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NBA lockout will divide players
Posted: Wednesday November 04, 1998 10:52 AM
The best news NBA owners could have received is that hardly
anybody has even noticed that the league cancelled the
first weeks of the season. This sounds like a putdown of
pro basketball. In fact, it simply has to do with the
calendar and
history.
Who knows when the NBA season is supposed to start? Dr.
Naismith famously invented basketball as a wintertime
diversion, but, a century later there really is no defined
basketball time. So what's the rush to settle when the
sport has become an endless
year-round activity, like movies or campaign
fundraising.
By contrast, the start of the baseball and football seasons
is a set part of our cultural calendar. Opening Day
baseball is synonymous with springtime; the start of the
football season heralds a return to school. When strikes
have threatened these
benchmarks, it is as if the Grinch has come to disturb the
schedule of our very own lives. How dare football do this
to me! Strike baseball? Why, you might as well shoot down
all those swallows coming back to
Capistrano.
But basketball has never been so much a part of the rhythm
of our everyday existence. In fact, it has prospered,
proudly, primarily as glitz—as show business. This
makes it all the more appropriate that the current dispute
is about, essentially, how
much the biggest stars can be paid over and above the split
in revenues that the league and the union pretty much agree
on.
There's a fascinating emotional conflict here, too. I've
always felt that fans are not so upset by how much money
players make, as they are disturbed by the fact that their
beloved heroes play so fast and loose with our
affections—changing teams so
blithely, abandoning us fans who love them. Everybody
recognizes, too, that ideally all leagues are better off
when the biggest stars stay put, lending stability, a more
lasting identity. The fact that Larry Bird, Magic Johnson
and Michael Jordan each
played with only one team
matters.
Indeed, it was for that greater good that the NBA
instituted what became known as "the Larry Bird
exception"—allowing franchises to ignore the
salary cap when it came to keeping a special, great player.
Jordan earned $33 million last year because of
that provision. But the definition of a Larry Bird has been
defined down, putting pressure on home teams to pay
anything to keep a star—or, even, a prospective
star.
The teams say:
Stop us before we spend too much.
The players say:
Any statutory limit on salary is downright
un-American. For now, the stars and their agents have convinced the
run-of-the-mill players, the ones who only make two or
three million a year, that it is in their best interests
that someone like, say, Patrick Ewing—a fine player,
but one without any box-office
appeal whatsoever—draws down $18.5
million.
So, as long as there is no public hue-and-cry to settle the
dispute, the pressure would seem to grow on the players'
solidarity. How long will the journeymen support the
struggle to pay a handful of stars monstrous millions of
dollars? Ironically,
recently in sports, it is the owners who have suffered because
of a split between the rich and poor franchises. This
time, it is the players who most risk division along class
lines.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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