Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We
Love

By Dave Zirin

Reviewed by Tom Gallagher

Los Angeles Review of Books
July 22, 2012

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=783&fulltext=1&media=TomGallagherwrites.com

Instead of yelling, "Kill the umpire," as they
supposedly did at nineteenth century baseball
games, Dave Zirin's Bad Sports, in its thoroughly
reasonable rant against team owners, suggests a
twenty-first century chant of "Jail the owner." He
could have lifted a subtitle from George Bernard
Shaw and called it The Intelligent Sports Fan's
Guide to Socialism were it not for all of the flacks
currently muddying the waters by claiming that
Barack Obama is a socialist. Just as some once
thought the target audience for Shaw's The
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism was not up
to the subject, there will be some who doubt today's
sports fan's ability to ponder questions deeper than
clutching or choking. Unlike those who see the
ritual attachment to groups of athletes in matching
uniforms as a sign of mental deficit, Zirin insists
that within every sports fan there exists a rational
kernel. For he is one of us. And his socialism, by the
way, is that of the Green Bay Packers.

But oh, those owners! Before you get to thinking
maybe this book is some boring anti-capitalist tract,
let me reassure you that Zirin never forgets he is
foremost a sportswriter, and that a sportswriter
must live by his wit. So this is, in fact, a very
entertaining anti-capitalist screed. And oh those
owners! They sure do provide him with some good
material. Of the dozen or so that he profiles, my
favorite has to be Dan Snyder, owner of the
Washington Redskins, which under his leadership
became "the only team that sells you beer inside the
bathrooms." Zirin is probably right in going on to
claim this "violates every health care law since the
Hammurabi Code," but I hope that at least Snyder
got some kind of efficiency award from his peers.
And you gotta love the one about him sending
stadium vendors out to sell year-old airplane
peanuts - peanuts in Independence Air bags, a
year after the airline went out of business.

Snyder's "yesterday's peanuts" scam is pretty much
just, well, peanuts, compared to, say, the $12
parking fee tacked onto every ticket, regardless of
whether the ticket holder actually parks a car,
carpools or rides public transportation. And upon
arrival at the 91,704 seat stadium - not actually
located in the District of Columbia, but in "a
godforsaken portion of Prince George's County,"
Maryland - that ticket holder can pay another $100
for a season pass to the express security check-in
line. But the best had to be the $23.99 Pentagon
Flag Hats Snyder made up for the fifth anniversary
of September 11, with all proceeds going to the
Redskins, until someone called him on it.

How richly stocked is the pond in which Zirin is
fishing? Well, former Texas Ranger minority owner
George W. Bush doesn't even rate his own chapter.
Zirin, however, does pitch an excellent two-page
reprise of the man's career - just when you've
maybe found it a lot easier to forget him than you
once might have feared would be the case. Made
managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball
team on the strength of buying a 1.8 percent share
of the team on borrowed money, and the subsequent
receipt of another 10 percent based on the value of
his celebrity name, Bush pushed the Rangers'
successful effort to get the city of Arlington, Texas to
cover $135 million of the $190 million total cost of
the team's new stadium. (Bush bought in for
$606,000 and sold out in 1998 for $14.9 million.).

What fascinates Zirin, though, is that when Bush
was interested in becoming Commissioner of
Baseball, the owners opted instead for Milwaukee
Brewers owner and president Bud Selig, who still
holds the post, yet they didn't hesitate to back Bush
when he ran for President of the United States. They
didn't want him running their business, but they
did want him in the White House, where there'd
presumably be other people to sort things out for
him. This rumination left me wondering if Selig
would have invaded Iraq if things had gone the
other way.

George Steinbrenner does have his own chapter, but
the rest of the crowd is so good that he actually
doesn't particularly stand out in this book, the core
of which is the story of professional sports'
continual grasping for the public dollar. Zirin quotes
former National Football League team owner Art
Modell describing his peers as "twenty-six
Republicans that vote socialist" (now 32), which is
to say they believe in government spending when it
is carefully targeted to things like new professional
sports facilities. Zirin figures the owners have
tapped the public for about $30 billion or so over
the past 25 years as publicly funded sports facilities
have become "the substitute for anything
resembling an urban policy in this country."
Consider New Orleans spending $185 million
renovating the Superdome - half of that Federal
Emergency Management Administration funds -
while famously unwilling and/or unable to house all
of its pre-Hurricane Katrina residents.

Is your city going to play in the big leagues and
build that new stadium, or do you want to let some
other city do it while you let the team you thought
was yours go away while your town faces the
prospect of a future "trapped in a Thornton Wilder
play," as Zirin puts it? While many Brooklynites of a
certain age still short-list Walter O'Malley with Hitler
and Stalin for moving the Dodgers away, Zirin
reminds us of the man who set the see-ya-later
sleaziness standard, Robert Irsay. With the locals
not willing to spring for a new football stadium for
the Baltimore Colts in 1983 and the Maryland
House of Delegates having passed legislation to buy
the team under eminent domain, Irsay ordered up
fifteen Mayflower moving vans and some Pinkerton
guards and, under cover of darkness, packed up the
team's uniforms, files, and whatever else made them
the Colts and took them to an empty waiting domed
stadium in Indianapolis.

Now, for that Green Bay Packers sort of socialism.
Packers fans don't worry about this type of thing so
much. Nowadays, a Wisconsin city of about 104,000
might seem a pretty unlikely place for a NFL team.
Not always that way. When the Packers, named after
blue-collar workers who packed things, joined the
league in 1921, the American Professional Football
Association, as it was then called, included teams
from Akron, Canton, Dayton, Evansville, Hammond,
Muncie, Rochester, Rock Island, and Tonawanda.
The main reason Green Bay was still around to win
the first two Super Bowls (and two more since) while
the others were all gone by 1930 is that when the
Packers experienced financial difficulties in 1923,
the team reorganized as a public corporation with
articles of incorporation stipulating that, should the
team ever be sold, all profit would go to a local
American Legion Post. As Zirin sees it, every fan
deserves this type of security.

He does underestimate fans' fickleness, though, and
the degree to which winning heals their wounds.
Given the 14 consecutive losing seasons Baltimore
Orioles owner Peter Angelos has presided over, Zirin
writes: "It will take more than a winning streak to
return the fans. That would be, as the saying goes,
like `giving CPR to a corpse.'" Yet on May 25 of this
year, 11,000 Oriole fans bought tickets on the night
of the game, setting a stadium record for walk-up
admissions. The team had finally started playing
well and the fans returned, even though Angelos
was still there.

Likewise, Zirin quotes a comedian who compares
the National Basketball Association's lowly Los
Angeles Clippers and the 16-time champion Lakers,
who happen to share the same playing arena: "The
Lakers' luxury box is prawns, caviar and opera
glasses while the Clippers stock Zantac, barf bags,
some good books, and cyanide." But guess what?
The Clippers acquired recent MVP Chris Paul to
pass the ball, and Blake Griffin to dunk it (Griffin
once dunked over a car in the league's slam dunk
competition - it was a Kia, if you're wondering) and
people started going for the Zantac; the Clippers
outdrew the Lakers at home this past season.

You won't find much comment on player salaries
here either. This is not surprising for a book
dedicated to the foibles of owners, and yet it seems
an obvious omission in such a sharp social critique
of professional sports in American life. There are
justifications, of course. Why pick on the highly
publicized athletes' salaries when we generally don't
have any idea what the owners actually make? Who
can name a single owner's "salary"? Remember how
upset Major League Baseball got when Los Angeles
Dodgers owner Frank McCourt had to open a Major
League team's books in his divorce proceedings?
That sort of thing is not done. His fate with the
league was sealed right then - even before he tried
to force the rest of baseball to follow suit. We can
perhaps make an educated guess as to owner
salaries, though. The last reported salary for
Commissioner Selig - $18.3 million in 2007 - and
the figures from the McCourt case suggest that a
$20 million annual take would not be unheard of for
team owners. And given that there are only about a
dozen baseball players making more than that, and
the players are the ones that people come to the
ballpark to see, you can understand how Zirin might
not want to focus on outrageous player salaries.
Besides, Luis Pujols's wife hadn't called the St.
Louis Cardinals' five-year, $130 million offer to her
husband an "insult" when Zirin was writing the
book.

As to what he did choose to write about, however,
he's certainly on the mark with his central
ownership question. And don't the owners know it!
Recognizing that the good example of the Packers
posed a threat to the "normal" owners, since 1960
the NFL has banned any non-profit organization
from buying into or starting a team. As for baseball,
when Joan Kroc tried to donate the Padres, which
she inherited from her McDonald's-founder
husband, Ray, to the city of San Diego, along with
$100 million, Major League Baseball nixed the deal.
(Kroc would later sell to traditional rich owners for
$75 million.)

And then there's the one about the Texan buying
the Liverpool soccer team - but I'm not going to tell
you everything in the book. What I will tell you is
that anyone who loves sports but hates team owners
is likely to find it one of the best on the topic since
Hunter Thompson's last shot.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate