by Barry Stagg
January 1999
Michael runs the Voodoo down
With apologies to Miles Davis, circa 1970, I have purloined one of the titles from his vast jazz repertoire for use as an appropriate title for this month's column. The album was the now possibly politically incorrect "Bitch's Brew" and the correct usage is 'Miles runs the voodoo down' but I digress. The purpose of using this catchy title is to write a rare column on basketball.
The 'Michael' in the title is Michael Jordan. The 'voodoo' refers to the tripe and drivel that the players and owners in the National Basketball Association call negotiating strategies.
By now even the most indifferent sports fan knows that the NBA has wasted about half its season in a perverse strike/lockout that revolves around which set of airheaded millionaires gets to divvy up the cash. Is it the owners and their mega-million dollar contract offers or is it the players and their mega-million dollar contract demands. The fact that there is a strike with all this money going to waste is indication enough that more atmosphere rather than brain material resides between the refined ears of any one of these overindulged dandies.
What caught my eye a day or so ago was the news that the magnificent Michael Jordan had attempted to make a divine intervention in the stalemated talks. Even in the rarefied fiscal atmosphere of these arguments among millionaires, the descent to their level of the magnificent Michael was cause for the combatants to pause. Few owners or players fail to recognize that the corporate colossus that is Michael Jordan Inc. has a financial gravity that even the richest and most jaded of the owners and players must acknowledge ,if not defer to.
Alas, the secular divinity of the basketball court was unable to sway the financial adversaries. The job action tumbles on in all its corrosive and cannibalistic confusion, bent on repeating the destructive mistakes that rended major league baseball so badly in 1994. The idea of millionaires shutting down the fiscal candy factory seems to make sense to the basketball crowd in 1998 just as it did for the diamond dummies in 1994.
Michael had to reluctantly concede that even his considerable business acumen and professional charm could not get the combative miscreants to any sort of compromise. They want and need this shutdown of work ,apparently to impress upon the paying public that their sweaty workplace is made of immortal stuff. How else to explain the self-destructive effort to turn starstruck teenage basketball worshippers into disillusioned and abandoned sports orphans. This is the same deal that drove dedicated baseball fans away from the game when the fools called off the 1994 World Series.
Perhaps this sort of destructive self-indulgence is indicative of an end of the millennium malaise that may be seeping from your frantic old computer chip, with its two-digit tumours, into the greedy, lazy hearts of Patrick Ewing and Jerry Colangelo. In a way maybe it is a cathartic act of species self-preservation, not unlike the relentless rush of Arctic lemmings to cliffside destruction. In the short run that mutant species known as the foolish, jaded sports bird will die off to the point where the environment(your wallet) can begin to afford to support a few more of these exotic and expensive creatures. Perhaps we should not interfere with the wily ways of Mother Nature. I will let Michael know about this right away.
Until next month, be proud, be prosperous.