What if there were no sports?
Back in the 1990s, the folks at Nike posed this question to us in a memorable black and white commercial that had either Jackie Joyner-Kersey or Charles Barkley or Michael Jordan narrating. The question was hard to fathom, which was what made the ad so compelling.
No sports? What do you mean no sports? How could there not be any sports?
The answer, boys and girls, is labor disputes.
And so here we stand, for the first time ever in the history of American sports, where perhaps the two most prominent leagues, with the biggest most recognizable players, are in a lockout that threatens to cancel the 2011-12 season two times over. No Super Bowl, no NBA Finals. No Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Ray Lewis, Adrian Peterson, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Paul Pierce, Dirk Nowitzki, or Kevin Durant. Okay, so maybe its not "no sports," but it essentially cuts our sports world in half.
They are the sports of the greatest amounts of pure athleticism. Breathtaking as guards take to the air with a slight angle for a reverse lay-up and running backs juke and spin away from tacklers. Baseball and hockey, by contrast, are sports dictated more by skill. The practices of skating, stick handling, or swinging a bat all involve intense commitment and repetitive practice in order to be great. In the world of the NBA and NFL, the natural physical gifts jump out at you and seem to explode off the screen, capturing the imagination. How can we fly like that or run or move like that? That's why that list of names in the paragraph above is so impressive. The star power in the names alone trump those of baseball and hockey, at least in this current era.
Ironically, these are the two sports in which we have never lost a full season due to a labor dispute. The NHL had to cancel its season in 2005, a year in which the Stanley Cup was never lifted. Some wondered what would come of the struggling league that had just lost its deal with ESPN and was doomed to some obscure channel called the Outdoor Life Network. The sport recovered and is stronger and more popular now than it was before the lockout.
The 1994 baseball strike cancelled the final third of a potential record-breaking season along with the playoffs. Baseball fans in Montreal still lose sleep over this. Overall, baseball had a difficult transition recovering from the strike as angry fans turned their back on the sport for the first few years. It took a steroid-driven home run barrage to win back much of the jaded, yet still naïve fans in 1998.
The NBA has only had one labor dispute, which cut short its 1999 season to 50 games, while the NFL played strike-shortened seasons in 1982 and '87, still the playoffs and championships were carried out like normal. No harm, no foul.
So what would things look like for the average fan if we subtracted these two seasons from the calendar? Imagine a November where the only pro sport we have to follow is hockey. In December, there would be no final frantic meaningful football games as teams battle for playoff spots. No Boomer and T.J. highlights on The Blitz Sunday night.
NFL and NBA fans would have to migrate towards their college counterparts to get their fix. The NCAA seasons still begin roughly around the same time as their respective pro seasons would have started. NCAA hoops and football ratings would enjoy a comfortable spike, especially as college football's regular season winds down and teams battle for a spot in the BCS title game. There would be one pro alternative — the fledgeling United Football League starts its first season this August. No, it is not backed by Vince McMahon, if that matters at all. Any takers? Didn't think so.
How will we cope through the long winter months of January and February with no playoff football, only hockey and college hoops, none of which mean anything yet? The first Sunday in February will be nothing more than another cold day in the dead of winter.
What about the three month stretch of April, May, and June when all there is to watch is early season baseball and playoff hockey? Some of you will adapt and get yourself glued to that action-packed sheet of ice featuring 12 angry anonymous Canadians. If ratings are any indication, most of you will simply go through withdrawals instead. No NBA Finals on the days between Stanley Cup Finals games. All of you who complained the NBA playoffs were too long will sorely miss all of it.
Luckily, the NFL labor dispute is on the edge of being resolved, as we are at least being told there may be a deal struck by the end of this week. If the season does start on time, there does not seem to be anything in place for the 18-game schedule the gluttonous owners so desperately wanted. Crisis averted there. Perhaps this is the one labor dispute where we cannot chastise greedy athletes for not being satisfied with big paychecks because the inherent greed to the point of stupidity by the owners is so apparent.
The NBA lockout has just started and thus, they are nowhere near an agreement. David Stern is a notoriously brutal negotiator, and thus there is a much higher percentage chance we will be left only without an NBA season, even after the thrilling NBA Finals that made such a liar out of me in my last column in this space. LeBron may not win a title next year, either, and this time, it may not even be his fault.
But, as of now, no deal has been done in either sport, and until there is one, I leave you all with one simple question. How much do you love hockey?
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