The Trouble with $port$
KANFER, STEFAN
Culture Watching The Trouble with $port$ By Stefan Kanfer IN Godfather II, mobster Hyman Roth watches his favorite team on television. With a sly smile he tells Michael Corleone, “I’ve loved...
...It involves ducking responsibility and defraying expenses...
...Will there be welfare reform for billionaires now that we are in hard times...
...Other owners have aped Steinbrenner's approach...
...But gambling is merely one kind of degradation...
...Occasionally a scholarathlete makes the scene, but all too many youths are recruited in high school, then moved onto universities...
...ad nauseam...
...Their public relations people offered a smooth rationale...
...The swindle is not confined to New York...
...Unsuccessfully challenged for many years, the clause was finally declared invalid in 1975 by an arbitrator who said two pitchers, Andy Messersmith of the Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Expos, could go on the open market...
...They were used for illegal and horrific dogfights on his land in Virginia...
...Not in the stadium...
...What's more, each season literally and figuratively pushes potential fans farther from the game...
...thus outfielder Johnny Damon journeyed there from Boston, etc...
...be sure, avarice is not confined to baseball...
...Louis Rams and Miami Dolphins running back Lawrence Phillips was arrested several times for assault and motor vehicle violations...
...As San Diego State coach David "Smokey" Gaines put it, "I believe in higher education...
...Vick is cur rently ser ving a 23-month sentence for his crime...
...Then television arrived...
...Since a player is likely to pack up and go for the highest offer when his contract runs out, the same teams usually play in October...
...In the bestselling Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL, authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger note that 21 per cent of NFL players have been charged with crimes ranging from fraud to homicide...
...It is hard to name any area of American life that has not been tainted by TV, from politics to news to sports to entertainment...
...En route, the superstar performer tends to acquire an outsized ego...
...In the old days ballplayers amounted to indentured laborers, controlled by the club owners who kept them...
...Losers get the next plane home...
...You know, 6' 8", 6' 9", 6' 10...
...If the players' skills are deemed marketable, Saturday's heroes become Sunday's superstars, with payments to match...
...Once his nefarious scheme was exposed, major league owners knew they had to act fast or see the Summer Game disappear...
...Granted, only a handful of major leaguers have ever been charged with gambling, and they have paid the ultimate price...
...After exposing the NFL’s criminal players, the muckraking Jeff Benedict, a practicing lawyer, turned his attention to the NBA...
...They live in a little bubble where they feel entitled to have women and sex and anything else they want on demand...
...And the World Series was played in daytime...
...cheated the players who didn’t use steroids and hormones...
...Amongthe samples vaPros and Cons: Atlanta Falcons defensive back Patrick Bates was charged with assaulting his pregnant girlfriend...
...What does that have to do with criminality...
...He got his $220 million stadium, thanks to the diversion of millions in tax revenues and borrowing authority from other public uses—such as the construction of libraries and schools...
...Champions get bonuses...
...Neither did they note that it will be low-wage, part-time, seasonal employment...
...Many a player has taken illegal injections to improve performance...
...Louis Cardinals' Knothole Gang that gotkids in free...
...The new Mets home, for instance, is now called Citi Field, and for that honor Citibank has agreed to pay $20 million per year over the next 20 years...
...New money may be drawn to a city or state by the presence of pro sports, but a much larger amount of money leaves the state in the form of multimillion dollar salaries to players and management...
...Unfortunately, their new freedom soon degenerated into a carnival of avarice...
...A Rams assistant coach addressed Phillips’ misconduct: “Everyone deserves a second chance, sometimes a third or fourth chance...
...No wonder the bank had to be bailed out by the government in another instance of Welfare for Billionaires...
...Recently football teams have been more severe with their unruly employees, but only after the most outrageous behavior...
...Bates was released by the Falcons, pleaded guilty to reduced charges—and signed with the Oakland Raiders...
...Former St...
...He pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct and was sentenced to 60 days in jail...
...There is always an outside chance for a wild-card berth, but wide openraces have become rare...
...According to Jose Canseco, a major leaguer who played on seven different teams, there was widespread use of steroids wherever he worked...
...In addition, thousands of passes were issued to schoolchildren...
...Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty to torturing and killing pit bulls...
...To persuade the city fathers, he declared, “The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries, and I say that with all due respect to the learning process...
...Although well-tailored team owners would probably never be so crass as to discharge guns in public, their chicanery is far more subtle and devious...
...In the past, sincere efforts were made to bring young people to the stadium...
...The first pitch does not even get thrown before 8:30 P.M...
...Still, by compiling “legendary” statistics he and his fellow users expanded their incomes along with their biceps, abs and lats...
...Not the public, not the city, not the players or the coaches...
...On the other hand, “owners who get stadiums built by taxpayers enjoy an annual value jump of about $100 million...
...Falcons linebacker Cornelius Bennett was charged with rape and unlawful imprisonment...
...No, it was the owners who made that judgment...
...I deal with the situation by eschewing the Super Bowl in favor of my local amateur hockey teams, watching sandlot baseball in the spring, and indulging in my preferred year-round game, table tennis...
...But bulking up illegally was, and is, nothing short of corruption...
...Three weeks after the baby was born he was charged with kidnapping the infant and beating the mother with a gun...
...Today, because TV prime time is where the big money resides, all Series games take place at night...
...The cost could be high...
...Miller concludes inarguably, “Most of the owners and most of the players do not maintain long-term homes in the cities they play in...
...It’s not a pretty picture—not on television, anyway...
...There is an informal term for this...
...Those men opened the doors for athletes to become modern-day Hessians, mercenaries who would work for the highest bidder...
...The rest of the money has come from publicly subsidized tax-exempt bonds...
...so-called “roid rage” is one of the characteristics of users...
...Replied Canseco, “Yeah, it is...
...There were aggregations like the St...
...The reason the NBA has a higher rate of arrests and criminal run-ins with the law,” maintains Benedict, is because “they are richer and more famous...
...Contracts for top players offer incentive clauses above and beyond their million-dollar salaries for achievements like being selected to play on the all-star team, hitting a specified number of home runs, or excelling at stealing bases...
...Besides, the new arenas would create jobs...
...If fans don’t want to follow the money, if they just want to watch competitors vie with each other for the sake of the sport, where can they go in 2009...
...There are numerous others—including, of course, steroids...
...Chances are he makes more in a week than the entire faculty of his high school does in a year, more than many now endangered CEOs of leading companies, more than the President, and most significantly, more than the coach who tries to keep him in line...
...Not likely...
...The chance to make a killing is even shorter...
...How many...
...It’s called Welfare for Billionaires...
...It was decided a few years back that both needed to be replaced...
...Now, there is nothing wrong with a player (or, more accurately, his agent) making the best possible deal with an employer...
...There is nothing wrong with free agency either...
...Owners get full houses...
...They shortchanged the fans, who naively assumed baseball was as unsullied in the 1990sasitwasinthe 1960s and'70s— those far-off decades when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record and Hank Aaron smashed the Babe's mark for career home runs, using nothing but talent...
...Certainly not the owners...
...They didn’t say...
...He remains on suspension...
...When they failed to make the series, he would buy whichever competitor did the most damage to his team...
...Everyone on the planet knows that college conferences have long been the minor leagues for the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA...
...Thanks to genes, diet and perhaps some chemical assistance, he is larger than most of his contemporaries...
...With a sly smile he tells Michael Corleone, “I’ve loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919...
...Thus first basemen Tino Martinez and Jason Giambi went, respectively, from Seattle and Oakland to New York...
...Just legendary...
...The professional football and basketball associations have stringent regulations about steroids and hormones, but they have none about the abuse of money...
...Alex Karras, former Detroit Lions defenseman, offered a wry autobiography: "I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms—Truman's and Eisenhower's...
...The same holds true in basketball...
...Money...
...Yet because he made bets on (and against) his own team he will never be elected to the Hall of Fame...
...The reserve clause, a paragraph in every player's contract, allowed abaseball team to keep him until he was sold traded or released...
...He found that the percentage of malefactors was even higher than the NFL’s...
...Many a Mafioso shared his nostalgia for the bad old days...
...According to the popular sports Web site Field of Schemes, which keeps track of fiscal matters in professional sports, “The $930 million in Yankee Stadium bonds will cost the city $10 million in lost tax revenue, the state $18 million, and Federal taxpayers a whopping $200 million...
...The answer was simple and direct: “I truly believe, because I’ve experimented with it for so many years, that it can make an average athlete a super athlete...
...Facing bankruptcy, they agreed to name a commissioner and abide by his rules...
...Yet the League rarely censures them—after all, winning is not the main thing, it's the only thing...
...It’s not the sort of competition that would attract Hyman Roth...
...Illprepared academically, they are cosseted by the faculty and protected by the alumni, whose contributions are in direct proportion to the number of wins per season...
...The ruling amounted to baseball's Emancipation Proclamation...
...No matter how rich the infielder, outfielder, pitcher or catcher, his bank account always has room for growth...
...A while back Art Modell, owner of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, sought to have a new stadium built to his specifications...
...He didn’t kill anyone...
...Alas, he sometimes thinks he's larger than the law...
...The BrooklynDodgersfollowed suit with their ownKnothole group...
...The wealthy did not get that way by spending their own fortunes...
...Where is the average fan and his family in all this...
...And it’s reality...
...The iron-jawed, incor r uptible Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was firm in his statement to players, staff and management: “No player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ev er play professional baseball...
...No wonder so many superstars appearonpoliceblotters almost as often as they show up for practice...
...There would be more seats for regular ticket holders, and more luxury boxes for the expense account suits...
...As Willie Mays has observed, “The life of a ballplayer is short and sweet...
...He was not released by the Falcons, however, nor was he fined by the NFL...
...Who decided...
...The last category seems to embody the preceding three, but sports have been the most profoundly affected...
...then again, it will never need a commissioner or a prosecutor to clean it up...
...Why would well-paid pros like Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez risk personal injury and prosecution...
...The trouble is, this geld über alles strategy is essentially confined to the wealthiest teams (i.e...
...In a weird way, though, it was Rothstein who saved baseball...
...the ones that operate in the biggest markets, cities like New York, BostonandLos Angeles...
...It can make a super athlete incredible...
...Four people attending a single game will cost more than $100 with the requisite parking fees, hot dogs and sodas...
...Some items went unmentioned: The games would look more attractive on high-definition television, ergo bigger prices could be charged for ads...
...It is a lopsided deal...
...Canseco was arrested several times for intemperate outbursts and physical abuse...
...So who is supplying the money for the new stadiums...
...Take the New York Yankees...
...What leads him to that conclusion...
...BAD BEHAVIOR is not confined to men with numbers on their jerseys...
...On the CBS program 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace confronted him: “Baseball is the national pastime, and what you’re saying is that the national pastime is juiced...
...The Big Apple’s baseball fans, they argued, deserve gleaming new facilities with good sightlines, attractive surroundings, appetizing food, and plentiful parking...
...Exhibits A and B: New York City’s two major league baseball arenas, Yankee and Shea Stadiums...
...Worse still, drug-abusing stars became the idols of high school athletes, easy prey for lockerroom pushers...
...Who can blame him for thinking he is larger than life itself...
...But that can take more than the customary four years...
...Well, if you look at the kind of crimes they are committing, it has everything to do with it...
...Canseco & Co...
...At the club where I play, the annual tournament offers a top prize of $150...
...For the Mets’ $528 million in taxexempt bonds, the figures are $6 million city, $10 million state, and $115 million Federal...
...Their owner, George Steinbrenner, made a policy of paying astronomic salaries to get the Yanks to the World Series...
...The winner usually spends it over the next two weeks buying drinks and dinner for the opponents he vanquished...
...Phillip Miller, an economist at Minnesota State University, reports that team owners have no reason to invest in privately funded stadiums “because the added value it brings to their franchise is negated by the debt...
...Pete Rose, for example, has more hits than anyone in baseball history...
...For with television came viewers, with viewers came commercials and endorsements, and all the blandishments of money...
...Eventually, most of these behemoths manage to get a diploma...
...For decades afterward, professional baseball was believed to be the cleanest sport in the U.S...
...I know from personal experience that young rooters rarely stay awake past the seventh inning...
...Mostly short...
...New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh as he drew his pistol in a nightclub...
...A lot of money...
Vol. 92 • January 2009 • No. 1
