Oh, These Poor, Billionaire NBA Owners

By Dave Zirin
Edge of Sports
September 30, 2011

http://bit.ly/poVax2

By the time you read this, the lockout could be over.
Also, by the time you read this, I could be dunking
right after finishing my four-minute mile. The owners
have locked the doors and will not reopen them until
the Players Association can, to quote David Stern's own
words, "guarantee profitability" for every team.
Stern's favorite subject these days is how the
billionaires he represents are just losing money hand
over fist. These are the wronged parties: the hard-
working, exploited, victimized chief executives
sacrificing their hard-earned fortunes just to overpay
their ungrateful players and provide us simple fans
with entertainment.

SLAM readers who resign themselves to the sports page
shouldn't be fooled. What Stern and company are doing
is just the sports page wing of an all-out public
relations offensive on behalf of the trampled-upon-
rights of your friendly, neighborhood billionaire. Pass
the Alka Seltzer. Poverty might be at a 20-year high.
Public workers, like teachers, firefighters and postal
workers, are being laid off in droves. Our
infrastructure may be rotting. Yet billionaires pay
fewer taxes than ever and a broad based call has gone
out for them to pay their share.  As billionaire Warren
Buffet has said, he actually pays a lower tax rate than
his secretary. The "wronged billionaire," who is just
trying to create jobs in between carrying our economy,
has become been created out of whole cloth to stifle,
confuse and silence our rage. As one "wronged
billionaire", Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis said
recently, "Economic Success has somehow become the new
boogie man; some in the Democratic party are now
casting about for enemies and business leaders and
anyone who has achieved success in terms of rank or
fiscal success is being cast as a bad guy in a black
hat. This is counter to the American Dream and is
really turning off so many people that love American
and basically carry our country on their aying taxes
and by employing people and creating GDP."

Ted Leonsis also claims to be losing money by the
boatload. The problem is that it's all an artfully
crafted lie. Leonsis and other NBA owners might be
losing money on the team, as bestselling author Malcolm
Gladwell recently explained, but that's just one part
of the story. It doesn't take into account the mammoth
tax breaks, the publicly funded arena, and the
immediate real estate that surrounds their home base.

Factor those in and, well, there's a reason why Ted
Leonsis is a billionaire. To create the Verizon Center
in the heart of DC's Chinatown, residential housing was
razed, businesses were shuttered and families were
priced out of the neighborhood. Now instead of Chinese
families, we have Starbucks and Chipotle with Chinese
lettering above their blaring signage. As for "carrying
the country" on his back, Leonsis might want to thank
his army of minimum wage Verizon Center workers for
keeping his ample frame in fancy suits. Behind every
great fortune is truly a great crime.

The owners of the NBA and David Stern have failed.
They've failed to be accountable to the communities
they've raided and to the players they've willingly and
happily put under contract. For them to cry about how
put upon they are in a country where almost 20 percent
of the population can't find work is obscene.

This is why Gladwell, who is no radical, ended his
column by writing, "We have moved from a country of
relative economic equality to a place where the gap
between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and
Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for
what they have to pushing for everything they can get.
They have mastered the arts of whining and predation,
without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is
the lesson of the NBA lockout."

He's right. I choose to stand with Zach Randolph. Z-Bo
said, "I'm definitely supporting the union. And we all
should. This is something I've never been through so
it's frustrating, but all of the players should stick
together. If that's a sacrifice we have to make (in
order) to make it better for the future then, yeah, I'm
OK with it."

I'm not OK with this lockout. I'm not OK with missing
hoop. But I'm less OK with billionaires who lie about
their losses because they want a few dollars more.

[Dave Zirin is the author of "The John Carlos Story"
(Haymarket) and just made the new documentary "Not Just
a Game." Receive his column every week by emailing
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