Pink Football - Sports and Cancer

 I was watching the Seahawks and Patriots the other day, and I know I should have been yelling about the Seahawks’ pathetic passing game, but all I could notice were pink flashes of color from the pink shoes, gloves and towels worn by many of the players. To be honest the pink did not really go with the Seahawks blue, yellow and green color schemes, but the color did its job, it etched into the spectators the importance of fighting breast cancer and all cancers. I remembered this was breast cancer awareness month. Those streaks of pink changed the game for me.

Color plays a huge role in sports culture. Many colors, like Michigan’s maize and blue or the St. Louis Cardinals’ red, grow from tradition. Color provides a uniform for teams and a unifying symbol of identity and community for fans. College and professional stadiums and field houses present restless seas of a team’s color. People signal their loyalties and commonalities as well as antipathies with their color-coded jerseys and paraphernalia. People on the street nod to a fellow supporter and may frown at someone wearingenemy colors.

Professional and college teams carry this to astounding depths. The NFL presents the epitome of a profession that demands uniformity of color in marketing and team activities. Professional and collegiate athletics color code everything from pens to socks to jocks to uniforms to stationary. Cheerleaders, bands, coaches, players and senior staff all wear mandated colors.

Walking into an operations center of a successful college of professional sports franchise you will walk on color coordinated carpets past color coordinated walls with decorations, awards and color coordinated logos lining the walls. Coaches’ and administrator’s offices will sparkle with official sanctioned logos and mascot likenesses. My favorites are the Top Pot Seahawk donuts with green and blue sprinkles you can get at the games.

Color binds together the sport’s communities and nurtures an emblematic connection. It joins players, fans and coaches together as a common army, oops, I mean community, bound together to support, celebrate and sorrow together.

 I was so used to the multi-level attention to color schemes that the incongruous pink shoes, neon pink gloves or chin straps or wagging pink towels shocked me. But then that was the point, wasn't’ it?

The color pink has become linked to an idea of femininity in modern America. A cascade of pink covered us when our daughter was born! Yet pink it not a primary color. It is watered down red—the color of blood and life. This dilute red caught some of the power of red but thinned the color into something delicate and fragile, compare a pink rose to a blood rose. Shrouding women and female babies in pink could begin the process of inculcating a particular vision of how to be a woman. This pink vision never included being an athlete or competing in sports. So the paradoxical connection of pink and sports carries even more power.

Yet female athletes have coopted pink and turned it not into a camp color, but a vibrant sign of celebrating feminine possibility. Their pinks tend to be brash and neon and pop out rather than fade into a gauzy background.

Young women and the women’s movement have elevated pink to a symbol to unite all people to remember the victims of breast cancer and to promise to engage the fight against it. Breast cancer had grown into a silent epidemic. The silence manifests a tendency of American medicine to be blind to certain diseases of women and the poor. Now worldwide breast cancer alliances fight cancer using pink as their rallying point to raise awareness, raise money and raise common allies across gender lines.

The marketing genius of aligning pink with sport not only defies the past, but it channels the color into a new vision. This pink expands the realm where women can succeed as well as highlighting a once hidden disease, a disease so hidden many women were not aware of its danger nor how to search for and act upon it. Now groups and events from races for the cure to pink biker groups celebrate the color and cause.

Linking pink to athletics works because professional and college sports embody youth, physicality and health. These athletes personify the strength, risk-taking and immortality only the young and healthy can exhibit. Many of us watch them and admire and celebrate them as well as root for our teams. Inserting pink to remind us of cancer carries a special potency given the audience who seeks out sports.

Linking pink with sports turns stereotypes inside out. Yesterday I saw pink boxing gloves in the window of a store both pointing to boxing as a realm women have entered but also reminding people to take breast cancer and all cancer seriously.  The UW pink basketball uniforms are actually quite cool. The athletes enjoy wearing them not just as a symbolic statement but because they look good in pink.

I attended a UW volleyball game last weekend that celebrated breast cancer awareness month and got the full immersive power of this alignment. Both teams wore pink warm ups. Coaches wore pink shirts with the mandatory purple W logo. Ushers wore pink. Student athletes in the student athlete section wore robust pink T-shirts with big W on them. The cheerleaders, of course, sported pink pompoms. The crowd cheered the messages on cancer awareness flashing on the huge scoreboard. All the breast cancer survivors and later all cancer survivors as well as those connected to cancer victims and survivors stood to be recognized. All the visceral power of sport, community and pink came together to recognize the threat and celebrate the struggle.

The NFL players provide another type of jolt. Here are some of the strongest toughest and most macho symbols of American culture. Yet the NFL gave permission to individuals to violate the league’s obsession with uniformity and wear pink during this month to show solidarity with the cause and with women. Just seeing these robust men wear pink, proudly and clearly, and proclaim their support with a pink chinstrap or shoe or towel sends a message of support to the 40 million people watching the games. But more deeply, it demonstrates that archetypical athletic males can connect to pink and not fear it or the women it symbolizes. I may be blowing in the wind here, but I believe these symbolic actions matter over time to erode the boundaries of gender identity that football can sometimes seem to enshrine more than any other sport.

Pink uniforms, pompoms, cleats, chin straps, gloves, warm ups appropriate and expand the possibilities of the feminine; but it also awakens, reminds and unites us all that we share a common enemy in breast cancer and all cancers. 

Pink football: bring it on. 

The Failure of Informed Consent and the Football Brain Trauma Debate

The new football season looms before us. Olympic memories linger, but the countdown to football dominates sports radio and ESPN. Fans and media cannot wait for the game and the carnage. But before we jump in to enjoy the sport, let’s remember the shadow that hangs over every football player and game as well as our support of it.

Football can kill the soul of players.

Junior Seau, a NFL icon, shot himself in the chest in May. He joins three former professional football players who committed suicide in the last two years. Several were diagnosed after the fact with mental illness caused by brain damage related from repetitive head trauma. Seau’s brain has also been diagnosed as suffering from CSE a progressive disease resulting from repeated head trauma. It contributed to his erratic behavior and suicide.

Football kills the soul by destroying brain functioning. The brain suffers from the generation of webs of plaque in the brain that destroy neural communication and processing. These plaque entanglements seem to be caused by repetitive head injuries, mainly traumatic concussions. Repetitive impact alone may also do as much damage in creating the nodes of tau proteins that anchor these tangles. The tangles lock up neurons and disrupt the brain’s neural ability to communicate and sustain a bioelectrical balance.

In July 2012 over 3000 former players consolidated their law suit claiming the NFL “deliberately and fraudulently” withheld and discouraged knowledge about the damage football was doing to the brains of football players. The law suit reflects accumulating knowledge about the cognitive impacts of injury as well as a widespread and belated recognition that while football is a violent and dangerous game, its damage lay far deeper and more sinister than destroyed knees, brutalized ACLs, wrecked shoulders and crippled players late middle age.

I have written about this often. I talked of Achilles Revenge where athletes choose to risk their health for glory and wealth in exchange for physical pain. The brain trauma goes beyond physical pain. The neural damage undermines judgment and manufactures erratic emotional responses. Players can suffer from dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE induces depression, loss of memory, unpredictable emotional swings and aberrant decision-making. Player’s emotional and judgmental resources erode. The more we know the more we understand the issues may be underreported.

This erosion of judgment, emotional stability and resilience combines with the normal physical pain and status loss retired players face. The loss of their locker room camaraderie and support compounds this isolation. Roman Oben a 12-year veteran puts it this way, “they spend the rest of their lives being shadows of who they were at 25.”

The result?

The rash of suicides by retired football players augments the compelling evidence that a significant percentage of football players may struggle with declining cognitive limits and depression in rates beyond the regular population. After Jay Easterling killed himself with a handgun, his wife Mary Ann commented, “He felt like his brain was falling off…He was losing control. He couldn’t remember things from five minutes ago.” Earlier Dave Duerson had shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for further study.

No other sport spawns this level of suicide. Sometimes suicide can be contagious as a way out of the emotional and spiritual pain of watching your personality slip away and losing control of all you value. No one knows how many ex-players struggle with mental illness induced by the brain trauma. No one knows the causal pathways. No one knows much about it because the NFL worked hard to discredit any research in this area.

The country will not outlaw football. Many present and former players resent efforts to mitigate the violence and long-term harm. They represent the classic commitment psychology of someone who has invested in the trauma and identity of the sport. They experience this as a form of initiation for them and the sport. If they did it, so should the young players. A number of players and commentators have already attacked the new NFL contract that places strict limits upon the level of contact in camp to protect the long-term welfare of players. They bitterly complain that drawing down the level of violence limits the ability of young players to demonstrate their toughness and beat out veterans. Others just say, “I’d do it all again.” So the players’ law suit focuses upon informing players and not regulating the game.

This solution flows from the  free choice defense. The players and league want to ensure that the new draftees have adequate information about the threats. The players can make “informed” choice.

Let’s look at what this informed consent might look like. We have to ask a person to make a decision to risk potential loss of their personality when they are 22 years old. We need to remember that human begins tend to overestimate catastrophic consequences but underestimate small losses. People also tend to be over optimistic in their own projections about how they will avoid statistical dangers to themselves. The informed negotiation leading to the brain trauma deal might look like this:

Drafted Player (DP)

“I have a chance to live my dream. I got drafted! This is incredible.”

Advisor/Agent (AA)

“Fantastic. Now we can negotiate with the teams to get you're a contract that matches your slot.”

RP    “How soon can we start?”

AA   “I meet with the team in two days, but before I begin we need to talk about something that a recent settlement with the league mandates.”

DP    “Got it. What’s up?”

AA   “Well, I need to alert you to the fact that football can be dangerous to your health. Here is a list of the dangers. I also have a video you can watch.”

DP    “Come on man. Of course I know that. I have three surgeries to prove it. This is news?  Football is a violent and dangerous game, I know that.”

AA   “Well I need you to read this disclaimer and check the part of about brain trauma, dementia and compromised judgment.”

DP    “Yeah, I’ll read it, but I know this stuff. I’m not afraid of this. My bonus will cover it all. Besides, this stuff is a hundred years in the future.”

AA   “Well actually, it’s about 20 to 30 years in the future, but you are right, most of these injuries start to impact you in your late forties. Sadly Chris Henry suffered it when he was 26. I also want to remind you that we may need to set aside some funds for this just in case from your signing bonus or your first year.”

DP    “Look, this is stupid. I am 23. I will be fine and besides I owe it to my mom and friends to take care of them. I promised my mom a new house, and I want her out of where she lives. Man, I suffered for this, and I want my return. She deserves this. I can take care of the stuff later. I’ve got a lot of money. Right now, just get the money so I can take care of my family.”

AA   “I just want to be clear. Football is dangerous and brutal and violent. We both know that.  Well, the court settlement does give you the option of talking to some guys, watching videos or going to a panel to talk about how to think about these injuries and prepare for it.”

DP   “I know what I’m getting into. I have the scars on my knee and shoulder to prove it. Besides I’m a lineman, and I’ve never had a concussion so I’m not that worried about it.”

AA   “Well some doctors think it’s not about concussions, but it about repetition. A number of players have had serious brain issues without any real concussions.”

DP   “Ok, OK. I’ll think about it. But I’ll take the risk. This is my one shot, my one chance. Football is what got me here. I owe it to myself and to my family. Besides I’ve read the interviews. Most of the guys say they’d do it all again even if they have sore knees.”

AA   “Well, OK. But remember you have been duly notified as required by the terms of the court settlement.”

DP    “By the way, what do the guys who have suffered brain damage say about how they are handling it.”

AA   “Well it’s kind of hard to figure out.”

DP    “What?”

AA  “Well. You know for some of the guys. Well, you know. Well, it’s like this.”

DP    “What are you getting to? Come on, spit it out.”

AA   “Well. A lot of them are not compos mentis.”

DP    “Come on. I’ve got a degree, but I did not take French.”

AA   “Well they aren’t really all the able to talk about how they are doing. You see, well. You see. Well a couple are living with tubes in their throats and respirators. Some of them are not all that stable or coherent all the time.”

DP    “This is getting a little weird.”

AA   “Look I’m trying to help. Think of it this way. You get wealth, privilege, fun and status for awhile.”

DP    “Yeah. I know. That’s the whole point of this.”

AA   “Well the other side is. You potentially give them your soul.”

DP    “This is a little metaphysical man, are you sure you are OK?”

AA   “I just want you to know. Their wives do most of the talking.”

DP    “Well I read about some other guys who were big names like Seau and Easterboork who were struggling with this. What did they say?”

AA   “Well, they can’t say much. They committed suicide.”

DRP   “Your’e shitten me, man. Look man, this is getting us nowhere. What do you expect me to do, go manage a car rental office?    ---         This won’t happen to me. Let’s make this happen.”

So much for informed consent changing decisions of players.

Every one of us entering a career embarks on a path that will change us. We seldom know what our future self will look like when we enter a job world. Sometimes we discover that our path is destroying what we value in ourselves, and we change jobs or change careers. Sometimes ten years down the road we look in the mirror and no longer recognize the person we have become. 

Throughout our life we negotiate over the person we are and the person we are becoming. None of us really knows how we will end up, but we do know that the person we become will be is shaped by the work we do. No different with football, but the impact can be  a little more severe.

No person easily or rationally risks his or her personality and capacity to be a human decision maker. The core of our humanity lies in our ability to feel, think and shape our life; it depends upon our brain working. The stealthy soul death brought on the brain trauma induced by impacts condemn players to a living death, far beyond their imagination.

Expecting informed individual choice option to address the brain damage threat is an illusion. It makes as much sense as the older argument that coal miners made a free choice to enter the mines and accept black lung disease compared to unemployment. The solutions remain similar. The sport and unions need to continue aggressive and continued research and interventions to minimize the long-term damage. The other path should involve joint contributions to a fund to support later life victims of the brain damage and soul loss that no one should have to bargain away.

The odds are that individual players will not build up a fund. Mary Ann Easterling, whose husband committed suicide, summed it up, "I'd also like to see the NFL take care of the players that do have symptoms or could possibly have symptoms."

The league and union need to do this. It is the least they can do for the sentence that some players will consign themselves to.

Sports Ethics: Play Through Pain

“Pain is your friend.”  “Pain lets you know you are still alive.” “Pain is good.” So Master Chief yells at the beleaguered SEAL recruits in a great movie G.I. Jane.

This lesson, so central to military life, pervades the moral culture of athletic competition. Every athlete trying to be a warrior, and here athletics draws heavily from millennial old origins as preparation for life combat, must learn to fight through pain and to seek goals despite  hurt and obstacles. Playing through pain is a central moral tenet of sports. It exemplifies three virtues critical to athletic success: self-mastery; courage; sacrifice.

It does not matter the moment we tune into sports, but pain splays through the games and the wounded fall before us with startling regularity. If we were not so inured to the carnage, we would be appalled by our callousness. This last month twenty five and counting baseball starters are out for at least three months. Seven Boston Red Sox outfielders alone are on the disabilities list. The first week of NFL pro to-practice saw at least three players end their seasons before even doning pads.  Derek Rose writhed on the floor with an ACL and the Chicago Bulls saw their playoff hopes collapse. The great Junior Seau committed suicide, too much pain. The NFL continues to try to bring to justice the players who deliberately attempted to end the effective careers of other league players through injuring them, not just pain. And this is only one month! 

All this endless pain in sports and life means we should not forget master chief’s lessons.. Pain is our friend, because pain signals to the athlete that his or her body has stressed beyond the point where it can continue to function at full efficiency and still be healthy. Pain signals deeper injury, inflammation, nerve overload, neurotransmitters warning and adrenalin flooded emergencies. The body floods itself with chemicals to deal with pain; some seek to quiet the pain, others to kick up the level  of awareness or body performance for a short time to get through the pain. Sometimes the body narrows the focus of the mind and eyes to prepare for and overcome the danger that body announces.

The ability of an athlete to be aware of and monitor their pain is important. In every sport every athlete lives with attrition of physical skill and strength over a season. They realize there are times when as an athlete they need to play with the pain because it is bearable and will not detract form their performance level. There are moments when they need to demonstrate courage to their teammates and encourage them to also play with a reasonable level of pain out of loyalty to each other; the contagion of a leader, if he or she can do it, so can I.

Last year Washington State University started a redshirt freshman quarterback Connor Halliday against Utah. It was his first start after a stunningly successful first game the week before. He played on cloud nine full of energy and adrenal protection. During the game he took some hard hits and suffered contusions and injuries, nothing that seemed out of the ordinary for the normal pain and injury that football inflicts upon its players. Yet later that day he ended up int he emergency room with a lacerated liver. The WSU doctors had run all the regular and protocol based tests when he was injured and nothing came up. This type of injury remains internal and not immediately evident; its pain should have alerted the quarterback of the severity. But like so many young athletes in the thrall of competition and loyalty and cortisol induced protection from pain, Halliday did not recognize the signals or refused the listen to them; he was going to play come hell or hi water.  To understand the culture of sport and athletes, it is important to listen to what his coach said after complimenting him for  "unbelievably courageous outing." "He hung in there and took hits and threw the ball under duress and pain. I'm very proud of his toughness and grit."

Yet even bearable pain may be a reason to leave the field. First, as in the case of the young quarterback, it may be the tip of an extensive set of damages not yet fully unfolded. It may be the warning signal that the body is pushing limits and catastrophic failure is shortly to occur. Playing on may intensify injuries or magnify the range of the loss. Secondly, even a bearable injury can detract from performance. It may be that a player hurts her or his team by staying on the field as an act of courage or self-mastery. Yet this important point is often missed and when Jay Cutler left the field of play for this reason the NFL's professional football semi-finals, he was vilified.

Pain serves a survival function and as an early warning system to people about the need to protect and attend to their body. It alerts athletes that worse is on the way if they keep pressing against the signals of the body. The young quarterback could have destroyed his life.

Pain manifests as a real physiological phenomena exhibited by neural and chemical responses. But pain is also experienced subjectively, and many persons have different responses to the same physical impact; they read their body differently. Individuals can be trained to deal with higher levels of pain, physical or mental, over time. Dealing with high levels of pain can be learned, and levels of pain that would paralyze a person at the beginning of training can be tolerated and functioned through later.

People experience pain subjectively, and the classic medical scales ask patients to rate pain 1-10. In real life, people might talk of mild or unbearable. It might be stabbing or throbbing or intermittent. It might explode or linger and thrum. The scaling and different manifestations make diagnosing and living with pain an art, not a science.

Sometimes the pain recedes because the pain initially signaled a level of muscle, vascular or pulmonary performance that the sport required pushing past. Pushing past meant experiencing the braying complaints of lungs, muscles and mind as the athlete learns to develop higher levels of endurance, strength or odd skills that require unique vascular and muscle specializations. The capacity of the body to function without hurting itself grows with practice and strength.

At other times the pain simply reflects bodily disorder and breakdown. The picture of Curt Schilling with blood flowing from a bone sticking through his foot as he pitches the Red Sox to a World Series win exemplifies the play through pain mystique and myth and imperative of sports. Jack Youngblood finishing a football game with a broken leg also ranks in the pantheon.

The key to remember is that  playing through pain has serious short and long term costs. First, pain distracts the athlete. It takes indirect concentration and focus to keep the pain at bay, and this distracts from utter complete presence to the task at hand. Second, the pain diminishes actual physical performance and limits physical actions. When a player is injured, they can often keep playing with adrenalin and team loyalty and support holding them together. But once on the sideline the adrenaline falls, the contagious strength of a huddle falters and the full measure of pain explodes and debilitates the player. The next time they go out, the deterioration of performance becomes obvious.

Finally, pain’s early warning nature signals later cost. Players who keep playing through the pain like a torn meniscus just tear the meniscus apart until they play bone on bone. Players with a ripped muscle continue to fray the muscle or micro-fracture grows into a greater break in the bone. Players compensate on the field and in compensating put excessive stress on other unprepared bones and muscle and end up multiplying injuries. The longer the player plays through the pain, the longer the healing and the greater the possibility of more injury and hence even longer healing. In my world of college athletes, the most common medical reason for waivers after major immediate injuries like ACL or broken bones involves players coming back too early, not giving their injury or body time to fully heal.

It makes perfect sense to play through certain types of pain. The accumulated aches, pains, strains, twists and bruises of a season nag at performance and harass a player’s focus. Good athletes know their own bodies well. They usually know when their body has reached its limits. Good athletes, like good professionals, learn to master these physical pains. They also learn to master and play through the mental pains that arise from daily life that ensnare daily suffering or worries about family or child or finances or breakups or friends. Playing through these pains mirrors a primary moral requirement of life.

The legendary status of playing through pain deserves its moral status. To do this humans manifest honor, strength of will, loyalty to goal and team. These are admirable traits and deserve praise. So modern athletes will “power through.”

But we have learned that more often than not playing through the pain of major injuries or threatening injuries makes no sense for athlete or team either in short run or long run. This is especially true for younger athletes who do not have the fine grained sense of their bodies or a well developed sense of self-preservation. This is why college and high school athletics must have independent and empowered doctors on the field to stop the athletes and stop the coaches when they prefer to risk the Achilles Choice that I have often discussed  to seek glory and victory.

The sacrifice of playing through pain makes little moral sense for young or college athletes. Players and doctors know this, even if coaches regularly forget it.

A Tale of Three Sports & their Unions-Part 1 & 2

Professional sports leagues require unions. Only a voluntary contractual agreement with organized players permits the apparatus of modern professional sports. Common apparel deals and common pool distributions as well as salary caps, required minimum expenditures on salaries and revenue sharing all need these agreements to protect a league from anti-trust challenges. The contracts permit drafts, compensation limits and trades to occur without restraint of trade challenges. Modern professional sport leagues deploy these devices to several vital goals:1)guarantee profit and return on investment; 2) maintain some competitive balance across big and small market teams; 3) police drug use; 4) give bad teams a chance to become better and construct balance competition over time. Despite each owners desire to win at all costs, they have a joint interests to steward steward a profitable sport with high quality games and competitive hopes for teams and fans.

 

Despite the central role of unions and their continuing and unique power, two labor negotiations broke down in acrimony—one lead the union to dissolve and players to sue the league, the other has lead to an impasse that may lose the season. Baseball, on the other hand, with little fanfare, just did a “handshake” agreement to extend labor peace to 20 years. I think these different outcomes flow from both the culture created between owners and players and the structure of incentives the contracts focused upon. In particular football and basketball narrowed in on a zero sum view of revenue tied to salary caps while baseball used luxury taxes and revenue sharing to address the chasm between small and large market teams.

Most team owners are unwaveringly entrepreneurial and aggressively libertarian in their politics. They hate having a strong union. In addition they tend to be very personally invested in the status and fate of their teams. This resistance coupled with periodic attempts to break the unions have blighted professional sports with thirty years of lockouts, strikes and bitter recrimination, reaching its height in the disastrous baseball 1997 seven month baseball strike that lead to a cancelled World Series or hockey losing an entire season in 2004-2005.

All professional sports are afflicted by the trend of large market owners buying up the best talent. Left on their own most sports would degrade to permanent oligarchies with permanent winners and losers and very frustrated and lost fans. It would also degrade the talent competition where one small group of teams would regularly trounce others based upon bought talent. Many of the union authorized mechanisms on revenue and drafts are to protect owners from destroying their sport through the dynamics of inequality in revenue as how to allocate costs among players.

In the last seven months the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had their collective bargain agreements expire. The NFL involved a four-month lock out, ugly negotiations and recriminations and immense public pressure to settle. The NBA negotiations have imploded with the NBA verging on a lost season. Baseball, which has the longest and most bitter history, has a handshake agreement to put a new agreement in place without a lockout or strike four months before the start of spring training.

Why the difference? All the negotiations involved complex and unique aspects but the chasms exist over percentage of revenue dedicated to owners and players as well as devices such as salary caps and luxury taxes to save owners from themselves and sustain some competitive balance and quality product for fans and media.

What interests me is that two sports along with hockey have used salary caps to address the issue of escalating salaries and competitive equity. To me this has always made sense, and it drives me batty that baseball has never used one. Baseball permits oligarchs to dominate talent by letting teams develop players and then the oligarchs like Boston, Philadelphia and New York buy that talent when they become free agents. The irony is that the two leagues with salary caps have generated two different economic and competitive cultures that lead to the labor chaos. Yet baseball has eschewed the rational approach, but evolved this deeper peace and even a common venture model.

While unions are dying everywhere in the United States, they thrive in professional sports because of the monopoly and monopsony of the leagues and the very limited and highly skills population from which players develop. The contacts also insulate the enterprise from many anti-trust and restraint of trade charges. So why the immense differences in outcomes of the last three negotiations?

The issue driving owners remains as always maximizing profit, long term investment and maximizing their freedom and status from being owners. Given whom the owners are, they strongly prefer not to have unions or long-term agreements with their employees.

As an example, the bitterness and contractual brinksmanship in football makes the least sense. Professional football has become the most popular and profitable professional sports enterprise in the United States. If owners are to be believed, only two teams are losing money.  Attendance and contracts rise yearly. The Super Bowl like March Madness has permuted into a cultural institution. The major device to generate quality of fan interest and quality of product has been a percentage split of revenue with players and a relatively hard salary cap.

With no guaranteed salaries, the football teams can seem to pay outlandish salaries but guaranteed salaries mean little. The real money has migrated to extremely high rookie bonuses and singing bonuses. This in turn softened the salary cap considerably. This hypothetical equality is augmented by some marginal revenue sharing to prop up smaller market teams who have trouble even reaching the salary cap minimum, but more than a few teams, as in baseball have not even spent their revenue sharing money on talent or salaries.

Part II will examine how the history and incentive approach influenced the approach and outcomes of these three labor negotiations.

Part II

So how did an economically and media successful enterprise like professional football get dragged to the abyss and almost lose its season. Really bad negotiating tactics, animosity and mistrust between the negotiating teams hurt. The players believe correctly that they play the most dangerous and life threatening sport in the world besides boxing. They resent the owners cavalier cover-ups and drive for money by piling on more games at the risk of their health. The owners seemed totally deaf to these concerns driving the enmity. The real drive of the owners grew from a small group of very powerful owners who wanted to change the share split with players to maximize their large investments.

This should have been easy to resolve. The economic policies distributed playoff teams far and wide as well as guaranteeing that many unsuccessful teams could turn themselves around within one to two years. Parity in playoff access had become the norm in the NFL; it worked and inspired fanatical fan and media support. Despite all this and very strong incentives to settle peacefully, the culture of animosity and resentment of players and owners and power of the hard line owners lead to the four month lockout and a new contract at the last minute.

The players actually gained considerable advantages around health and safety issue with limits on practice and full pad time and new pensions for older players. The owners gained a more friendly percentage distribution but had to build in requirements that teams that receive revenue sharing must spend a very high percentage on salaries rather than use for profit and starve their talent pool. The salary cap remained harder than before. More  limits upon rookie compensation will lead to more rational risk spending and increase the money balance to veterans. It is not ot a bad deal that could have been struck much earlier. It was worked out after bitter negotiations that reaffirmed a culture of antagonism and rogue owners till wishing unions would disappear.

The fact that the unions did use their Armageddon play and they did disband to challenge the ownership and competitive balance structure shocked everyone, including the players. It emboldened the NBA players, and cast a shadow upon the very similar but different negotiations of the NBA.

The NBA is a mess compared to the NFL. Assuming you can ever believe owners, it claims 22 teams of 30 lost over 300 million dollars. The league had steadily lost cachet, and media interest and attendance had edge downward for a decade with a slight blip last year. The incipient pro soccer league actually passed the NBA in per game attendance. The talent level remained superb, the skill level mediocre, and the too long season and grotesque playoff schedule where half the teams make it diminishes mid season games to the point of meaninglessness. The quality of play reflected it.

The NBA’s soft cap with too many exceptions had become nonsensical only really affecting young players. The league had developed salary ratios of 3 or 4 to 1 despite a cap. Unlike the NFL, the championships remained clustered within a small number of teams with mini-dynasties. The endless playoffs at the end of an insignificant and low TV rated season, generated little interest until the very end. The NBA desperately needs a hard cap or strong revenue sharing to ensure both a quality product and some reasonable level of profits, otherwise the cycle will continue. The losses, the bitterness, the off field culture of the league heightened already bitter anger between the two sides, and neither was willing to compromise despite being well within a ball park. In negotiating terms they had hardened their positions rather than looking to their interests. Unlike the NFL where calls for President Obama’s intervention rang out, very little public pressure arose to demand a settlement. For many folks the NBA season could disappear and no one would notice or care.

The NBA has another huge problem. For many fans, college basketball and March Madness provided an easy substitute. If the NBA did not play, it hardly mattered to many basketball fans because from November through March, they could watch passionate and interesting basketball with far better TV distribution than the NBA has. This substitute effect for the NBA reflects rising college ratings and interest along side slowly declining NBA attendance and wide spread indifference.  The NBA culture and negotiations the focus upon zero sum issues and a strong substitute mean the league and players are making themselves irrelevant.

Baseball has had the longest and worst history including a cancelled world series, a nullified reserve clause and collusion actions. Yet this month a new contract will be signed with little fanfare or brittleness. In fact, baseball over the last twenty years has evolved into something resembling a partnership arrangement rather than the adversarial relation of the other sports.

Much of this grows from the abiding fan loyalty and comfort with the sine wave progress of teams and seasons. It grows because baseball essentially owns uncontested market territory from April through September. It grows from a remarkably successful economic model that generates profits, limited but effective revenue sharing from luxury taxes and stable or increasing attendance even as baseball has sunk into the shadow of football in terms of sports interest and wealth.

I wonder how much of this evolves from baseball not having a salary cap and living with incredible inequality in expenditures among teams. Maybe the lack of cap and guaranteed expenditure percentages displace the negotiations in a way that enables them to occur without being seen as zero sum games. I think the lack of a cap but very powerful luxury taxes permits the rich to spend freely but at the same time pay to subsidize others. This softens the libertarian and don't tread on me beliefs of many of the owners. Maybe a league that almost destroyed itself in 1997 and permitted itself to be humiliated by drug scandals collectively knew it could not afford the conflict.

Baseball moves much more slowly than football or basketball in talent development and team transformation. This leads owners to a longer-term view to begin with. But paradoxically baseball has had championships distributed across the widest array of teams of any sport, far more than NBA and more than the NFL.

This distribution of championships should not occur but it does for two odd reasons. First, baseball teams draft college players or invest in international or high school players and can keep them under professional contract for six years. This means that most teams keep players until their late twenties. The problem with baseball occurs when the rich teams simply buy up the best players from smaller market teams.

The catch and irony is that these rich teams must now give six to seven year contracts to players in their early thirties or late twenties, a totally absurd risk calculation. The average players peak years are 23-31, after that they steadily and and inexorably decline in skill and production. This means the rich teams are locking into huge contracts for two to four years of peak performance while the other teams got five years of peak performance years at much less money. This has resulted in older and slower rich teams who perform far more erratically than their salaries would suggest because of the age and long term contract factor. At the same time the sheer inequality has driven teams to be more innovative in player evaluation and scouting to offset these differences.

Oddly enough the bitter history seems to have generated a sense of partnership.This has been augmented by their Commissioner actually learning from past failures rather than magnifying them like basketball's David Stern.  It leads to a “handshake” contract but also mutual willingness to address issues like signing bonuses and earlier availability for arbitration as well as moving teams from leagues or adding an extra wild card team. It also leads both sides to realize the integrity of the enterprise depends upon aggressive testing and to create cutting edge technology and requirements to test for human growth hormone.This supplements mandates that players must now wear a new helmet to protect them from 100 mph fastballs.  Both sides realize they have vested interest in the reputation and physical integrity of the sport.

I think the fact the baseball achieves most of their competitive balance goals through luxury taxes rather than caps with exceptions makes the negotiations less bitter. The powerful and personally invested owners do have more freedom but they pay a heavy cost of up to 75 to 100 percent tax when they go over the agreed upon limits. The issues do not feel like zero sum games but rather permit owners to act if they are willing to pay the costs. This will now be extended to address the issues of huge rookie costs that are hurting everyone. The luxury tax money then gets redistributed. I don’t like it but the logic has worked to produce competition and balance when it should not.

Three sports. Two wars, one reached a treaty based upon the sheer money both would lose; one is on the verge of imploding for a decade over embittered relations and an economic model that does not work. One lives in hard-nosed comity because they learned their lesson and has made an incentive and penalty economic system that should not work but actually produce real competition. The culture ensnaring the two sides and the focus of economic relations had as much to do with these outcomes as the real issues involved.

A Tale of Three Sports and their Unions-Part 1

Professional sports leagues require unions. Only a voluntary contractual agreement with organized players permits the apparatus of modern professional sports. Common apparel deals and common pool distributions as well as salary caps, required minimum expenditures on salaries and revenue sharing all need these agreements to protect a league from anti-trust challenges. The contracts permit drafts, compensation limits and trades to occur without restraint of trade challenges. Modern professional sport leagues deploy these devices to several vital goals:1)guarantee profit and return on investment; 2) maintain some competitive balance across big and small market teams; 3) police drug use; 4) give bad teams a chance to become better and construct balance competition over time. Despite each owners desire to win at all costs, they have a joint interests to steward steward a profitable sport with high quality games and competitive hopes for teams and fans.

 

Despite the central role of unions and their continuing and unique power, two labor negotiations broke down in acrimony—one lead the union to dissolve and players to sue the league, the other has lead to an impasse that may lose the season. Baseball, on the other hand, with little fanfare, just did a “handshake” agreement to extend labor peace to 20 years. I think these different outcomes flow from both the culture created between owners and players and the structure of incentives the contracts focused upon. In particular football and basketball narrowed in on a zero sum view of revenue tied to salary caps while baseball used luxury taxes and revenue sharing to address the chasm between small and large market teams.

Most team owners are unwaveringly entrepreneurial and aggressively libertarian in their politics. They hate having a strong union. In addition they tend to be very personally invested in the status and fate of their teams. This resistance coupled with periodic attempts to break the unions have blighted professional sports with thirty years of lockouts, strikes and bitter recrimination, reaching its height in the disastrous baseball 1997 seven month baseball strike that lead to a cancelled World Series or hockey losing an entire season in 2004-2005.

All professional sports are afflicted by the trend of large market owners buying up the best talent. Left on their own most sports would degrade to permanent oligarchies with permanent winners and losers and very frustrated and lost fans. It would also degrade the talent competition where one small group of teams would regularly trounce others based upon bought talent. Many of the union authorized mechanisms on revenue and drafts are to protect owners from destroying their sport through the dynamics of inequality in revenue as how to allocate costs among players.

In the last seven months the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had their collective bargain agreements expire. The NFL involved a four-month lock out, ugly negotiations and recriminations and immense public pressure to settle. The NBA negotiations have imploded with the NBA verging on a lost season. Baseball, which has the longest and most bitter history, has a handshake agreement to put a new agreement in place without a lockout or strike four months before the start of spring training.

Why the difference? All the negotiations involved complex and unique aspects but the chasms exist over percentage of revenue dedicated to owners and players as well as devices such as salary caps and luxury taxes to save owners from themselves and sustain some competitive balance and quality product for fans and media.

What interests me is that two sports along with hockey have used salary caps to address the issue of escalating salaries and competitive equity. To me this has always made sense, and it drives me batty that baseball has never used one. Baseball permits oligarchs to dominate talent by letting teams develop players and then the oligarchs like Boston, Philadelphia and New York buy that talent when they become free agents. The irony is that the two leagues with salary caps have generated two different economic and competitive cultures that lead to the labor chaos. Yet baseball has eschewed the rational approach, but evolved this deeper peace and even a common venture model.

While unions are dying everywhere in the United States, they thrive in professional sports because of the monopoly and monopsony of the leagues and the very limited and highly skills population from which players develop. The contacts also insulate the enterprise from many anti-trust and restraint of trade charges. So why the immense differences in outcomes of the last three negotiations?

The issue driving owners remains as always maximizing profit, long term investment and maximizing their freedom and status from being owners. Given whom the owners are, they strongly prefer not to have unions or long-term agreements with their employees.

As an example, the bitterness and contractual brinksmanship in football makes the least sense. Professional football has become the most popular and profitable professional sports enterprise in the United States. If owners are to be believed, only two teams are losing money.  Attendance and contracts rise yearly. The Super Bowl like March Madness has permuted into a cultural institution. The major device to generate quality of fan interest and quality of product has been a percentage split of revenue with players and a relatively hard salary cap.

With no guaranteed salaries, the football teams can seem to pay outlandish salaries but guaranteed salaries mean little. The real money has migrated to extremely high rookie bonuses and singing bonuses. This in turn softened the salary cap considerably. This hypothetical equality is augmented by some marginal revenue sharing to prop up smaller market teams who have trouble even reaching the salary cap minimum, but more than a few teams, as in baseball have not even spent their revenue sharing money on talent or salaries.

Part II will examine how the history and incentive approach influenced the approach and outcomes of these three labor negotiations.