boutons
12-25-2004, 10:05 AM
NBA Tries to Appease Both Sides of Culture Gap
By Mike Wise
In many ways, the National Basketball Association is like any other billion-dollar business trying to attract a younger audience without alienating its core customers. It's just that the NBA's balancing act has played out in a months-long drama witnessed by millions around the world.
Today the league will have two of its games televised nationally as part of a Christmas Day package, and they could not be more emblematic of the challenges the NBA faces. The games likely will draw millions of viewers, presumably few of whom will be watching to see which team best executes the backdoor pass.
The Los Angeles Lakers will play the Miami Heat with all eyes on the matchup between rival former teammates Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. And the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons will play for the first time since a brawl on the court and in the stands at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan led to player suspensions and criminal charges.
The non-basketball drama might make purists cringe, but it clearly is good for business. The NBA's gross revenue this season is expected to surpass $3 billion, nearly double the amount the league took in during Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997-98.
To continue that growth the league must serve two disparate audiences: a sometimes fed-up, disconnected, aging fan base and the young, edgy 18-to-34 demographic -- of all ethnic backgrounds -- that cannot get enough of today's in-your-face, trash-talking bravado on the court. Purists point to the disappointing performance of the U.S. team at the Olympics -- a group comprising 11 NBA players and the second pick in the league's annual draft finished third -- as a sign that the quality of play is deteriorating at the expense of showmanship.
NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a recent interview in his New York office that the league has become a reflection of broader cultural changes in the United States, but is not responsible for them.
"The world of sports has become so big and the external forces so pervasively powerful that we're consumed by it," Stern said. "You cannot do anything about Kobe Bryant's case shown live on every network as the story of the day for months -- or when the brawl at the Palace is run 300,000 times on television and downloaded 5 million times on the Internet."
The NBA has embraced its new generation of stars, including controversial players such as Allen Iverson and Rasheed Wallace, each of whom reflect a hip, new urban street ethic that they carry onto the basketball court. "We are who we are," Stern said. "We invite scrutiny. Because that's what's good about our game. That's what drives us."
Some former players and longtime fans worry that the NBA is in the midst of a dangerous shift away from its roots as purely a basketball league.
The NBA "needs control again, because I think the players are now controlling the league," said Mel Davis, a former player and now the executive director of the NBA's Retired Players Association. "I know I'm ultra-conservative, but I'm tired of it. When players get injured now, they sit on the bench looking like they are going to a party or something. All this jewelry on, the earrings, the tattoos. It's crazy. They should sit there with a suit on or get fined."
Stern can point out that his approach is working financially. Gross revenue went from approximately $1.7 billion in 1998 to $2.8 billion last season. The league will likely surpass $3 billion in basketball-related income this season. Franchise values have doubled as well, with the Phoenix Suns fetching more than $400 million in a sale completed in July.
Today, a legion of young stars sell sneakers and jerseys. Players decked in platinum ropes and baggy jeans often adorn the covers of provocative publications, such as Slam and Dime, which appeal to a generation raised on the hip-hop chic that dominates today's NBA.
For the past 10 years, counterculture heroes have emerged from Slam magazine's pages. Its covers feature the game's top stars scowling into the lens, essentially playing gangsta: "Latrell Sprewell . . . How He Saved the NBA."
"We're ingrained in the culture now," said Russ Bengston, Slam's editor in chief for the past five years. "We're a necessary evil for the NBA. I'm sure there's things about us they don't like, you know, 'They're going too far. Why did they do that?' But I think they understand we're reaching a demographic of their audience that maybe they're not reaching as much."
In dealing with players, Stern has walked a line between being punitive and empathetic. His behavior has mirrored the league's dilemma: trying to woo new fans while clinging to the revenue generated by old ones.
"Iverson had cornrows, but fans loved him because he was himself," said Penny Hardaway, the veteran guard currently playing for the New York Knicks. "And when the league saw that the public loved him, they had to follow suit."
In regard to Stern's suspensions over the years, Hardaway added: "I don't think they're distancing themselves from the players they marketed. I think they're trying to say to fans, 'We're not going to let this turn into a thug league.' "
"There wasn't a conscious decision to market any of our players," Stern said. "The draft defined itself. LeBron James came to us [in the 2003 draft] as the most touted player and best known first-round draft pick that we've probably ever had. We went with the tide."
A generation ago, players' agents were obsessed with grooming their clients to make them palatable for a mainstream audience. Yet modern NBA players, who make millions of dollars in endorsements and salaries, no longer need local newspapers or radio hosts to sell them as telegenic stars.
Electronic images and glossy magazine covers are now king. Old media have been leapfrogged by athletes and their agents who can reap more profit and exposure through a video-game likeness or a shoe commercial.
"The reality is, there's a certain cross-segment of young America, not divided in any way by race, that focuses on certain fashion, certain music artists and certain athletes," Stern said. "In that community, which is 18 to 34 years old, the NBA does very well."
Yet that reality has also created a chasm not only between generations of fans, but also generations of NBA players.
"These guys don't understand the history," Davis said. "And the NBA legends are watching this saying, 'What kind of respect do they have for the game?'
"You can go in a certain direction to a point, but when you step over the line that's when you look back at where you came from," Davis added. "And maybe the brawl is one of those moments."
The melee at the Pistons' home arena in suburban Detroit last month, in which several Pacers stormed into the crowd, then fought fans in the stands and on the court, dominated national news coverage for more than a week. Suspensions were handed out to nine players from both teams, the longest imposed against Pacers forward Ron Artest, who was forced to sit out the season's remaining 73 games without pay. Criminal charges ranging from misdemeanors to felony assault were issued against five Pacers players and seven fans. Bill Walton, the Hall of Fame center working as an ESPN analyst that night, called it "a mind-boggling scenario."
"I'm sitting there, thinking, 'How can this possibly be happening?' It was surreal," Walton said. "In all my years in basketball, it was the lowest point for me."
Neither Walton nor Stern say the league has become dangerously entangled with the most unseemly elements of hip-hop lifestyle. "That's too much of a generalization," Stern said. "I don't know what that means. That's a different conversation. Because to us, the most compelling measurement or judgment of our players by fans is how well they play and how hard they play."
The quality of play was roundly criticized last summer, however, when ill will toward NBA players bubbled to the surface at the Olympics in Athens. A collection of NBA millionaires -- all younger than 30 and all black -- were castigated for not winning an Olympic gold medal. Iverson's wearing of headphones before a game was viewed as a sign of disrespect to country and team.
Is the NBA's perceived image problem an issue of covert racism, in which young black players are sometimes thrust into a world of double standards? "It's a combination of subtle race issues and a little bit of jerk-ism," Stern said. "A few players set themselves up for being the object of it. But there's a certain layer" to the race issue.
Billy Hunter, the executive director of the players' union, goes further. In the wake of the Pistons-Pacers brawl, Hunter said, Stern had to send a message to his patrons in a league that is "90 percent white customers and almost 85 percent black players."
"And I feel for him," Hunter said. "It's not Artest that gets vilified. It's the entire league. It's 'those guys.' But the problem when you say 'those guys,' it generally connotes 'those black guys.' So Grant Hill is one of those guys. Ray Allen. Tim Duncan. Nobody can escape it. When a baseball player goes into the crowd, they indict the one guy. When it happens in our league, it's a societal problem."
The NBA has gone through several up and down cycles in recent decades. And it emerged from each downturn led by dynamic on-court personalities. Having achieved mass popularity on the heels of the great Celtics, Knicks and Lakers teams of the 1960s and early 1970s, the NBA regressed for a time, at one point losing its national television contract.
In the 1980s, the emergence of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird -- and then of Michael Jordan and a cast of stars such as Charles Barkley, David Robinson and Patrick Ewing -- catapulted the game to stratospheric heights. Their appeal became enormous after 1992, when during the Barcelona Olympics, NBA professionals represented the United States for the first time. The success of the "Dream Team" made the NBA a global phenomenon.
After Jordan's retirement from the NBA in 1998, there was an unspoken search by the league to fill the vacuum. In stepped a glut of new young stars, whose rough image was jarring for many fans accustomed to Jordan's and Magic Johnson's smiling, sunny demeanors.
In one of the most telling instances of the NBA's approach, Stern admonished an editor from the NBA-sponsored Hoop magazine when tattoos covering Iverson were air-brushed off the cover photo. Stern made it clear he wanted his players to be shown as they were.
But in these past six months the league has faced some tough challenges to its image.
Bryant was brought up on sexual-assault charges in Colorado, which were dropped, but not before a media circus. Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended for choking his coach in 1997, justified his efforts to secure a new, multimillion-dollar contract from the Minnesota Timberwolves by saying, "I've got a family to feed." Carmelo Anthony, the Denver Nuggets young star, appeared in a homemade DVD sold on the streets of his native Baltimore that included men smoking marijuana and making violent threats against police informants. And there was the brawl in suburban Detroit.
In a much edgier NBA, Antawn Jamison, the veteran forward now playing for Washington, questioned his own marketability. He had averaged more than 20 points per game between 1999 and 2003 while with the Golden State Warriors and was unable to make the roster for the league's annual all-star game, while some of his bad-boy peers were selected to play.
"There was one point, during a time when I thought I should have made the all-star team, I was like, 'Maybe I got to be somebody different . . . beat a girl up or something to get ratings,' " Jamison said in a recent interview. "And it actually crossed my mind. What else more could I do? I can't do anything else. How am I not getting recognized? Maybe I need to come out and get a [technical foul] or something."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Mike Wise
In many ways, the National Basketball Association is like any other billion-dollar business trying to attract a younger audience without alienating its core customers. It's just that the NBA's balancing act has played out in a months-long drama witnessed by millions around the world.
Today the league will have two of its games televised nationally as part of a Christmas Day package, and they could not be more emblematic of the challenges the NBA faces. The games likely will draw millions of viewers, presumably few of whom will be watching to see which team best executes the backdoor pass.
The Los Angeles Lakers will play the Miami Heat with all eyes on the matchup between rival former teammates Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. And the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons will play for the first time since a brawl on the court and in the stands at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan led to player suspensions and criminal charges.
The non-basketball drama might make purists cringe, but it clearly is good for business. The NBA's gross revenue this season is expected to surpass $3 billion, nearly double the amount the league took in during Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997-98.
To continue that growth the league must serve two disparate audiences: a sometimes fed-up, disconnected, aging fan base and the young, edgy 18-to-34 demographic -- of all ethnic backgrounds -- that cannot get enough of today's in-your-face, trash-talking bravado on the court. Purists point to the disappointing performance of the U.S. team at the Olympics -- a group comprising 11 NBA players and the second pick in the league's annual draft finished third -- as a sign that the quality of play is deteriorating at the expense of showmanship.
NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a recent interview in his New York office that the league has become a reflection of broader cultural changes in the United States, but is not responsible for them.
"The world of sports has become so big and the external forces so pervasively powerful that we're consumed by it," Stern said. "You cannot do anything about Kobe Bryant's case shown live on every network as the story of the day for months -- or when the brawl at the Palace is run 300,000 times on television and downloaded 5 million times on the Internet."
The NBA has embraced its new generation of stars, including controversial players such as Allen Iverson and Rasheed Wallace, each of whom reflect a hip, new urban street ethic that they carry onto the basketball court. "We are who we are," Stern said. "We invite scrutiny. Because that's what's good about our game. That's what drives us."
Some former players and longtime fans worry that the NBA is in the midst of a dangerous shift away from its roots as purely a basketball league.
The NBA "needs control again, because I think the players are now controlling the league," said Mel Davis, a former player and now the executive director of the NBA's Retired Players Association. "I know I'm ultra-conservative, but I'm tired of it. When players get injured now, they sit on the bench looking like they are going to a party or something. All this jewelry on, the earrings, the tattoos. It's crazy. They should sit there with a suit on or get fined."
Stern can point out that his approach is working financially. Gross revenue went from approximately $1.7 billion in 1998 to $2.8 billion last season. The league will likely surpass $3 billion in basketball-related income this season. Franchise values have doubled as well, with the Phoenix Suns fetching more than $400 million in a sale completed in July.
Today, a legion of young stars sell sneakers and jerseys. Players decked in platinum ropes and baggy jeans often adorn the covers of provocative publications, such as Slam and Dime, which appeal to a generation raised on the hip-hop chic that dominates today's NBA.
For the past 10 years, counterculture heroes have emerged from Slam magazine's pages. Its covers feature the game's top stars scowling into the lens, essentially playing gangsta: "Latrell Sprewell . . . How He Saved the NBA."
"We're ingrained in the culture now," said Russ Bengston, Slam's editor in chief for the past five years. "We're a necessary evil for the NBA. I'm sure there's things about us they don't like, you know, 'They're going too far. Why did they do that?' But I think they understand we're reaching a demographic of their audience that maybe they're not reaching as much."
In dealing with players, Stern has walked a line between being punitive and empathetic. His behavior has mirrored the league's dilemma: trying to woo new fans while clinging to the revenue generated by old ones.
"Iverson had cornrows, but fans loved him because he was himself," said Penny Hardaway, the veteran guard currently playing for the New York Knicks. "And when the league saw that the public loved him, they had to follow suit."
In regard to Stern's suspensions over the years, Hardaway added: "I don't think they're distancing themselves from the players they marketed. I think they're trying to say to fans, 'We're not going to let this turn into a thug league.' "
"There wasn't a conscious decision to market any of our players," Stern said. "The draft defined itself. LeBron James came to us [in the 2003 draft] as the most touted player and best known first-round draft pick that we've probably ever had. We went with the tide."
A generation ago, players' agents were obsessed with grooming their clients to make them palatable for a mainstream audience. Yet modern NBA players, who make millions of dollars in endorsements and salaries, no longer need local newspapers or radio hosts to sell them as telegenic stars.
Electronic images and glossy magazine covers are now king. Old media have been leapfrogged by athletes and their agents who can reap more profit and exposure through a video-game likeness or a shoe commercial.
"The reality is, there's a certain cross-segment of young America, not divided in any way by race, that focuses on certain fashion, certain music artists and certain athletes," Stern said. "In that community, which is 18 to 34 years old, the NBA does very well."
Yet that reality has also created a chasm not only between generations of fans, but also generations of NBA players.
"These guys don't understand the history," Davis said. "And the NBA legends are watching this saying, 'What kind of respect do they have for the game?'
"You can go in a certain direction to a point, but when you step over the line that's when you look back at where you came from," Davis added. "And maybe the brawl is one of those moments."
The melee at the Pistons' home arena in suburban Detroit last month, in which several Pacers stormed into the crowd, then fought fans in the stands and on the court, dominated national news coverage for more than a week. Suspensions were handed out to nine players from both teams, the longest imposed against Pacers forward Ron Artest, who was forced to sit out the season's remaining 73 games without pay. Criminal charges ranging from misdemeanors to felony assault were issued against five Pacers players and seven fans. Bill Walton, the Hall of Fame center working as an ESPN analyst that night, called it "a mind-boggling scenario."
"I'm sitting there, thinking, 'How can this possibly be happening?' It was surreal," Walton said. "In all my years in basketball, it was the lowest point for me."
Neither Walton nor Stern say the league has become dangerously entangled with the most unseemly elements of hip-hop lifestyle. "That's too much of a generalization," Stern said. "I don't know what that means. That's a different conversation. Because to us, the most compelling measurement or judgment of our players by fans is how well they play and how hard they play."
The quality of play was roundly criticized last summer, however, when ill will toward NBA players bubbled to the surface at the Olympics in Athens. A collection of NBA millionaires -- all younger than 30 and all black -- were castigated for not winning an Olympic gold medal. Iverson's wearing of headphones before a game was viewed as a sign of disrespect to country and team.
Is the NBA's perceived image problem an issue of covert racism, in which young black players are sometimes thrust into a world of double standards? "It's a combination of subtle race issues and a little bit of jerk-ism," Stern said. "A few players set themselves up for being the object of it. But there's a certain layer" to the race issue.
Billy Hunter, the executive director of the players' union, goes further. In the wake of the Pistons-Pacers brawl, Hunter said, Stern had to send a message to his patrons in a league that is "90 percent white customers and almost 85 percent black players."
"And I feel for him," Hunter said. "It's not Artest that gets vilified. It's the entire league. It's 'those guys.' But the problem when you say 'those guys,' it generally connotes 'those black guys.' So Grant Hill is one of those guys. Ray Allen. Tim Duncan. Nobody can escape it. When a baseball player goes into the crowd, they indict the one guy. When it happens in our league, it's a societal problem."
The NBA has gone through several up and down cycles in recent decades. And it emerged from each downturn led by dynamic on-court personalities. Having achieved mass popularity on the heels of the great Celtics, Knicks and Lakers teams of the 1960s and early 1970s, the NBA regressed for a time, at one point losing its national television contract.
In the 1980s, the emergence of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird -- and then of Michael Jordan and a cast of stars such as Charles Barkley, David Robinson and Patrick Ewing -- catapulted the game to stratospheric heights. Their appeal became enormous after 1992, when during the Barcelona Olympics, NBA professionals represented the United States for the first time. The success of the "Dream Team" made the NBA a global phenomenon.
After Jordan's retirement from the NBA in 1998, there was an unspoken search by the league to fill the vacuum. In stepped a glut of new young stars, whose rough image was jarring for many fans accustomed to Jordan's and Magic Johnson's smiling, sunny demeanors.
In one of the most telling instances of the NBA's approach, Stern admonished an editor from the NBA-sponsored Hoop magazine when tattoos covering Iverson were air-brushed off the cover photo. Stern made it clear he wanted his players to be shown as they were.
But in these past six months the league has faced some tough challenges to its image.
Bryant was brought up on sexual-assault charges in Colorado, which were dropped, but not before a media circus. Latrell Sprewell, who was suspended for choking his coach in 1997, justified his efforts to secure a new, multimillion-dollar contract from the Minnesota Timberwolves by saying, "I've got a family to feed." Carmelo Anthony, the Denver Nuggets young star, appeared in a homemade DVD sold on the streets of his native Baltimore that included men smoking marijuana and making violent threats against police informants. And there was the brawl in suburban Detroit.
In a much edgier NBA, Antawn Jamison, the veteran forward now playing for Washington, questioned his own marketability. He had averaged more than 20 points per game between 1999 and 2003 while with the Golden State Warriors and was unable to make the roster for the league's annual all-star game, while some of his bad-boy peers were selected to play.
"There was one point, during a time when I thought I should have made the all-star team, I was like, 'Maybe I got to be somebody different . . . beat a girl up or something to get ratings,' " Jamison said in a recent interview. "And it actually crossed my mind. What else more could I do? I can't do anything else. How am I not getting recognized? Maybe I need to come out and get a [technical foul] or something."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company