I'm Locking Out The Lockouts

Alright, I'm gonna try to keep this post short, as I admittedly do not know much about the labors lockouts pending in the NBA and NFL, but I feel they worth some form of discussion. I mean, hell, I can barely manage the payroll for my simulation Nationals team: it's halfway through the season and I am somehow twenty million in debt to the District of Columbia already (Jake Peavy is fucking expensive, man).

This man is a completely impotent leader.
I can't be funny about how much I hate
David Stern. Photo by Eric Richardson.

My interest can merely just not stay tacked to such a meaningless issue, meaningless in that it is a bunch of fucking-absurdly-rich people arguing for more control and revenue from a bunch of more-fucking-absurdly-rich people. That might sound uneducated, sure, but sports is about putting balls into goals, reaching the endzone, or any other of the various signs of physical and technical dominance that rile us up and make us proud to be fans. Sports is not about having the entire construction of teams altered to fit markets, punishing an area not for its lack of love for a team, but for its lack of something as basic as population.

This is how areas like Florida get two World Series winning Marlins teams, an appearance at said monumental sports occasion by the Rays, as well as one of the most dynamic groups of basketball players the last few decades has seen. And how does the area reward these amazing accomplishments? THEY STILL DON'T GO TO FUCKING GAMES. These attendance struggles by the MLB are confusing enough, this isn't even the USA's sport any more as much as it is Latin America's, a population certainly prevalent in Florida.

Note: I would say everyone in here can suck a fat dick,
but there's not even enough of them to make it
pleasurable. Photo by liddybits. 

But, what is even more confusing for me as primarily a basketball fan, is their lack of an ability to maintain at least a fucking interest in the most powerful player alliance since perhaps Havlicek, Russell, and Jones. The Heat organization was at one point asked by the NBA to cover their empty seats with white covers as to create the illusion of people giving a shit. Miami had to request it's fans to "Fan Up!" with it's infamous ad which requested for fans to come early and stay for the whole game, and oh yeah, to actually get up from their fucking iPhones and cheer once in awhile (if you think I'm shitting you, just google "Miami Fan Up", the Cleveland Leader article is especially entertaining). Mark Cuban even stated, and completely correctly I might add, that in the crucial and ultimately final Game 6 in Miami, Dallas fans "punked the shit out of" Miami fans, leading to a near-home game environment for the Mavs. Miami fans annoy even Charles Barkeley, the most annoying guy in basketball. When you confront a Miami fan with such blatant facts, they usually give a LeBron-esque comment about how there is so much to do in Miami, why show up on time or stay for the completion of a basketball game?

The only Heat fans I care about. And it's only for the
air-humping. Photo by Dori.

These cities do not deserve basketball teams, but hell, they're rich. South Beach is rich as fucking sin, rich as a fucking sin against basketball.

In the NFL you do have the issues of player health, something very important to me, but an issue that should be discussed completely separate of revenue. Both the NFL and NFLPA should be worried about concussions in the first game of the season, not in the as-of-yet nonexistent seventeenth and eighteenth games. Everyone, as usual, is so concerned with money and revenue-sharing that keeping our favorite and most skilled players around for as long as possible has become a secondary priority.

So, while we crucify college athletes for getting free meals or perhaps benefiting monetarily a fraction of what their school gets from their performance, rape and rob the NBA so teams have an actual ability to compete (oh wait, by teams I mean markets, for the love of God), and postpone and possibly gut this country's favorite sport, could someone actually just fucking concentrate on making the sports safer and more entertaining?

Or, how about this novel idea: lets just play some fucking games.