There is power in a union

After a relatively quiet summer off-season in the NBA, two big bits of news came in over the last week.

First, the league officially announced on Friday – after unofficially looking the other way since the days of Bob Cousy, short shorts, and fundamentals – that a “player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may take two steps in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” This after a March story on ESPN.com in which Joe Borgia, the league’s vice president of referee operations,  admitted that when it comes to the one-step traveling rule, referees “really don’t reference the rulebook.”

Then, on Tuesday, word came down that negotiators for the league and its referee’s union had reached an agreement on a new contract. If the contract is ratified by a majority of the union’s 57 referees at a vote scheduled for Friday, the men in black and white will be back at work in time for the beginning of the regular season, ending a lockout that began in mid-September.

Coincidence, you think? Arbitrary confluence of unrelated events? Maybe. But then again …

Up until yesterday, the negotiations between the league and the referee’s union had been a complete disaster, with the refs looking for pay raises and increases in severance and pensions and the league looking to give them nothing of the sort. In early April NBA commissioner David Stern pulled out of talks after he and the union’s chief negotiator exchanged insults through the media, and since then the whole thing has been in the hands of lawyers.

Preseason games, meanwhile, went ahead as planned, with replacement refs from the WNBA and the NBA’s Development league scaring the wits out players and coaches and making them long for the good old ways when they knew the names of the people they were screaming at.

But the real season is about to begin, and since both sides have a vested interest in everyone getting back to work (Stern doesn’t need the hassle that will come with inexperienced refs clashing with cranky NBA coaches, and the refs themselves have already missed two paychecks), it makes sense that a deal has been reached.

But what if the change in the two-step rule wasn’t just an arbitrarily timed decision made by league officials but rather a perfectly timed demand by the referee’s union to get themselves back on the court with dignity? What if it was being used as leverage this whole time?

Think about it: You have a rule that no players follow and no referees enforce but the breaking of which drives old-school fans and opposing coaches to distraction. Every time an NBA poster-child like Dwyane Wade or LeBron James is caught on tape taking extra steps on the way to the basket and getting away with it, fans and opponents scream up and down that the league has two sets of rules: one for superstars, one for mere mortals. And who do they scream at? The refs, of course. Never mind that basketball players are so quick and so athletic these days that it’s hard to tell if they’re traveling even in slow-motion replays; never mind that refs are only human and that they’re trying their best to see through a wall of impossibly muscular bodies in order to make calls; never mind, even, that these refs have been told by their bosses not to call players with traveling if they take an extra step. Never mind any of it; when a fan or a coach or a player or a sports writer sees an injustice, he is going to turn his wrath on the man with the whistle in his hand (and not in his mouth).

And who needs that? The one-step travel rule/non-rule was little more than a bludgeon to beats refs’ heads in with, leaving the men and women in black and white in an impossible situation: make the call and face the fury of an angry league looking to keep casual fans and sports-highlight shows interested; miss the call and face the spitting vitriol of the basketball blogosphere.

No, best to use the rule as a bargaining chip in your negotiations. Tell the league you’ll concede on pay raises and severance packages and pension plans for a few years while the economy recovers, but in return demand the league rescind a rule that was absolutely crushing you and yours on a nightly basis.

Then, two years from now, when those contracts are up again, demand that hand-checking and the three-second rule get struck from the books as well. Or out the door you’ll go.

Market-Tested Portrait of a Modern-Day Hero

So, you’re LeBron James – newly minted MVP of the NBA, co-captain of the U.S. national team that just reclaimed the Olympic gold medal, worldwide marketing phenomenon, and poster boy for all things decent in the American sporting character. You’re 24 years old, you made $31 million last year, and you’re fitting your 11-bedroom mansion with a bowling alley and a barbershop. Everyone who knows anything about basketball has you penciled in for a career that may match or even exceed that of Michael Jordan. You’ve got the world, in other words, on a string.

Then word starts getting around that some no-name player from some no-name college in Louisiana had the gall to dunk on you at your own Nike-sponsored summer basketball camp. Dunk on you, King James, the heir apparent, the Chosen One, and all that – at your own Nike camp. And worse than that, rumors start to spread that more than one person sitting in the stands at the game was videotaping you getting posterized by a kid no one’s ever heard of and whose name would never otherwise be typed in the same magazine as yours.

So what do you do?

The smart money is nothing, right? Laugh it off, shrug it off, suffer a few days of minor embarrassment as the  footage makes its way onto YouTube and then sports-highlight shows and finally a few late-night comedy shows, and then move on. Maybe go on a talk show yourself to jokingly explain away how the whole thing happened – say you were sick with malaria that day or missing a leg or too concerned about the teetering state of Obama’s health care plan to concentrate on sending the kid’s ball, and the kid himself, flying into the fourth row. Use the situation to draw attention to some pet charitable cause. Then, as former NBA player and coach and current TV announcer Doug Collins suggests Jordan would have done, you invite the kid to a game of one-on-one and crush him in front of his friends and family.

Anyway, that would be the human thing to do.

But we’re talking about the NBA in 2009, so expecting the human thing is pure wishful thinking.

No, instead of playing it cool, James, or Nike officials at James’ behest, or Nike officials not officially at James’ behest but with James’ tacit approval, confiscated the video of two different videographers because, they claimed, videotaping of after-hours pickup games was a no no. And the rules are the rules.

Make those tapes disappear, in other words, before anyone sees a mere mortal taking a basketball demigod to the hole.

So now the situation is a bit of a mess for LeBron and his carefully cultivated image. As Sports Illustrated columnist Phil Taylor put it last Thursday, “[T]he attempt to suppress the evidence was a miscalculation by James, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t his second misstep in recent weeks. The great dunk cover-up comes on the heels of his rather ungracious exit from the playoffs in late May, when he drew criticism for leaving the court after the Cavs’ elimination without bothering to shake a single Orlando player’s hand. Neither of these is a major offense, of course, but taken together, they do point to a troubling possibility. Could it be that LBJ, who had until now shown such unerring public relations instincts, is beginning to take himself too seriously?

“Some diva tendencies are starting to show … presenting yourself as a sore loser or a thin-skinned star is no way to keep the public on your side.”

Apparently “diva tendencies” are the only thing James needs to worry about here. But it seems to me the ramifications of “Dunk Gate” (my term, though not my proudest literary moment) go far beyond the petulant, and poorly thought-through, reaction of a spoiled superstar. We’re too accustomed to narcissistic superstar behavior to care about stuff like that anyway. In fact, we like our stars to act like divas. We want them doing things we’d never have the gall to do, getting away with things we’d never even contemplate. We can’t get enough stories about athletes or singers or movie stars destroying hotel rooms or mistreating restaurant staff or cavorting with strippers or throwing people through windows. It makes them seem human, more relatable, less like deities and more like people with flaws and tempers and jealousy and self-delusions. Just like us, only much, much better.

As long as they keep acting human, we keep loving them. Which is why James’ quick exit from the court after losing to Orlando in the playoffs didn’t bother me, even though it was all sports commentators were talking about the next day: “LeBron James – carefully constructed and maintained marketing phenomenon and portrait of the new, more decent, more sportsmanlike, less ‘urban’ NBA – refused to shake hands with his opponents after losing! Might a crack in the veneer of commercial perfection be starting to show? Is the image wearing thin?”

Absolutely not. Sure, no one likes a sore loser, but there could be nothing more human than to want to storm out of public view and out of the camera eye after watching your golden season come to a whimpering end. Watching LeBron sulk his way into the locker room and disappear from the stadium without talking to the press made me like him as a human being for the first time – because it was the first time I’d seen him act like a human being. James’ preternatural air of constant goodness and unerring, prefabricated nobility up until that point always struck me as a false face. Or more to the point: a commercially constructed face built for maximum cross-marketing profitability. Every time he spoke at a press conference or appeared on a commercial or smiled during a game, I got the sense that I was watching the world’s first living, breathing, slam-dunking human billboard – a cyborg sports phenom built in a lab by a team of Nike, Gatorade, and State Farm scientists to project the world’s most perfect image of corporate synergy.

No blood, no heart, no tears, just money wrapped in muscles.

Which is why I found “Dunk Gate” so disappointing. Not because James was acting like a diva, but because he had clearly learned a lesson from his little show of emotion after game six in Orlando and decided he needed to re-establish his role as the perfect Madison Avenue automaton. Team LeBron didn’t see their golden man-child getting dunked on as a shot at his pride; they saw it as a shot at his infallibility. Which is dangerous when infallibility is the image you’re using to sell the world sneakers and bubblegum. If James were really human, he wouldn’t have cared that much if some kid had gotten lucky and beaten him to the basket while he was trying to recover from the weak side. But he’s not really human, so he and his programmers decided to shut down the possibility that his image as the Greatest had somehow been tarnished.

If this all sounds creepy, it’s because it is. James is the leading voice of a new generation of athletes who were born in the Michael Jordan Age, who came to consciousness in an era when athletes weren’t merely athletes but marketing tools. Guys as young as James don’t remember that before Michael Jordan and his financial team took over, athletes were good for the occasional shill or two but weren’t defined by the companies they shilled for. Jordan took the whole idea of corporate sponsorship and turned it into a means of self-identification. Jordan was Nike and Nike was Jordan; one didn’t exist without the other. And that’s how they wanted it.

This generation now ascendant in the NBA – the James generation, the D-Wade generation, the Dwight Howard generation – they are the first generation that never knew a time before Michael Jordan and his integrative, immersive approach to marketing as personal identity. As far as they know, personality is meaningless outside the context of salesmanship and image-branding. So little surprise that they’re so free of controversy, so polite, such good commercial actors, such portraits of sportsmanship and common decency. Unlike, say, the older (and apparently more dangerous) Allen Iversons and Latrell Sprewells of the world, they see being able to look good while holding a Coke can as just as intrinsic a part of being a great athlete as shooting a basketball.

So for my money, the problem here has nothing to do with being a diva or a bad sport, about having tattoos or wearing corn-rows, about yelling at referees or cursing at fans or getting caught snorting cocaine. It’s something darker and more sinister, something far more damaging for impressionable kids to see and admire. This issue is related to the total supremacy of capitalism, the triumph of marketability over humanity. This is about the deification of a being who has voluntarily made himself into a corporate cyborg afraid of nothing more than tarnishing a profitable image – not by acts of deviance or misguided passion but by showing imperfection. Kids these days are growing up worshipping men who view human behavior as inconsistent with success and believing that the highest mark of accomplishment and global citizenship is having the most profitable and most diversified sponsorship portfolio possible – human life, human rights, or just plain human reactions be damned.