So LeBron James is opting out of his contract with the Miami Heat, and of course on Twitter the result was the regularly-expected storm of condemnation. Partially this is leftover blowback from “The Decision,” which everybody hated because LeBron arrogantly decided to reveal an enormous piece of sporting news on national television (and in the process forced ESPN to donate millions to charity, something most people forget). But partially it’s the result of two mindsets towards professional athletes, neither of which is terribly healthy.

The first mindset is distinctly authoritarian in tone, which is to say: “LeBron owes the fans.” The question of how much LeBron or any player owes their fans is, of course, never quantified, because the operating principle behind this mindset is that LeBron or any other professional athlete should just be goddamned grateful that they get to play a game and be paid money to do so. The second mindset is dismissive (and far more prevalent on the left side of the political spectrum, where jokes about “sportsball” are annoyingly common from people who should frankly have more common sense than to disparage something many people enjoy simply because it’s not their thing) and stems from the idea that professional athletes don’t deserve the money they earn because professional sports themselves are bad.

What is common to both mindsets is that athletes are, in some way, different from other workers. In fairness, this is true in some ways: in North America most athletes are still unionized, which makes them relative outliers on the labour spectrum, and have levels of job protection that most people cannot get any more. But that doesn’t change the nature of the fact that professional athletes are still labourers, and in many ways more purely exemplify the value of labour in the labour-capital relationship more than any other business you can conceive. After all, if you don’t have players, then you don’t have a sport. And yet, in professional sports, most leagues only have half of the revenue at most going to the players without whom there would be no league (and it is often less).

Which is why LeBron choosing to opt out of his contract early to become a free agent is important. He put that clause in his contract – as did Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh – because they all agreed that they wanted to try and win as many championships as possible, to create a team for the ages, and if it didn’t work out then they could go their separate ways or try to retool as necessary after a few years. And the results have been reasonably good: four straight NBA Finals appearances, two championships. That is pretty impressive. But, following the 2014 NBA Finals – where the Heat were whipped like a mule by the San Antonio Spurs, who were fundamentally a better and smarter team and where the Heat’s previous reliance on athletic, smart attack failed them when LeBron turned out to be the only star athlete left on the Heat – it’s clear that the Heat no longer have what it takes to win championships reliably.

(An aside: this is typically the point where some fans will complain about the obvious collusion on the part of LeBron, Bosh and Wade to play together, which doesn’t make any sense when you think about it: why should we condemn players for deciding to create a superteam when, if it was achieved through trades/free agency by a team, we would be celebrating smart management? This all goes back to that authoritarian mindset.)

This is exactly the scenario that LeBron, Wade and Bosh envisioned when they all signed with the Heat for a bit less than they otherwise could have commanded in free agency: the model does not work now. Time to find a new one – whether that means each of them going their own separate ways, or each of them terminating their contracts and re-signing with the Heat for less money so the Heat can afford to sign additional quality players.

It may not work; LeBron has opted out, presumably to force the Heat’s hand, but the biggest reason he’s opting out is because Wade might decide he wants to keep his $20 million per year, because nobody in their right mind signs Dwyane Wade to a deal for anything more than half that at this point, and even $10 million a year might be comparatively generous for a player who cannot under any realistic circumstances play starter minutes as a star player any longer. But that, too, goes back to what’s fair for workers: nobody forced the Miami Heat to sign Dwyane Wade to a $20 million contract. Why should Wade give up $42 million over the next two years to make other people happy? That’s a lot of money. Wade can do what he thinks is best for him and LeBron can do what he thinks is best for him (and for LeBron, that’s winning titles).

Of course, none of this really matters, because at the end of the day this is purely about envy. The people complaining about LeBron opting out are, at root, complaining that he makes a very large amount of money (regardless of the fact that he is legitimately the best in the world at what he does and that there is an insane market demand for what he does, a demand that is so great that frankly the NBA salary rules are restricting LeBron from earning what he could conceivably get from teams did those rules not exist), and generally also complaining that they do not. That’s all it is. That’s all it really ever was. And it’s a bit of a problem, because when people are opposed to workers engaging with their own basic labour rights – with workers using the terms of the contracts they negotiated to their own advantage – it’s the beginning of a slippery slope.

My friend Jonathan Balofsky wanted to comment on something re: the internet and WWE, and it ties into a longer post I’ve been wanting to write, so take it away, Jon:

Recently, New York Post sportswriter Phil Mushnick once again took aim at the WWE and Vince McMahon over the large number of wrestlers to have died before the age of 45, in an attack on the organization on the eve of RAW 1000. Mushnick has argued in various articles that even though some performers died after leaving WWE, WWE was a large contributor to their deaths (calling the company a death mill), citing among others, Brian Pillman.

This took me ten minutes on Google to research with some assistance from the commenters at wrestlinginc. Maybe it’s time for journalists to do more serious research before they make disrespectful accusations.

Saying that a sportswriter is a hack is kind of a truism: most sportswriters are hacks, after all, and the list1 is in many ways stupid and frivolous, as demonstrated above. However, the list is a bit self-serving.

I don’t buy the “partially responsible” argument with respect to steroid deaths like Curt Hennig or Davey Boy Smith, though, by saying “well, they wrestled other places too!”2. Here is the simple truth: Vince McMahon is a bodybuilder. He always has been, and he wants his wrestlers to be muscular guys, which is why for decades he turned a blind eye to drug use by practically everybody’s admission (and, depending on who you believe, did far more than turn a blind eye). Before the WWF’s rise to prominence, professional wrestlers were not nearly so muscular, ripped and toned – and then they were everywhere because Vince set the national standard and the matching set of expectations as to what wrestlers were supposed to look like. (Eddie Guerrero went from being a slim, muscular man in WCW to a ripped, much bigger man in the WWF.) There is just no way that Vince (and by extension the WWE) does not bear some ethical and moral responsibility for that. Even if they have gone a long way to try and make amends for it by putting together a more coherent testing regime – well, there’s a reason you make amends in the first place.

But the real reason Vince bears responsibility for all those deaths is simple: Vince McMahon has always, always been controlling of the wrestlers he employs, and never missed a chance to exploit them. This recent interview says it more simply than I ever could:

MCMAHON: Our talent is taught not to be prima donnas, to be on time and know their lines. And quite frankly, people in Hollywood, once they see what we do, they are amazed. Our talent doesn’t demand the biggest trailer or a certain amount of grape juice or whatever the hell it is. Our talent is extremely flexible and knows how to act, so it’s a logical extension for them.

Vince McMahon: always willing to explain why it’s a good thing when your employees – whose effort and, yes, pain you have spent a lifetime profiting from – know not to get uppity.

But seriously, the WWE’s attitude towards its employees has gotten better only insofar as Vince is willing to avoid having them die young. Which is not to say he is an inhuman monster who revels in his wrestlers’ suffering, because that would be stupid; I am quite sure that Vince genuinely wishes his employees to be as happy and healthy as possible. But the key word here is “possible,” and the WWE’s well-wishing doesn’t extend to actually employing the wrestlers directly (since that would increase the company’s liability) or directly providing them with health insurance (too expensive). It’s quite true that most wrestlers will say quite willingly that Vince always treated them well and the WWE was a great place to work, and I would imagine most of them are being honest about that – but then again, how would we know? Because every wrestler who doesn’t want to burn bridges with the largest employer in wrestling isn’t going to trash-talk them.3 The WWE hires wrestlers long-term, gives older and semi-retired wrestlers jobs as trainers, road agents, producers – and there are of course the “legends contracts” where retired wrestlers are effectively paid to be retired wrestlers. They all know what happened to the wrestlers who did burn bridges; every few years there’s another cautionary tale, and most of them don’t end up on their feet like Jesse Ventura did.

People who know me know that I generally tend to side with labour when it comes to labour/management disputes, and nowhere else is this more the case than in pro sports, where the labour is the entire reason the product exists even moreso than anywhere else. Pro wrestling isn’t quite as pure in this regard because of its scripted nature, but even so: it is quite obviously the case that the wrestlers drive the product. Regardless of how much credit you want to give Vince for the success of the WWE4 the fact remains that nobody is gonna pay money just to watch the McMahon family soap opera without there being wrestling to drive the product.

Vince’s attitude, though, isn’t unique to him (unfortunately). It’s another example of what Dave Lartigue recently discussed in his excellent post yesterday: management wins when the argument that labour has no inherent worth is conceded. Of course Vince is going to celebrate that his talent isn’t “prima donnas” who don’t want to be treated specially like other actors: anything that diminishes the value of labour and accepts, as a given, that workers aren’t going to assert their equality of value to management is going to be celebrated in management culture. And that’s a problem, because the Vince-as-god belief system has become inherent to wrestling (with people mostly forgetting the 1993-1995 period when the company was at least within the danger zone of going under), and so long as the management/labour relationship is that unbalanced, there’s always going to be problems no matter how beneficient a dictator the manager may be.

At least nowadays the problems mostly aren’t people dying, and that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s setting an awfully low bar to pass, isn’t it?

1. Which appears to be a compilation of wrestler deaths that Mushnick has complained about over the years, and which I won’t bother reproducing or linking – go find a dirtsheet site if you like. [↩]
2. Which is one Vince McMahon has made a few times in an attempt to mitigate PR damage. [↩]
3. At least, not anywhere it will get reported back. [↩]
4. And he deserves credit – despite the failure of the World Bodybuilding Federation. And ICOPRO. And the XFL. And his various attempts to build separate wrestling brands. I suspect we’ll add Tout to this list in a few years. [↩]