Going the Bible one better, English writer Samuel Butler added: The want of money is so quite as truly.
What has this to do with home runs, hockey sticks, curve balls and curved blades? What hasn't it?
Welcome to professional sports today . . .
Where the love of money is the root of all evil and the want of it is so quite as truly.
Where wealthy athletes say they'd play the game for free but balk at a salary cap. Where free-market entrepreneurs buy teams in monopolist leagues and then insist on socialism (revenue sharing). Where the fan becomes the enabler in an abusive relationship by supporting this enterprise at ever-increasing prices.
"Money has cheapened the experience for the fan," says Steve Baker, adjunct professor of sports law at the University of San Francisco. "Sports looks less like a sport and more like a business. For the fan, there is total disgust."
Every professional athlete, every team owner, every league executive knows the customers for the suckers they are. Grab 'em by their hearts and minds, and their wallets will follow.
Listen to NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, speaking at the Smithsonian Institution, repeating the mantra of a former colleague: "The NFL is unique because it packages emotion, loyalty, civic pride, civic commitment, and then sells it."
The NFL is unique for another reason. It puts teams on the field. Baseball and hockey can't. Basketball might not after Thanksgiving.
The key to football's success, say the industry moguls, is a salary cap.
Not that they call it a salary cap. They talk about "cost containment" or "a handle on player compensation" or "a payroll tax."
They'll send Richard Ravitch (or someone just like him) out to posture (instead of pasture). Is anyone not sick of Ravitch's New Yorky plea that owners be told "what it's gonna cawst us to play basebawl?"
A salary cap becomes the great equalizer for owners, who long have asked players to save them from themselves when there's bidding for talent. The NBA and its union agreed to a cap in 1983, the NFL and its players in 1992. A cap fixes the pool for salaries as a percentage of league revenues.
NFL players currently get 64% of all money earned from ticket sales and broadcast revenues for salaries alone. The NHL estimates it paid 61.4% in 1993-94 to players, while baseball coughed up 58%.
In the NFL, where revenue sharing long has protected smaller markets, the salary cap levels the playing field on the expense side. Owners can run the business like, well, a business.
"Football has got it made, because they share something like 92% of their revenues," says Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles. "We in baseball are drooling over that. Why couldn't we come up with that kind of system?"
They could, but they won't. Baseball's fat cats (read New York Yankees) won't share with the skinny minnies (read Milwaukee) unless players agree to take it out of their hides. Baseball never has shared gate revenues in a meaningful way, and the loss of its network TV deal skewed the numbers toward reliance on local broadcast revenues.
Good for New York, with $47 million in local TV and radio dough. Bad for Milwaukee, with $5.5 million. Without even payouts from a fat national deal, baseball lost its bearings.
"The marketplace went south, but most clubs felt the $14 million per team (in TV revenues) would be there forever and probably increase," says Giles. "The $14 million went down to $6 million, and we didn't have the revenue to justify the salary scale that had developed over that four-year period."
Thus the move for cost containment on the labor front and revenue sharing by the clubs.
Hockey makes similar arguments. Growing payrolls swallow every new dollar, including added revenues from Fox in a new TV deal, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman says.
"We are a league with profound economic problems. This is not just an issue of big markets and small markets," says Bettman. "Most teams in this league are not profitable. Over the last four years, this league has gone from a collective profit to substantial collective loss."
Why a lid on salaries? That's Bettman's history. He was a lawyer for the NBA when it made a deal with its union in 1983 to pay players 53% of its revenues while putting clamps on free-agent movement. His senior vice president and general counsel, Jeffrey Pash, worked for Covington and Burling, Tagliabue's old firm, on NFL cases involving free agency.
If the past is prologue, what comes next? Conventional wisdom has hockey players bowing to the pressures of the missed paycheck by Dec. 1 and baseball's struggles lingering into spring. The larger battles might lie ahead.
"I see sports at a crossroads," says Baker. "Sports is on the cusp of entering a much more lucrative phase. We've seen a transition in the last 20 years from sports to business-of-sports, and I think in the next 10 to 20 years you are going to see sports truly enter into multinational relationships.
"The single asset that will increasingly grow is the recognition from owning a sports team. If you're associated with the Dallas Cowboys, people want to buy products with your name on it. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to get people's attention. With sports, that's built in."
