Stern-Cold: Losing the N.B.A. Dave Zirin http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/04/david-stern-nba.html “I don’t know where you were raised, but I lived with rats. I used to kill rats. We had a .22 rifle and we would lay in the kitchen and shoot them on the floor. One thing my grandmother taught me was that if you got a rat trapped, you’ve got to give his ass a way out, because he will fight you if he has to. If you don’t give us a way out, a chance for a compromise, you’re going to get a fight.” An American labor leader made the previous statement last month. It wasn’t a Teamster, United Autoworkers official, or anyone from the public-sector battles in the Midwest. The union in question is the National Basketball Players Association, and the man who promised “a fight” was their executive director, Billy Hunter. Hunter was referring to the stalled negotiations over a new collective-bargaining agreement for the N.B.A. The current labor deal expires at the end of June; if no progress is made before then—and there hasn’t been much in several months—the league could join the N.F.L. as the second major American sports league whose players (and, of course, fans) are locked out. There is an extra lacquer of anger and mistrust in the N.B.A. because of the particular commissioner with whom Billy Hunter is negotiating: David Stern. For thirty years, Stern has been arguably the most successful commissioner in all of sports. Having Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan in his league certainly helped, but Stern has taken the N.B.A. from a second-tier attraction to a global phenomenon. In recent years, however, another, utterly implacable side of Stern has emerged. Fans in the greater Seattle area, who didn’t want to spend three hundred million dollars on a new, publicly funded stadium and lost their team, are familiar with Stern’s vindictive side. (The Sonics were moved to Oklahoma City, where they are now the Thunder.) But never has Stern seemed as unbending, isolated, or arrogant as he does now. Players are warned; complaining coaches are silenced; and negotiating partners are enemies. Stern, speaking to a room full of N.B.A. stars during All-Star weekend, reportedly said that he knew where “the bodies are buried” in the league—presumably because he had buried some of them himself. “It was shocking,” the Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose told Yahoo! Sports. “I was taking off my gear, and when he said that, I just stopped and thought, ‘Whoa…’ I couldn’t believe that he said it.” Then, on April 7th, the N.B.A. referees union announced that they were complaining to the National Labor Relations Board that Stern and the N.B.A. had violated federal law by engaging in unfair labor practices. Their filing includes accusations relating to an “obscene expression” that Stern directed at union negotiators in a January 24th meeting. According to the report, Stern stormed out of the meeting in a rage when the stenographer refused to take his obscenity out of the record. And there’s the tale of Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy. When Van Gundy told reporters that Stern doesn’t allow dissenting opinions, the commissioner responded, “We won’t be hearing from him for the rest of the season.” He then said of Van Gundy, “I see somebody whose team isn’t performing, whose star player was suspended, who seems to be fraying.” Most fans could care less about Stern’s attitude—but his state of mind is a problem for the sport of basketball. If he’s not willing to negotiate in a way that shows respect, then there likely won’t be a season in 2011. Stern is pursuing a strategy similar to the one N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has adopted: demanding wage cuts and claiming financial hardship, while offering players, at best, a limited look at the books. But Stern’s demands extend further. Stern and the owners also want teams to be able to retain players at their discretion, even if their contracts have run their course. This would effectively end free agency and turn back the clock on sports labor relations by decades. “That’s a dealbreaker,” Billy Hunter told me. “I’m dead set against it, and most players would be as well. This would oppress players. Why was free agency fought for and achieved? You take that away if you have a franchise player tag. We will be just as adamant as not accepting it as we would about not accepting a hard salary cap…. If they continue to put forth the same demands, we are going to find ourselves in the same situation as the N.F.L.P.A.”—the football players, who are still locked out. In a season where ratings and interest are up, and players like Chicago’s Rose and the L.A. Clippers’ forward Blake Griffin are leaving a new generation of fans breathless, David Stern is practicing his own version of the extreme austerity. But, just as there are no schools without teachers and no fire stations without firefighters, there is no league without the players. No one buys an N.B.A. ticket to watch David Stern. This seems to be a reality he has forgotten—no matter where the bodies are buried. Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. *** Repossess the Mets! Dave Zirin http://nyr.kr/hqi4B6 Growing up in New York City, I was a Mets fan down to the marrow of my bones. I’d stand outside of the old Shea Stadium, pleading for autographs, and eventually my baseball glove had more names on it than the cast on a third grader’s broken arm: Mookie Wilson, Ron Darling, Kevin Mitchell—any Met who’d stop for me. My bedroom was a shrine to the team; posters of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Keith Hernandez watched over me as I slept. I loved those teams of the nineteen-eighties. I always talked about them using the pronoun ”we,” as in, “We are going to win it all this year.” (In 1986, we did—and I was there for game six.) That’s why it’s been so ineffably painful, over the past several months, to see the ugly truth unveiled: the Mets aren’t my team, or New York’s team. They are Bernie Madoff’s team. When I was reading William Grieder’s piece on Madoff in the Nation—where I’m the sports editor—I couldn’t help but think that there is no criminal statute against using and abusing an entire fan base. We now know that the owners of the Mets, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, were financial partners with the Babe Ruth of swindlers. They allegedly used Madoff’s portfolio as a sort of personal bank, with the team being both their collateral and their cash register. Now they are facing anywhere from three hundred million to a billion dollars in lawsuits from an assembly of Madoff victims. As a lawsuit filed by the victims’ trustee, Irving Picard, states, Wilpon and Katz “made so much easy money from Madoff for so long” that, despite the myriad red flags, they “chose to simply look the other way…. There are thousands of victims of Madoff’s massive fraud. But Saul Katz is not one of them. Neither is Fred Wilpon.” According to the lawsuit, Wilpon was using his Madoff-made gains to pay off as much as half a billion dollars in debt he accrued in building the team’s new stadium, Citi Field. (It is somehow telling that the field would be named for a bank.) In response, Wilpon and Katz said in a statement: The trustee’s lawsuit is an outrageous “strong arm” effort to try to force a settlement by threatening to ruin our reputations and businesses, which we have built for over fifty years. That statement, and many others like it, is up on the Mets Web site, making it even harder to cordon off one’s feelings for the team. (“To see business owners so misjudge their audience is solar-eclipse-black humor,” Jeff Passan, a Yahoo sports columnist, wrote.) Wilpon and Katz are now looking to sell anywhere from a twenty-five-per-cent stake to the entire team. One hopes they will. The team has already received a twenty-million-dollar loan from Major League Baseball after running through the seventy-five-million-dollar line of credit available to all teams in financial distress. And they owe a few players, some of them disastrous signings, a tremendous amount of money. Mets Nation is owed something, too. Not just because their trust was so flagrantly violated—their blue and orange entangled in a Ponzi scheme—but because the taxpayers of New York paid for two hundred million of the six hundred million it took to build Citi Field. Maybe we are owed the team. Why shouldn’t the Mets follow the model of the Green Bay Packers and allow fans to buy shares? In Green Bay, people buy a piece of their beloved Pack and all they get in return is a piece of paper saying that they are part owners. This is a model worth emulating, especially given the Packers’ recent success. Over the past twenty years, the Wilpons have careened from one embarrassment to the next. These are tough times, when tightening budgets have led to historic attacks on schools, hospitals, and public services. Why shouldn’t the Mets help subsidize all that? Imagine how it would be if every time you saw a kid in a David Wright jersey, you knew that the proceeds would help to keep the city afloat. We should repossess the Mets. Once we do, I will be first in line to buy my shares of the club. Then the Mets really will be “our team” again, and I can resume the passion of youth, with the confidence that my love isn’t just an asset in the Madoff-Wilpon-Katz portfolio. Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. *** Baseball's blues: It's not just the Dodgers Dave Zirin http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin-dodgers-20110422,0,4297920.story Three years ago, I spoke at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles and asked a room of 50 teenagers how many of them had ever been inside Dodger Stadium. One intrepid student raised his hand. To understand why Major League Baseball had to seize the storied franchise this week, look no further than this moment. But it's a moment that could be replicated in cities across the country. The league takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers is more than just a comment on owner Frank McCourt's financial problems or the McCourt divorce drama. It's more than a black eye for the onetime franchise of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela. It's more than a comment on a club that from 1973 to 1986 led the major leagues in attendance every year except one. It is a commentary on the rotten economic state of Major League Baseball. As has been widely reported, attendance is significantly down, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. For years, owning a baseball team was like having a license to print money. Public subsidies, luxury boxes and cable deals filled the coffers of owners. Ownership subsidized the lavish conspicuous consumption of Frank and Jamie McCourt. It also created enterprises that are overleveraged sinkholes dependent on tax dollars while pricing out working-class fans. The evidence isn't pretty, and it goes well beyond Frank McCourt's needing a personal loan from Fox Broadcasting to make the team's payroll. Last year, the World Series-bound Texas Rangers were bought at a bankruptcy bidders' auction in the middle of the season. This season, the New York Mets — playing in the game's largest market — started the year as a husk of a franchise. The team allegedly had been used by owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz as a cash register to invest with disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. Now they're being sued for every cent they have by the trustee for Madoff's victims and are looking to unload a piece of the franchise. These are the most dramatic examples of an industrywide squeeze as the old revenue streams, in these tight economic times, are running dry. Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm described automakers as "a healthcare provider that happened to make cars." For a generation now, baseball has been a highly leveraged real estate urban development plan in which men happen to play a game. Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a tragedy for the game. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the league have no answers about the future of the Dodgers or even baseball in Los Angeles. They don't seem as if they have any long-term answers at all. This unprecedented, jarring response to simply seize the team can only be read as a panic move. Like someone who just throws out everything in the attic rather than sort through the debris, it reads like a reactive response to everything: the McCourt divorce, the inability of a league owner to meet his payroll, questions about security after the tragic near-fatal beating of a rival team's fan on opening day and the need to bring in showboating security specialist and former LAPD Chief William J. Bratton. It's long been said — whether about steroids, realignment, the All-Star game — that Selig's nickname is "Mr. Reaction." This will do nothing to allay that criticism of his tenure. The answer to the Dodgers' problems is a somewhat simple one, although enacting it flies in the face of the bylaws of Major League Baseball. The answer isn't found in the glittering Hollywood Hills but in the sparsely populated tundra of Green Bay, Wis. The NFL's Green Bay Packers offer an alluring alternative that couples winning with community connection. The Packers have no embarrassing owners like the McCourts. In fact, they have more than 112,000 owners. The team is owned by the fans, the only publicly owned, not-for-profit major professional team in the United States. This has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the NFL. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response. Could this work in Los Angeles with the Dodgers? Would the fans pony up to make sure that the franchise doesn't leave the City of Angels? Would fan ownership also translate into a deeper connection between the city and the team? Those are tantalizing questions. But without profound public and political pressure, it's doubtful that Angelenos will get the chance to find out. Considering the generations of civic love bestowed on this team, the people of Los Angeles certainly have a greater claim on the team than Major League Baseball. But then this is also a team founded on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. Maybe the chickens have just come home to roost. Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. *** Taking Back the Los Angeles Dodgers Dave Zirin http://www.thenation.com/blog/160162/taking-back-los-angeles-dodgers On Friday, I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that put forward a common-sense solution to the current ownership disaster that is the Dodgers franchise: public ownership. Last week, Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball took the unprecedented step of seizing the team from bankrupt chief executive Frank McCourt. In my column, I asked the question: instead of now selling off this historic franchise to the highest bidder, why not allow the fans to be the new bosses? What if Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball pursued the solution—that has been so successful for the Green Bay Packers—public ownership? The Dodgers faithful could buy shares in the squad. Then—like in Green Bay—60% of concessions could go to local charities, premium tickets could be made affordable to working class Angelenos, and one of baseball’s most storied teams could repair its ruptured relationship with an alienated fan base. Let Los Angeles be a baseball town again. Let them truly be the people’s team. It’s unlikely that Major League Baseball or the sclerotic Selig would want any of this. After all, since 1961, it’s been written explicitly in the league’s bylaws that fan ownership is as forbidden as the spitball or aluminum bats. Selig sees his number one job as protecting the profits and interests of ownership—not safeguarding the best interests of the game. Proclaiming to the world that fans can own a team and sports owners are superfluous creatures runs counter to Selig’s very DNA. In other words, I didn’t expect the suggestion to gain much traction at MLB central. But I also didn’t expect Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn to step up to the plate and swing for the cause. Hahn, the daughter of former City Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, is now running for US Congress. The day following publication, Hahn cited my piece in the LA Times on her campaign website and issued the following statement: “The Dodgers have been previously owned by FOX and the McCourt family, it is clear that the only ones who have the teams best interest at heart are the fans. If elected to Congress, I will introduce an amended version of the ‘Give Fans A Chance Act’ which would allow Major League Baseball teams to be owned and operated by their fans, much like the Green Bay Packers are structured today.” This is an idea whose time has come. Major League Baseball for years has relied on public subsidies to make mountainous profits. We have collectivized the debt and privatized the profit for years in operating the National Pastime. But now, as our states face historic cuts, it’s time for payback. I spoke to 12th grade LA public school teacher Sarah Knopp, and she said, "Just a percentage of the revenue from merchandise sales could help save the hundreds of art and music teachers being pink-slipped right now. At my small school for at-risk kids, art is one of the main tools that keeps students engaged and practicing higher-order thinking. And we're losing our art teacher. Then there’s physical education. Maybe Dodger revenue could help us to develop world-class sports programs, rather than cutting them. When I was a public school student, girls' sports were crucial for me during those formative years of self-esteem development. I'm scared that a whole generation of girls (and boys) will suffer the effects of not having those opportunities." The only way this option could be pursued is with a tremendous amount of pressure. This pressure needs to be of two kinds: popular, fan-based pressure on Major League Baseball, and political pressure on—and through—the political powers in LA and California. People should rally, fans should hold up signs, politicians should be questioned, and every union in greater Los Angeles, should back Councilwoman Hahn's call. The Bud Selig alternative involves selling off the team to the highest bidder, with no guarantees this broken franchise would even stay in Los Angeles. Today Selig announced, that former member of the George W. Bush inner circle and Ambassador to Japan J. Thomas Schieffer would be running the team. This is not the right direction for the team or the city. The answer lies not in Bush-Land, but Green Bay. It should be noted that this franchise was founded when it was stolen from the people of Brooklyn, Then the actual Dodgers Stadium was built on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. At that time, Chavez Ravine was a beloved residential community of Chicanos known to all as “the poor man’s Shangri La”. Shangri-La was seized by the state and handed over to owner Walter O’Malley. Second base now sits on what was once someone’s house. It’s long past time we take the team back. Doing so would rectify the past, aid the present, and maybe play a part in changing the future. Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.