What would I do if I had a hundred million dollars and a desire to buy a sports franchise?
First things first, I wouldn't buy a baseball team. I have a small moral problem with paying a middle reliever $10 million for three years of work (Jeff Nelson, the former New York Yankees reliever just signed a huge contract with the Seattle Mariners). He throws fewer pitches in a season than Pedro Martinez throws in a game, and the majority of them don't matter at all. And forget everybody that says the New York Yankees won because of their superior middle relief. That's a pure lie. They had to bring in a starter to pitch middle relief in one World Series game, and may I remind you that the position of a middle reliever wasn't even around 15 years ago, and teams still figured out a way to win.
I don't want a shortstop who wants a bigger office than me (Seattle Mariner Alex Rodriguez wants his own office and a guarantee that he will have the most publicity on the team). Plus, any superstar in baseball is going to want about $200 million, which is twice as much as I just won in my fantasy, so even though it's my fantasy, paying that much money for a guy to hit and throw a ball is out of the question.
So I guess I won't invest in a baseball team.
I'm not going to buy a football team either. It would be hard to look in the mirror every morning knowing that I'm shelling out $5 million a year to my middle linebacker so that he can hire fancy lawyers to get his murder charge dropped (Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis got off on charges of murder this past offseason). There would only be so many times I could defend my wide receiver who didn't so lucky with the penal system (Carolina Panther Rae Carruth) after he arranged for his pregnant girlfriend to be shot and then hid in the trunk of a car.
I would be hard-pressed to give a few million dollars to my tight end (former Green Bay Packer Mark Chmura) who was accused of having sex with his daughter's babysitter, or my outside linebacker (Denver Bronco Bill Romanowski) who got his wife to buy him performance enhancing drugs.
Plus, if I were a football owner, I would feel too pressured to follow the lead of my other owners and assume that I know everything about football. I would buy as many big-name players as I could (Washington Redskins' owner Dan Snyder), disregarding any thought to how their arrival could impact the cohesiveness of an already successful group of players. I would probably demand that my coach win a Super Bowl, regardless of whether he likes the moves I've made, and fire him in midseason if it appears that won't happen even if it was my own fault.
It appears I'm not cut out to be a football owner.
I wouldn't even try my hand at owning an NBA team. Maybe it's the way I was raised, but I just lose a lot of respect for guys that play with emotion and heart in college, then sleepwalk their way through the NBA season (virtually the entire league). I don't know what it is, but I would not be able to look at myself if I gave up my hard earned money to some guy who plays to about half of his potential (Vin Baker), hangs out with his posse after the game (Allen Iverson) instead of his team, smokes weed during the season (Jason Williams), then dogs it the next night (Vin Baker again).
Plus, I wouldn't want to raise ticket prices over and over again to the point where the average family can't attend a game. I wouldn't want to own a team where we force some 50-year old who's liked the team for 49 years to stop coming to games. Instead we force him to sit at home, watch the game on TNT and listen to Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith. I would never do that to anyone, so I won't own a basketball team.
My options are running pretty thin here. It can't be that athletes and owners are so detestable these days that I wouldn't want to own any professional team if I fell ass-backwards into money? Well, it's close. There are some redeeming qualities to sports, but it seems like the guys with all the money are trying hard to ruin all that. Since we can't exactly root for players who leave town the next year or entire franchises that threaten to do the same, all we have is the essence of the sport itself, but that's slowly deteriorating. Baseball players don't know how to bunt, wide receivers don't run patterns when they're not the main target, and basketball players can't shoot a 15-foot jumper.
I don't know if it's because of our new, hip, get-yours-at-all-costs society, or because ESPN only shows dunks and three-pointers. I don't know why the sports page has turned into the Financial Crimes, or how anyone can hold out because 190 million dollars just isn't enough. But the fact of the matter is that the three major sports have ripped the games away from the fans, and it's about time to rebel.
Turn off your TV. Don't buy that new Kobe Bryant jersey. Hand in your season tickets. Players sit out all the time, so let's do it to them. If you're like me, and you're tired of watching athletes half-ass it on the court when you paid 75 dollars to watch them, then stop paying, stop watching. It's not that hard. I've already stopped watching NBA games, and I'm pretty sure I'm better off. Baseball's hard to watch on TV, and it's getting to be a lot like wrestling - you know what's going to happen before it starts.
I've only been a sports fan for 20 years, but I'm pretty sick of reading about players and athletes wanting more and more money and not caring at all about what the fan wants. I have no problem with players being compensated for their performance, even if they get paid millions. But can they just show us they care about the game? Can they act like their team or their city matters to them? Is that too much to ask? I don't think so.
Until they start to do that, I say we holdout.
