It is the sort of time Kipling had in mind when he wrote “The Gods of the Copybook Headings:”
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social progress began:
That the dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.
Surveying the Carnage
It isn't quite that bad for the National Basketball Association. But it's getting there. And the people who run the NBA are either obtuse or deceiving themselves in the hopes that they can deceive the rest of us; especially those of us who were once fans but would now just as soon turn off the television and spend Sunday afternoon figuring our taxes. Tom Daschle, trying to convince you that you are sending the fair and proper amount to the government, even when it can't spend it all, has an easier sell than David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, who will enter negotiations soon for a new television contract.
The last contract, signed four years ago, was for slightly more than $,2.5 billion. Since then, the number of regular season viewers on network television has declined by 38%. Those are Dr. Koop, Priceline, Pet.com numbers.
Still, as he surveys the carnage, Stern blithely tells the Wall Street Journal that ratings are…well, overrated. Which sounds sort of like what those investment gurus were saying about profits last year. Old way of thinking, you know. Why shouldn't you buy stock in companies that don't make any money and, similarly, why shouldn't NBC spend billions to broadcast games nobody wants to watch?
Symptoms, Not Causes
It's the new paradigm, right? You've got games that aren't very compelling played by athletes who aren't very appealing. What viewer wouldn't stay home to watch that and what TV executive wouldn't pay billions to broadcast it?
“We're actually feeling pretty good in this post-lockout, post-Jordan era,” Stern says. Which sounds like your broker telling you to double up on Amazon.
It's undeniable that Michael Jordan's retirement hurt the NBA but, you wonder, did anyone think he was going to play forever? And a strike by millionaire players who complained in the press about how hard it was to keep up with the payments on the Lamborghini without a regular paycheck coming in…that wasn't exactly great for the NBA's image. But Stern's remark, which implicitly assigns all the NBA's woes to the departure of Jordan and the foul odor left by the strike misses the point. Those are symptoms; not causes.
Michael Jordan was a great basketball player (probably still is), maybe the best ever, and he made buckets of money. It is unlikely that anyone in the world thought he was overpaid. But the age of Jordan was not just about Jordan. There were some other pretty good players out in the league. Guys named Bird and Magic and Malone and Barkley. And even Jordan, remember, couldn't win all by himself. Before the team brought in some players who could compliment his game, the Bulls were also-rans. Jordan was the star but if you double teamed him, he would kick it out to Paxson or Kerr for three and he played defense like he played offense. Like it was part of what they were paying him to do; like not doing it would be unprofessional and worse. If, indeed, anything could be worse.
The Taste of the Young Male
Today's players are different. The game they play is different. They may be as gifted athletically as Jordan. They could even be more gifted, which just makes the point about his superiority as a player. He played a far better game with the same gifts.
This begins to sound like the old lament about how much better things were in the old days. But, the old days are the only days to which we can compare the new days. And when you make the comparison, these days don't come out very well.
What made the NBA such a hot ticket over the last 20 or 30 years — the ascendancy of the game began before Jordan — was a sense that somehow the game was right for the times. This was the thinking fan's game. The players were smart, the coaches were smart, the teams played smart. People liked to get together on Sunday for bloody marys and basketball. Fans of the great Knicks teams loved them for their intelligence and the way the individuals — Bradley, Monroe, Frazier, Reed, and Debusschere — fused their own personalities and style of play into something organic that was far greater than the sum of the parts and that had its own distinct personality that matched up wonderfully against, say, the Lakers. This was true of the Pistons with Isiah Thomas; the Celtics of the Bird era and, certainly, Jordan's Bulls.
Stars were important and inevitable but teams carried individuals to glory. Today, individuals seem to compete for slots on the “Plays of the Day” segment of ESPN's SportsCenter. Detractors of the game like to point to loutish behavior among its stars and they have a pretty easy time coming up with fresh evidence, police blotters being part of the public record. But the NBA has its good citizens, like Tim Duncan and Grant Hill, as well as lots of players who are just athletes and human beings and respond, as most humans do, to the incentives.
Somewhere along the way, the exhibitionist, in-your-face, taunting, petulant style of play was held up as the way to glory and tall money. And TV bought into the idea that this is what the young male demographic was looking for. Anyone who hitches his fate to the taste and intelligence of the young male deserves whatever he gets and in this case, it seems to be both bad basketball and lower ratings.
Basketball is the latest sports product to grovel at the feet of the young male demographic. The NBA will never be able to match the XFL in vulgarity. And until it can once again provide fans with good games between interesting teams — a sense of both narrative and character — its ratings will continue to slide.
The NBA suits, like Stern, may insist that the league's lack of star power is the source of the problem, but they should remember that even a star needs a good part. And these days, the basic NBA script is a dog that makes Ishtar look like art.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online.)
