The Fans Get Fouled

The National Basketball Assn. once was the bedrock of professional sports leagues, having never lost a regular season game to a strike or a lockout. Now the NBA has gone the way of pro baseball, hockey and football. Its owners and players are likely to learn soon that distaste and disinterest among fans have outlasted the labor dispute that delayed the start of the season.

Owners and players are generally clueless in these money struggles and can’t understand why their popularity has plummeted to the level of a root canal. Yes, some actors command similar dollars and can be equally wretched role models. But here’s one big difference: You don’t have to pay $40 for a movie ticket.

So who can be sympathetic when sports franchises are worth the equivalent of an International Monetary Fund bailout and average player salaries are more than many Americans earn in a lifetime? Meanwhile, local governments can be left in the lurch, like Anaheim, which will have to shell out a total of $7.5 million to the operator of the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim if the arena can’t land an NBA franchise.

But the lesson is never learned, and matters grow worse. The National Hockey League hardly endeared itself to fans with its 1994-95 labor dispute. And in major league baseball it took the McGwire-Sosa Show and the most memorable season in decades to boost attendance back to pre-1994-strike levels.

Oh, it’s indeed good that the NBA lockout is over and that the teams can get back to work, for their ability to entertain, on and off the court, has been missed. But in the end the fact remains that the fans have been shortchanged. They deserve to be courted just as sweetly as the latest fast buck.