Old white men can be a curious lot. Through much of the country they’re bellyaching for freedom, against the tyranny of outside forces, like the government, taxes or unions from impeding them in any way. However, sometimes, ideals be damned, they need to stand up for other old white men who feel aggrieved by people exercising the very freedom they harp about defending.
On the day the Knicks introduced Carmelo Anthony after a months-long courtship, the Nets acquired the alleged coach-killing Deron Williams from the Jazz. Not to mention this being less than a year after LeBron, D-Wade and Chris Bosh orchestrated a coup that allowed the three to join forces in Miami. And let’s not forget that Chris Paul isn’t exactly thrilled with his situation either playing for the league-owned Hornets. Well, this isn’t sitting well with old white sportswriters and talking heads.
Dick Vitale thinks the inmates have taken over the asylum, a New York Daily News beat writer takes to the airwaves to argue players have too much power, Ken Berger of CBSSports.com calls it all a “shell game” that exposes a “dark underside,” which portends league-wide “Armageddon,” Rick Reilly is tut-tutting over these egotistic stars deleterious effects on the game, SI’s Michael Rosenberg rails against Carmelo’s selfishness and the same magazine’s Ian Thomsen said these deals just about assured a lockout because owners won’t stand for player machinations of this sort any longer. Yet, I didn’t see anyone writing stories about how wrong Denver was to trade Chauncey Billups, who wanted to finish his career in Denver–so much for player control.
As much as “The Decision” was a disgrace and that the whole ‘Melo trade talk was needlessly protracted, this endless handwringing over players pushing to play on the team of their choosing is fraught with stupidity; a pervasive attitude that athletes should stay under the thumbs of owners. The hive mind of sports media seems to agree that the olden days of owners maintain total control like in those wondrous days of yore before free agency, when sports was closer to indentured servitude.
This idea is hardly new. Chuck Klosterman enjoys arguing that if you polled sports writers on their personal politics, they majority would appear left of center, however the lens through which they view sports makes them seem oppressive and antiquated. None of them would want an asshole like Bill Parcells as their boss, but they insist that players need to stay in lock-step with his dictatorial demands. Columnists, like the current Supreme Court, are firmly on the side of bosses and our corporate overlords. That means the NFL’s dean of journalists, Peter King, writes slurpy love letters to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in Sports Illustrated on the eve of a major labor negotiation that’s looking to fleece the players and Buzz Bissinger idiotically opines that the NBA is too black for white America.
Somehow, owners have co-opted the notion that their actions represent the ones that are for THE GOOD OF THE GAME and that players, in opposing ownerships’ moves, are in the business of destroying sport. Mind you that it’s the owner Tom Hicks that bankrupted the Texas Rangers and eviscerated Liverpool FC with his over-leveraged idiocy. It was George Shinn whose moral and financial bankruptcy has nearly brought the NBA’s Hornets to their knees. The NHL, in their lust for money, expanded idiotically into the Southern US, diluting and bankrupting their sport. Donald Sterling’s naked profiteering has kept the LA Clippers from ever being great, on top of him being a horrid human. The NFL owners create a system where they don’t guarantee player salaries, forcing them to destroy their bodies to keep a roster spot, but then get fine-happy when the players start destroying their bodies too much, and yet the owners still push to add two more games to an already grueling season. For THE GOOD OF THE GAME, indeed.
The sports media has been complicit in this charade for a long time. These guys have been so used to carrying water for ownership, that siding with them in these current labor disputes must almost be a Pavlovian response. There was hardly a whiff of dissent back in the 1990s, when America’s cities went on stadium-building binges with their own cheering section in the media.
Those halcyon times when a predominantly conservative group of multi-millionaires and billionaires built their entire economic model on government subsidies and handouts in the form of opulent sports palaces constructed on the public’s dime. In these pursuits, sports talk radio and newspaper columnists handled the PR for them by heralding the “need” for stadiums for the city’s economy despite countless studies by the likes of economist Andrew Zimbalist that point to the contrary. They held up the idea that to be a “World Class” city, you had to have professional sports teams, but as was aptly pointed out back when the Seattle Sonics begged for a new arena, the visiting Prime Minister of China didn’t meet with the owners of the team, he met with Bill Gates.
The media helped fleece cities to benefit owners and now they’re primed to do the same to wrest money and rights from the players. Perhaps because with the advent of free agency, sports fandom has become a practice in rooting for laundry, so it makes sense to stick up for those who own the laundry as apposed to the ones who are loaned the shirts and short pants on a limited basis. But in the coming labor battles in both the NBA and NFL, the Tea Party should break with the old white men in the front office and get on the players’ side to demand that they keep their freedom.
Jeremy J. Repanich is a 30-year-old writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. I'm such a fucking cliche.
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