Pride
08-22-2002, 09:28 AM
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=679&e=3&cid=679&u=/usatoday/20020822/cm_usatoday/4382270
Who needs baseball? Bring on the NFL
Thu Aug 22, 7:56 AM ET
Sandy Grady
I never thought it would come to this. I never imagined my response would be sheer relief when that baritone ''hypester'' in the National Football League television ad bellows, ''Are you ready for some football?''
• Get your career off to the right start
• Actors called to traverse the dark side
• Today in the Sky: Real-time airport weather, delays, and travel news
• Travel deals, news, and features straight to your inbox. Click here to sign up!
Yesssss.
If nothing else, the gazillionaire players and owners of big league baseball have done a marvelous sales job for the 2002 pro-football season. Compared with baseball's messy greedfest, the NFL is a paradise of sanity.
Now the baseball players may commit the lemming-like stupidity of going on strike Aug. 30. I say, who cares? Warm up those blitzes, post patterns and goal-line stands. Who needs Bud Selig when we have John Madden?
Look, I went down a long road with baseball. Hero-worshiped the minor leaguers in my hometown, Charlotte. Covered the big leagues when teams traveled by train and the grass was real. First time I walked into Philly's old Connie Mack Stadium, Robin Roberts and Don Newcombe were warming up, the field was a floodlit jewel, and I thought, ''Wow.'' Covered a dozen World Series and hung out with players from when they were making just $7,000 until the first millionaires. Even liked them.
But something has changed.
The secret of sports is a belief in fantasy. No matter how tough life may be, sports gives a fan a separate universe of heroics and drama. (Maybe that's why the most volatile, loyal fans come from gritty blue-collar towns.) It's like being engrossed in a season-long movie or novel, with the World Series as the last chapter: It may be fiction, but you gotta believe it matters.
Baseball, especially since the 1994 strike and this summer of greedy chaos, is managing to kill its own dream.
The Suits -- the lawyers, accountants, tycoons and negotiators -- have taken over. The action's in the boardrooms, not in the ball yards. And it's boring.
Who (except George Steinbrenner) cares whether baseball's ''luxury tax'' is X or Y percent?
Compared with the numbing detail of baseball's haggling, I'd rather read the collected speeches of Alan Greenspan ( news - web sites).
Do I blame the owners for this stupefying impasse?
You bet. They're the undisciplined egotists who can't resist bloating their payrolls on superstar salaries. Basically, they're asking the players, ''Please stop us before we spend again.''
And the players, terrified that their average $2.4 million pay won't keep rising, may be suicidally dumb enough to go on strike.
That would be a gift for pro football, already the faster, glitzier sport. The Super Bowl is the biggest TV (and betting) event of the year. Most NFL stadiums are sellouts on Sundays.
Meanwhile, baseball, despite the McGwire-Sosa-Bonds homer binge, is still recovering from its 1994 strike. A new ESPN poll found that only 13% said baseball was their favorite spectator sport compared with 21% for football.
Should we start calling baseball the National Past-Time?
Sure, I admit there are things to dislike about professional football. Watched on television, the games are an endless blur of beer ads and promotions for network sitcoms. The commentary by ex-jocks is monotony compared with the glory days of Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. Watch it live, the commercial timeouts break the flow of the games. But there's passion in the grandstands.
Baseball has steroids, contraction, an All-Star Game that laughably ends in an 11th-inning tie because they run out of pitchers, and endless money bickering,
No wonder pro football looks like a nirvana of stability. It has a real salary cap, real revenue sharing among teams, labor peace through 2007.
Pro football is cleaner: While baseball dithers over drug testing, the NFL already checks its players for steroids, androstenedione ( news - web sites) (which may have helped McGwire hit those homers) and the stimulant ephedra.
And the NFL has real suspense before the season starts about its eventual champion.
Not baseball. You could make a cautious bet that the 2002 World Series (if it's played) will be won by the Yankees, Braves or Diamondbacks -- especially the TV-wealthy Yankees. But in baseball's Poor vs. Rich class war, even the wildest dreamers in small-market towns such as Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Tampa Bay know there's no chance. (OK, the Minnesota Twins are a wondrous anomaly.)
In pro football, long shots New England, Baltimore and St. Louis have won the past three Super Bowls. Of 32 NFL teams, probably a dozen realistically think of themselves as Super Bowl contenders. All you need is a hot quarterback, chemistry and luck.
Are the rich toffs who run pro football smarter than the rich toffs who run baseball? After all, football had its own run of bitterness and strikes in the 1980s. But it shrewdly divvied up the TV pot among all teams and capped players' salaries at 62%-to-64% of a team's revenue. So a top NFL quarterback or running back makes less than $9 million a season -- enough for a Mercedes but hardly in the obscene class of Texas Ranger Alex Rodriguez's $21 million.
Sure, fans gripe that the NFL salary cap and free agency chase their favorite stars out of town. There'll never again be a team like the Pittsburgh Steelers, who won four Super Bowls with the same cast.
The difference?
The NFL has all-season drama, labor sanity, big-play glitter and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Baseball has Bud Selig, Don Fehr and 1,000 lawyers in a fiscal gabfest. With all of its faults, pro football doesn't let big money stifle the fans' dream.
My hunch is that baseball players won't be dumb enough to walk out. Would anybody care?
National disgust this time would be lasting. Baseball could go the way of The Saturday Evening Post, the Studebaker Lark and the Hula Hoop. For a new generation, there are too many high-tech distractions to stick with a slow 1890s sport mismanaged by rich fools.
Kill the fantasy, kill the game.
Sandy Grady, a former sports and political columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Who needs baseball? Bring on the NFL
Thu Aug 22, 7:56 AM ET
Sandy Grady
I never thought it would come to this. I never imagined my response would be sheer relief when that baritone ''hypester'' in the National Football League television ad bellows, ''Are you ready for some football?''
• Get your career off to the right start
• Actors called to traverse the dark side
• Today in the Sky: Real-time airport weather, delays, and travel news
• Travel deals, news, and features straight to your inbox. Click here to sign up!
Yesssss.
If nothing else, the gazillionaire players and owners of big league baseball have done a marvelous sales job for the 2002 pro-football season. Compared with baseball's messy greedfest, the NFL is a paradise of sanity.
Now the baseball players may commit the lemming-like stupidity of going on strike Aug. 30. I say, who cares? Warm up those blitzes, post patterns and goal-line stands. Who needs Bud Selig when we have John Madden?
Look, I went down a long road with baseball. Hero-worshiped the minor leaguers in my hometown, Charlotte. Covered the big leagues when teams traveled by train and the grass was real. First time I walked into Philly's old Connie Mack Stadium, Robin Roberts and Don Newcombe were warming up, the field was a floodlit jewel, and I thought, ''Wow.'' Covered a dozen World Series and hung out with players from when they were making just $7,000 until the first millionaires. Even liked them.
But something has changed.
The secret of sports is a belief in fantasy. No matter how tough life may be, sports gives a fan a separate universe of heroics and drama. (Maybe that's why the most volatile, loyal fans come from gritty blue-collar towns.) It's like being engrossed in a season-long movie or novel, with the World Series as the last chapter: It may be fiction, but you gotta believe it matters.
Baseball, especially since the 1994 strike and this summer of greedy chaos, is managing to kill its own dream.
The Suits -- the lawyers, accountants, tycoons and negotiators -- have taken over. The action's in the boardrooms, not in the ball yards. And it's boring.
Who (except George Steinbrenner) cares whether baseball's ''luxury tax'' is X or Y percent?
Compared with the numbing detail of baseball's haggling, I'd rather read the collected speeches of Alan Greenspan ( news - web sites).
Do I blame the owners for this stupefying impasse?
You bet. They're the undisciplined egotists who can't resist bloating their payrolls on superstar salaries. Basically, they're asking the players, ''Please stop us before we spend again.''
And the players, terrified that their average $2.4 million pay won't keep rising, may be suicidally dumb enough to go on strike.
That would be a gift for pro football, already the faster, glitzier sport. The Super Bowl is the biggest TV (and betting) event of the year. Most NFL stadiums are sellouts on Sundays.
Meanwhile, baseball, despite the McGwire-Sosa-Bonds homer binge, is still recovering from its 1994 strike. A new ESPN poll found that only 13% said baseball was their favorite spectator sport compared with 21% for football.
Should we start calling baseball the National Past-Time?
Sure, I admit there are things to dislike about professional football. Watched on television, the games are an endless blur of beer ads and promotions for network sitcoms. The commentary by ex-jocks is monotony compared with the glory days of Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. Watch it live, the commercial timeouts break the flow of the games. But there's passion in the grandstands.
Baseball has steroids, contraction, an All-Star Game that laughably ends in an 11th-inning tie because they run out of pitchers, and endless money bickering,
No wonder pro football looks like a nirvana of stability. It has a real salary cap, real revenue sharing among teams, labor peace through 2007.
Pro football is cleaner: While baseball dithers over drug testing, the NFL already checks its players for steroids, androstenedione ( news - web sites) (which may have helped McGwire hit those homers) and the stimulant ephedra.
And the NFL has real suspense before the season starts about its eventual champion.
Not baseball. You could make a cautious bet that the 2002 World Series (if it's played) will be won by the Yankees, Braves or Diamondbacks -- especially the TV-wealthy Yankees. But in baseball's Poor vs. Rich class war, even the wildest dreamers in small-market towns such as Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Tampa Bay know there's no chance. (OK, the Minnesota Twins are a wondrous anomaly.)
In pro football, long shots New England, Baltimore and St. Louis have won the past three Super Bowls. Of 32 NFL teams, probably a dozen realistically think of themselves as Super Bowl contenders. All you need is a hot quarterback, chemistry and luck.
Are the rich toffs who run pro football smarter than the rich toffs who run baseball? After all, football had its own run of bitterness and strikes in the 1980s. But it shrewdly divvied up the TV pot among all teams and capped players' salaries at 62%-to-64% of a team's revenue. So a top NFL quarterback or running back makes less than $9 million a season -- enough for a Mercedes but hardly in the obscene class of Texas Ranger Alex Rodriguez's $21 million.
Sure, fans gripe that the NFL salary cap and free agency chase their favorite stars out of town. There'll never again be a team like the Pittsburgh Steelers, who won four Super Bowls with the same cast.
The difference?
The NFL has all-season drama, labor sanity, big-play glitter and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Baseball has Bud Selig, Don Fehr and 1,000 lawyers in a fiscal gabfest. With all of its faults, pro football doesn't let big money stifle the fans' dream.
My hunch is that baseball players won't be dumb enough to walk out. Would anybody care?
National disgust this time would be lasting. Baseball could go the way of The Saturday Evening Post, the Studebaker Lark and the Hula Hoop. For a new generation, there are too many high-tech distractions to stick with a slow 1890s sport mismanaged by rich fools.
Kill the fantasy, kill the game.
Sandy Grady, a former sports and political columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.