1998-03-07
Allen Iverson is a point guard on the Philadelphia 76ers. He is possibly the most promising young talent in the game. The Sixers pay him $9.4 million over three years, but he also receives endorsement money from Reebok. It costs $54 a ticket to watch Allen Iverson play.
Iverson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, in the ghetto, in a dilapidated house that was frequently unheated because his mother, who was 15-years-old when he was born, could not afford to pay the bills. The house reeked of backed-up sewage.
As he grew up, Allen watched friend after friend die violently in gang turf wars. Allen's father served time--for stabbing a girlfriend--as did his step-father. But Allen was born with a gift, and he worked hard to perfect it. He starred in high school basketball, and then for two years at university. Then he hit the big time: the NBA.
Now that he is a millionaire, Iverson has moved his mother, his sisters, his aunts, his uncles... just about everyone in his extended family, and his girlfriend and two children of his own, into decent housing outside of Philadelphia. He also supports two full-time body-guards.
Who is after Allen Iverson? I don't know. But every important person has a body-guard.
Allen Iverson served some time in jail when he was in high school because he was in a bowling alley when a riot broke out between some whites and blacks. The police arrived and arrested four blacks, including Iverson, and none of the whites. He was alleged to have thrown a chair that struck a woman in the head. He received five years in penitentiary even though he had no previous convictions and insisted that he had left the alley immediately after the trouble started. His conviction was later over-turned upon appeal and erased from his record.
Did you read that carefully? A young black man with no previous convictions received a 5-year sentence for allegedly throwing a chair at a woman during a fight in a bowling alley. Five years. Isn't that a little harsh? What does five years in prison do to a young man like Allen Iverson? What do you have when he comes out? Do you think that when he comes out, he will say to himself, "Whoa! I'll never do that again!"
Allen's high school friends can't afford the $54 it takes to see Allen play, but Sports Illustrated reports that some of the white men who can afford it heckle Iverson mercilessly.
What does Allen spend his millions on, after supporting his extended family? Incredibly tasteless, ostentatious jewelry, a red Jaguar for his mother, a Mercedes Benz for himself. Whatever he wants.
This is the face of the modern pro athlete. Everyone I know complains bitterly about the absurdly excessive amounts of money these athletes are paid. When we find out what they spend that money on, we are sometimes shocked at the waste and extravagance. We are disappointed that they don't seem to put the money back into the poverty-stricken communities they came from.
Salaries for professional athletes entered the realm of absurdity years ago. Everyone seems to know it, but no one seems to know any way to stop it. And they keep going: the latest contracts are for over $100 million. This is beyond idiocy and absurdity: it is pure madness.
But the story of Allen Iverson should give us pause. It is one thing for comfortable, middle-class whites to stand appalled at the state of affairs in professional sports; it is quite another for a black-teenager from an American ghetto. For many of these teenagers, their only hope of leaving their poverty behind is either drug-dealing or professional sports. In some ways, Iverson's huge salary is his payoff for suffering years of abuse and degradation.
Consider also the case of Latrell Sprewell, who assaulted his own coach, P.J. Carlesimo. The team and the League did the right thing, for once. The team terminated his contract and the NBA suspended him. Astonishingly, an arbitrator over-ruled both, shortened the suspension to six months, and reinstated his $17 million contract. Once again, we are beyond the realm of the unusual and into the realm of the completely bizarre. If you physically attacked and injured your supervisor, do you think you would be merely suspended? Where would you find an arbitrator dumb enough to reinstate you at full salary?
Given the general weirdness of all this, is it so hard to believe that the CIA deliberately encouraged drug-use by inner-city blacks, or that the budget deficit was the result of a conspiracy among bankers, investors, and the military, to convince the general public that government spending was out of control and force social spending down while continuing to line their own pockets? If you carefully analyze the changes in tax law over the past twenty years, two things are clear:
What has this got to do with Allen Iverson and basketball? Just part of the general weirdness of our economic system, that's all. Millions of people go to work every day. They spend hours and hours working hard, doing various challenging tasks, and thusly they generate enormous wealth. Where does this wealth go? Well, we know that you and I are getting about the same amount we got twenty years ago, maybe a little less. On the other hand, professional athletes, heads of corporations, and Al Dunlap-- the man who is famous for taking "down-sizing" to extreme heights in the name of shareholder profits--are all making way, way, way more than they used to. Bank profits are way up. Microsoft is making a bundle. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Madonna.... In 1990, the average NHL salary was $200,000. Today it is $1.1 million. When was the last time you got an increase in your pay?
Money moves around. We ought to pay close attention to how it moves around. There is one thing that is resoundingly clear about the way it moves around: pretty well anybody who can take more, will take more. There is no restraint on human greed. Some people regard unions as greedy. That may be true, but the difference is that unions distribute wealth far more widely than corporations do, and history tells us that the more widely and evenly wealth is distributed, the safer and healthier a society is.