LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD: How the Law Can Make Sports Better for Fans.

• Author: ROWE, JONATHAN
• Position: Review

LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD: How the Law Can Make Sports Better for Fans by Paul Weiler Harvard University Press, $29.95

How rich sports makes poor sports

THERE IS A SENTENCE IN PAUL WEILER'S Leveling the Playing Field that telegraphs his pitch. Weiler is talking about the goal of his proposals to reform professional sports. "Just as we know from other areas of institutional governance," he writes, "sports leagues have to be designed in a fashion that not only fairly distributes the existing financial pie but also generates an expanding pie--again for the benefit of fans as well as owners and players."

That's the economic catechism in a nutshell--the assumed beneficence of an expanding pie. Weiler doesn't show exactly how this bigger pie will benefit fans, and that's the point. To the economic mind the assertion is true by definition, and no further discussion is required.

But perhaps it is. Perhaps the standpoint of the fan is different from that of owners and players--and of policy experts like Weiler. Perhaps it requires a different metric. Just possibly fans want a better game, which is not the same as more money sloshing through the proceedings--which is what economists mean by an expanding pie.

That is the question raised by (though not in) Weiler's book. Though it deals overtly with professional sports, actually it is about much more. The standpoint he embraces--the conventional Anglo-American economic model--has become the lingua franca of public policy and debate. Whether the issue is medicine or antitrust, prisons, schools, or even the protection of the earth, the question increasingly is not, "What do we need to do?" Rather it is, "How can we make this part of life look more like what the economics textbooks say?"

In sports the point comes through with special clarity. Sports derive from a realm of value that lies outside the preoccupations of the market. (So too do the crafts and professions generally, but less obviously so today.) Teamwork, loyalty, a pride in craft for its own sake, a rootedness in place--economists regard such qualities as Medieval relics, and clogs in the cosmic gears of market efficiency. Yet they remain important for the rest of us; and so the language of the market jars in a way it doesn't when the subject is say, lignite production or microchips. We feel more confidence in asking whether the agenda implicit in the model is going to take us where we really want to go.

Weiler will make many more confident still. He makes a number of good suggestions, and his heart is in the right place. But ultimately he ends up demonstrating why economics doesn't have all the answers, and why increasingly it misses the point. When it comes to money, folks, sometimes we've just got to say no.

Roots

Pie aside, pro sports are a mess. Players whine over seven-figure salaries; corporations saturate the proceedings with ads; billionaire owners shake down local taxpayers for stadiums and arenas; and the rich--both individual players and entire franchises--get richer, while those in the middle get crumbs from the table. Fans meanwhile have to pay over $45 a seat, on average, to take the kids to an NBA game, not counting parking, and concession prices that rival those at Dean and Deluca.

Sports are a metaphor for life all right; and it's little wonder that people from the sports world seem to gravitate increasingly to Washington these days. They've had a lot of practice. (Usually they come as conservatives who, having gotten rich in taxpayer-financed arenas, proceed to rail against the use of taxes to help anyone else.) As in politics, moreover, the common denominator to the many ills is money. The more there is, the worse things seem to get; and this raises problems for a belief system that regards the accumulation of money--the expanding pie--as the first good from which all others flow.

Weiler is a professor at Harvard Law who is a frequent expert source for sports reporters and a consultant in labor disputes. He is the kind of person whose views help shape both what happens in the sports business and how the media portrays what happens. This makes Leveling the Playing Field significant as a window on the kinds of changes that are within the framework of respectable opinion at this time.

The book is divided into two sections. The first deals with what one might call the "social" issues, such as gambling, drug use, and violence by players. The second deals with money issues, the ones that fall within the scope of labor law and antitrust (Weiler's specialties) at least. As a text and primer on the issues, Leveling the Playing Field does an admirable job. If you have puzzled over the difference between a hard and soft salary cap, or wondered why the antitrust laws affect major league baseball and basketball differently, or why big-money NBA stars such as Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing sought to &certify their player's union as a blow against the owners...