Thank Goodness Players Will Have Something to Do

Well, NBA happy days are here again. Karl (Il Postino) Malone won’t have to play pro basketball, Italian style. Patrick Ewing won’t have to post up on a picket line. Air Jordan will have a job to go to, once he’s done co-starring with Muggsy Bogues and Buggsy Bunny in their new motion picture. Looks as if there will be basketball business as usual, after all.

The final score was NBA Big Shots 226, Union Busters 134 (no overtime) in a vote announced Tuesday that resisted a bid to disband the players’ union. Basketball’s labor relations board will appeal, and Sacramento lobbyist Mitch Richmond is already calling “Foul!” but, barring unforeseen developments, the NBA season will begin on time.

Ahhh, legal action. It’s fantastic.

I was anxious there for a month or two. Without work, what would NBA players do to pass the time? Poor Dennis Rodman can’t spend every night at the MTV awards, wearing a skin-tight bodice from Fredrick’s of San Antonio, now, can he? Hakeem and Shaq can’t spend every afternoon together on their bicycle built for two.

Oh, sure, Charles Barkley could become governor of Alabama, but that would take what? Couple hours a week? Ten, tops? There just aren’t enough good part-time jobs to go around.

This way, at least, nobody is going to starve. Each NBA team’s salary cap will be increased from $15.9 million to a cool $23 million, soon as the new collective bargaining agreement is ratified. And by the end of this proposed contract, in its sixth year, that amount will rise to an even cooler $28 million a season, which should be enough to satisfy either a dozen Philadelphia 76ers or a single Derrick Coleman.

The commish, David Stern, and his lieutenants saw Tuesday’s tally as a great, great victory. They had repelled the rebellion. Simon Gourdine, painted as some sort of Simon Legree in his role as executive director of the players’ association, felt totally vindicated, crowing, “I believe this is a wonderful victory. We are going to savor it.”

Not so happy was Jeffrey Kessler, the lawyer for the petitioners, who said on behalf of Ewing, Jordan and 132 other nay-sayers that he has not ruled out trying to get the vote’s result overturned. Also not jumping for joy was Richmond, the all-star of Sacramento’s otherwise anonymous club, who complained that Stern abused his role as commissioner by pressuring both the backcourt and the front court.

I am not sure what sort of “undue pressure” this meant, or how much clout Stern actually has. What did he do--threaten to call up hundreds of replacement players from the Albany Patroons and the Yakima Sun Kings?

No, I think most of the league’s players took to the polls and exercised their rights as individuals by electing not to follow Ewing and Jordan into the valley of unemployment. Some of them know that when the superstars begin making top-top-top dollar instead of merely top dollar, without limit in a system of free enterprise, it will be they , from the NBA middle class or lower class, who get sacrificed by their teams in a cost-cutting gutting.

And so, the new buzzword of basketball, decertification, was temporarily put to rest, unless, perhaps, William Safire needs a column next week. The union stands, as is. After half a century without so much as a peep from the people who play it, professional basketball had an uprising that threatened its very infrastructure. Somewhere up north, men can now breathe easy and officially become a Toronto Raptor or a Vancouver Grizzly. Oh, how proud they must be.

For 74 days and nights, the NBA technically did not exist. Bosses and workers theoretically couldn’t mingle. Magic Johnson’s midsummer charity bash had to make do without Magic Johnson. Players signed or traded couldn’t be introduced at a public function by the team, because the team’s doors were, figuratively and philosophically, “locked,” to everyone but management and coaches.

I began to picture an actual possibility of a Laker starting lineup of West, Johnson, Kupchak, Cooper and Drew, which, hey, now that I write it, doesn’t look half bad.

With the start of training camps looming, teams began to have genuine concerns. The Utah Jazz, in particular, had big, nasty, painful ulcers in the making, namely because of Malone, who rather than man a picket line was prepared to flee to Europe, to play pro Greco-Roman basketball or whatever they play over there. I mistakenly thought Malone would rather haul hogs to Omaha in an 18-wheeler than abandon the NBA, but obviously he had other plans.

Without the Mailman, by the way, Utah’s record next season would have been 10-72. Just thought you Jazz lovers should know this.

The players have spoken. Malone and 225 of his friends and foes have voted to leave well enough alone. Ewing, Jordan, Richmond and the rest should accept this, and move on, as well as accepting our eternal gratitude for boycotting before the season, rather than during it.

Thanks to them, nobody will have to miss one minute of thrilling Raptor-Grizzly basketball.