It’s cute to be Cursed. It’s lovable to be a Loser.
Except that it’s really not.
It’s cute to be Cursed. It’s lovable to be a Loser.
Except that it’s really not.
Take for example Boston Red Sox fans. After the World Series, various experts predicted that Sox fans would soon be wandering the streets aimlessly, unable to function due to the sudden absence of the yearly heartbreak that gave their life “meaning.”
Except they’re really not.
Fact is, aside from people who shill “Bambino” books and “Lovable Losers” T-shirts and “Whose Curse is Worse?” mock TV trials, none of us think year after year of failure by our favorite teams is in any way redeemable.
When our team misses the playoffs for 10 years in a row, it doesn’t make us “spiritually stronger.” It just makes us ticked off.
I sometimes joke that I didn’t mind the first five years of the Warriors missing the playoffs … it’s the last five years that have been the killer. Actually, the first five years sucked, too. No joke.
It’s been ten straight years of losing basketball in a league that practically lets you into the playoffs if you have a functioning PA system and a copy of the Jock Jams CD. It’s incompetence bordering on the criminal. And it all comes down to the stupidity of Golden State ownership.
Here’s the thing … people like to point to any number of factors other than utter stupidity as causing a team’s failure. Injuries. Bad luck in the draft or in games. Financial difficulties in small markets. And it’s true, those things can have an impact on a team’s performance.
But even added up, all those excuses are nothing compared to the real reason there are perennial losers like the Warriors: Dumb owners hiring clueless management to bring aboard mediocre coaches to cajole uninspired performances out of overmatched players in front of screwed fans.
It’s just that simple. Stupidity at the top is for some reason tolerated in team sports. Stupid owners are allowed to keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over, for years and years, leaving entire cities in ruins.
It’s the psychological equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Only stupid owners do it in real life, where no matter how handsome and wooden you are, you can’t outrun the tornadoes and tidal waves and falling buildings of despair over how much your team bites. Twenty-five years of Clippers history is falling flat on your head, Bill Pullman, and there ain’t a thing you can do about it.
Despite all the fixes and rules changes and revenue sharing leagues have enacted over the years, these marathons of ownership ineptitude still happen all too often in sports. They’re happening in places like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and yes, the Bay Area.
And they really don’t have to. There are lots of smart people out there who would love a chance to run a professional sports team. It’s just that there are also plenty of entrenched owners who would rather pull the rest of us down with them into their pit of incompetence than sell what they obviously can’t manage. Thus I present you with a not-so-modest proposal to fix this whole mess.
Start with the idea that we should reward success and punish failure – starting at the top, with the owners. So right off the bat, we get rid of player draft structures that provide an incentive to be the biggest loser. Next, scrap any kind of revenue sharing that takes money from organizations that are successful at drawing fans and gives it to organizations that stink at it. Keep the salary caps (and install one in baseball) because then everybody’s got the same money to work with, and nobody can complain about being in a small or underperforming market.
Now for the punishing failure part. In my league, owners get three years to produce a team that wins more than half its games. No .500 team in three years, and you have to reimburse the fans with any profits you’ve accrued over those three years in the form of lower ticket prices. Haven’t had a .500 team OR a profit over the past three years? Your team goes up for sale to highest bidder. End of story. Get outta town, Jack. Go mismanage an oil company or something.
That’s all there is to it. We just incentivize not being a dimwit in charge of a major sports franchise. Darwin does the rest.
Damon Poeter is sports editor of the Gilroy Dispatch. He can be reached a dp*****@**********rs.com
