That term – Sports Tax – is not hyperbolic. In a week that saw Louisiana fork over $5 million to the NFL for the privilege of helping that league make big Super Bowl money, Sports Tax is the most accurate catch-all label for the four sets of levies the public is being made to shell out.
The first Sports Tax comes from the higher taxes we all pay in order to fund direct handouts. Just as NFL owners convinced Louisiana politicians to give them that $5 million taxpayer subsidy, similar collusions between team owners and lawmakers have been forcing taxpayers everywhere to do much the same. In all, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that “taxpayers have committed $18.6 billion since 1992 to subsidies for the NFL’s 32 teams, counting the expense of building stadiums, forgone real estate taxes, land and infrastructure improvements, and interest costs on public bonds.” That’s almost $1 billion every year – and that’s just for football, meaning the figure isn’t even counting similar handouts for other leagues.
The second Sports Tax comes in the form of a rigged tax code, which effectively compels honest taxpayers to bankroll professional teams. As Republican Sen. Tom Coburn detailed in a report last year, the NFL, NHL, PGA (among others) use special provisions in that code “to exempt themselves from federal income taxes on earnings.” The report concluded that because of this, “Taxpayers may be losing at least $91 million subsidizing these tax loopholes for professional sports leagues that generate billions of dollars annually in profits.”
The third Sports Tax is embedded in your cable television bill. Though this levy is not itemized on your bill, the Los Angeles Times reports that up to half of your total cable payment is “for the sports channels packaged into most services.” That’s because the sports stations tend to charge significantly higher rates than other outlets, and yet are automatically included in most basic cable packages, thereby preventing ratepayers from opting out. The result is a tax obligating those who do not watch sports to subsidize those who do.
The final Sports Tax hits you two ways: First when your annual taxes go to support higher education and then when you or your kids pay ever-higher tuition rates. In both situations, your cash is typically subsidizing large schools’ sprawling athletic departments. That’s right – thanks in part to multi-million-dollar coaching salaries, 93 percent of those departments bring in less money than they generate, meaning you are paying a Sports Tax to make up the difference.
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Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.
This year’s ads were quite varied thematically, but two themes stood out to me: nostalgia and destruction/redemption. It’s not too hard to explain the source of these themes — our recent economic collapse and very slow recovery, a long and difficult war, widespread confusion about who we are and what our future is, make these particular themes good bets for advertisers trying to hook the emotional mind of the American populace. Both nostalgia and destruction/redemption play to the pervasive anxiety in the country.
Other players describe an off-camera NFL that is darker than the carefully scripted show presented during Super Bowl week. Their recollections, based on playing careers that touched every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s, include:
“Midnight snack” buffets at a team hotel the night before games that would consist not only of food and drink, but also painkillers so that, as Rory Graves, an Oakland Raiders offensive lineman from 1988-91, puts it, “The next day, you feel like a kid. You could run into a car — no pain! You didn’t feel nothing.”
Cans of beer tucked into airplane seat pockets before players would board, so they’d have something at the ready to wash down the prescription drugs such as the painkiller Vicodin (commonly called “footballs” by players because of their oblong shape) or the muscle relaxant Flexeril (“home plates” because they’re pentagons) disbursed freely by someone coming down the aisle on team flights. “We took those drugs because we wanted to play, but there was nobody stopping us,” Turley says. “We’re young. We’re 10 feet tall. Nothing can harm us. If you’re giving it to us, we’re going to take it.”
Widespread and regular use of Toradol, a medicine intended for pain relief, generally after an operation, and a central part of one of the lawsuits that says the drug could put someone with a head injury at increased risk. “If it wasn’t torn or it wasn’t broken, to me, Toradol fixed it and allowed me to keep going. I was so used to using it that I wanted to make it a weekly ritual to make sure that if I did get hurt, I wouldn’t have to be taken out of the game,” says Joe Horn, who estimated he got four or five concussions during a career in which he caught more than 600 passes for the Chiefs, Saints and Falcons from 1996-2007. “To be honest with you, we were kind of — what’s the word for it? — addicted. But I always thought it was OK; the NFL doctors were giving it to us.”
Being scorned by teammates or coaches if unable to return to a game because of injury, and a seeming total dismissal, particularly in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, of the notion that head trauma could cause significant problems, immediately or long term. “Get back out there” was a phrase repeated by the ex-players, citing words they heard during practices or games. As Joe Harris, a linebacker with five teams from 1977-82, says: “I know I had nine or 10 concussions, because I played through them. A lot of times, I’m out there and I was dazed, and I heard guys say, ‘He’s knocked out, and he don’t even know it.’ And then you talk to your coach, and they bring out smelling salts. ‘Give him a hit of that, and put him back out on the field.’ And they show you fingers, and you say it’s three when it’s two. And they say, ‘Get back out there. Just hit the one in the middle.’”
A day-to-day, post-football existence that is difficult because of, for some, depression, dementia, migraine headaches, memory lapses, along with balky hips and knees and shoulders. “My body hurts all the time,” says Mark Duper, who caught more than 500 passes as a wide receiver with Dan Marino’s Miami Dolphins from 1982-92. Duper is more concerned, though, about the ringing in his ears, the loss of memory, “having a conversation and, all of a sudden, I just forget what I’m talking about.”
By any measure the Super Bowl is socialist from head to toe.
Start with the venue. Governments paid for over 80 percent of the new $750 million Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the Super Bowl venue. The Colts chipped in about 15 percent, an investment they probably recouped in inflated asset value the day the stadium opened. Governments are also covering the estimated $20 million a year in operating deficits.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The NFL itself is a government creation.
Back in 1961 Commissioner Pete Rozelle convinced Congress to grant anti-trust immunity to the NFL to allow it to negotiate with broadcast companies as a single entity. Its first contract with CBS proved so lucrative that each team had $332,000 in the bank at the beginning of the season, a sum that exceeded most team payrolls at the time. Flush with cash, team owners might have started a bidding war for players if a truly free market in labor prevailed.
But having eliminated a free market externally in the broadcast marketplace, this new government sanctioned monopoly proceeded to eliminate a free market internally in the labor marketplace. The NFL imposed a rule allowing any team losing a free agent to another team to receive something of equal value from that team. Few teams were willing to risk signing a high profile free agent only to see their own rosters depleted.
Free agency came about only in 1993 after a jury ruled in favor of the players in a restraint of trade lawsuit brought by a group of NFL stars. That verdict and the threat of a class action filed by Reggie White of the Philadelphia Eagles on behalf of all NFL players led the league to the bargaining table. Still the owners refused to allow a completely free market by demanding and receiving a salary cap.
But Joe Paterno’s sin was not apathy. Joe Paterno participated—consciously or not—in a cover-up and a conspiracy. And in the pile of good things and the pile of bad things that is Joe Paterno’s life, covering up child rape is a pretty weighty “bad thing.” Far weightier, I believe, than the good that was his football coaching record. To define and defend what Joe Paterno did as “apathy” is to erase the victims, to ignore the very real consequences of very real actions. Saying, “If it is true that Joe Paterno is a bad man for not doing more (and maybe it is) …” is to allow equivocation where there should be none. Apathy isn’t what makes Paterno’s actions despicable. Over the course of more than 3,500 days, Paterno actively decided not to say anything, not to follow up and to continue to allow Sandusky access to Penn State facilities, knowing he had never been formally charged with his abuse of children. Paterno chose silence over action, when he knew that his action could stop sexual abuse. Why I Am Not Joe Paterno ☀
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