Low on sports
The Super Bowl is five percent football; the NBA All-Star Game less than that
BY HENRY ABBOTT
If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend and love basketball, you might want to enter the swirl of All-Star festivities. Make your calls, work your networks, grab your credit card, and please do NOT spend $50 a head to get into the NBA Crossover starting noon Friday at the Moscone Center.
It’s a thin rebranding of what used to be called Jam Session, which I would describe either as a trade show or the world’s worst indoor carnival. The floor plan of Jam Session has always been carved up like a trade show, by brand. Any fun is an afterthought of bottom-line-focused folks marketing video games, cell-phone plans, razors, or insurance. It’s actually fun to ride the scrambler or wail a softball at a stack of cans. What’s the fun value of waiting in line to pose with a poster-size image of Dwyane Wade slathered in T-Mobile logos?
Last week, the Moscone Center had a Chron’s and Colitis Congress, which set the tone. The NBA Crossover verbiage notes that fans who throw objects (part of the sport) “are subject to ejection and arrest with penalties that may include fines and/or jail time.” Also, if your diaper bag is bigger than 14 inches by 14 inches by 6 inches, like every diaper bag, you will be denied entry. There are heavy-handed reminders who’s in charge.
If you do make it in, there’s a chance you’ll wander near Al Horford, Chris Paul, or another player with required personal appearances remaining in their deal with some insurance or cell phone company. In my experience, Jam Session mostly functioned to remind regular folks that big things are happening beyond their reach. You’re not at the dunk contest nor wherever Noah Kahan performs. It’s hard to say who’s in that bus with the tinted windows pulling up to the arena—could be players, bankers, or razor company executives. Metal barriers will keep you disappointing yards from the lobby of the players’ hotel.
What regular folks get is an overpriced gift shop where you can get a mini-basketball or, as budgets allow, a commemorative pencil—which is, I guess, a pointed lesson in Adam Smith’s capitalism.
“It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another—yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago.” – Leonard Read
The words of that Scottish economist lasered through America’s formative politics. Someone would argue for rules or regulations so the strong wouldn’t devour the weak, and then someone else would say the magic words “Adam Smith” which mean … well I barely read Adam Smith. But I know he’s a hero of the deregulation crowd thanks largely to his idea of “the invisible hand,” wherein freeing people to act selfishly in capitalism has some tough-to-quantify social benefits—like pencils.
As monopolies, though, sports leagues in America don’t honestly feel the economy’s headwinds. The big leagues persist with exemptions to America’s antitrust laws, which are reliably renewed either a) because elected officials don’t have the stones to take on sports or b) because sports seem to serve the public interest well enough there’s no need to intervene.
NBA Crossover is an argument the billionaires have stopped caring what the public wants. There are more:
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