Sports Withdrawal

This time of year I begin to experience withdrawal from my primary addiction - sports.

What about baseball? You may ask, but I completely quit paying attention to MLB after the last strike, and never returned. And I no longer miss the sport. It started as a general disgust over the fact that both sides were merely fighting over control of the gazillion dollars generated by the sport. The owners and players both decided to have a showdown to try to gain the power to control the larger slice of the pie. The bald and obvious battle for power and wealth turned my stomach, and I decided I would never again be able to watch a major league game again without being reminded of how everyone involved in the sport took me and all of the fans who generated that wealth for granted.

Sure, the sports I still follow, NFL and NBA, are probably not that much different. But those sports, aside from the half-season lockout in the NFL several years ago, haven't lost an entire season in such power plays.

Did anybody notice that the NHL missed their entire season this year? I barely noticed, and suspect the same was true for many others. The NHL should take a lesson from baseball, but of course that's not happening. There aren't any NHL teams nearby, and the sport doesn't translate well on TV. You have to be there in person to get the full effect of a hockey game, which can be lots of fun. But for me, it's more fun to see the minor league hockey games, which are relatively close, cost a fraction of the cost of an NHL game, and are more fun to attend anyway.

So recently there was the controversial decision by the NBA to set the age limit for rookies at 19. That effectively means that prospects have to sit out a year after high school or go to college for at least a year before they can join the NBA. There have been some very vocal opponents of the policy who call it racist and an unfair restriction.

It is true that the NBA didn't make many friends among the NCAA basketball coaches and fans when they began to allow teams to draft players straight out of high school. Baseball's been doing that forever, so why not basketball?

What I'm wondering is, which is more racist - the idea that players should at least be given one year of post-high school education before trying to make the jump to the NBA, or that (black) players who aren't college material shouldn't be forced into a college anyway for a year. Maybe it's just me, but I think the second is the racist attitude.

How many of the 18-year-olds drafted by the NBA last week will never make an NBA roster? How many might get to sit on the bench for a couple of years before they're unceremoniously dumped on the street? Most of them. The players in the class of LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, Jermaine O'Neal, etc. are the exceptions. The vast majority of those players coming out of high school will be back on the street, with no education, no skills, and most likely a ton of personal baggage. Were they well served by those who gave them their "shot" at fame and fortune before they were physically and emotionally prepared?

Then there's the whole "system" of development in the basketball world, which I think is the worst of any sport. But I'll hold off on that part for today.