Columnist Dean Juipe: Fans immune to pro sports' labor woes

It moves around on what seems to be a rotating basis.

One year it's Major League Baseball having a labor problem.

The next year it's the National Football League.

Every few years it's the National Hockey League.

And this year it's the National Basketball Association.

It leads to World Series games not getting played.

And NFL games with stand-in players.

And cancellations and threats of cancellations of NHL and NBA games, such as the NBA's decision this week to trim its schedule to 68 games and keep trimming by a week for every week the current lockout stays in effect.

With each dispute, few lessons are learned. Mistakes are habitually repeated. Solutions are temporary, a Band-Aid at best.

The big money in professional sports has led to big-money-driven debates over how to slice that appetizing pie. Everyone wants more, more, more.

If it requires a walkout, a strike or a lockout, so be it. Both sides -- players and owners -- see such interruptions as part of doing business and even plan for them accordingly.

Every sport's players' association has a war chest for these ballyhooed catastrophes. Likewise, don't think the owners are ever caught unaware when a shutdown becomes reality, as they have long since braced for the worst-case scenario.

Less fortunate are those on the periphery. Stories this week have surfaced pertaining to the NBA lockout in which vendors, distributors, parking attendants and even sports-book directors in Las Vegas are asked how they'll get by in a pinch.

Each has a tale of woe, some more legit than others.

For many of these people, no games equals no revenue.

But for the athletes and owners themselves, no games equals a setback yet one that will be overcome when the schedule is restored. Few of them are seriously hurt by the failure to play a couple dozen games.

That's because the money is always greater, always stacked a little higher, once peace is achieved and play resumes and the fan adjusts to his greater financial burden. Oh, there are temporary glitches in the revenue chain as a result of a work stoppage, yet, to date, every sport has bounced back from labor-induced peril to be more formidable than ever.

Remember all the hand wringing that was going on in baseball's front offices when the 1994 World Series was canceled? They actually had some fear of a lasting fan retribution, and there was a little. Yet by 1998 and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and the New York Yankees all was forgiven and the sport arguably had its most sensational -- and most financially rewarding -- year in history.

There are pockets of exceptions, yet fans have become immune to labor issues and the inevitable loss of games they entail. So the NBA season won't open as originally scheduled next week? With football at midseason, hockey under way and college basketball just around the corner, who really cares if the NBA stays dark an extra month or two?

When the games resume, there won't be any grudges held.

Life goes on. Each of us has greater concerns.

archive