Money Isn’t Everything--Except in the Sports Sections

The sports section of a daily newspaper, once a refuge from reality to which readers could turn for amusement, often reads today like the rest of the paper.

A sports fan can no longer retreat to his little corner and escape the bad news. Often, in fact, he can’t even get a good laugh.

The precise moment that sports, and the reporting of them, became less fun cannot be documented, but somewhere along the line, sports turned into a business as cold and competitive as the oil or steel industries, and many of the people who played them lost their senses of humor.

Many sportswriters today lament this loss of humor and innocence in the games they cover. They tend to be the older ones. Many young writers seem to be as serious as today’s athletes, attacking the flaws in sports with the journalistic zeal of political reporters.

The young writers’ pursuit of athletic sins is not entirely a bad thing, of course. The scandals in games and the frailties in the character of athletes were overlooked and covered up for too long by sportswriters who cheered in the pressbox, played cards with their heroes and wrote their biographies.

Still, games ought to be fun, for crying out loud, and not treated as seriously as the national budget, abortion or arms control.

What changed the character of sports was not serious journalism, of course--that only made them less fun to read about. Money, probably, altered them the most, although a strong case could also be made for the obsession with winning. One leads to the other.

Athletes always had good hours, and they made more money than most of us while working half the time. It was hard for a fellow working on an assembly line, driving a truck or selling shoes to liken the playing of games to toil. Most people played them for the sheer joy of it. So did most athletes, probably, before the great money machine, television, came along.

When all that money started pouring into the owners’ pockets and remained there, the players became restless. Finally, they formed unions to free themselves from bondage and collect their share. Reasoning that they could make more on the open market, they took to court the rules binding them to one team and won the fight. Sports and sports pages haven’t been the same since.

Although their freedom to make a living in the marketplace, as other citizens do, was long overdue and financially rewarding to athletes, it drastically altered the fabric of sports. Some baseball players became mercenaries, using their newly won freedom to sell their services to the highest bidder every year or so. Teams began to lose their identities as players moved from one team to another. Even such revered heroes as Pete Rose and Steve Garvey left their loyal fans for more money.

Agents and strikes intruded upon sports. Salaries and prize money grew markedly, often becoming bigger news than the events. Sports pages began to look more like the business section than a review of fun and games. Not all readers were pleased. Sportswriters were criticized for devoting more attention to money than the games they covered.

In The Times’ sports section recently, for example, a story on Page 1 said building contractors had filed a $7.7-million lawsuit against Hollywood Park and, for the second day in a row, there was an account of sports entrepreneur Jerry Buss’ alleged financial problems.

On Page 2, a headline read: “Lloyd, Navratilova Will Play for $112,500 Prize.” The money was to come, the story said, from a purse of $1.8 million. In the same story there was an account of another tournament that had a purse of $40,000, but in only one paragraph did readers learn how well anybody played.

On Page 4, high in a story on the Daytona 500, it was reported that the race had prize money of $1.28 million. On Page 5, the score of only one golfer was reported before the tournament’s purse of $400,000 was mentioned. One player had won $116,262 of his career income of $454,627 in the tournament, the story said.

On Page 6, readers learned that former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier had won a $243,621 tax fight with the Internal Revenue Service, that the San Diego Padres had offered to pay $450,000 to a pitcher seeking $750,000 and that arbitrators had awarded catcher Mike Scioscia of the Dodgers a salary of $435,000 and had given pitchers Doug Sisk of the Mets $275,000 and Jerry Koosman of the Phillies $600,000.

It was a typical day. The dollar sign clutters the sports pages of most newspapers every day. Horse race results look like stock tables. There are claiming prices, purses, mutuel pools and payoffs for win, place and show, and daily doubles, exactas and the Pick Six. Races are often identified by the amount of the purse, as in the $265,000 San Antonio Stakes or the $157,400 Sierra Nevada Handicap.

Prize money is published with the scores in golf, tennis and bowling tournaments, and the leading money winners in some sports are listed every week. Some tournaments, in fact, are identified by how much they are worth rather than by their commercial names.

The irony of all this is that editors continue to publish such financial information, although the size of the purse doesn’t mean much today in sports. Money is tossed around like confetti by owners, promoters, television and commercial sponsors.

Once upon a time, the Santa Anita Handicap attracted national attention and the best horses in the land with a purse of $100,000 because a race worth that much was rare. Today, not even a million-dollar race always attracts the best horses.

Some golf and tennis players routinely skip tournaments offering purses as high as $500,000 or more. A million-dollar golf tournament in Las Vegas, in fact, gets little press attention and is not even staffed by The Times. Other tournaments with purses of $400,000 are reduced to small type in the back of the section. A $375,000 tennis tournament at LaQuinta attracted Jimmy Connors and a bunch of spear carriers.

But what really sets Sports apart from the other editorial departments of a newspaper is the attention it pays, and the space it devotes, to the salaries of the people it covers. Virtually no player signs a contract today without having his salary estimated in print--or in some cases, published as fact.

The ballpark figures have become easier for reporters to obtain for several reasons. Salaries are sometimes revealed by agents or the players’ associations, and when an athlete takes his case to an arbitrator, his pay is publicized. Other numbers are leaked by players and even general managers when it serves their purposes.

Still, many salary estimates are wrong, simply because some contracts are so complex that it takes an accountant, lawyer or computer to interpret them. Athletes get all kinds of bonuses, low-interest loans, deferred income and such non-cash compensation as property and stocks.

It is not surprising, of course, that sportswriters focus so much attention on money. Most of us are curious about the income of others and fascinated over the pay of executives and celebrities.

Fortune Magazine entertains us each year with a list of the country’s highest-paid executives. Some of the best reading in corporate reports to stockholders are the listings of executive salaries and bonuses. To most of us, the news that CBS signed Dan Rather as an anchorman was not as interesting as learning that he got $8 million or so to sign.

When Jack Nicklaus sank that putt on the 18th hole in The Skins Game last November, the story made Page 1, not because he had beaten Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Tom Watson, but because the shot had been worth $240,000.

When athletes moved into an income bracket with entertainment celebrities and business executives, they paid a penalty for their affluence that most other rich people avoid. They became fair game for criticism. Many fans get angry when a quarterback making $800,000 a year has a bad game, reasoning, perhaps, that a player making such an enormous salary should not have a bad game.

The pay of some athletes, in fact, seems to bear no relation to their skill.

In no sport is this more evident than baseball.

Players who will not make baseball’s Hall of Fame are making $1 million or more. A player who hits mostly singles and throws like a Little Leaguer can make that much, and a third baseman with little range, average arm and speed and a batting average of less than .300 can command $750,000. Pitchers who lose as often as they win and seldom complete a game are paid more than the presidents of some big corporations.

Such high salaries would seem to be incentives for players to improve, but that has not always been the case. The reason, one researcher found, is that owners give many of their wealthy employees guaranteed, long-term contracts.

“This saps a player’s incentive both to play at peak performance and to play hurt,” said the researcher, economist Kenneth Lehn of Washington University in St. Louis.

In his 1980 study of 188 players with guaranteed, long-term contracts, Lehn found that injuries increased by 165% in the three years after their signings. “What’s more, for pitchers, post-contract disability soared by more than 300%,” he said, adding that the percentage of players on the disabled list rose from 13.8% in 1976 to 21.8 in 1980.

Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson told Lehn: “A little security goes a long way with a ballplayer. With a long-term contract, he just isn’t the same guy he used to be.”

Sportswriters are curious about such things. But should sports sections focus as often as they do on stories about money and the other sordid subjects that have made their pages less entertaining to read lately? A reading of the nation’s major newspapers suggests that editors believe they should.

Still, some critics claim that a sportswriter’s essential craft is to report only what happens on the field or court, put it into perspective and leave non-sports subjects to other departments of the newspaper.

What these critics forget is that sports are often dull and need embellishing. To say that Fernando Valenzuela won 12 games for the Dodgers last season is not as interesting, say, as reporting that he made $91.666.66 for each victory.