OWNERS STILL CONTROL THE BALL IN SPORTS
Player empowerment growing, but they’re not calling the shots in any league just yet
Sports movies are notorious for their climactic scenes that are a little too perfect. The home run that explodes a light standard, the game-winning long touchdown catch that comes when the defence mysteriously forgets to guard against the deep ball.
My favourite in the ridiculous-sports-endings genre comes in the 1994 film The Scout, in which Brendan Fraser plays a phenom pitcher who starts the World Series and proceeds — spoiler alert — to throw a perfect game. With 27 strikeouts. He throws 81 pitches, all strikes. Oh, and he hits a moon shot homer for the game’s only run. Bob Costas, playing himself, narrates the final scenes with what is supposed to be excitement but sounds mostly like disgust.
High Flying Bird, the new film from Steven Soderbergh, is not really a sports movie. It’s more like the anti-sports movie, a story that deals with the world of professional sports but deftly avoids the trappings and cliches of the field of play.
And yet, it also builds toward a finish that feels implausible. High Flying Bird, set amid a long-running NBA lockout and mostly about an agent and his star client, explores the idea of who should have ownership of the games, the people who play them or the leagues that control them. I’ll tiptoe around what happens in it — the film is available on Netflix — but the lesson it offers is that the leverage should belong to the guys who shoot and dunk, not the wealthy men who pay them.
It is a decidedly pro-labour film, in other words, in a pro-management sports world.
The most obvious case of this, at present, is in Major League Baseball, where dozens of free agents remain unsigned even as spring training is getting underway. The lack of bidding for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, two MVP-type talents imagine that baseball’s owners have formally conspired to keep salaries down, but it seems like many of them have realized that, hey, this whole not-spending thing is making them a lot more money. Players can gripe about it on social media — and they have — but it hasn’t shamed any teams into doing things differently this winter.
Basketball, meanwhile, is the one sport where player empowerment truly has grown by leaps in recent years. But in Anthony Davis’ spectacularly failed trade demand, there lies the suggestion that could be changing, too. There have been reports that the New Orleans Pelicans refused to deal with the Los Angeles Lakers, Davis’ preferred destination, out of spite and that small-market owners were privately encouraging the Pelicans to take a stand. Now that a stream of star players have engineered trades while still under contract — Paul George, Kyrie Irving, Kawhi Leonard — this was the first case where a team might have torpedoed itself just to avoid granting a superstar his wish to leave town. The background to the Davis saga is that the Pelicans are owned by the Benson family, who also own the New Orleans Saints. The franchise is overseen by football guys at the top level, too, and in the NFL, where contracts are not guaranteed, a trade demand is a good way to get oneself released and labelled a bad locker-room guy. Davis, who could leave New Orleans for nothing after next season, should have the leverage, and yet the message from the Pelicans is that they get to call the shots, not him. (Confusing this message somewhat is that the Pelicans on Friday canned the GM who didn’t bow to Davis’ demands.) And the thing is, a lot of fans would agree. Whether it is Le’Veon Bell holding out from the Pittsburgh Steelers or William Nylander doing so with the Maple Leafs, or Harper and Machado unable to spark a bidding war, much of the reaction from fans is the same: shut up and take the money. You are playing a game, so be happy.
It’s a process that repeats itself all the time. Most fans don’t get mad at the owner who balks at paying a player more, they direct their vitriol at the player who is reluctant to accept what is offered. The leagues, the franchise, the uniforms: this is what holds the fan’s allegiance. The players are fungible.
High Flying Bird imagines a different balance of power. It is, I think, a very Hollywood ending.