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Thomas Boswell: NBA Steals Wrong Play From Baseball
NBA Steals Wrong Play From Baseball
By Thomas Boswell
Friday, November 6, 1998; Page C01
Basketball better be careful. Both owners and
players in the NBA have fundamentally
misunderstood the stakes in the game of chicken
they're playing. Neither side has a clue about
the true nature of the long, brutal road
they've begun to travel together.
The popular analogy is to compare the NBA's
lockout, now in its 128th day, to the baseball
strike of 1994. This is not only the wrong
comparison, but also a deeply misleading one
that may delude both sides about the true
dangers they face.
The NBA arrogantly believes it won't repeat
baseball's horrific mistakes. We're not that
stupid. We'll never wipe out our whole season
or jeopardize our TV dollars. By Jan. 1, we'll
be playing. Just chill out.
Meanwhile, the NBA is duplicating -- down to
the details -- the baseball strike of 1981.
That's the analogy that should scare the NBA to
death.
It takes a long time -- many years of hatred
and mistrust, bad faith and grudges -- to do
something as historically dumb and destructive
as baseball pulled in 1994. You have to lay the
groundwork. You have to poison the water.
Powerful people, and their ardent disciples,
must learn how to despise, demonize and distort
their adversaries across the bargaining table.
That takes time, pain, public embarrassment and
enormous sums of squandered profits.
That's what the NBA is doing now. Commissioner
David Stern and agent David Falk, deputy
commissioner Russ Granik and union head Billy
Hunter, are doing a textbook job of setting the
stage for years of anger, future strikes,
erosion of public image and finally -- who
knows? -- maybe 13 years from now, one final
battle as idiotic as the one from which
baseball is still trying to recover. In 1981,
baseball owners had what seemed to them a
perfectly sensible plan. They'd foment a
midseason strike in hopes of not only testing
the strength of the players' union but,
perhaps, breaking or weakening it. The owners
had a timetable and strike insurance; they
followed their plan to the day. Baseball's big
TV money arrived only at the end of the season
and in the postseason. So, the owners thought,
not much was really at stake. What a bunch of
smart guys.
The season was split. Play was resumed with an
all-star game. The players lost lots of salary.
The owners lost some gate and goodwill, but few
TV dollars. The season was "saved."
But the fuse to the dynamite was lit. Union
head Marvin Miller and his aide, Don Fehr,
learned just how down and dirty the owners
could play. And their membership did, too.
Instead of weakening the union, the owners
accidentally strengthened it enormously. Owners
such as Jerry Reinsdorf of the White Sox and
Bud Selig of the Brewers did a slow burn that
lasted for a decade. There'd be other days,
other battles.
NBA owners might look around the room,
especially if Reinsdorf -- who also owns the
Bulls -- is in it, and see how much of the old
baseball rhetoric has been resurrected. Do we
have a secret drop-dead date for a settlement,
boys? Was this lockout all scripted in advance?
Back then, baseball was willing to wipe out two
months of games to test its union. Now, the NBA
seems pointed toward losing two months for the
same general purpose. It all seems so savvy and
predictable in the short run -- especially if
your game has never had a significant work
stoppage, as baseball hadn't in '81 nor the NBA
until now. But it's dumb and doomed in the long
run.
On Wednesday, the NBA bad-mouthing truly
escalated. Stern sounded like he was reading
from the scripts of past baseball
commissioners.
"The people we met with today would like to
make a deal. Whether they'll be allowed to or
not is going to be another issue," said Stern,
who then named Falk and Arn Tellem as the
agent-puppeteers who were chiefly in charge of
the union. "I believe, with good reason, that
agents for the high-end players have now . . .
decided that any deal that has a limitation
that would affect perhaps 30-40 players, even
though it would benefit the great mass of our
400 players, is a deal that doesn't deserve to
get done."
Sometimes ownership claims it's an egomaniacal
union boss, such as Miller, who is leading the
poor, misguided players down the primrose path.
Or it's the agents leading everybody by the
nose. Whatever. The result is inevitable:
People get mad. And they remember.
Tellem called the charge "ludicrous." Falk shot
back: "I'm flattered they think I'm running the
union but clearly what David Stern is trying to
do is tactically divide us -- the agents from
the players, the high-salaried players from the
middle class. This should be a wake-up call to
the union to stay unified."
It probably will be. It was in baseball. More
pro athletes name their children after their
agents than after their parents.
NBA owners are also considering the tactic of
"allowing" teams to talk to players "who call
and ask questions." Talk about an insult. Why
not just post a sign that says: Let's see
who'll break ranks. Yes, give us a call, so you
can be our flunky. Then pay the price when the
games start again.
Saber-rattling seems so natural to the process,
so easy to forget afterward. But it isn't. "The
commissioner has continuously tried to drive a
wedge between players and repeatedly he has
failed," union head Hunter said on Wednesday.
"Now he wants to split the players, the agents
and the union. . . . We're just not going to
capitulate."
Once you hear warfare words, such as
"surrender" and "capitulate," you know it's
getting personal.
The '81 baseball strike often seemed more goofy
than serious. Midseason games would be lost.
Big deal. Now, the NBA's early season
difficulties carry the same lack of weight.
Many fans say they wouldn't care if the whole
season were erased. Nobody talks about the
details of either side's proposals.
That '81 charade, orchestrated by owners just
like this NBA lockout, had some bad short-term
effect on attendance. But the sport quickly
regained, then surpassed, its previous
popularity. The real damage reappeared only
with time. Each succeeding labor negotiation
became a bigger and more bitter piece of
brinkmanship than the last. Finally, everybody
went over the cliff together, consumed by their
ancient accumulated animosity.
By the standards of baseball, the NBA has just
begun to get ugly. The future -- a bad one --
has not been written in stone yet. But we're
getting there. Faster than the NBA thinks.
The major issue before basketball's owners and
players is not the present, though they think
it is. What's at stake is the future. Years and
years and years of the future.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company