It’s all over now but the pouting for NBA players, and one can only hope they perspire better together than they collectively bargain.
Disenchanted fans will demand quality when the games begin again, which means our heroes must ignore all those floor burns incurred while their flimsy union was squashed like a grape by management.
The only souls who feel worse than NBA athletes about the lockout settlement are baseball owners. They wanted everything their basketball counterparts and Commissioner David Stern got by exhibiting more stomach for a fight.
Forget the details involving meal money and marijuana. The fact that NBA owners won a salary cap for individuals–unprecedented in professional sports–is what really matters. Bosses built a ceiling; the roof fell in on labor.
Look closely amid the rubble and you’ll see the pointed little head of David Falk, the slippery superagent of the superstars. Evidently he wasn’t so smart after all. He blabbed about starting a new league, and in a weird way, that’s what he received, albeit with a face full of slaps.
By securing a maximum wage of $14 million per annum for the next Michael Jordan–pardon the blasphemy–owners not only establish a system to control costs but a mechanism to control the very essence of how the NBA will be marketed into the 21st Century.
During the years when its product emerged from the scrap heap of tape-delayed NBA Finals to prime-time exposure, the league gladly tossed the baton to brilliant soloists such as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. When it was the Celtics vs. the Lakers, it was really Larry vs. Magic, and it worked.
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It also worked when Jordan took over, for he is the most gifted and most driven athlete in team sports, maybe ever. Yet even with him as the perfect example of a demigod/ goodwill ambassador, there emerged trouble from below.
The problem is not that Jordan isn’t worth $33 million, or even $66 million. The problem is that many of those instant celebrities whose salaries he helped elevate aren’t. The young men who represent the NBA’s future tend to be preoccupied with how to spend their fortunes instead of how to earn them. They often leave college too soon and learn how to deal with the rest of their lives too late.
Not incidentally, a number of the raw twentysomethings can’t play, either. In our glee over the belated start to the upcoming NBA season, we forget how the caliber of games had deteriorated last season. Even Jordan fretted recently about “the credibility of our sport.” He dared suggest that his ability to soar to such heights had “infected” the NBA’s soft underbelly as much as it had helped.
Perhaps there is a shred of truth to that. Perhaps, too, the NBA tempts danger because wannabes who get paid ungodly sums before they sink their first professional shot are as unwilling as they are incapable of respecting the league enough to carry on, as Jordan did after Bird and Magic.
The lesson from the lockout, however, is that ownership has retrieved the keys to the vault and the lead limousine. The union bent only before it broke, and now the question is whether less show biz will equate to better biz.
Early indications are positive. The abbreviated ’99 schedule could have begun, fittingly, on Groundhog Day. Instead, we wait until Feb. 5, which just happens to be a Friday night. Television! So all is not lost, even if the union’s Falk-loaded executive committee hasn’t quite figured out what hit it, let alone maneuvered a peek at management’s real bottom line.
While players continue to wonder about actual revenue streams, fans are left to plead that Jordan returns, as if he isn’t mature enough to make up his own mind. Beg if you must, but if you aren’t embarrassed while kneeling, at least prepare to be disappointed.
The NBA has been saved. It will be a cold day when Donald Fehr, the bulldog chief of baseball’s union, entertains the absurd notion to restrain wages of his stars. But now that basketball’s bosses have done their thing, it doesn’t mean baseball owners won’t try. The grenade is in their hands.