Remember this moment
Right after the NBA postponed their season, numerous prominent players—among them Giannis Antetekuonmpo and Zion Williamson—stepped up to provide for arena workers left in the lurch. These were moving gestures, and the NBA promoted them as feel-good PR victories. Many other players, teams and owners pledged money to their own arena workers and team staffs. In a vacuum—especially if you’re not actually doing the math on what the average arena’s operating costs are—it’s a really good story.
But now economic realities have taken over, and tons of billionaire owners have done little to support the people that make their sport’s experiences so polished and valuable. The list is long. Those same owners who were extremely willing to take taxpayer money and subsidies have zipped their pockets closed. The same franchises who have made a fortune selling Personal Seat Licenses (which do not include the actual seats in the purchase) $60+ parking passes and other trumped up, independently value-less commodities.
Remember this moment.
Often—maybe too often—pro sports leagues have become reflecting pools of American culture. It took the NBA’s postponement for the freaking government to start taking COVID-19 seriously. The NFL, true to its tone-deaf brand, is reflective of another segment of the culture—they’re blindly moving forward as if COVID is an inconvenience, as opposed to a global crisis that is in its earliest stages that will affect every one of its employees. (The WWE is somehow still hosting WrestleMania 36 this Saturday, but the WWE has never cared about their employees—even the company’s biggest stars are contractors who have to go out-of-pocket for medical expenses). College sports have shown a little more caution—barely—but their business is built on free labor and the margins are huge enough that coaches, athletic directors and administrators don’t have to sweat losing their bonuses. In college athletics, there’s still money in the banana stand.
Kansas basketball is not the pinnacle of this problem. (Football, on the other hand…) But they’re by no means free from the problems that speckle the sport. But as we see teams and owners strand their part-time and gameday workers, a tension is building. Approaching sports innocently and without an eye constantly fixed on the business elements of sport has been a luxury we enjoyed; now, as hundreds and hundreds of sick people flock to hospitals not knowing what kind of care to expect, America will look very different on the other side of the crisis. That’s not a suspicion. And it’s likely that we’ll never look at for-profit sports the same way again.
Sports diversions are coming—ESPN’s ballyhooed Jordan doc, “The Last Dance”, is arriving early, even though April 19 feels roughly one billion years away from today. But in the absence of sport entirely, we’re forced to work with the information we’re receiving from the leagues. Labor disputes. The near-certainty that free agent athletes hitting the labor market in the near future will be punished for the timing. A last-gasp effort to save the Olympics that had absolutely nothing to do with the participating (or lack thereof!) athletes. Sport is changed forever, and how it fits in our lives going forward will be reflective of where we’re at as Americans. And I don’t think that reality will look kindly on the billionaires string-pullers who chose to do nothing.
Remember this moment. The “reflection” analogy works both ways—sports will look like how our culture looks after the pandemic has run its course, and I have a feeling that American life will forever be changed.