Did you know Dr. J was an Atlanta Hawk for two preseason games?
It’s true. Long story short, the Milwaukee Bucks picked him in the 1972 draft after one year in the ABA, which would have put him with Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (So much for there not being super-teams back then). He ended up signing with Atlanta because he found out his agent was employed by his ABA team and got him signed to a below market contract. Dramatic? Of course. The whole thing went to court, J had to honor his contract in the ABA, and history has Dr. J playing two preseason games with Pete Maravich.
The point of this story is that there is this lifelong, and ridiculous, perception, that athletes once played “for the love of the game”, and they didn’t care about money. This perception exists because most of the athletes in an earlier time had to get jobs in the offseason to keep the bills paid, so it did make the athletes look like “one of them”.
The problem is that those perceptions have always been phony. Go back into history. Reggie Jackson, Eric Dickerson…Joe DiMaggio.
Yup, Joltin Joe held out. Wanted $40,000 a year. Ended up losing and got $25,000. Still held out.
Remember the toughest running back of the 70s, or one of them, John Riggins? He was when “REAL MEN PLAYED FOOTBALL” or whatever tripe is barfed out by fans. He sat out an entire season to get paid, just like that pariah Le’Veon Bell. Never was the same again, just like Bell, outside of the Super Bowl performance.
The issue is that the money, the endorsements, the sponsorships…they slap us in the face now. Back in the movie Major League 2, Roger Dorn retired and bought the team, and it drained his finances to the point where he had to put sponsorships on the wall like a minor league team. Look at 2021 and that’s every field now, including Fenway and Wrigley.
Ticket sales haven’t been a big percentage of a franchise’s money for about three decades. It started with the YES network for the Yankees, and now every franchise has to have a prime TV deal to make a profit. COVID just exacerbated that more.
The difference now is social media. You knew Mickey Mantle had a good time on the town, but you got the scoop in the paper or weekly magazines. Now it’s all 24/7…every bit of it. Everything is money now, everything is in our face now, and it makes the simpler times seem better.
But it also makes different generations repeat falsehoods. Money has always been around. Athletes have always wanted more. The difference is that athletes are chipping away at the owners and getting more.
That’s the thing fans miss in all this. Owners have always been greedy, and athletes tried chipping away for years. They now have, and the game has changed.
And if people think athletes weren’t playing politics back then? That’s happened also.
Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised fists at the 68 Olympics, Isiah Thomas tried making Larry Bird’s popularity a black-and-white thing till Bird shut it down in one press conference. There are many more examples.
Again, it’s social media that put everything on steroids. “None of that happened back then” is a myth. The world changed in 1920s, 1960s, and now. Life changes. It’s a different time now, and it will be in 40 years from now.
Money will be different then also. Get ready for the first billion-dollar contract.