Hey there. My name is Owen Sanborn and I am a 20 year-old college student with an expected graduation date of May 2016. Meaning in less than a year, I am going to have the opportunity to (hopefully) find a job/employer of my choosing based on my own needs, wants and desires.
I will (hopefully) have a plethora of options to choose from, as I will have leveraged my previous experiences and talents to create a specific demand for my services. Because after all this is capitalistic America where you supposedly earn what you are worth.
For some reason, the scenario I described above does not apply to athletes and nobody seems to really care.
Picture this, you are Anthony Davis before the 2012 NBA draft. You are the unheralded number one prospect on the draft board because of your basketball prowess and the exhibition you displayed during the NCAA Tournament a few months back.
What do you think an NBA team would pay you per year for your services if you were on the open market? $10-$12 million per year? I would even argue that that figure is a bit low.
But guess what, you are not going to be able to negotiate that kind of contract for yourself. The NBA has a rookie scale (starting at $4,753,000 in the first year, per realgm.com) implemented that you unwillingly get lumped into, hurting the ceiling of your career earnings.
On top of the limited earnings, you are not going to get to choose your place of employment. No, instead you get to be selected in a draft where you have no say in where you want to play. You will just have to smile and put on a hat that doesn’t fit correctly while stating how excited you are to have finally reached your dream of playing in the NBA.
The basis behind these principles is for the sake of withholding “parity” within the league. A ramification of allowing an incoming player to choose where he wants play would be the stacking of rosters and as a result, there wouldn’t be much doubt as to who would be in championship contention (*cough* kind of the like the Cleveland Cavaliers now *cough*).
The problem with that logic is that parity, at its roots, sounds an awful like a socialist term.
I mean… We don’t see parity in the real job market, so why do we seek it in our sports leagues? So we can protect the owners and ensure that their billion dollar investment in a team is rationalized?
Last time I checked, if Google or Apple want to get their hands on the next great software engineer, there is nobody out there stopping them. That would just be referred to as “good business.”
The whole idea is a mockery of the American dream and the athletes are the victims of it. There is no reason why they should not be able to seek out the best situation for their careers and livelihood based on the perceived value that they have leveraged for themselves. That is a basic right in this country.
Wait a second, I sound like a downer. Getting drafted is a great moment for any young athlete. A true accomplishment of their dreams.
All I am saying is when you read between the lines, the entire situation is corrupt and backwards.
Now instead of an athlete, you are a technology mogul fresh out of college who has developed the latest app to command $2 billion net worth. Technological engineering (well, math really) has been your life’s work, a talent that has been a part of your life since you were a child. Much like, you know, a seven foot tall athlete who puts a ball through a hoop.
Under the scope of capitalistic America, you will earn what you have leveraged yourself to be worth in the open market. $2 freaking billion. You haven’t been told where your place of employment is going to be for the next half decade while your earning potential is capped or put into a “fresh out of college” salary scale.
Nobody is going bat an eye or be up in arms over the situation. Ironically, most will turn to themselves and say “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”
My question is: Why have we not made this same distinction when it comes to athletes?
Is it because we categorize them as heroes, idolizing their talents with the hope that they will take our favorite sports franchise out of the gutter and into the promised land?
Too often as a society, we dehumanize athletes. In my opinion, this leads to the backlash and venom spewed when an athlete is in search of more money or spotlight. Fans come from the perspective that athletes are there for their entertainment, forgetting that they are in fact still humans trying to make a fairly compensated living just like everyone else.
The opposing argument has always been, “Oh well, athletes make enough money as it is. What is the difference between $5 million and $10 million? You are still a millionaire playing a kid’s game for a living.”
The difference between those two sums is FIVE MILLION DOLLARS; hypothetical person that I am upset with!
That is a lot of dough to be leaving on the table. Especially when playing under the guidelines of a league that has owners raking in pools of money from media contracts, sponsorship deals, gate receipts and the growing valuations of franchises just because of the product that is on the court/field.
Not to mention that these owners are free from the burden of salary caps and restricted earnings while somehow continually duping local governments into giving them hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money to help fund a stadium/arena that they could realistically fund themselves (do not get me started).
The hypocrisy is sickening.
Is it because we associate their profession to playing a game rather than an actual job that requires hours upon hours of work?
Being an professional athlete is mostly about work that goes unseen. Before you roll your eyes, consider this: would you want to wake up at 5 or 6 AM every morning during the summer, shoot thousands of shots, do countless ball handling drills and then run up sandy hills with one of your best friends that is an athletic cyborg like Kevin Durant?
Yeah, me neither. I would much rather enter numbers into a calculator for seven hours, go on home, eat some chips, play with my dog and call it a day.
Sure, athletes have a set of attributes that are the result of hitting the genetic lottery, but sustaining those skills and becoming a professional is a rigorous process that few can muster.
I do not know the answers to these questions. All I know is that athletes should have more rights in terms of their earning power and place of employment. After all, that is the American way.
Maybe someday we will get there. LeBron James has become the most powerful athlete today — perhaps even ever — by altering the landscape of an entire league with his free agency decisions and continually signing one year deals to hold leverage over his front office and owner to surround him with a championship level roster.
An athlete having leverage over an owner, what a concept.
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