Labor Disputes and Chris Rock: I Take Care of My Fans!

The way owners and players talk about lockouts/strikes and splitting the money is like a couple going through a divorce.  And we all know who gets hurt in divorces: the children. In our case, it’s the fans. Show me one child (or fan) who thinks that divorce is a good thing.* 

Look, we know that the owners and the players are never going to breakup for good.  Its all a tactic, but it hurts everyone else involved. 

These guys are fighting for the upper hand in a PR war that has no winners. Public opinion will never take the side of owners in a lockout, nor the players in a strike, just like observers will never take the side of the parents over the children. 

This isn’t the olden days of racial bias, no free agency, or no salary cap (mostly).  Players aren’t striking workers at the Hormel factory in Minnesota in 1985. And team owners, despite their best efforts to portray themselves as such, are not small business owners impacted severely by the economy. In addition, all this bickering hurts the sponsors paying top dollar to be associated with these guys.

Fans hate labor strife, and hate it with a passion. Even those fans who savvy businessmen, or are well off financially don’t understand how owners and players can bicker so publicly and so often when each party is making billions of dollars respectively.

Our proposed solution: Take strikes and lockouts off the table. Adding another relationship analogy, have you ever been in the early stages of a relationship and during an argument said to the other, maybe we should just break up? 

That’s OK, because it’s early on and you’re trying to get a feel for each other. But after a certain point (six months, maybe a year), it’s no longer OK to use the break-up bomb. You just have to work through it, you can’t just keep threatening to walk away.

So here’s Chris Rock (paraphrased) making a request from all the fans out there to the bickering owners and players:

You know the worst thing about owners and players? Owners and players always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. An owner or player will brag about some shit a normal man just does. An owner or player will say some shit like, “I take care of my fans." You're supposed to, you dumb #*&@&! What kind of ignorant shit is that?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter @Fanvibe

(* To be clear, we’re not talking about abusive relationships or other violent situations. I think we can all agree that owner-player relationships are not about abuse, violence, or mental torment.)