“We are not surgeons, or even plumbers. Society cannot do without those skills; it can certainly do without ballplayers.”
— Steve Garvey, ex-ballplayer
“Republicans are for the rich, Charles,” scolded Charles Barkley’s mother. “Mama,” said Charles, “I AM rich.”
Speaking as we do in the hallowed backwash of the Bulls, the temple of Michael and the orgiastic essence of Dennis, in the fog of thrown rice and rose petals, this may be the wrong time to rant.
Chicago boasts a champion, a swaggering, world-famous winner, and if you win, all is baby’s breath. Every excess and insult, every egregious and tasteless act is forgiven.
“When a ballplayer is winning,” wrote Jim Brosnan, author and former pitcher, “even his sweat smells good.”
Smell Michael, Dennis and Phil.
Never mind that at the height of their NBA trophy run, the Bulls were grubbing for money. As in Michael Jordan had better get his and Dennis Rodman had better get his and Phil Jackson had better get his or the franchise should be folded, the owner shot, the city burned.
Punch through the euphoria and the manufactured fan identification with the Bulls’ championship, and you get the same old soup: Professional sports, from baseball to tennis, the NFL, NHL and NBA, with their arrogance, greed, addictions and skewed values, have become a hideous pastime.
Segue over to the Olympics, that once-pristine thrill-of-victory pageant, and you see a vendor-choked bazaar plied by underwritten athletes with Mary Lou Retton-sized dollar signs in their eyes. And is there any excuse for the so-called Dream Team, that band of NBA ringers whose Olympic presence is a worse men-among-boys sham than the old USSR national hockey teams?
Here’s one: When the Dream Team ascends the medal-winners’ podium-and who can forget Michael Jordan’s Nike-not-Reebok uniform snit of the ’92 ceremony-their serene patriotism will not veil the fact that they are what most Olympic athletes aspire to be: poster boys for today’s obnoxious, overindulged but outrageously wealthy professional athletes. Never mind that today’s pros, once icons and, dare we say, role models, have become philistines, thugs, addicts and, worst of all, whiners. Simpering, petulant, enough-is-never-enough whiners.
Take Carlton Fisk’s word for it.
Fisk, that grizzled longtime White Sox catcher known as “Pudge,” saw it coming, and responded with a timeless rebuke.
It occurred during a game in 1990. Fisk was 42, a veteran of 20 years of pro ball. He was catching while Deion Sanders, a 22-year-old, two-sport pro nicknamed “Prime Time” and “Neon Deion” who was being paid millions but who had yet to complete a full major league season, was batting. Sanders popped up. Instead of hustling to first, Deion sauntered toward the dugout.
Fisk lumbered after him and, in a sudden wave of insight and bile, unloaded.
“Run it out, you piece of –! Go on, run it out!” he bellowed.
Twelve words-or maybe just three-that defined Neon, his attitude, perhaps his entire sauntering jock generation.
Four years later, professional baseball players, with salaries averaging $1 million, went on strike.
When they begrudgingly returned last year (attendance figures for many stadiums, including Comiskey Park, in mid-1996 are down) and fans hooted at them, Ozzie Guillen, the ribald, normally delightful White Sox shortstop barked, “We don’t owe the fans nothin’.”
Albert Belle, Shaquille O’Neal, Jennifer Capriati, Lawrence Taylor, the University of Nebraska football team. . . .
Why stop with the players?
The same paint can be brushed on most every owner of a professional sports franchise-“little boys with big wallets,” wrote Harold Parrott-starting with Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and ending with the Cincinnati Reds’ Fhrer-loving Marge Schott. (Exempt Mike Veeck of the St. Paul Saints.)
Don’t forget the coaches. (But not Phil Jackson. Then again, the money thrown by desperate owners at winning coaches is so outrageous that it seems to have turned Jackson, a sublime man and would-be Lakota Sioux tribesman, into Gordon Gecko, he of “Wall Street” and “Greed, for lack of another word, is good.” During the NBA championships, Jackson, whose last salary was $866,000, actually hinted at retreating to Montana, which, incidentally, would have prevented his twin sons from completing their last year of high school here, if he did not get his booty. He did. Turned out to be $1.8 million.)
All agents. (Is it any wonder that agent Mel Levine, a convicted scammer, titled his tell-all book, “Life in the Trash Lane”? Levine, who bribed college players with Corvettes, indignantly wrote: “A day doesn’t go by that some professional athlete isn’t looking to renegotiate his contract and, worse, refuses to honor the contract he has signed.”)
Busloads of toadying TV sportscasters. (Was there anything more shameless than an NBC sport coat interviewing Shaquille O’Neal’s agent during a playoff game? And the weasel had the audacity to criticize the Orlando coach.)
Players union representatives.
Most sports radio mouths. (Can there be a special chamber in sports purgatory for WSCR-AM 820’S Mike North and the locally canceled but nationally syndicated and universally obnoxious “Fabulous Sports Babe?”)
Athletic shoe companies.
Too many parents, especially those of tennis and gymnastics brats.
And, finally, all hustlers of sports memorabilia, particularly the guys who tried selling postage stamp-size pieces of a Michael Jordan “game-worn” jersey for $9.95.
But not Carlton Fisk. He has since departed the game, and sourly so, for old Pudge refused to quit and had to be evicted from the White Sox roster like a deadbeat tenant.
Deion Sanders, on the other hand, left baseball for good for the NFL. There he is paid $35 million by an owner who appears in commercials with him and he is allowed to prance, preen and congratulate himself in the masturbatory manner that has become the standard for the sport. Said Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Albert Lewis: “The days of scoring a touchdown and throwing the ball to the official are over. When a guy scores now, he is promoting something for TV, a new dance. It’s for marketing.”
It isn’t the high price of stars that is expensive, it’s the high price of mediocrity.
-Bill Veeck
Money. Great gobs of it. Money, the fuel that drives the engine, spoils everything.
One of Babe Ruth’s famous remarks has been quoted repeatedly since 1930 when he was asked about getting more money-$80,000-than President Herbert Hoover. “I know,” said Ruth, “but I had a better year than Hoover.”
A more appropriate Ruth quote, however, might be this one: “A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he’s making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don’t make any difference if it’s baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It’s business, I tell you. There ain’t no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.”
That came from a legend who literally saved the game of baseball after the 1919 Black Sox scandal and was a gate attraction the equal of which we have seen only in Michael Jordan.
Yet Ruth’s grandiose claim has become the mantra of every modern-day pro. And a bugaboo to fans. The chasm between the fan’s wages and the player’s contract has never been wider. Pro athletes are Monte Carlo. Fans are Haiti.
When asked if he was worth $5.38 million a year, Roger Clemens, the fireballing Red Sox pitcher, replied that he was one of a half dozen men in the world who could throw a baseball 95 miles an hour over a narrow white plate. If you can do it, too, Clemens said, you get five mil.
Give Roger that one, but what of the Cubs’ fastball-bereft Frank Castillo who gets his brains beat out every four days for a not inconsiderable sum of $1.7 million? Here you can fill in your favorite overpaid underachiever. Try Bobby Bonilla, a chronic slacker and malcontent, whose $4 million a year meant that during the baseball strike he lost $31,148 a day.
Still, it is not the cash, but the attitude that goes with it-that haughty presumption of entitlement. Professional athletes remind us of heirs of the rich, the brats named Getty or Johnson (as in Johnson & Johnson) who inherit millions, then sue their estates for more millions.
Take Tony Phillips. A fine lead-off hitter who is greatly helping the White Sox, the 37-year-old Phillips, nevertheless, went on record about how devastated he was that the California Angels did not re-sign him last year.
“Hurt’s not the right word,” he told writer Joe Goddard. “My heart was crushed!” The Angels had said he was simply too expensive to have back. What did Phillips make? $4.37 million! What heartless heathens, those Angels executives. So Tony, the crushed one, signed for $1.8 mil with the Sox.
This kind of thing has made for a palpable rancor, if you can imagine, between player and owner, according to Tribune baseball columnist Jerome Holtzman. “Today the players rarely speak to the boss. Their agents are their best friends,” wrote Holtzman. He quoted an anonymous owner who said, “I don’t want to talk to my players. They’re never satisfied. All they want is more money.”
Or as the Bulls’ John Salley likes to say, “It’s not what you’re worth, it’s what you can negotiate.”
The hitch is that fans demand that their guys, their winners, be paid big. Americans, capitalists all, venerate not character but cash. Make too little of it-like a teacher or a physicist-and respect dribbles your way in the form of chocolates and Hallmark cards. Money, particularly in sports, equals testosterone, gonads, gristle, machismo, cojones. Our athletes must make it and make it mega. Drive phallic cars. Build ostentatious houses. Date babes. Snort expensive drugs.
The yelp over the proverbial cost of a ballpark excursion for a proverbial family of four-Ward and June, Wally and the Beav-is a sham. If a team contends, fans spends wads of cash for tickets to big games.
Would everything be better, or at least more tolerable, if the jocks made less money? Probably not. I was hanging around members of the Cincinnati Reds’ “Big Red Machine,” the club of Johnny Bench, Davey Concepcion and Pete Rose in the late 1970s when Rose was about to bolt the team over a salary dispute. How much did he want? $600,000. That is less than one-tenth of what the Cubs showered on Ryne Sandberg in 1992, and Ryne Sandberg, even in today’s dollars, is no Pete Rose.
Yet the money gap invites hostility. John Underwood, the fine former Sports Illustrated writer who wrote a book in 1984 entitled “Spoiled Sport,” asks simply, “Can an athlete paid $1 million be tolerated when he strikes out or misses a free throw?” To Underwood, it was plain that players believe it is better to be envied than respected.
No one is immune. Today’s Olympic athletes fairly ooze dollar-envy. Replied skier Billy Johnson way back in 1984 as to exactly what his victory in the downhill meant to him: “Millions.” The same sentiment lurks beneath the coquettish smile of 15-year-old gymnast Dominique Moceanu, the Nadia Comenici clone whose choreographed lunge for lucre includes a tinsel-thin, hardcover autobiography published by Bantam Books. Or the diver, who, upon qualifying for the U.S. squad thanked God, his coach and his agent, and who shall go unnamed lest he or any of the above, except for God, maybe, get a plug.
Hall-of-Famer Duke Snider once said, “Man, if I made $1 million, I would come in at 6 in the morning, sweep the stands, wash the uniforms, clean out the offices, manage the team and play the games.”
Yet before you proclaim the black-earth pedigree of old-timers, consider that Snider recently ran afoul of the law for not reporting cash made selling his autograph, something he used to give away, at sports memorabilia shows. And the great Pete Rose is reduced to the “whore” (his word, said in protest to criticism) of the Home Shopping Network.
Nick Van Exel, Andre Agassi, Jack McDowell, Christian Laettner, Bob Probert. . . .
How and when this sports monster was birthed is no anthropologist’s secret. Look back to the 1960s and you find everybody from Joe Namath to Muhammad Ali-with much second-banana help from Howard Cosell-discovering that personality, honed by TV, was as important as performance. Namath became “Broadway Joe”; Ali was simply “The Greatest.”
Soon their take from sports was dwarfed by their out-of-the-arena revenue. The more visible, even notorious, they could become, the more merchants shoveled endorsement dollars their way. The marketing dance was on and no better jigged than by the likes of of Reggie Jackson, Brian Bosworth, Deion Sanders, Jim McMahon, Andre Agassi-the list grew long. And TV-bred fans, who suckled at the teat of commercials, saw nothing amiss.
A numbers crunch. A few years ago, Sports Illustrated compared major league baseball in 1950 and 1990. The average major league baseball player’s salary in 1950 was $11,000 ($56,595 in 1990 dollars) In 1990, the average salary was $600,000. Major league revenues-TV and radio, concessions, etc.-in 1950 were $32.1 million ($164 million in 1990 dollars.) In 1990, baseball’s revenues totaled $1.3 billion. At the start of the 1996 season, the average major league baseball salary was $1,176,967. Ken Griffey Jr.’s $8.5 million is tops.
And Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, a man who contributed his fair share of lunacy to salary hikes, once said about a player demanding a piddling $3 million: “Stop! Can one man make a $3 million difference in a ball club? I don’t know.”
In baseball, as well as other pro sports, franchises have became toys, big ego toys, to be sure, bought by giddy but theretofore faceless billionaires eager for the attendant fame and the chance to clown around with Deion Sanders. Television and huge suite-filled arenas were part of the package. Throw in landmark court rulings creating free agents, and owners soon were throwing mega bucks at players whose unctuous agents negotiated through the media.
Keeping score was the cutthroat sports press, which damned owners if they threw too much dough at croppers and damned them if they refused to throw too much dough at top performers.
The players, no longer tied to a single team for life, became mercenaries, Hessians, hired guns. Any identity with a city or a franchise vanished. Most pros chose to live in Arizona, Florida or California because their salaries allowed them to find the temperature they desired when they desired it. Forget those sentimental hometown notions fans love to harbor, pros did not love Chicago or Buffalo or Cincinnati or whatever city claimed them for the length of the schedule, no matter how many times they said so in pre-season interviews.
Which moved Mayor Daley to comment upon his personal boycott of his beloved White Sox (which he ended on opening day 1996) after the 1994 players’ strike that he was sick of multi-millionaire athletes who give nothing back to the community. In fact, Daley could have added, it is hard to find another group of millionaires anywhere that does so little for its constituents. Business and political leaders with such a legacy would be pilloried.
One cold day in 1984, the Cubs’ Keith Moreland saw a batting practice line drive knocked down by the Wrigley Field wind. “They ought to blow up this place,” snarled Moreland, who lived in Texas and returned there after he was finished with the Cubs. Wrigley Field to Moreland meant not tradition or lore or an urban gem; it was just a cold, pain-in-the-butt ball yard that made him look bad.
Was it any wonder then that these athletes-turned-gods might outgrow their britches? No baseball fan over 40 can forget the sight of Reggie Jackson going rant-for-rant in the New York Yankees’ dugout with manager Billy Martin after Martin had reamed him for dogging it in the outfield. Jackson by then was already making more money than Martin (most players today make more than their coaches) and was not going to take guff from a manager.
Which bred a whole litter of players who knew because of their fat salaries-the average NBA salary is now $2 million-and long-term contracts that they were bigger than any coach. Chris Webber, formerly of the pampered University of Michigan “Fab Five,” wasted little time as a pro for Sacramento trying to force coach Don Nelson off the team. At first it seemed to backfire: Webber was traded. But Nelson was fired at season’s end. Then again, Webber is the spawn of a college era in which coaches such as Duke’s cherubic Mike Krzyzewski personally cash in on six-figure endorsement contracts from shoe companies while their players, the ones wearing the sneakers, are forbidden to earn a nickel.
That may be the genesis of so many other other disgruntled franchise players, such as the Nets’ Derrick Coleman, Atlanta’s Christian Laettner and Chicago’s Rodman, who have made careers of flouting team authority. And just wait for more philosophy from Ray Allen, a recent high NBA draft pick from the University of Connecticut, who said of his college tenure: “Where would I rather be? In the NBA, making money, with no rules, a job and any car I want? Or where I’ve got to wake up early and go to class and have no money in my pocket.”
Albert Belle curses female sports reporters, whips baseballs at photographers and throws forearms into the jaws of second basemen. Denver’s Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the athlete formerly known as Chris Jackson, not only says that as a devout Muslim he cannot stand for the national anthem, but adds that the American flag stands for “tyranny and oppression.” As do, no doubt, the faces on the 2.4 million greenbacks he gets for playing a game in this tyrannical and oppressive land.
Such arrogance rears its hoary head toward any authority figure, particularly referees. Witness Rodman’s head butt, Nick Van Exel’s shove, Magic Johnson’s push. Hear the wails of today’s John McEnroe-inspired tennis prima donnas. Catch a replay of Indians’ pitcher Julian Tavarez body- slamming umpire Joe Brinkman to the ground during a recent melee. Which was not as bad, perhaps, as Marge Schott’s reaction to umpire John McSherry’s fatal coronary on opening day. Snarled Schott, “Snow this morning and now this.”
Is it any surprise, then, that off the field our pros are just as cavalier? “I am not a role model,” said Charles Barkley (in a commercial, of course.) Drug-taking and dealing, alcoholism, drunk driving, spousal abuse, manslaughter, tax evasion-the sports page reads like a police blotter. Culminating, of course, with O.J.
Americans are hero worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal class.
-Oscar Wilde
An important ingredient of such crimes, of course, is the blind eye turned by pro franchises-and by many college programs, too. Way back in 1982, the Chicago Bulls had no qualms about using a first-round draft choice on Quintin Dailey despite his settlement of charges that he attacked a student nurse in college. Women’s groups picketed the Bulls’ offices. Dailey started at guard for four years.
Signing rotten characters who can play well has never brought a club shame, however. Baseball gave cocaine addict but crafty left-hander Steve Howe seven chances. The Blackhawks eagerly signed the dissolute Bob Probert. The Bulls embraced Dennis Rodman, once a dirty word from Detroit, like a lover.
Yet sports fans deify these knuckleheads, these indulged slackers, these self-absorbed brats. Fans flutter before their TV-bred fame.
Are we mad?
Even the ivy of a great university wilts in the face of a sports hero-as at Northwestern, whose remarkable, ringer-free football team won the Big Ten championship last fall. Then its administration, under oppressive public and media pressure, shoveled a contract to coach Gary Barnett-after the coy Coach made less-than-subtle shop-arounds to other hungry universities-that dwarfed those of the school’s most prestigious professors.
Then again, what shoe contracts do professors bring in? If the University of Michigan sold its soul to Nike and created a mindless village for its crypto-amateur athletes, why can’t NU?
This year’s Golden Apple Awards ceremony, a wonderful WTTW-Ch. 11 celebration of 10 elementary schoolteachers featured Barnett as its keynote speaker. A football coach! It’s akin to Harry Caray addressing a linguistics convention. Coach Barnett said his most inspiring mentor was, of course, another coach, which is probably easier than explaining why running a football program, which is blocking and tackling, as Vince Somebody-or-other said, is worth more to a university than an engineering chair.
Of course, this is heresy. Chicago basks in the glory of the world’s best professional basketball team. It says so on T-shirts manufactured before they were so.
Michael is our god. Dennis is our idol. Phil is our guru. And Scottie, Tony, Luc, Steve. . . .
We love their pooled sweat. We’d bathe in it if we could.
Look at the pride our city’s occupying professionals have instilled in us. Look at the revenue and the restaurants and the national TV trucks they have brought here. Look at the foundations a few of them have created, and do they not show up at Lou Malnati’s for charity, and does not the Bears’ Chris Zorich give out turkeys to the poor at Thanksgiving?
Yes, yes and yes. . . .
In a magazine called The Nation, which, I’ll wager, no Bull except perhaps Phil Jackson, has ever read, a writer named Katha Pollitt suggested that if we are really serious about curbing social ills we should forget about prohibiting so-called perversions such as pornography or same-sex marriages and consider a ban on sports.
“Away with them!” she wrote. For sports, particularly the voracious animal of professional sports, Pollitt contended, is surely a perversion, one that encourages “the worst forms of male privilege and jerkiness.”
“Sports pervert education, draining dollars from academic programs and fostering anti-intellectualism,” Pollitt wrote. “They skew the priorities of the young, especially the poor, black young, by offering the illusory hope of wealth and fame.”
She was just getting started.
“Athletes are disproportionately represented in campus sex crimes, and the pros’ reputation for violence, against women or otherwise, is legendary. Without sports, we never would have heard of Ty Cobb, O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Billy Martin, Darryl Strawberry.”
No Ty Cobb? The guy who said of his opponents, “I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch”?
Even Pollitt knew that was going too far. She might just as well have called for a ban on testosterone.
“I don’t know what came over me,” she finally admitted.
We all know that sports is a billion-dollar industry. It is the fabric of our lives. (“The belly button of our society,” said former pitcher Bill Lee.)
Dare we scoff at its importance or wish its demise?
Dare we hope for the day when the Com Ed commercial comes true, a commercial- again!-in which kids are trading cards of Nobel prize winners, as in “I’ll give you two Saul Bellows for one Enrico Fermi.”?
It might be a start. “Study your algorithms, kid,” as University of Chicago Nobel winner Gary Becker says in the same ad, seems more promising than the fatuous “if you build it, they will come” clich coined by W.P. Kinsella in “Shoeless Joe.”
Yet they keep building and we keep coming and the athletes, Mama Barkley, are rich. And exalted. And envied. A decade from now they will be more so.
Plumbers and surgeons, Mr. Garvey, are the suckers.
