a lap around the court, high-fiving the fans.
Imagine, the athletes actually made physical contact with their fans. I hadn’t seen that since Charles Barkley spit on an 8-year-old girl during a game in New Jersey a few years ago.
The WNBA works on making converts. After each game, two players from the home team sit down for autograph sessions and informal banter with the fans. It’s a nice touch.
People love the WNBA. They love watching athletes who are having fun. They love watching women get a chance to compete on a stage they haven’t shared before. On top of all that, women’s basketball is a great game.
There’s a lot of talk in men’s professional sports, especially in baseball, about recapturing that connection to the fans. Forget it. Pro sports are too far gone to get it back. They’re too expensive, too elitist, too populated with athletes who think a 12-year-old should supplement their seven-figure incomes in exchange for an autograph.
The men in sports are surviving with the luxury boxes and $5 beers, but they’ve lost the thread that connected them to the people in the cheap seats. Now the women are getting their chance, and they’re connecting. Reinsdorf should bring the WNBA to Chicago next season. Just for the fun of it.