Will Ben Roethlisberger get a pass at this Super Bowl?
MONDAY, 24 JANUARY 2011 22:27
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/will-ben-roethlisberger-get-a-pass-at-this-super-bowl
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE BUSINESS AND POLITICS OF SPORTS
The National Football League's Super Bowl matchup between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers probably will draw a lot of people to a television set on February 6, but the game also has a chance to become very political because of the Steelers starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. The Steelers quarterback has been involved in two highly publicized "incidents" with women and earned a four game suspension from the NFL for whatever happened.
Of course, very few people know what really happened in both cases. But the fact that Roethlisberger is in the national spotlight should spark some attention from national media about athletes and behavior.
Did Big Ben's win over the Jets complete his rehabilitation and his image or should there be a real discussion about Roethlisberger and others not only in the NFL but all sports who have been in trouble?
Don't expect anything from Rupert Murdoch's FOX syndication or his FOX News Channel on the topic. Don't expect people like Kathy Redmond to all of a sudden be on Face the Nation, Meet the Press or This Week discussing jocks and sexual assault. There is no way the National Football League television partners, Murdoch and FOX, General Electric (soon to be Comcast/GE) and NBC, Disney's ABC or Sumner Redstone's CBS would ever touch that type of story.
Kathy Redmond would be a great guest on FOX's Super Bowl pre-game hype show. Redmond was allegedly raped twice by University of Nebraska star Christian Peter at the university in 1991. The university did nothing to punish Peter at the time. Eventually Congressman Tom Osborne, the former Nebraska coach, apologized to Redmond. She founded The National Coalition Against Violent Athletes in 1998.
Needless to say, Redmond isn't a hero to all, particularly in the jock community.
The National Coalition Against Violent Athletes has no place at the Super Bowl table. It is too dangerous to the image of the NFL. Kathy Redmond and her group should be heard however during the Super Bowl lead up, especially with Roethlisberger being so prominent in the game.
Instead there will be the nonsense about how Big Ben has been a good citizen, kept quiet and served his four game suspension. Roethlisberger will be rehabilitated by the media and will just become a loveable, maybe slightly misunderstood fellow. As long as Lawrence Taylor could terrorize offenses during this time with the New York Giants, a lot of stuff off the field was overlooked and during the LT days with the Giants there were some allegations that some people were given money to look the other way at LT's discretions although nothing was ever substantiated. LT was probably just misunderstood as well.
The news will pivot to the last small town NFL team playing another grand old NFL team and the coverage will get silly.
The Super Bowl is serious business however. It was a catalyst behind a holiday in Arizona and changed broadcast rules in the United States. It is like Christmas, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving rolled into one.
The Super Bowl is after all, America's Holiday. It is the Christmas sales season for fast food pizza, supermarket markets which have Super Bowl sales on snacks, it is a big day for beer sales and there are the commercials which are seemingly more important than the game.
The truth is this. The Super Bowl has an economic impact on virtually every city, town, village and hamlet in New Jersey and the United States because people are throwing parties and buying big screen TVs and food. The Super Bowl has been in the past an agent for change both in Arizona and in the world of television and radio in the United States.
The National Football League pulled a Super Bowl from Arizona and put the political weight of the entity known as the NFL into a lobbying position in the state capital in Phoenix. Arizona "celebrates" Martin Luther King Day as the result of direct intervention by the National Football League in terms of dangling a Super Bowl in front of voters. In 1987, newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's first act in his new job was to erase Martin Luther King Day from the Arizona calendar as an official state holiday. That decision set off a boycott of the state with entertainers like Stevie Wonder refusing to perform in any venue in Arizona.
Governor Mecham's reasoning was simple. The Arizona legislature in 1986 and Governor Bruce Babbitt, in Mecham's opinion, created the holiday illegally.
The National Football League, in an attempt to help the Phoenix Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill to sell more seats after he misread the Phoenix-area market following the move of his Cardinals from St. Louis to Tempe in 1988, awarded Tempe the January 31, 1993 Super Bowl. But Mecham's decision created a number of problems for the league, specifically the National Football League Players Association was not too keen on playing the NFL's showcase game in a state where a governor took away the holiday and the action was supported by Senator John McCain.
In 1989, the Arizona state legislature approved a law making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday but voters needed to approve the measure. In 1990, Arizonans went to the polls and rejected the making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. Shortly after the voters said no, the NFL said no to Arizona and pulled the January 31, 1993 game from Tempe.
The National Football League after pulling the 1993 game went back to Arizona and laid the cards out on the table telling voters if they approved the holiday in a November 1992 vote, the NFL would award the next available Super Bowl to Tempe. Arizona voters approved the 1992 ballot initiative and five months later the NFL lived up to their part of the bargain and granted Tempe the January 28, 1996 game.
Given the events of the past year in Arizona, it would seem that the National Football League will make another statement with silence. The Super Bowl probably is not returning to Glendale, Arizona any time in the new future and will give the game to "quieter" areas.
Meanwhile, the 2004 Super Bowl changed TV. Janet Jackson has left more of an impression on American society than her brother, the late Michael Jackson, because without Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston, Texas back on February 1, 2004, American's would be getting "live" over-the-air radio and TV, warts and all, since over-the-air radio and TV station owners would not have to worry about being fined for indecent programming whether it is a visual or something said.
American politicians and political appointees or at least those politicians who were pandering for a certain block of voters became prudes and put more teeth into public airwaves indecency laws because of Janet Jackson. Those politicians wanted to protect viewers and listeners who tune into over-the-air radio or TV shows and might be offended by language or nudity. Cable TV, broadband and satellite radio do not have the same restrictions for whatever reason.
That performance changed how America's receive over-the-air TV and radio offerings and gave American conservatives a new rallying point and eventually would introduce a new censorship or morality through the threat of hefty fines against media companies who might be found in violation of "indecency."
Of course "indecency" is in the eye of the beholder and for some members of Congress, it took about 15 hours for them to start screaming about Janet Jackson's exposed breast on the steps of the Capitol in Washington.
Viacom's CBS television network had the rights to the game which featured New England and Carolina. As part of the game presentation, Viacom had MTV produce the halftime show which featured Jackson and Justin Timberlake. During a song and dance routine, Timberlake exposed Jackson's breast for less than a second but that was enough time to get the "purity and vice" machine of the Republican Party going on morality. The usual suspects got on that bandwagon led by The Parents Television Council, Brett Bozell and Phyllis Schlafly. Congress got on that train as well as Michigan Republican Fred Upton proposed legislation that would raise fines for violating indecency rules from the 2004 level of $27,500 to $275,000. Zell Miller, the Democrat who was the United States Senator from Georgia, thought the incident was part of the "decaying morality of America" and Federal Communications Chairman Michael Powell wanted an immediate investigation into the Super Bowl half time show.
This was red meat for certain politicians and their followers but for the most part it was a tame incident that was not really seen but most people until they were alerted to the fact that there was an "wardrobe malfunction" and that is when most people saw the incident on TIVO in slow motion. What has been forgotten about the Super Bowl show were the actions of the other acts including a performance by Nelly in which he pointed to his crotch and Kid Rock's poncho which looked like a cut up American flag.
Even more interesting, Janet Jackson was fingered as the culprit and got the brunt of the criticism with Timberlake pretty much emerging unscathed.
The NFL put out an apology almost immediately for the halftime show and fired MTV on the spot although the league had no problem accepting Viacom's money for the right to show the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl gave conservative Republicans running for office in 2004 a platform and they ran with it. Janet Jackson was soon replaced on the indecency list by Howard Stern and eventually the whole thing morphed into a debate about gay rights (the Dick Chaney-John Edwards Vice President debate) which was a perfect plank for the Republicans in a Presidential election. An issue with little substance or importance, perfect for the American TV and radio punditry culture.
Eventually, Viacom was fined $550,000 for broadcasting the Jackson "wardrobe malfunctioning" incident. CBS continues to appeal the fine.
After the Super Bowl incident, Michael Powell and the FCC dug in and started to go after other areas.
By October 2004, Commissioner Powell and his FCC colleagues started thinking whether or not a hockey game that feature fights was suitable programming between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily.
The Federal Communications Commission did a study at the behest of Congress on over-the-air, cable and satellite television violence and how that type of programming impacts children.
The FCC already had rules banning so-called indecent programming on radio and TV between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily. The FCC indecency guidelines have been in effect since 2001 but most people were unaware of the rules until Janet Jackson's bare breast was exposed after a "wardrobe malfunction."
The FCC was very serious in 2004 about what was seen on TV, after all it was an election year but the study was crucial business not only to those looking for an election issue aside from the Iraq War and the FCC could give politicians some cover for other "important" issues.
Yes, hockey fighting might very well be considered violent programming. This is a major problem for not only the National Hockey League, but also the National Football League which has sold violence for decades going back to the CBS production of the Violent World of Sam Huff, narrated by Walter Cronkite, in 1960.
One of sports major selling points is violence. When the Nashville Predators began marketing its product to Tennessee in 1998, the marketing department showed hockey collisions and NASCAR accidents in sales presentations.
Sports TV highlight shows feature collisions, fighting and general rowdy behavior. Sports video games routinely feature fighting and blood.
The National Hockey League did fight back in 2004. NHL attorney Phillip Hochberg wrote a letter to the FCC saying that "the NHL feels that it is improper to even consider whether a sport like hockey would fall into any definition of televised `violence."
Should both the Congress and the FCC get involved and regulate fighting in hockey, violence in football, boxing matches, and high and tight pitches in baseball? Of course not.
The morality fight continued after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl. ABC-TV scheduled the movie Saving Private Ryan for Veteran's Day 2004 but 65 of the network's affiliates would not show it because of language concerns in the movie. Howard Stern was fired by Clear Channel stations (whose Texas owners had heavy ties to the Bush White House although to be fair Clear Channel became a major factor in the broadcasting industry because of the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by President Clinton). There were incidents surrounding the 2009 Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl is much more than just a championship football game.
Evan Weiner, the winner of the United States Sports Academy's 2010 Ronald Reagan Media Award, is an author, radio-TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business." His book, "The Business and Politics of Sports, Second Edition is available at www.bickley.com, Barnes and Noble or amazonkindle. He can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
http://www.mcnsports.com/en/node/7463
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2009
3:00 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- You don't need a crystal ball to know that 2011 is going to be perhaps the most intriguing sports year in North America ever. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association may not be operating because of labor actions.
Both leagues and their players are two years away from the end of their respective collective bargaining agreements. The football players are acting as if they except the owners to lock them out of training camps in 2011, the National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern said earlier this week that at least half of the NBA's 30 teams are money losers, the NBA has reduced the salary cap for team payrolls slightly for the 2009-10 season and there is a thought that the cap will be tightened more so in the summer of 2010 with the worsen economic conditions finally being felt by the league.
On Wednesday the new Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association DeMaurice Smith took some of his labor association members to Congress to discuss the economics of the National Football League. Smith's tactic is a new dimension for football players in their talks with the owners, he wants Congress to understand the players side of the story, that the owners are making a lot of money thanks to acts of Congress, including the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act and the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger and that the players, who are the game, continue to get a fair shake in divvying up the NFL money pie.
It is an interesting but risky ploy by Smith and raises the question of whether he wants to help or hurt his membership. Undoing the 1961 and 1966 legislation would ultimately have a crippling financial impact on the players. Additionally Congress has never sought to unravel either of those pieces of legislation. Scrapping the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act will impact not only the NFL, but Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA and college sports along with golf and tennis tournaments as TV revenues, whether they come from over-the-air network TV or cable, provides the financial underpinning needed to run sports successfully and performances salaries are pegged to TV dollars along with ticket sales and marketing partnerships.
The National Football League Players Association has always been considered the weakest of the four major league sports players groups in North America. Whether it was Ed Garvey or Gene Upshaw at the head of the table, the main criticism is that the association leadership always looked for money first and did not look after pension benefits, health benefits for players on the field and retirees nor did they bother with getting contract guarantees. Talk to players who were part of the 1982 or 1987 labor actions and they think the strikes were pretty much a waste of time that accomplished very little.
NFL players get paid significant salaries but the way contracts are structured, players can keep salary bonuses but if they are cut, they get a slimmed down severance which is different from the other sports whether it is Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League.
Smith has to be aware that the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act allowed the 14-team NFL to pool it's resources and gave NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle the ability to sell the league as one entity in a bidding war between the two major broadcast entities of the day (1961), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) with CBS winning. Because CBS was constantly beating out NBC for the NFL rights in the early 1960s, NBC said enough was enough and funded the American Football League with a lavish TV contract prior to the 1965 season. NBC's money gave the AFL additional credibility and eventually the leagues would agree to merge.
The merger required an act of Congress. That happened in October 1966. The two pieces of legislation rocketed the NFL into the upper stratosphere which enabled the sport to blast past baseball in popularity.
In the 1980s, two Congressional bills inadvertently created new and lucrative revenue streams for sports although the NFL did not jump into the cable TV game until 1990 some six years after the Cable TV Act of 1984 which allowed cable companies to bundle networks such as ESPN, WTBS, CNN and the Weather Channel into basic expanded tiers and sell the package as one entity to consumers instead of offering a la carte choices. The Congressional legislation saved ESPN from going under along with the other networks and quickened the migration of sports from over-the-air TV to cable TV which was able to pay leagues and teams more money than networks because there were two sources of revenue streams, cable TV fees and advertising instead of the one stream, advertising, which was available to over-the-air TV networks and stations.
The 1986 Tax Act had revisions which changed the formula of paying off municipally built stadiums and arenas and limited the amount of money municipalities had available to pay off debt from events inside of new stadiums and arenas built after 1986 to just eight cents on the dollar. The stadium and arena game became a nuclear arms race between cities throughout the United States as political and business leaders wanted to make sure they satisfied owners wallets and egos by building the best facilities they could on the public dime, facilities which upped potential (and untapped) revenues streams to unimaginable levels prior to the Reagan era or even in the first five years of the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
The cable TV and tax bills opened the door for billions of dollars to be captured by the owners of NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams in the 1980s and now Major League Soccer is taking advantage of the changes in the tax code dating back to 1986.
NFL owners want to keep more of the revenue coming into the league because of high debts that have been incurred but various owners who overpaid for a franchise or put too much into the building of a new stadium. The owners still have not come up with a sufficient revenue sharing mechanism that will keep Dallas' Jerry Jones happy or Cincinnati's Mike Brown enthused. It is a little more than seven months to the Super Bowl but the NFL's real big game will take place after this year's championship game as the league and players need a deal struck by the start of free agency in March or the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement change. The owners will no longer have to abide by a salary cap while the players give up two years of free agency from four to six years. If there is no deal by March 2010, the likelihood that the owners will lock out the players in 2011 increases expediently.
Expect the rhetoric from both sides to increase as well with the looming March free agency period.
Meanwhile NBA owners and players will soon get to the bargaining table to discuss life after the 2010-11 season and it might get very ugly long before the end of the current bargaining agreement. NBA revenue streams from marketing partnerships are down, ticket prices are being dropped and that means basketball related income will be less, the players get 57 percent of basketball related income at present. NBA owners say they are losing money and for the first time in ages, players salaries will go down in 2009-10.
Sitting on the sidelines are Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. In 2004, the NHL owners locked out the players for an entire season and got a salary cap as part of the new deal. The NHL labor negotiations seem to set the tone for the NBA and Major League Baseball as the two players associations came up with new deals without a labor action because the theory goes the players saw the owners meant business in hockey and because of various cross ownerships in the three leagues, the players paid far more attention to the hockey lockout than they would under normal circumstances. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL are joined at the hip because of ownership overlaps in the various leagues and in the ownership of regional cable TV networks. Baseball's collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2011 season. The NHL's deal could end as early as September 2011 or September 2012.
It is doubtful that Bill Hunter, the National Basketball Players Association's Executive Director, Paul Kelly, the NHLPA Executive Director or Michael Weiner, who is succeeding Donald Fear as Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director, would seek out Congress and ask them to change the playing conditions by reviewing the laws that have strengthen the owners' pocketbooks, but DeMaurice Smith is going down that road, at least he has put Congress on notice that he might need help. Smith might have been on President Obama's transition team and might know how Washington works but Bill Clinton could tell him a little something about sports collective bargaining. President Clinton tried to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to end the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed. Neither the owners nor the players wanted to listen to the president. It took a United States District Judge in March 1995 to end the strike after that judge ruled the owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by ending the free agency and salary arbitration systems and the judge ordered the reinstatement of the old collective bargaining agreement after finding that the owners (the owners chief negotiator at the time was Richard Ravitch who recently was named by New York Governor David Patterson as the state's lieutenant governor) did not bargain in good faith. One of those owners was Texas Rangers Managing General Partner George W. Bush.
The District Judge? Sonia Sotomayor who is President Barack Obama's choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
eweiner@mcn.tv
Will there be an NBA or NFL Season in 2011?
By Evan Weiner
July 16, 2009
3:00 PM EDT
(New York, N. Y.) -- You don't need a crystal ball to know that 2011 is going to be perhaps the most intriguing sports year in North America ever. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association may not be operating because of labor actions.
Both leagues and their players are two years away from the end of their respective collective bargaining agreements. The football players are acting as if they except the owners to lock them out of training camps in 2011, the National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern said earlier this week that at least half of the NBA's 30 teams are money losers, the NBA has reduced the salary cap for team payrolls slightly for the 2009-10 season and there is a thought that the cap will be tightened more so in the summer of 2010 with the worsen economic conditions finally being felt by the league.
On Wednesday the new Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association DeMaurice Smith took some of his labor association members to Congress to discuss the economics of the National Football League. Smith's tactic is a new dimension for football players in their talks with the owners, he wants Congress to understand the players side of the story, that the owners are making a lot of money thanks to acts of Congress, including the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act and the 1966 American Football League-National Football League merger and that the players, who are the game, continue to get a fair shake in divvying up the NFL money pie.
It is an interesting but risky ploy by Smith and raises the question of whether he wants to help or hurt his membership. Undoing the 1961 and 1966 legislation would ultimately have a crippling financial impact on the players. Additionally Congress has never sought to unravel either of those pieces of legislation. Scrapping the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act will impact not only the NFL, but Major League Baseball, the NHL, the NBA and college sports along with golf and tennis tournaments as TV revenues, whether they come from over-the-air network TV or cable, provides the financial underpinning needed to run sports successfully and performances salaries are pegged to TV dollars along with ticket sales and marketing partnerships.
The National Football League Players Association has always been considered the weakest of the four major league sports players groups in North America. Whether it was Ed Garvey or Gene Upshaw at the head of the table, the main criticism is that the association leadership always looked for money first and did not look after pension benefits, health benefits for players on the field and retirees nor did they bother with getting contract guarantees. Talk to players who were part of the 1982 or 1987 labor actions and they think the strikes were pretty much a waste of time that accomplished very little.
NFL players get paid significant salaries but the way contracts are structured, players can keep salary bonuses but if they are cut, they get a slimmed down severance which is different from the other sports whether it is Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League.
Smith has to be aware that the 1961 Sports Broadcast Act allowed the 14-team NFL to pool it's resources and gave NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle the ability to sell the league as one entity in a bidding war between the two major broadcast entities of the day (1961), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) with CBS winning. Because CBS was constantly beating out NBC for the NFL rights in the early 1960s, NBC said enough was enough and funded the American Football League with a lavish TV contract prior to the 1965 season. NBC's money gave the AFL additional credibility and eventually the leagues would agree to merge.
The merger required an act of Congress. That happened in October 1966. The two pieces of legislation rocketed the NFL into the upper stratosphere which enabled the sport to blast past baseball in popularity.
In the 1980s, two Congressional bills inadvertently created new and lucrative revenue streams for sports although the NFL did not jump into the cable TV game until 1990 some six years after the Cable TV Act of 1984 which allowed cable companies to bundle networks such as ESPN, WTBS, CNN and the Weather Channel into basic expanded tiers and sell the package as one entity to consumers instead of offering a la carte choices. The Congressional legislation saved ESPN from going under along with the other networks and quickened the migration of sports from over-the-air TV to cable TV which was able to pay leagues and teams more money than networks because there were two sources of revenue streams, cable TV fees and advertising instead of the one stream, advertising, which was available to over-the-air TV networks and stations.
The 1986 Tax Act had revisions which changed the formula of paying off municipally built stadiums and arenas and limited the amount of money municipalities had available to pay off debt from events inside of new stadiums and arenas built after 1986 to just eight cents on the dollar. The stadium and arena game became a nuclear arms race between cities throughout the United States as political and business leaders wanted to make sure they satisfied owners wallets and egos by building the best facilities they could on the public dime, facilities which upped potential (and untapped) revenues streams to unimaginable levels prior to the Reagan era or even in the first five years of the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
The cable TV and tax bills opened the door for billions of dollars to be captured by the owners of NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams in the 1980s and now Major League Soccer is taking advantage of the changes in the tax code dating back to 1986.
NFL owners want to keep more of the revenue coming into the league because of high debts that have been incurred but various owners who overpaid for a franchise or put too much into the building of a new stadium. The owners still have not come up with a sufficient revenue sharing mechanism that will keep Dallas' Jerry Jones happy or Cincinnati's Mike Brown enthused. It is a little more than seven months to the Super Bowl but the NFL's real big game will take place after this year's championship game as the league and players need a deal struck by the start of free agency in March or the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement change. The owners will no longer have to abide by a salary cap while the players give up two years of free agency from four to six years. If there is no deal by March 2010, the likelihood that the owners will lock out the players in 2011 increases expediently.
Expect the rhetoric from both sides to increase as well with the looming March free agency period.
Meanwhile NBA owners and players will soon get to the bargaining table to discuss life after the 2010-11 season and it might get very ugly long before the end of the current bargaining agreement. NBA revenue streams from marketing partnerships are down, ticket prices are being dropped and that means basketball related income will be less, the players get 57 percent of basketball related income at present. NBA owners say they are losing money and for the first time in ages, players salaries will go down in 2009-10.
Sitting on the sidelines are Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. In 2004, the NHL owners locked out the players for an entire season and got a salary cap as part of the new deal. The NHL labor negotiations seem to set the tone for the NBA and Major League Baseball as the two players associations came up with new deals without a labor action because the theory goes the players saw the owners meant business in hockey and because of various cross ownerships in the three leagues, the players paid far more attention to the hockey lockout than they would under normal circumstances. Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL are joined at the hip because of ownership overlaps in the various leagues and in the ownership of regional cable TV networks. Baseball's collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2011 season. The NHL's deal could end as early as September 2011 or September 2012.
It is doubtful that Bill Hunter, the National Basketball Players Association's Executive Director, Paul Kelly, the NHLPA Executive Director or Michael Weiner, who is succeeding Donald Fear as Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director, would seek out Congress and ask them to change the playing conditions by reviewing the laws that have strengthen the owners' pocketbooks, but DeMaurice Smith is going down that road, at least he has put Congress on notice that he might need help. Smith might have been on President Obama's transition team and might know how Washington works but Bill Clinton could tell him a little something about sports collective bargaining. President Clinton tried to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to end the 1994-95 baseball strike.
He failed. Neither the owners nor the players wanted to listen to the president. It took a United States District Judge in March 1995 to end the strike after that judge ruled the owners had violated the National Labor Relations Act by ending the free agency and salary arbitration systems and the judge ordered the reinstatement of the old collective bargaining agreement after finding that the owners (the owners chief negotiator at the time was Richard Ravitch who recently was named by New York Governor David Patterson as the state's lieutenant governor) did not bargain in good faith. One of those owners was Texas Rangers Managing General Partner George W. Bush.
The District Judge? Sonia Sotomayor who is President Barack Obama's choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.
eweiner@mcn.tv
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