I will attempt to keep my personal history out of this as much as possible. It's important, however, to note that I read and can therefore generally be thought to be influenced by the bigger voices in the professional basketball blogosphere. It's also important to note that the way I've written about the NBA in the past has mostly been with an eye on how our place in time affects the things happening now. In other words, I've tried to answer the question: How does what's happening in the NBA now reflect what has come before and how does it reflect the attitudes created by the contemporary world? I guess that delves into the realm of "my personal history" pretty deeply. Best to move on to the content.
Bill Simmons, aka "The Sports Guy," wrote before LeBron James' nationally televised "Decision" that James' decision to play for the Miami Heat next season
amounts to a cry for help. His previous ideas about LeBron's free agency destination indicated that Chicago would be a decision about winning, Cleveland would be about loyalty, and New York would be about immortality (i.e. fame). He had not thought Miami was the viable option that it became. LeBron announced his decision to sign with the Miami heat through an hour long show (it ended up being longer, in reality) dedicated to his choice. This decision smacks of a cry for help because it means LeBron will be joining forces with two other athletes who are also deemed part of the NBA's elite. It smacks of a cry for help because it seems like an admission that James is not able to win a championship as the sole elite player on a team.
There. Now you're caught up on the impetus for this article. I'm not going to quibble over the minutiae of this situation. Who's the best player on Miami and which teams are now the strongest in the NBA? No. These kinds of questions are ones I care about, but that's not the point of this article. My goal is to paint a picture that this issue can be fit into, one that it can be seen as part of. The quibbling is going to go on for days. It'll go on until all the relevant players are retired, and beyond that. Because that's the nature of sports. But I'd like to go beyond that and look at a few things that have transpired since the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Championship in June up until this point. Why is this span of time important? Because the NBA Finals are the time when professional basketball in America is at its most visible. Because the span of time following the Finals this year lived in the shadows of the casual fan. With LeBron's decision of Thursday evening, the casual fan can go back to not caring about basketball for a few months, and perhaps nearly a year depending on the level of casualty.
The idea of casualty (so close to causality that it pains me) is an important one. In a nutshell, casual means as if almost by accident. LeBron James, Thursday, was courting the
casual fan, the accidental fan. LeBron has stated that he would like to become a "global icon," which means reaching deeply enough into the psyche of popular global culture to become a force inevitable, something people can not care for and yet remain consistently aware of. LeBron wants to cross over from the realm of the attention grabbing and into the realm of the subliminal. He wants to become legendary, a part of the pop culture tapestry, an immovable object that stirs the irresistible force of time and, in effect, becomes a similar force in and of itself. When we speak of global iconography, we mean advertising. And adverting works on a subliminal level. Or, it's supposed to. When you're at Sears shopping for a Christmas gift for a nephew, do you reach for the unknown label or the one highlighted by a Sean John or Michael Jordan symbol? Chances are, you go for the one you know. And that's the significance of being a "household name."
Look, the point of writing this is to ask, of myself and of any potential reader, what is the point of winning (in sports)? Or, perhaps more accurately, what are we really winning?
Exhibit A: LeBron James. Why does LeBron want to win? The whole idea of leaving Cleveland was to make his chances at winning a title more likely. Why is this more important that representing an area you grew up in and represented for seven years? In any other profession, most people would laud a young man moving to a place of greater opportunity. Some might say that's the American dream. But LeBron is certainly not being looked at by Clevelanders as a native son making good and getting out. He's compared to Benedict Arnold, and his jersey is burned. In Cleveland, they burned LeBron James' name and he watched while being televised nationally, and we watched to see how he reacted. I think he tried not to, which is perhaps admirable.
But, again, why does he want to win? The answer is possibly two-fold. He wants to win so he'll be remembered as a winner, a champion, and he wants to win in order to increase his global icon cachet. Most people want to be remembered. It is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. How will I be remembered when I die? As a person who spends much of his year in the public eye, LeBron cares about this perhaps more than most. He needs to be a champion, because otherwise the memory of his pursuits and accomplishments won't be as insistent as other athletes or public figures. This first aspect leads into the second. In death, how you are remembered matters. In life, how you live matters, the quality of your day-to-day activities, the ease or comfort with which you can do what you want to do. Money plays a big part in this. The more money you have, the higher your quality of life, generally.
Of course, money can be said to be the ultimate determiner of winning. But if money, and the comforts it affords, simply signify winning, what then is the point of money? I'm not economist, but don't millions of dollars, when they reach past the first two or three or AT LEAST two or three dozen, don't they become a bit superfluous? Once you've bought yourself and your family the houses, cars, food, and entertainment, once you've satisfied your and your people's desires, what then is left? A desire for more. Okay, okay. I'm getting a little preachy here. But realistically, LeBron has stated that he wants to be a billionaire, so the question is: Why? What would that allow him to do? The first thought is that he could own his own NBA team. The second thought is he could buy or begin other kinds of ventures. Clothing lines. Textiles. The American economy has always fought over textiles, and it remains the case today. Anyway. This would mean he could
make more money. What is the goal of an NBA owner, for that matter?
Make more money? But it becomes a bit repetitive, right? Why make more money? Why own a franchise, a company, a set of companies? Because it allows you to make more money. Or, if you're getting tired of using money as our symbol for winning, because it allows you to have more control over your life.
We live in a capitalist society. We affect those that interact with us in a myriad of ways. In a business hierarchy, if you more generally someone's boss than you are someone's employee or subordinate, then you are more in control of your own life. The richest man in the world, hypothetically, doesn't have to worry about people telling him what to do. Okay, okay,
okay. I dipped into the hypothetical. But we've taken a glimpse at the reasons a basketball player, an athlete could want to "win," whatever we as people internet-ly interacting think winning means.
Let's take a look at Exhibits B and C together. Exhibit B is Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Exhibit C is basketball fans. Dan Gilbert wrote an incensed, rather irrationally toned letter to the fans of the Cavaliers that seems more like an attack on LeBron than anything else. You can read it
here. The Cavaliers fans, as mentioned earlier, burned a jersey representing their feelings of betrayal. They lost tonight, obviously. But what did they lose? The fans lost the opportunity to take part in the good memories and feelings of pride that LeBron could have created had he stayed in Cleveland. But they also lose the right to be loyal to the Cavs. Okay, they can remain loyal to a losing cause (which is assuming the Cavs become a "losing" organization), but I was being a bit sardonic. The idea of being a fan is that you get to cheer on superhuman feats performed in the name of winning. That's the essential idea. But a team exists on the loyalty fans show in purchasing tickets, jerseys, or other merchandise. It's a capitalist system, make no mistake. A team exists on the tv ratings it gets, which are fueled/paid for by advertising. Money. A professional team cannot exist without money.
Pause a second. A professional
team cannot exist without money. Obviously, the paid aspect is what makes it a
professional team, but it's not what makes it a
team. To make a professional team function, you need players who are paid to play. In other words, they need to not
need to worry about making money in other ways, though they might want to. If they needed to make money in other ways, it would be considered an amateur team. What else is reasonably needed for a professional team? They need an arena, which needs to be maintained. If it's a national team, they need money for transportation. Transportation is hard to get around, even if thousands of jet planes flying around our planet's atmosphere sucks for environment. Arenas, however, are often subsidized by a city's government. Obviously, the structure needs to be approved by a city because it causes all kinds of traffic issues, both cars (also sucky for the environment) and people. An arena makes lots of noise, so you can't just plop it down anywhere. But when a team gets an arena approved by a host city, often the host city provides money to help them build it. Okay, I haven't done my research on this, but I remember it being mentioned whenever a team threatens to leave a city. Here's
a site that has done research, though it may be a bit biased.
Anyway. Fans pay for stadiums. If not through tax dollars, than certainly through ticket and merchandise sales, or by watching sports and buying the products thereby advertised. Fans also pay for players. Those millions of dollars LeBron and similar players are making? Those are salaries driven by the market. If people wouldn't pay for tickets that would support those kinds of salaries, or if people weren't swayed by sports driven advertisements to buy products, those salaries could not be that high. What am I getting at? I'm trying to answer what fans are winning by having a winning sports team in their city. They are winning the right to pay for those teams, those players. What are owners winning? They are winning the right to take what profit they can from teams they manage or pay to have others manage. Some owners do not make a profit. I understand that. But the idea of owning a sports franchise is to make money on it.
So let's look at this year's NBA fans who won the most, the Los Angeles Lakers' fans. What did they get out of winning besides getting to pay for the right to go to more games? They won the right, apparently, to riot. I won't even honor such acts with a link. You can google it yourself, if you didn't hear. One incident that sticks out is a car being flipped simply for the fans' furor over victory. So what did they win? Shouldn't "winning" contribute to the ease or comfort of one's life? Perhaps causing destruction like some (obviously not all, but the outliers deserve to be talked about since they seemingly got the most of winning) makes for a good story to tell friends and family the day afterward. But really? Doesn't that seem to be more what you would expect from a losing set of fans?
I wrote on facebook, as LeBron's Decision program on ESPN unfolded, how quiet it seemed. The people in the background of his interview with Jim Gray, who I can only assume were "fans," did not cheer at all. They looked solemnly on. Perhaps it was an intended effect, or poor planning. But I noted how quiet it was because I wondered why this wasn't being cast as a jubilant situation. The sportscasters seemed a bit giddy. Jim Gray had a big grin on his face at the end of the interview. There was a moment of celebration shown out of Miami. Beyond that? Not much. ESPN just moved on, and perhaps they should be lauded for that. On ESPN, the station that was held hostage by James' camp, James' decision was not a moment for fanfare. Instead, it was a moment for increased discussion of the NBA. Discussion, I like. And yet, I am a fan. I want to feel vicarious elation. I want to scream and shout over the superhuman. Perhaps James' performance as a stoic distributor of information was superhuman. But it wasn't the kind I was expecting. Here I dip into that which I hoped not to, my personal history.
I've always been a bit perturbed by LeBron the businessman seeming to oftentimes take precedence over LeBron the athlete. There are numerous stories about LeBron being an off-the-wall humorist behind the scenes. We were afforded a glimpse with his pregame antics with his teammates this past season, which rubbed some players (namely, Joachim Noah) the wrong way, especially when they bled into his in-game behaviors. LeBron has been called The King, but he's barely ever seen to act like a king. He doesn't do whatever he wants, when he wants. That distinction would go more to someone like Ron Artest. LeBron acts, except for certain instances of displayed humor, like someone who's considering every movement, every implication, someone who's angling for global icon status. In that, he's less like a king and more like a chief adviser, a person who wants to and generally does wield all the legitimate power. In holding himself thus, LeBron perhaps too blatantly reminds us that the players do not generally hold the power, the owners do.
So, I've now gone over 2,500 words, and I'm not sure I've quite achieved a unified message. I think that's fitting, though. I don't have a lot of answers on this, just a lot of questions. Do we, as fans, think the way the system works is right? If we don't, do we have a responsibility to do something about it? And what is that something we might do? I think the first step is to know these kinds of things and talk about them, write about them. For what purposes do our favorite athletes and the owners of our favorite teams act? Don't just talk about the sports implications, talk about the real life implications. Don't just buy a ticket or a jersey you can afford, ask yourself if that's the right mentality. Just because you can buy something you want doesn't mean you should. And then, what do our watching habits really mean? Teams are partially funded by the money given for TV ratings. When you watch TV, companies can tell which channels you're watching when, and consequently know what shows are most important for advertisers to target. When you click to a website, you are giving it traffic, which allows its sponsors to provide more funding. All these things matter. The smallest click of a finger, when multiplied a million times, can move millions of dollars.
One last sobering revelation that came to light during this time period. I submit to you Exhibit D: Ray Williams. The story of Ray Williams remains a bit incomplete. To put it simply, this former NBA player is homeless. It was a story published in the Boston Globe and received by me through
Ball Don't Lie and Yahoo Sports. The story seems unclear as to how Williams lost everything. This is not to say that this is a common affair among NBA alumni. However, it does beg the question, what is really going on in the NBA? What does it really promote in its players? As fans, these things reflect on us. If not for the NBA, who knows what Ray Williams life would be like. It could be better, it could be worse. Still, it's difficult not to wonder if the system is broken, if money needs to flow like it does through professional sports. The question leaves me feeling empty inside. I will continue to question and probe for answers. I hope you will too.
(If you're interested in my personal history, you may want to peep
this epocrypha)
