We don't need no stinkin' billionaires: a sports world with no owners
"Imagine all the peo-ple/livin' life in peace"
Sometimes kids suck. They can be smelly, whiny, nagging brutes. Sometimes kids are so cool and sharper than you ever thought possible it reminds you the future’s still worth caring about. Last week at a birthday party I asked one of my kid’s friends what their favorite ice cream was. They said vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. My instinct was to think they’d just ignored the question and listed every flavor they liked. Then they went into this beautiful exposition on all the ways the interplays between those flavors combines into one divine dining experience — the flavors, their different properties once melted, the do’s and dont’s of which flavors can be mixed in which order. I have seen the face of God, I thought.
A lotta times, older people fall into well-dug ruts of thinking and it takes younger people to break us all out of it. I’m younger than most sports owners, so I feel confident I’m onto something when I propose most professional athletes and fans could bind together to create a better sports world for both and leave the owners out in the cold entirely. That’s not just an idealized fantasy. It could — should — happen in our lifetimes, and sooner than later.
As spectator events, pro sports have always needed two elements: athletes who people are willing to pay to watch play, and customers willing to do so. Perhaps early in the history of organized team sports, owners served a purpose. Back then, the people who owned teams were still filthy rich, but the athletes were by no means. When you think of Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Babe Ruth, George Mikan, these were all world-class athletes with enormous fan bases, smaller in scale but not rabidity, to Jacob deGrom, Shohei Ohtani and Joel Embiid today.
Back in the day, the players weren’t making enough money where they could own a team, pay for all the human and equipment transportation, own/afford an arena, league fees, the salaries of any and all staff required to operate every facet of the team, the public-facing organization and everything else that comes up in such an operation. Maybe back then, there was a meaningful division of labor, if not money. But mutualism this was not. The owners were still unfathomably wealthy. Athletes worked off-season jobs in order to make ends meet, and we’re not just talking back in the days of black-and-white TV. In the mid-1980s I had the baseball card of a ballplayer named Richie Hebner. In the offseason he was a gravedigger.
Who needs owners today, though? LeBron James is a billionaire — still an exception among active athletes, but others will join him, combining their salaries and their off-the-court endorsements and business interests. Magic Johnson and Tiger Woods are billionaires. Carmelo Anthony could be one day. Tom Brady. Peyton Manning. Shohei Ohtani, too. Alex Rodriguez may or may not be one; as part-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves he’s already swimming in those waters. There’s certainly enough financial clout within the community of NBA players that it’d only take a few to possess the buying power to partner in or even lead an ownership push. You know who knows better than most how useless owners are, and how much more they need the players than the other way around? The owners.
That’s probably one reason why the NBA made it a point to include in this year’s league’s new collective bargaining agreement with the players union a section detailing that the Players Association will “invest on behalf of all NBA players in one or more private investment funds approved by the NBA to acquire passive, non-voting minority interests in one or more NBA teams.” Listen to that pussyfooting language! The owners are doing the players a favor by letting them start to invest — with a chaperone, natch — to acquire “passive, non-voting minority interest” in a real live actual NBA team!
The players don’t need the handout. They could start their own league, put themselves in charge and cut out management entirely, a leech currently getting 50% of the revenues the league players create. Think about it. Everybody hates the owners. The players have spent literally their entire history fighting against the non-step efforts of the owners to deprive them of every dime and every right they could. The fans don’t need them; there are countless examples from both American teams (the Green Bay Packers) and entire leagues overseas (the German Bundesliga) with entirely different, fan-centered ownership models. The media could just as easily strike media rights deals with groups or representatives the players themselves appoint.
I don’t know how it works with musicians who do big arena tours, but I imagine when Billy Joel plays Madison Square Garden or Taylor Swift plays the Staples Center, some kind of split has been agreed upon between the performer and the venue as far as costs and revenue. No reason the players couldn’t start their own league, play a shorter, more worker- and fan-friendly schedule, closer to 65-70 games, and have total control over rules, standards, scheduling, media responsibilties and a pot of revenue they wouldn’t have to split half and half with the owners. And they could even continue to rent out big arenas. Those joints would still make a cut of the loot. Just not the whole half they deserve none of.
Look at the lot who own the teams I root for. Manchester City is run by a government that uses the club to wash away the stink of their human rights obscenities. Liberty owner Joe Tsai looks at China and Hong Kong and decides the big bad is the victim. Knicks owner James Dolan is like if Bruce Wayne devoted his life to mid jazz and bullying. The Mets were recently purchased by Steve Cohen, who MLB’s other owners hate with a passion because he, the richest one in their clubhouse, has the gall to treat them the way they treat people in their lives — like something money can disregard.
The wealthy operate as if the rules don’t apply to them because they have the money to make anyone they need do anything they want. Someone like Cohen throws that into distortion; money is only supposed to make these people feel empowered, not powerless. If the only good billionaire is only good because he’s ignoring billionaires the way billionaires ignore everyone else, that doesn’t add up to good.
Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry each bring something to the table that the others don’t. But at least they each bring something. Athletes contribute kinesthic artistry and genius that brings people together who might otherwise always be apart. That means something. Fans bring passion, create culture and bring meaning and joy to what’d otherwise be a meaningful physical act; Lord knows there’s enough of those going around. Worker-creators and the buying public are a progressive mutualism.
It’s good for everybody to live in a world where people can create and appreciate art. We don’t need already-bloated bloodsuckers guzzling half of the profits, much of the fun and most of the decision-making. Sports has changed a lot the past 20 years, much less 50 or 100. I hope one day we witness the end of owners. I wish our grandchildren could puzzle over that more than with how prior generations let climate chaos become irreversible, but you know what Mick Jagger says.