PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE

Professional Athlete

Professional Athlete

Introduction

One of the greatest challenges facing professional sports has been the rapid increase in earning power of professional athletes during the past quarter century. This challenge is likely to dominate the sports business landscape in the coming decades, especially as salaries and endorsements that have reached averages in the millions of dollars encounter an increasingly turbulent, complex, and transnational economy. But now, more than ever before, the income potential of professional athletes has significant implications for the relationship among sports, business, and society.

As professional sports became more organized during the twentieth century, professional athletes in all developed countries were increasingly paid several times the average worker's salary. But even the relatively high-paying jobs that persisted through the first 70 or so years of the century did not parallel the rise, magnitude, and capacity of the professional athlete's earning power during the latter part of the century, especially in the professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey leagues in the United States. The rise of the professional athlete paralleled that of the blue-collar worker, albeit with much better pay. That is, both professional athletes and blue-collar workers carved out a livelihood based on a cash wage with few fringe benefits until unionization increased their capacities to earn higher salaries and gain benefits. This increased both their social standing and their political power. But just as dramatically as the status of the blue-collar worker has fallen during the past 30-plus years, the status of professional athletes has experienced growth.

Issues in baseball and football among pro athletes

Despite most bidders' awareness of the “winner's curse,” it fundamentally occurs because the thought processes of those doing the bidding—that is, ownerships—is irrational.

Not only is it unprecedented for all of these agreements to be negotiated with near simultaneity, but also this round of bargaining is different from the past in another respect as well - i.e., a kind of role reversal. For it is baseball, which was filled with strife and discord in what I have characterized as a 30 year war before it enjoyed unprecedented peace and prosperity ever since my National Labor Relations Board intervened in the “mother all strikes” and obtained an injunction in 1995 from now Justice Sonia Sotomayor.1 Now, having concluded two agreements without resort to strike or lockout in 2002 and '06 the parties have put behind them uninterrupted warfare and a losing streak of legal mistakes by the owners. The prospects appear to be good that we will continue to enjoy uninterrupted peace beyond the 17 years that the parties will have lived together successfully at the end of this year. True, there are issues and problems which will arise at the baseball collective bargaining table in this year.

Though the steroid scandal of the '90s and the early part of this century appears to have diminished and the litigation involving BALCO has ended,2 the problem of HGH for which baseball has not yet devised a test remains out there. But, as the late George Steinbrenner's admonition to ...