Generally, when it comes to sports owners pleading poverty every time they have to renegotiate with players, I am completely unsympathetic. The “always side with labour over bosses” rule is never stronger than when one is talking about pro sports, because without the players there would literally be no product, and sports owners are some of the worst examples of management crying poverty that there ever have been – where their franchises have not become profitable and ridiculously appreciated in value over time (particularly in an era where they can very easily blackmail communities into handling much of their expenses), it is usually because of mismanagement on a scale that is truly ludicrous (cf. the Maloof brothers, owners of the Sacramento Kings, who have turned a traditionally profitable small-market team with a crazy-passionate fanbase and a city willing to help pay for an arena into a neverending disaster) and even then mismanagement is no guarantee that the franchise will not continue to be profitable anyway.

Ridiculous salaries? The teams are making the money, and the players are the reason the teams are making the money; really, the salaries are much more justifiable than the fact that the owners in most leagues usually end up taking about half of all the money the teams make on the basis that they own the team brands and pay the cheerleaders and such. LeBron James has the league maximum contract and, based on his personal fanbase, brand power, ability to help a team compete and everything else that comes with being the best basketball player in the world, he is widely regarded as being underpaid.¹

But LeBron is underpaid not because he does not have a maximum contract, but because other players – like Rudy Gay or Joe Johnson, for example – have maximum contracts as well. If Rudy Gay is worth $14 million per year, then LeBron must comparatively be worth much more than that – or so the argument goes. Of course, you can as easily argue that Gay and Johnson² are overpaid rather than LeBron being underpaid – but this only works if you accept that the salary cap determines actual maximum player value, rather than being, oh, a totally artificial construct that owners demanded long ago in order to maintain the illusion of parity between small market and large market teams and to give them bargaining power over players.

But why, then, are the likes of Gay and Johnson paid so much? The answer is a bit more than “because teams can.” Rather, it is because every free agent signing or contract extension that rewards a good-but-not-superstar-level player with a maximum contract – Gay, Johnson, A’Mare Stoudemire, Deron Williams, et cetera – is done because a team wants to win. NBA players – and pro athletes playing in team sports generally – chase two things: money and prestige. Money is self-explanatory. Prestige is playing in large markets, playing for an organization that wins titles regularly – your Celtics, your Yankees, your Man Uniteds – and winning titles. This means that franchises with a track record of success (and let’s be honest: these are usually, but not always, large-market franchises, because they have more money and because top players want to play in big cities where there are more fun things to do and you will be more famous) will always have more ability to sign good players than small-market teams that have no history of sustained competitive success.

Which means that small-market teams – or teams like the Toronto Raptors, who aren’t technically a small-market team, but who get treated like one because it’s Canada – feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have to overspend in order to get quality players to stay in their town. This is not exactly true, but it’s true enough in a league where two teams (Boston and the Lakers) have won about half of the championships. So GMs overspend on players to create the sense that they are where The Good Players Go To Play so they can sign some more players – who also end up being overpaid when GMs try this strategy. And sometimes this strategy works (the Miami Heat). And sometimes it does not (the Raptors).

And I have been trying to figure out how the league might stop doing this, but I am hamstrung in two respects. Firstly, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma – if one team says “WE will overpay the good players” and nobody else does, then they will get their pick of the best players and while they might not be the best team, they will be very good and competitive for a few years (which is the point because GMs don’t stick around a team forever anyway and they want their tenure to be successful) and if they’re very good and competitive for a few years then the odds that players will begin to view them as a good place to play will increase. (It happened to the Houston Rockets, and Houston the city is, well, kinda shitty.) And there’s not a good way to rule around prisoner’s dilemmas that I can think of.

And second, like I said – this problem exists because of an artificial construct on player salaries that the bosses use as rhetorical and real leverage whenever they like, so I am not particularly inclined to want to solve it in the first place.

1. Since a lot of nerds read this blog I am anticipating the usual bunch of “well I don’t even WATCH sports and I don’t GET sports” comments. Dear nerds: there is quite possibly nothing more fucking annoying than that in the entire world, except when you are misogynistic and/or homophobic. So don’t do it. Don’t do the other bad things either. [↩]
2. Yes, yes, get your snickering fit over with now. [↩]

Since the thing that was previously worst in the world was a commercial, it is only fair that one such also be the best:

“Yeah… cool guy.”

But then Foot Locker released the even better alternate version:

DOPE.

Over at Torontoist, I participated in a roundtable discussion about the Toronto Raptors. And then, of course, the Raptors promptly won a game, presumably out of spite.

This is my second year playing fantasy basketball and it hits the sweet spot for me in terms of fantasy sports – less rigorous and attention-demanding than fantasy baseball¹ (where everybody plays almost every day and roster decisions tend to be insane in terms of amount of attention required), and less annoying than fantasy football (both because I don’t like football, and because fantasy football people have a tendency to be really, really irritating about fantasy football, whereas fantasy B-ballers in my experience tend to recognize the essential absurdity of what they are doing and are willing to make riskier choices in the name of fun).

Anyway, this is to say that the one MetaFilter-based league I’m in right now is, I think, not quite enough to whet my fantasy B-ball appetite. Therefore, I have created a second league for MGK readers (and well, whoever really). I’ve capped it at 16 teams but we can go with as few as 8. Head-to-head weekly matchups, scoring by categories (free throw percentage, field goal percentages, points, threes, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, and turnovers), live draft (tentatively for Saturday at noon EST).

League is here. To join go here – league number is 157832, password is “mgkisthebestest”. So… come on! Lots of room!

UPDATE 11:00 A.M. EST: Half full already!

UPDATE #2, 4:00 P.M. EST: We’re at twelve teams and I have locked it so as to make sure we don’t have an uneven number of teams going into the draft. If you want to play and aren’t in yet, email me (mgk@mightygodking.com), and when I have a set of two people who want to play I will send both of you invites.

1. Discussion of the apathetic failure of the previous MGK-based fantasy baseball league is OFFICIALLY DISCOURAGED. [↩]

Watch this compilation of finishing moves from All-Japan Pro Wrestling in the early-to-mid-1990s without wincing at least once and you will impress me:

What’s interesting about this to me is that All-Japan’s death rate (and it is sad to say that death rate in wrestling is something that can be quantified) is so low. There’s only one guy in this video who directly died as a result of wrestling, Mitsuhara Misawa (green and white trunks). [EDIT: In comments, Rev rightly points out that Gary Albright died of a heart attack mid-match in 2000, so: two, not one.] Terry Gordy died of a blood clot, Doug Furnas of complications from Parkinson’s and Steve “Dr. Death” Williams from throat cancer, but none of those can really be blamed on their wrestling careers. All of the rest of the people in this video are still quite alive and in many cases are still actively wrestling, and this is video from almost twenty years ago where every other move looks like they’re actively trying to break the other guy’s neck. This, I think, speaks very well of Japanese wrestling’s training culture.

VIA THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE
Lausanne, Switzerland

FIVE RINGS: Your suggestion to revise J.R.R. Tolkien’s stanza describing the Rings of Power from his Lord of the Rings series by adding the line “Five to the International Olympic Committee, who think they’re so goddamn special, la dee dah” was, to say the least, terribly impolitic. Also, it does not scan well.

POPEYE: We understand that you are a fan of Popeye, but Popeye was created by E.C. Segar, an American, and is currently owned by an American company. Really, Popeye has nothing to do with Britain at all and is not appropriate for the opening ceremony, even if it would be exciting to watch him fight Aslan (whom we believe is who you meant by “that God-Lion, you know the one”). Other suggestions you made that have nothing to do with the United Kingdom fall into this same category: Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, the re-enactment of a chase scene from the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (which is set in Rome, which is in Italy, not Great Britain), the army of dancing leprechauns (which are Irish, not British), and Spider-Man (who is portrayed by a British citizen currently but who is not, in and of himself, British).

Sincerely, etc. etc.

I’ve occasionally wondered if the MGK.com audience is interested in professional wrestling analysis, and I suppose there’s no better reason to test the waters than what Dave Meltzer calls “the biggest money-drawing pro-wrestling show of the last 130 years.”  (It is a little known fact that the Earp brothers and the Clanton gang actually settled their differences with a eight-man tag in front of a sellout crowd at the Tombstone Sportatorium.)

The sensibility that WrestleMania is a special show on the WWE calendar is somewhat artificial.  There’s no particular reason that WWE couldn’t save their biggest matches or their stadium events for, say, SummerSlam or Survivor Series.  But WrestleMania has an aura about it, primarily because of epic matches like Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant (1987), Hogan vs. Ultimate Warrior (1990), the Rock vs. Steve Austin series (1999/2001/2003), Hogan vs. the Rock (2002) and Shawn Michaels vs. the Undertaker (2009-2010).  For WrestleMania XXVIII, WWE is poised to deliver the same kind of big-time, clash-of-the-titans feeling with a main event the company has been hyping since about a month before WrestleMania XXVII.  It’s just that big!

John Cena vs. The Rock

I’m not sure the wrestling fandom has anticipated a match this much since Hogan and Andre.  For over a year I’ve heard serious discussion about whether fans in the Sun Life Stadium will riot if the Rock loses in his hometown.  There’s been tons of buildup for this one, as Rock and Cena have traded “is this a fake storyline or something more?” barbs at each other for years.  Ostensibly, the story is that Rock retired in 2004 to make movies, and now he feels like coming back but Cena resents that the “people’s champion” walked out on the people.  Recently the Rock has added the wrinkle that he wants to prove he’s the greatest of all time by becoming the only man to defeat Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, and John Cena at WrestleMania.

The real story, though, is as follows:

1. The Rock was one of the biggest stars of one of WWE’s hottest eras.
2. John Cena is one of the biggest stars of the last 7-8 years.
3. Hardcore wrestling fans can’t fucking stand John Cena and want to see him die.
4. But nobody ever really beats John Cena when it counts because he’s a big star.
5. But  the Rock is a bigger star, and if anyone can get the job done, it’s him.

Basically, this match is every online Superman vs. Batman debate made manifest.  Up to and including the part where nobody notices that Batman is just Superman with a blue cape.

Who will win?  Let’s put it this way: WWE is hoping this will be the highest-grossing WrestleMania of all time, and very few people are paying to see the Rock lose.

Who should win?  My personal WrestleMania experience would be perfect if I could hear millions of butthurt Cena-haters wailing as one on April 1, so I’m rooting for John Cena.

continue reading "WrestleMania XXVIII Preview"

1) Bears punter Devin Hester died at some point during the 2010 season. Bears head coach Lovie Smith used unholy rituals to bind his spirit to this earth, in order to force him to act as a ghostly punt returner for the team. This can sometimes unnerve opposing punters. (“It’s got to be tough for [the Green Bay punter], with the spectre of Devin Hester downfield waiting for him.”)

2) Lions quarterback Shaun Hill makes a terrible mattress. (“You should never sleep on Shaun Hill, I’ll tell you that.”)

3) The injuries to Seahawks quarterback make it very difficult for him to insert a football into his rectum at the current time. (“He’s having trouble opening up his hips and really driving through that football.”)

4) Rams running back Stephen Jackson is a compulsive masturbator, but one with impressive stamina. (“I just gotta touch it 25-30 times a game.”)

There is a school of geekdom that shows no interest in professional sports. To them, I say, there is nothing quite like a group of men having to speak extemporaneously for several hours using terminology that can quite easily be taken wrongly.

Every time I hear about the latest college football recruiting/scheduling/conference-jumping/coach-changing/insert-scandal-here scandal, I always hear someone trying to excuse it by simply acknowledging what we all know. “Hey, it’s a business!” they say, as if to imply, “Only foolish and naive people actually believe that crap about ‘the purity of the student-athlete’, pal. That kind of thing went out with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Get with the times.”

Which is all absolutely true, but misses the point: The problem isn’t that getting money involved in college athletics taints the purity of the sport and that they should return to the good old days when it was a sport for students, by students; the problem is that if it’s a business, then the college athletes are the employees. And if they’re employees of a business, then they should get paid. Instead, not only do they not get any actual financial compensation for their labor (they get scholarships, which generally include campus housing, but even at the most expensive colleges that usually amounts to less per year than you could make driving a garbage truck–not to mention, the kids aren’t getting as much use out of their scholarship when they have to spend so much time practicing and playing) but in addition to that, if someone other than their employer, the university, tries to recompense them for their labor, they’re suspended from their job without pay. The school gets to make as much money as they want off of the students, but the student has to stay broke to keep their love of the game “pure”.

Some people claim that the college players get valuable football experience that helps them make the pros, but that’s not an excuse either. Minor-league baseball players gain experience and get paid (although admittedly, they don’t make as much as garbage-truck drivers either.) The point is, if we’re going to have college teams serving as farm leagues for the NFL, then college athletes should be paid for their labor the same way every other working American is. Colleges that make millions off of their football programs, then insist they’re simply providing an extra-curricular activity for their students when it comes time to pay the people who are making those millions possible, are exploiting those kids. “It’s a business” isn’t an excuse, because it’s only a business when the people in charge want it to be a business. The hypocrisy of the stance is what people are complaining about, not the fact that money has sullied the sport.

ROUND OF 16
Uruguay over South Korea
Ghana over USA
Netherlands over Slovakia
Brazil over Chile
Mexico over Argentina
Germany over England
Japan over Paraguay
Spain over Portugal

ROUND OF 8

Ghana over Uruguay
Netherlands over Brazil
Germany over Mexico
Spain over Japan

ROUND OF 4

Netherlands over Ghana
Spain over Germany

FINAL

Netherlands over Spain

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also: after today, I don’t think Spain has nearly as good a chance to advance to the group rounds as some people do, even though they did beat Honduras today. Chile was always going to be their toughest match in this group, and if you assume that Switzerland beats Honduras (and the Honduran team just isn’t on the level of anybody else in this group, so the Swiss have good odds), then Spain has to beat Chile to advance. Chile can cheerfully play for a tie, which still nets them first place in the group.

I still think Spain can eke it out – heck, I picked them to win the whole thing before it started – but, yeah, it’s a bit uphill.

So I am looking at the World Cup draws and MGK was complaining about how “fucking Italy gets a walk to the semis,” and he doesn’t like Italy because he thinks they play the game like dicks somehow. I’m not up on soccer beyond the basics, but I assume they try to bribe referees or grab the microphone before the soccer match and they run down the local fans, like “hey we slept with all your sisters last night and they weren’t even that good, not like the girls in Italy,” or something like that. Because that’s what I’d do if I were a pro wrestler, and I figure it translates to other sports.

But that’s not the point. The point is that North Korea is somehow in the World Cup this year, which is fantastic, because the entire country is apparently, like, insane or something. And insane countries will do anything to win a soccer match. It might not make sense to anybody else, but you got to understand that North Korea, being a crazy country, will think their plans are all sensible and rational no matter what they might be otherwise. Because they are crazy.

Like, maybe they capture a bunch of whales. And then, they put the whales on their team as goalkeepers. They get two defensemen to swab down the whale with water and feed the whales buckets of mackerel, and the other teams are all “how do we get the balls past these whales? The whales are bigger than the net!” And the other teams can’t score against North Korea (well, except for Brazil, because Brazil will always find a way to score a goal somehow – if Brazil wasn’t allowed to travel to South Africa for the World Cup for some reason, they would invent intercontinental ballistic corner-kicking technology) and North Korea gets into the semifinals based on tie scores. Then Portugal threatens to sue FIFA, and they go to court, and Portugal’s lawyer at a key moment clutches his knee and falls down to the courtroom floor and starts rolling around in agony. The North Koreans say “this is blatant anti-whale discrimination and those whales are North Korean citizens,” but when the judge asks the whales to sing the North Korean national anthem, the whales just go “eewwwwoOAAAAAAAuuuuuuuuh.” And then North Korea quickly says “well, that’s our anthem,” and to prove it they have a thousand North Koreans assemble and sing just like the whales, in unison, because the North Koreas believe in being prepared for all eventualities and are willing to use whips to get what they want. And they go all the way to the final, where they lose to Brazil.

Or maybe the North Koreans decide that the key is misdirection! So they disguise themselves as South Korea, and go play South Korea’s matches! Their opponents, not expecting the radical North Korean strategies and being prepared for South Korea’s disciplined orderly style of soccer (I don’t actually know what South Korea’s style of soccer play is, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it is disciplined and orderly, because the South Koreans are the Germans of Asia and everybody knows it) lose terribly. Meanwhile a team of elite North Korean secret agents work to confuse the South Korean team into playing North Korea’s opponents for them, and South Korea loses to Brazil for them. At the semifinal ceremony (there is a ceremony, right?), the North Korean team takes off their South Korean jerseys and say “a HA, we were the North Koreans all along! Now we will advance to the semifinals!” And then they lose to Brazil.

Or maybe the North Koreans get their asses kicked in their own division, and then in the first semifinal round the Ivory Coast team is playing Spain, but then the speakers start blaring Ted DiBiase’s old WWF theme song “Money, Money, Money.” And the North Koreans come out with briefcases and the briefcases are filled with Euros and they say, “look, Ivory Coast, we understand that your average per-capita income in your country is like sixteen hundred dollars, because we read it on Wikipedia. Would you rather lose right now, to Spain, or would you like to let us play Spain instead and you can take home all this wonderful money?” And then the Ivory Coast team looks all ashamed and the crowd cheers them because they don’t want the Ivory Coast players to sell out but ultimately the Ivory Coast players have to take the money because their country is poor. And then North Korea whispers in their ear that now they are their slaves because they took the money and that means it is a binding contract, so the Ivory Coast team goes to the trucks the North Koreans brought and releases the bulls, which stampede onto the field because they are the mortal enemies of all Spaniards. North Korea wins by default, and progresses to the next round, where they lose to Brazil.

So many ways this could go!

I’m a big fan of K’naan, so to hear that Wavin’ Flag is the official anthem of the 2010 World Cup makes me happy.

I think the existence of Donald Sterling makes the case that the European football club system of league construction (the freewheeling, free-enterprising “to play in the top leagues you have to make an effort”) is superior on multiple points of argument to the American system of league construction (tightly controlled and defined membership).

Sterling’s profit model – which essentially consists of doing the bare minimum necessary to compete in the league – simply wouldn’t fly in European leagues because the Clippers, in a Euro-style system, would eventually sink to whatever second tier existed, at which point the Sterling model fails because the expense of running a team as large as the Clippers wouldn’t be satisfied by the revenues generated by a second-tier team. Admittedly, Sterling could then rejigger his system to do even less and allow the Clippers to do the bare minimum to compete at second-tier – but then they’d eventually slip to third-tier, and at that point your worth-hundreds-of-millions-team is not actually worth hundreds of millions any more, and you’ve run a profitable enterprise into the ground.

Discuss.