fred klein on sports

               As a Depression baby, born in 1938, I’ve always had a thrifty streak-- okay, a cheap one. As someone once described the golfer Sam Snead, I like to know the price of my breakfast before I eat it. That is to say I don’t mind spending money if I get value in return but draw the line on frills. For instance, having a Lexus isn’t worth its $10,000 difference with my Toyota, which gets me where I’m going just fine, thank you.

               Thus it is that I’m regularly revulsed at what has been happening with sports- ticket prices. The Wall Street saw that no tree grows to the sky doesn’t seem to apply to them. Just when you think they’ve topped out, they shoot up again, and people stand in line to pay them.

               I admit that my perspective may be warped by my earliest box-office experiences. I got into my first Chicago Cubs’ games for nothing, as in zero, and did it legally. Back around 1950, when I was 11 or 12, other kids and I would ride our bikes over to Wrigley Field at around 3 p.m. in season and wait until the gates were opened to let the paying customers leave. While they were going out we’d go in, to watch late-inning play. Sometimes games would go into extra innings and we’d get a bonus.

            

              When I paid for Cubs’ tickets back then I’d ante up 65 cents for a grandstand seat. Kids could get into the bleachers for a quarter, but I thought the better view was worth the extra money. What can you see from the bleachers, anyway?  If memory serves the adult price for the grandstands at the time was something like $1.50.  

Even as an adult I could attend games for what today amounts to pocket change. In 1972, recently back in Chicago after a decade elsewhere, I was part of a group of four that shared a couple of season tickets to games of the Chicago Bulls, then still a fledgling team in the NBA. Our seats were excellent, in the second row of the first balcony, behind the Bulls’ bench in compact Chicago Stadium, and went for $5 per.  We held the same seats through 22 years and three NBA championships (1991, ’92, ’93), and while the team raised prices regularly ours didn’t top $30 in that span. We bailed when the Bulls moved into the new and vastly larger United Center in 1994 and proposed to kick us up to the nosebleed level at more than double the price. Seats comparable to the ones we used to have go for about $200 today.

What sent me off on this latest rant was an internet posting I came across during a recent browse. An outfit called “promocodesforyou,” which offers discount coupons on a variety of products, put together four very neat graphs showing the average (repeat, average), one-person cost of attending a game last season for each team in our four major sports leagues-- the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball. Topping the list, at $925.80, was the New England Patriots of the NFL. Baseball was headed by the Cubs at $170, the NBA by the New York Knicks at $176 and hockey at $600.66 (!) by the Vegas Golden Knights.

Now, I don’t know anything about the research that went into the chart and must note that its prices included not only admission but also the “average” spending for food, beer and parking that a stadium trip often entails.  As any fan can vouch, parking can come to a hefty slice of an outing’s cost, but the prices still startled.

The Patriots’ tab came to close to $1,000 per, so I looked a little deeper into it. Sure enough, a visit to a ticket resale site showed that two lower-deck, midfield seats for the team’s Sunday (Nov. 17) home game with the Philadelphia Eagles were offered for $2,025.98, without any trimmings. As for parking, although cheaper berths are available far from Gillette Stadium, reserved-spot prices ranged from $67 to $486. I had trouble believing that last figure, but there it was.  I bought my first car for a price not much above that.

As for baseball, my prime example of wretched excess came last year when my Cubs opened an in-stadium eatery and drinkery for holders of the 700 or so most-expensive seats in Wrigley Field. Admission to the place began at the single-game ticket price of $400 and topped out at $695. That’s to see a baseball game—one! For those prices a free open bar wouldn’t be too much to supply.

The picture strains credulity even at the average-guy level. The Pittsburgh Steelers were in the middle of promocodesforyou’s NFL scale at about $400 a seat. A pair for the team’s 10 home games (eight regular-season and two preseason), thus would come to $8,000. For a couple earning an above-average $100,000 a year, that would come to more than 10% of its annual after-tax pay.

That many people are willing to take such a hit is seen in the attendance figures of the NFL, NBA and NHL, all of which have held about steady at over 90% the last dozen years. In each of those sports, though, demand is relatively inelastic due to the shortness of the football season and the smallish (17,000-20,000) seating capacity of the two indoor sports in their big-city settings. It’s a standing joke in Chicago that hockey has 20,000 local fans and each has a Blackhawks’ season ticket.

Baseball has long (81-game) home schedules and large stadiums, so there’s more room for fluctuation. Its attendance has been declining, with this year’s total gate of 68.5 million ticket sales off about 4% from the season before and 14% from the 2007 high of 79.5 million. MLB has turned itself inside out trying to account for the drop, mostly fingering the sport’s deliberate pace and length of games, but it seems to me that economics also are to blame. To paraphrase Jimmy McMillian, who a few years ago ran for mayor of New York on a rent-control platform, ticket prices are too damn high!

 I recommend doing what I do, which is watch on TV. Everyone at home can see a game better than anyone in the stadium, and there are no lines for the bathrooms.

               Change usually moves from west to east in this land so it was no surprise that the sharpest challenge yet to the NCAA’s long-held amateurism model came from California. Last month that state’s legislature passed a bill enabling college athletes to profit from the sale of their “names, images and likenesses,” a trio that quickly became so repeated it’s been reduced to its initials, NIL.

The “just pay ‘em” crowd cheered and pols in other states, always eager to please, promised similar bills. Some Congressmen also signaled a readiness to act. The NCAA at first sputtered and recoiled but then, earlier this week, promised to go along, starting in 2021. And just like that—a seeming revolution.

Don’t be misled, however. Putting a few more dollars in the pockets of college jocks isn’t a bad idea, but it’ll change little else. The law of unintended consequences lurks, and the exploitation and hypocrisy can continue.

 The fact is that the players do get paid and well, in the form of the scholarships they receive.Depending on the institution these range in direct cash value from about $50,000 to about $250,000 over their four-or-five-year term, plus the seven-figure lifetime-income boosts that typically come with college degrees. In addition, since 2015 they’ve been receiving “cost of attendance” stipends for things like laundry, travel and the occasional pizza that their scholarships don’t cover. These differ from school to school and in 2018 ranged from $5,666 a year (at the U of Tennessee) to $1,400 (at Boston College), averaging about $3,500. That’s not much, but it ain’t hay, either. And that’s on top of any sub rosa money some have gotten from boosters from time immemorial.

Further, anyone who thinks that an endorsement bonanza awaits college athletes is wrong. The jock-endorsement field at any level isn’t nearly as lucrative as many people think; while a few superstars such as Steph Curry, Aaron Rodgers and Serena Williams can sell their NILs for millions most athletes earn nothing from theirs. In the Phoenix area where I live the only regular current ads featuring sports figures are auto-dealer commercials by Kliff Kingsbury, the Arizona Cardinals’ head coach, and Arizona State U. football coach Herm Edwards, and some TV spots for a plumbing and heating contractor by Shane Doan, a retired Arizona Coyotes hockey player.  As far as I know, no active Phoenix professional athlete has any such gig.

A few college athletes could be exceptions; Zion Williamson probably could have landed a big shoe contract while still at Duke. Larger numbers of college athletes could be paid for the use of their NILs in video-game applications, but because of the many-way divisions the medium dictates individual payments probably wouldn’t be large. And no matter how sports loving, not many people would buy a car or even a hamburger because some college jock asks them to.

What’s more likely to happen is that the lifting of the outside-payments ban will take some currently hidden payments out of the shadows; call the new rules the Booster Liberation Act, if you will. Instead of paying kids under the table Mr. or Ms. Generous will get a bunch of them together and take their picture, then put it in their store or office window and call it advertising. Or they may have the kids over for a public autograph session at $5 or $10 a pop. The NCAA no doubt will address the booster issue and try control it, but as the shoe-company scandal in basketball showed, it will be as unlikely to succeed as are its current prohibitions.

The most important thing about the new opening is that it exposed the NCAA’s growing legal and societal weaknesses.  From its founding in 1906 the organization has been a political powerhouse, getting its way at every level of American government. Just about every president, governor, judge or legislator has an alma mater he or she reveres, or must be seen as revering, and a call from one of its reps could be counted upon to protect the school’s interests. The NCAA thus has functioned as a cartel other industries envied, its activities largely free from governmental meddling.

Alas for it, though, the way universities have warped their educational missions in pursuit of entertainment dollars has compromised their integrity, making them fair game for regulation.  Talk about reforms that go beyond the financial have been making the rounds in Washington in recent years, with the likes of U.S. Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a former Stanford footballer and current presidential hopeful, backing proposals that would do just that.  

Whatever Washington does it won’t tear down the campus stadiums, but things could be done that could improve the odor of big-time college sports and benefit the athletes that play it. A simple start would be to ban freshman participation in varsity sports, thus making sure that athletes have at least a passing interest in academics and get a chance to ground themselves in their classrooms before doing or dying for Old Siwash.

If that sounds radical it shouldn’t— freshman ineligibility was an NCAA rule until it was repealed in 1972. Additionally, holding freshmen out of competition but retaining their four years of eligibility already exists in the form of “red shirting.” This usually is done so the athlete can grow physically, but there’s no reason it couldn’t also apply to his or her intellectual development.  It wouldn’t right every wrong in the system. Cutting back the game, travel and practice requirements that amount to a full-time job and block anything approaching a normal educational experience would help more. But it’d be a start.