alarming sports story

Presumably only a small portion of this blog’s readers are interested in American sports, but I was alarmed to read THIS STORY BY LESTER MUNSON about an antitrust case that the U.S. Supreme Court has strangely agreed to hear.

Essentially, the National Football League (NFL) is going to argue that the league is a single entity in competition with other forms of entertainment such as cinema, rather than the current system under which all the teams are seen as being in competition with one another. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the NFL, it will give the NFL and all other American sports leagues a crushing power to restrict player and coach salaries and drive ticket prices sky high. This would be disgusting, essentially reversing much of the progress made by sports labor in recent decades, especially through the heroic struggles of baseball players such as Curt Flood. The results might be so horrible that I could stop following sports altogether.

Munson is one of the best sportswriters in the business. He also happens to be a lawyer, which is why he writes on legal issues for ESPN. I met Munson once in Chicago during my sportswriting days. Even though it was only one meeting, he might well remember me, since he was stunned that I was working on a doctorate in philosophy at the time, and I was stunned in return at his incredible knowledge of small Iowa college sports teams such as Coe and Cornell. (I’m still not sure how he knew that stuff.)

You can read about the case in the article itself, if you’d like. But the NFL seems to be calculating that the four conservative Justices will rule in their favor, and there is the odd fact that liberal Justice Stephen Breyer ruled against the NFL player’s union in a past case. That would be 5-4, if Breyer sides with the league again.

Interestingly, Sonia Sotomayor, now up for confirmation to the Court, played a major role in ending the 1994-95 baseball problems by ruling in favor of the players. (Former pitcher David Cone testified on her behalf before the Senate.)