The National Football League has one of the best things going in
the history of team sports. Its owners and players are on the verge
of blowing it entirely, leaving the fans in the lurch. The game
should belong to the fans who pay for it. If the owners and players
ruin the coming season, may a serious pox be on both their
houses.
How stupid must both sides be to even come close to
risking their pot of gold and their pre-eminent place in the
affections of the American public. How short-sighted. How
incredibly unimaginative with solutions. And how pathetically
greedy.
As they say in bridge, let’s review the bidding. Under the
old system that is expiring on March 4, the teams operated on the
level playing field set by an ingenious and workable salary cap.
League balance is excellent. And, despite the literally
unbelievable — not at all believable — claims of some
owners, everybody prospers unless they ware utterly incompetent.
Eight billion dollars in revenue allows lots of
prospering.
Owners, addicted to taxpayer-financed stadiums and
outlandish ticket prices like junkies on a diet of both crack
and meth, are upset because the current system sets aside
60 percent of revenue to be dispersed among the players. They want
to backtrack on that percentage. Cry me five rivers and a
large-sized lake.
In all my years as a huge sports fan, longtime New Orleans
Saints season ticket holder, sports writer (yes, that’s how I got
my start), and columnist, I never have supported the players in a
sports strike. Nobody deserves the sort of money, for instance,
that baseball players get for running around on manicured,
deep-green fields. But this — this is different. The violence of
professional football is almost unimaginable. The careers are
short, but the cumulative injuries are forever. If most owners are
making profits — which they certainly are — under today’s 60-40
split of an $8 billion pot, then there’s no reason to monkey with
that overall breakdown. The players, after all, aren’t demanding
more, but just to keep what they have.
Worse, the same owners who feign serious concern about
player health are promoting the unbelievably moronic idea of
turning a 16-game regular season into an 18-game season. Don’t they
know there are limits to the stresses the human body can endure?
Don’t they know that the fans don’t want to see their favorite
players get hurt and have their careers cut short? Commissioner
Roger Goodell makes the ludicrous claim that the 18-game proposal
is all for the fans, to save fans the annoyance of four full
pre-season games. Yeah, right — as if the league ever really cared
anything about the fans except what is in their wallets or allowed
by their credit cards. Fans endure what the Washington
Post’s Sally Jenkins called “a splitting headache and sour
stomach from the $19 margaritas and the $12 wine and the $10 beers
and the rest of the fiscal insanity.” That’s not to mention the
obnoxiousness of the only-for-premium NFL Network, which makes some
of the league’s biggest games unviewable by a huge swath of the
public. Fans are near the breaking point already. What we need
isn’t more bells and whistles; what we need is a stop to the cost
spiral.
Yet here the owners are threatening a lockout. Huh? Rather
than wait to see if players strike, the owners would lock out the
very people who do the actual grunt work, the people without whose
phenomenal skills these owners would be rich nobodies with only
their bank accounts to feed their egos. (Then again, if there’s no
NFL season, maybe more owners can get their names in the papers by
suing alternative weeklies because of hurt feelings over a devil
illustration. Dan Snyder could show them all how to star in their
own movies and call it The Anti-Social Network.) King
Solomon couldn’t collect his riches without his mine workers, and
the owners don’t actually own any teams if the teams have no
players to generate the gold. Or, to change metaphors, locking out
the players makes as much sense as it would for an astronaut to
turn off his own oxygen suit before a space-walk.
On the other hand, the players are acting like spoiled
brats as well. Rather than hiring as their union’s executive
director somebody who actually has proved that he cares about the
game, they hired a big-money lawyer whose idea of how to avoid a
lost season isn’t to start negotiating months in advance, but
instead to try to use his connections with Eric “The Pardoner”
Holder and the rest of the Obama administration in order to get
politicians to ride to the players’ rescue. The threat is to
“decertify” the union and then ask Congress or the courts to
eliminate the league’s super-valuable anti-trust exemption. But it
is that very exemption that helps the league do all the things —
revenue sharing, salary caps, joint marketing agreements, etc. —
that keep the playing field level enough for every fan to have
reason to hope his team can one day win a Super Bowl. The
anti-trust exemption is what allowed the league to thrive and
become pre-eminent. Eliminating the exemption would be like the
players cutting off their own versions of Brett Favre’s favorite
cell-phone-seduction-tool in order to spite their jock straps.
(These guys bust their noses all the time and don’t mind spiting or
rearranging their faces, but see how they like it when their league
gets ruined enough that their groupies decide to throw themselves
at golfers instead.) What’s needed here isn’t trial-lawyer
brinksmanship — a testosterone-fest for paper-pushers — but
steady, persistent reason and common sense.
There is no reason, none on Earth, why the two sides can’t
find a solution. There’s plenty of money to go around.
That said, the NFL right now really is great
entertainment. The last five years have had superb season climaxes.
First was the long-awaited triumph of pro’s pro Peyton Manning and
nice-guy coach Tony Dungy. The next year featured the first Super
Bowl featuring a team unbeaten after 18 games, the amazing
possibility of back-to-back championships by quarterback brothers,
the most amazing single catch (ball-to-helmet) in NFL history, and
the greatest upset since Joe Willie prepared with “two beers and a
broad.” The year after that featured another nail-biter, won by
another all-world catch (Santonio Holmes dancing in-bounds in the
end zone), in a game featuring two future Hall of Fame
quarterbacks. Then came the Saints’ marching in after 43 years,
first winning in overtime against a legend from a New Orleans exurb
(Favre’s Kiln, Miss., is less than an hour from the French
Quarter), then in the match-up against real local-boy Peyton, the
son of the single most beloved player in the team’s first four
decades. Finally, this year, another nail-biter, with the
Lombardi-haunted Packers first dispatching the 80-year rival Bears
before edging out the AFC’s single most storied franchise in a game
not decided until the last minute.
This is the sort of sporting spectacle worth saving. It is
why true fans should not just curse the greed on both sides of this
labor dispute, but instead wish for constructive solutions — and
even propose them. In Part Two, tomorrow, I’ll put forth my own
ideas. But for now, in the spirit of Starrs fallen forward into
frozen end-zones, let’s just say that the way to the winning score
for both sides is just to push forward, knowing that the will of
Lombardi insists the task is doable.
