Sports In The Year 2001

MARCH 26

The NCAA's Exxon/L.L. Bean Final Four has just become history. As my Instant Audience Analysis Indicator shows, the ratings this year were not so hot. This was partly because the championship game was a bore—a blowout in which the UNLV Runnin' Rolaids beat the Duke Blue BMWs, 139-72. But much of the falloff in viewership occurred because the nation had been sated a week earlier with all the fresh and exciting basketball it could take during the third annual USA Today High School Final Four. This increasingly popular event features an elimination tournament among USA Today's 32 top-rated high school teams, and the spectacle of these excitable teenagers playing their innocent young hearts out has completely captured the American imagination. Of course, there arc the inevitable rumors in the media (USA Today excepted) that some of these players are neither so innocent nor so young, but so far nothing has been proved and I personally am accepting the whole thing at face value, acne and all.

APRIL 15

The federal income tax deadline and Opening Day of the baseball season both occur today. While I am transmitting my completed tax form through Home Control Truck directly to the IRS satellite, I am watching President Dan Quayle as he putts the first ball from home plate to the mound to inaugurate the 2001 season at the vast, fishbowl-shaped stadium of the world champion Florida Marlins. Just now starting his second term, Quayle has let it be known that he wants to go down in history as the "Sportsmanship President," and he points to the fact that he pays his monthly Tele-Pay bills out of his own pocket as one proof of his commitment to fair play.

Golf is still Quayle's favorite game, but he doesn't play anymore. He prefers instead to spend long hours watching televised tournaments, hoping to catch a player in some obscure violation of the rules so he can call in and report him, thus documenting for all time the high level of sportsmanship in his Administration.

Speaking of taxes, Quayle campaigned, as did George Bush before him, on a promise of no new taxes. It didn't work that way.

I am here to tell you that we now have a marvelously popular system of taxes that is based on the humongous revenues that pay-per-view television is generating. When PPV first began to spread through the country in the mid-'90s, the American people rose up in a monumental outcry. Naturally, we didn't want to have to pay for anything that we had gotten for free for so long. But much, much more infuriating to us was the knowledge that all of those countless billions of PPV dollars were going to end up in the pockets of some of the most venal people in the world—namely the owners, executives, agents and players of big-time sports in America. We were already appalled by the unvarnished greed exhibited by so many of the leading lights of our sports establishment. And we were even more disgusted by the thought that the more we paid for sports, the more these louts and ingrates would profit. We still loved our games, but we despised the greed of the people who played and ran them.

So we raised hell. We couldn't stop the onslaught of PPV, but we did stop all the money from going to the sticky-fingered sports establishment. In 1998 Congress passed by an overwhelming margin—over President Quayle's veto—a bill calling for a 70% federal tax on all PPV revenues. Since the annual total generated by PPV last year was just over $50 billion, that taxation produced a cool $35 billion, which was earmarked for good causes that had long gone without strong federal support, such as cancer and AIDS research and aid to education, the arts and the homeless. Some of the money was also used to take a bite out of the national debt. Federal employees, including yours truly and all the men and women at the Duluth post office, were recently given a 10% raise—the first since our salaries were frozen in 1994 after the S&L bailout hit $1 trillion.

The state and municipal governments also levy heavy taxes on PPV revenue, and they have initiated another much-needed form of social aid: subsidized access to televised sports for those who can't afford Tele-Pay rates. Most states and towns now offer Welfare Sports Aid. This allows the full schedule of all nearby big league and major college teams, plus the so-called jewels—the No. 1 Bowl, the Super Bowl, both Final Fours, the Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500, the World Series, etc.—to be shown free on government-supplied TV sets in the homes of poverty-level families. There are also federal Sports Aid stamps, which are issued to the poor in the same way that food stamps used to be and are applied as credits against Tele-Pay charges.

What we have wrought here is simply some of the most enlightened taxation in history. Besides all the good being done with tax money, the PPV bundle available to the sports establishment—roughly $10 billion a year—is more than enough to make everyone at the master webs quite prosperous, if not obscenely rich. Actually, the various heavy PPV taxes have worked to put a cap on payrolls in all sports; even in baseball, top salaries have not risen above the 1991 peak of $5 million a year—which makes all of us who love sport but hate greed a bunch of happy campers.