SPECTATOR SPORT
Money worries
Simon Barnes
PROFESSIONAL sport depends for its following — that is to say, its very existence — on its audience's willing suspension of disbelief. The audience must be willing to blind themselves to the absurdity of sport: once the bubble of importance is pricked, sport has no meaning.
In the pricking of the bubble lies the death of sport, and in the United States ears are ringing with the sound of the pop. Sport has made itself look quite uncon- scionably silly. And the audience wakes up, rubs its eyes and says, 'Well, I suppose it always has been silly.'
The National Basketball Association of America puts on the richest team sport in the world, and the owners and players have been in dispute about how best to divvy up $2 billion from television.
They have been quarrelling for 190 days, players have been locked out, and the bas- ketball season has continued without any- one actually playing basketball. The poor exploited players' case for pity is perhaps a little undermined by the fact that the aver- age annual salary in the NBA is $2.6 mil- lion.
The only sane response is to call a plague on both their houses. 'Sir' Charles Barkley, a noted player and talker, has declared that he was disappointed with both sides; Jeff Hornacek of Utah Jazz said, 'I wouldn't blame the fans if they didn't come back. Neither side comes out of this looking good.'
In sport there is always a fascination with money. No one wants to know what advance Ted Hughes got for Birthday Let- ters, or what they pay Emma Kirkby for singing like an angel at St John's, Smith Square. But the money earned by Michael Owen, or the story that the latest teen foot- ball sensation, Joe Cole, was on £5,000 a week while still at school, are facts lovingly recorded, lovingly read. Money is a mea- sure of great talent or promise. It inspires a good-natured envy alongside a patriotic feeling that it is bloody well deserved, and a mild resentment that no one, especially no one that young, should get that sort of money for having fun.
But when sportspeople start to argue about these head-spinning sums of money, sympathy disappears very quickly. Hang on, this money is a gift, from us. How dare you quibble about it? This is not wholly logical, but sport is an area in which people mostly let themselves off logical thought. Profes- sional sport exists because it is a pleasure: if you withhold your labour or lock out the players, you are depriving your paymasters of pleasure, and this is something that leads not only to resentment but to that terrible question: what on earth is the point of it all?
There are increasing signs of the same thing happening here. Look at football's incessant wage squabbling, so far less dra- matic than in America because it happens on an individual rather than a collective basis. Take the one-man strike of the Not- tingham Forest footballer Pierre van Hooij- donk, or the financial mess and incessant squabbling of rugby union. Already these things are resented. And they are exactly the matters that cause people to suspend their disbelief, to lose their sporting faith and turn elsewhere for their pleasures.
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