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Dropping the ball
Yesterday, the NFL announced two suspensions: the Tennessee Titans' Adam "Pacman" Jones was suspended for all of next season after 10 instances in which he has been interviewed by the police, including police in Las Vegas who recommended felony and misdemeaner charges for his part in a fight and shooting outside a strip club that left a man paralyzed, and which police allege he began. He also has a case pending for obstructing police in Atlanta when he was arrested there in 2006. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Bengals' Chris Henry was suspended for 8 games (half a season) after he was arrested 4 times in a 14-month span for charges from firing and possession of an unregistered handgun to giving alcohol to minors and a DUI charge, as well as the recent charges for driving under a suspended license (caught when he failed to use a turn signal).
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote to the players:
"Your conduct has brought embarrassment and ridicule upon yourself, your club, and the NFL, and has damaged the reputation of players throughout the league. You have put in jeopardy an otherwise promising NFL career, and have risked both your own safety and the safety of others through your off-field actions. In each of these respects, you have engaged in conduct detrimental to the NFL and failed to live up to the standards expected of NFL players. Taken as a whole, this conduct warrants significant sanction."
Each of these suspensions is without pay, which for Jones could mean $3.1 million, assuming his team goes after this year's pro-rated portion of his signing bonus--which they are expected to do--and not just his base salary of $1.29M. I'm not sure what this means for Chris Henry, who is a lower-salaried player and only missing a half year, but it has to be hundreds of thousands of dollars that he'll be losing. To top it off, although these suspensions are for 16 games and 8 games respectively, the fact is that after that point Jones and Henry can apply for reinstatement if they've followed all the terms of their suspension--there's nothing automatic about them getting back into the league. This makes particular sense given the way that each of them has gotten in trouble repeatedly. You'd think, wouldn't you, that after the first offense, someone in a high profile position like that would be extra careful to keep his nose clean, right? Not these guys--one thing after another after another, including Henry's minor traffic violation just a few weeks ago. What the hell don't these guys get??
Good for Goodell. I'm glad to see the [relatively new] NFL commissioner putting his foot down on issues like this. Because of the NFL Players Association, teams' coaches and owners are severely limited in what they can do to discipline players, so this had to come down from the top, and it's good to see that the league is willing to take a hard line. Players need to remember that they are entertainers, paid to play a game, not Olympian gods striding across the world-as-playpen. Their talent (and, yes, hard work) have opened the door for them to a privilege, not a right.
Of course, my jaw also dropped when I was typing the salary figure for Jones. There's something absolutely amazing about a world where some people make millions of dollars a year for playing a game (it's particularly galling when some of those millionaires turn out to be very public jackasses) while the rest of us work for, comparatively, peanuts. Don't get me wrong, I get the economics of it--players make this much because 1) the market for sports is large enough to support these kind of salaries and 2) the athletes who can do these things are rare enough to create a sort of bidding war for their talents. As far as it goes, the salary cap in football has kept its salary rather more reasonable than some sports, while also keeping the competitive playing field more level.
In an odd way, these huge salaries could even be seen as sort of encouraging. We're such an affluent society that we, the common people, can afford to spend millions of dollars to attend sporting events and movies, to watch cable and satellite television, to buy CDs and attend concerts.. the entertainment industry is huge and that's true because we pay for it. We're so affluent that we can, besides paying our regular taxes, pass measures to tax ourselves to finance statiums for these multi-million-dollar industries. As much as we'd all like to be making more money and what even what doctors and lawyers make is nowhere near what professional athletes make, at the same time we have so much that even our poverty is wealthy by the standards of some countries and historical eras. None of this, of course, changs the fact that there has been a growing inequality between the folks at the top of the economic ladder and those at the bottom with a shrinking middle class between them.
No, my point in all of this--as much as I can be said to have a point--is that it's interesting to me that in a nation where we have a sense of ourselves as largely overworked and underpaid (and I'm not disputing that characterization), we nonetheless spend so much of our limited financial and temporal resources on the entertainment industry, such that our society can and does support large profits for the owners and astronomical salaries for the players, to say nothing of performing artists and their industry.
Your thoughts are, as always, welcome.