NBA Believes it Won’t Repeat Mistakes Made By Baseball

Basketball better be careful. Both owners and players in the NBA have fundamentally misunderstood the stakes in the game of chicken they’re playing. Neither side has a clue about the true nature of the long, brutal road they’ve begun to travel together.

The popular analogy is to compare the NBA’s lockout, now in its 128th day, to the baseball strike of 1994. This is not only the wrong comparison, but a deeply misleading one that may delude both sides about the true dangers they face.

The NBA arrogantly believes it won’t repeat baseball’s horrific mistakes. We’re not that stupid. We’ll never wipe out our whole season or jeopardize our TV dollars. By January 1, we’ll be playing. Just chill out.

Meanwhile, the NBA is duplicating--down to the details--the baseball strike of 1981.

That’s the analogy that should scare the NBA to death.

It takes a long time--many years of hatred and mistrust, bad faith and grudges--to do something as historically dumb and destructive as baseball pulled in 1994. You have to lay the groundwork. You have to poison the water. Powerful people, and their ardent disciples, must learn how to despise, demonize and distort their adversaries across the bargaining table. That takes time, pain, public embarrassment and enormous sums of squandered profits.

That’s what the NBA is doing now. Commissioner David Stern and agent David Falk, deputy commissioner Russ Granik and union head Billy Hunter, are doing a textbook job of setting the stage for years of anger, future strikes, erosion of public image and finally--who knows?--maybe 13 years from now, one final battle as idiotic as the one from which baseball is still trying to recover. In 1981, baseball owners had what seemed to them a perfectly sensible plan. They’d foment a mid-season strike in hopes of not only testing the strength of the players union but, perhaps, breaking or weakening it. The owners had a timetable and strike insurance; they followed their plan to the day. Baseball’s big TV money only arrived at the end of the season and in the postseason. So, the owners thought, not much was really at stake. What a bunch of smart guys.

The season was split. Play was resumed with an all-star game. The players lost lots of salary. The owners lost some gate and goodwill, but few TV dollars. The season was “saved.”

But the fuse to the dynamite was lit. Union head Marvin Miller and his aide, Don Fehr, learned just how down and dirty the owners could play. And their membership did, too. Instead of weakening the union, the owners accidentally strengthened it enormously. Owners like Jerry Reinsdorf of the White Sox and Bud Selig of the Brewers did a slow burn that lasted for a decade. There’d be other days, other battles.

NBA owners might look around the room, especially if the Bulls owner is in it, and see how much of the old baseball rhetoric has been resurrected. Do we have a secret drop-dead date for a settlement, boys? Was this lockout all scripted in advance? Back then, baseball was willing to wipe out two months of games to test its union. Now, the NBA seems pointed toward losing two months for the same general purpose. It all seems so savvy and predictable in the short run--especially if your game has never had a significant work stoppage, as baseball hadn’t in ’81 nor the NBA until now. But it’s dumb and doomed in the long run.

Last week, the NBA bad-mouthing truly escalated. Stern sounded like he was reading from the scripts of past baseball commissioners.

“The people we met with today would like to make a deal. Whether they’ll be allowed to or not is going to be another issue,” said Stern, who then named Falk and Arn Tellem as the agent-puppeteers who were chiefly in charge of the union. “I believe, with good reason, that agents for the high-end players have now . . . decided that any deal that has a limitation that would affect perhaps 30-40 players, even though it would benefit the great mass of our 400 players, is a deal that doesn’t deserve to get done.”

Sometimes ownership claims it’s an ego-maniacal union boss, like Miller, who’s leading the poor, misguided players down the primrose path. Or it’s the agents leading everybody by the nose. Whatever. The result is inevitable: people get mad. And they remember.

Tellem called the charge “ludicrous.” Falk shot back, “I’m flattered they think I’m running the union but clearly what David Stern is trying to do is tactically divide us--the agents from the players, the high-salaried players from the middle class. This should be a wake-up call to the union to stay unified.”

It probably will be. It was in baseball. More pro athletes name their children after their agents than after their parents.

NBA owners are also considering the tactic of “allowing” teams to talk to players “who call and ask questions.” Talk about an insult. Why not just post a sign that says: Let’s see who’ll break ranks. Yes, give us a call, so you can be our flunky. Then pay the price when the games start again.

Saber-rattling seems so natural to the process, so easy to forget afterward. But it isn’t. “The comnmissioner has continuously tried to drive a wedge between players and repeatedly he has failed,” said union head Hunter on Wednesday. “Now he wants to split the players, the agents and the union. . . . We’re just not going to capitulate.”

Once you hear warfare words, like surrender and capitulate, you know it’s getting personal.

The ’81 baseball strike often seemed more goofy than serious. Mid-season games would be lost. Big deal. Now, the NBA’s early season difficulties carry the same lack of weight. Many fans say they wouldn’t care if the whole season were erased. Nobody talks about the details of either side’s proposals.

That ’81 charade, orchestrated by owners just like this NBA lockout, had some bad short-term affect on attendance. But the sport quickly regained, then surpassed, its previous popularity. The real damage only reappeared with time. Each succeeding labor negotiation became a bigger and more bitter piece of brinksmanship than the last. Finally, everybody went over the cliff together, consumed by their ancient accumulated animosity.

By the standards of baseball, the NBA has just begun to get ugly. The future--a bad one--has not been written in stone yet. But we’re getting there. Faster than the NBA thinks.

The major issue before basketball’s owners and players is not the present, though they think it is. What’s at stake is the future. Years and years and years of the future.