Lost Season Would Have Been Fantastic

So three months after leaving us with our noses pressed against the front window, the NBA suddenly comes bursting through the door full of smiles and apologies and ticket applications.

So after walking out on a nation of adoring fans who have made it a billion-dollar sport, the NBA suddenly walks in and announces it could use a good hug.

So what.

As recently as last week, I wanted the lockout to end.

Now that it has ended, I don’t.

In the final bickering days of arguably the most ill-conceived and poorly executed labor negotiations in sports history, one thing became clear:

The best solution to this would have been no solution.

For the sake of the future of all professional sports, better that the NBA canceled the entire season.

Not because this new, abbreviated version will be tainted.

But because it won’t.

Fans are angry now. But fans will forget. Fans always forget.

Folks in town say they will never attend another NBA game. But they won’t be saying that on the night of the Lakers’ first playoff game this spring.

People say they will never again pay good money to those high-priced babies. But they will if one of them is named Michael Jordan.

Face it. We’re suckers for entertainment. Even if the curtain goes up late, a good show will make us forget our anger by intermission.

And in June, the world will breathlessly watch an NBA championship series without giving one thought to the hell it took to get there.

Which will give the next greedy officials of the next labor-troubled sport a free pass to try the same thing.

They never learn.

Because we will never make them learn.

A canceled NBA season would have made them learn.

It would have been the first season wiped out by a labor dispute in the history of American professional sports.

It would have been the first absence of pro basketball in this country for an entire winter since the league’s inception 52 years ago.

It would have been great.

Sports fans would have kept watching college basketball and hockey.

When it came time for the NBA playoffs, they would have watched baseball.

In time, we wouldn’t miss the game. Already, we don’t miss the players.

Like most pro athletes, it isn’t as if many NBA guys offer much more to our communities than their ability to play a sport.

With no game, they would have become as irrelevant as a Hawaiian weatherman.

(One bad thing is, Shaquille O’Neal would have had time to make another movie and cut another rap album, but that’s another story.)

For fans, absence would have made the heart grow harder.

And lessons would have been learned.

Pro sports leagues would have realized--big revelation here--that their followers can live without them.

Pro athletes would have realized that their jobs--like our jobs--are tenuous and worthy of their respect.

Television would have gained a new understanding of the uncertainty of the sports landscape, and rights fees everywhere might have dropped.

Lower rights fees mean lower salaries.

And lower salaries might have ultimately meant lower ticket prices.

Even if there wasn’t a bottom line reached, there would have been a fine line crossed.

A professional sports season is canceled, and the world doesn’t end?

Suddenly, in every sport, the fan would have regained a bit of power that was long ago snatched away by things more important to teams.

Things such as television and merchandising. Things that fill up their bank accounts but rob their souls.

Professional sports leagues might think twice before forgetting who is the seller and who is the customer.

Teams might stop taking for granted the unconditional love heaped upon them by their admirers.

Officials might stop talking about lockouts and strikes more than balls and strikes.

Oh, well.

So back to work they go, and don’t try to stop them.

Because although we underrated their greed, you cannot underrate their egos and the desire to protect them even if it means only 50 games by fat guys.

So who won? Who do you think won? Who always wins in these situations?

“I don’t think anyone won,” Indiana Pacer guard Fred Hoiberg said.

Losers always say that.

The owners won, silly, because they saved millions in salaries and still signed a deal that is better than their old one.

You don’t need to understand all the complicated percentages and numbers--who does?--to know that the players have been losers since Oct. 19.

That was the date arbitrator John Feerick ruled that, because of the lockout, the owners were not required to pay the 226 players with guaranteed contracts.

With one decision he saved the owners--and cost the players--a potential $700 million.

Goodbye, players’ leverage.

Their differences with owners over the cut of the billion-dollar industry had already been whittled to relative pennies.

Their next move should have been a surrender.

But pride got involved, and soon union leaders such as Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning were acting as though the owners had elbowed their ribs and poked their eyes.

So they started taking swings.

And in the NBA, you know what happens when somebody takes swings.

The owners won, the players were embarrassed, now everybody will shut their mouths and go back to work and hope we all forget.

And we will, until it happens again.

And it will happen again.