Monetizing the Mind of the Unsuspecting Sports Fan

It crept up slowly but it is now upon us. Sports is now largely a discussion about the money. Watch ESPN, listen to sports talk shows. Go online and see what the “sports” guys are filling their shows with…..the entire discussions are about contracts, extensions, buyouts, guaranteed money. Those are now the “stats” in sports: “10 year 300 million”, “7 year 180 million”. Yes, it happened gradually but now it’s fully metastasized. The genie is out of the bottle and he's too fat to fit back in.

I’ve said this so many times but it’s always apropos: Money (and sex) are the cream that always rise to the top. They are the chains that get pulled when the media executives feel they need more market share. It’s obscene. It’s enough to make you turn your back on the whole circus. Sports has always had the undertones of being a business. We get it. We aren’t totally stupid. We knew that but it didn’t distract us from what went on between the lines….we weren’t coerced to focus on the bank accounts of the athletes, the checkbooks of the owners. Those numbers could never compete with the contact of bat on ball or the sight of a last second field goal going through the uprights, or the high arcing 3 point shot over an extended defender that hits nothing but net. Now, I’m Pro Sports, it’s too often a discussion of profit and loss. These guys are less athlete and more about being millionaires. It’s ALL business.

A decade or so ago no one knew about the money, the contracts, the bonuses. There was not only the perception that people played for the “love of the sport” but it was a quasi reality. Many athletes from the 1960’s and before had other jobs during the off season. Being a pro athlete didn’t pay the bills. I understand that things have changed and sports is much less about sports and that means that players are going to make lots more money, though I never thought that a point guard would make as much as someone who built the railroads or someone who started and built the largest steel industry in the world. O.K., that's fine but do we have to obsess about it like it is a sport unto itself? I never knew, or cared, how much Johnny Unitas was making, or Willie Mays, or Magic Johnson, or Kareem. No one cared and no one knew back then. It was immaterial and irrelevant. Those days are gone thanks in largest part to the media who are always out panhandling for more attention, whatever it takes. They want to create “sound and fury” and money talk is one of the two best “talks” we can have. Can’t we even pretend that it is about athletes playing a game? It worked when Koufax was starting games 2, 5, and 7 to lead the Dodgers over the Minnesota Twins in the 65’ World Series. He won all three of those games. No one had any awareness of how much money he was making. Baseball was never more popular than it was in the 1950’s. Back then, people would stop working and stand in the streets with transistor radios listening to the play by play of a World Series game. Somehow we were protected back then from the crude knowledge that Mickey Mantle was making X amount of dollars per home run swing.

The media feeds us this junk like cigarettes and crack cocaine. They have slick guys with suits and ties behind a desk and they tell us what we should care about and focus on and we take the bait every time. They put enough gloss and sparkle on the production and the next thing you know “The Housewives of the NBA” is the most popular show on TV. When in need go for that lowerst common denominator: money and sex. It’s insidious…the way Camel and Marlboro are insidious and calculating.

I couldn’t care a speck about salaries. Frankly why is that something I should even be privy to? What if when you went to the movies the salaries of every actor were listed in the opening credits? Include their per diem for expenses. Why not put everyone’s salaries down….the director, the stunt doubles, the guy who sets up the lights? What’s the message?You are how much you make. That is your “value” in society. That is a horrible message. It’s Trumpian.

These days players will always go for the most money. It’s the only carrot in the room.

Years ago, in 1992, Larry Bird was contemplating retirement. His body was not responding to treatment and he was exhausted physically from chronic injuries. In his contract with the Celtics it said that if Bird did not announce publicly his retirement before a certain date then he would be contractually entitled to his salary for the last year of his contract. It was several millions of dollars. Bird knew what the contract said. In spite of the protestations of his agent Bird announced a few days before the cut off date which cost him an entire years salary. His agent couldn’t understand why Larry didn’t wait the few days so he would get the millions that the contract entitled him to. Larry said, “If I’m not going to play then I don’t want to get paid. It’s that simple.”. This is a guy who forfeited the money that was contractually owed to him out of principle; a principle that Larry Bird constructed himself (and lived by). It wasn’t society’s “principle”. It wasn’t the principle of the masses. Larry Bird played by his own rules. I have never forgotten that. It says as much about Bird as anything he accomplished on the court. Bird was untarnished by the money or the fame. He famously mowed his own lawn.

The media tries to tell us what is important. They are the last people who should have a hand in that discussion. They have a huge conflict of interest. They want your focus. They want you to pay attention at all costs. They want you to smoke their “cigarettes” at all costs. They don’t care if it brings back public hangings and burning at the stake. Similarly, We know the NFL cares less about brain injuries and players health, in spite of all the medical studies and scientific data. They can’t afford to let these distractions keep them from reaching their stock projections.

Charles Barkley was the lone dissenting voice in a ridiculous discussion last week on TNT over whether Duke freshman Zion Williamson should leave college now to avoid injury. He said:

“When did we get to the point where all people care about is money?”

The bottom line is that if the media (substitute the word: society) says that money is the most important discussion then the players will certainly adopt that angle and they will, like sheep, go where they are led. There aren’t enough Larry Bird’s around to tip the scale towards sanity. People like you and me will continue to follow the shiny object and we will find ourselves by the water cooler on Monday talking about players salaries and hundreds of millions and salary caps and buyouts. We will put less focus on the “hit and run” and a line drive hit to the opposite field. We are so easily hypnotized. We aren’t discerning enough to separate the recyclables from the pure junk.

Sometimes that lacking ability to think critically and independently will only result in the denigration of professional sports. Other times it will lead to the deaths of 60 million people. We just can’t afford as a society to think like sheep. There are too many selfish interests waiting to profit form that laziness.