I Don't Need the Money

By Bill Littlefield | Thursday, April 29th, 2010

“I don’t know if it was anything specific,” said Ryan Howard, first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies. “But it suddenly occurred to me that $125 million, even spread over five years, was just silly.”

At the time Mr. Howard was sitting at the wheel of his fabulously expensive car, killing time before traveling to the preposterously luxurious restaurant which he had reserved for himself and several of his friends.

“Look,” he continued, “who could possibly need more than, say, $20 million per annum? Even if all I ever thought about was how to spend a lot of money, even after taxes and my agent’s cut, I’m pretty sure $20 million would cover me.”

When he learned of Mr. Howard’s comments, Lebron James had an epiphany.

“My mom has a nice house now,” he said. “The $40 million plus I make each year – I think it’s around that… maybe’s it’s more by now…anyway, you can’t have everything, right? Like that comedian said, ‘Where would you put it?’ So why do I need to have enough money to buy everything?

Now, my agent says that the dollars, that’s how they measure who’s the best, so I get the most money, but, man, I’m secure enough so that I don’t need that sort of validation. I’m going to call the Cleveland front office and tell ‘em to save some of their money for the rainy day when I leave to play somewhere else.”

When word of these curious developments began spreading throughout the community of professional sports, other counties were heard from.

With one voice, former Los Angeles Lakers teammates Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, each of whom is paid in excess of thirty five million dollars each season, announced that they felt like frauds.

“Sure, we’re good at basketball,” Mr. O’Neal said.

“Yeah, well, you used to be good at it,” said Mr. Bryant.

“Always the kidder,” Mr. O’Neal said with a big grin. “Anyway, after we’ve put away the first couple hundred million, maybe we ought to test the proposition that we love the game so much, we’d play it for free.”

“Right,” said Mr. Bryant. “Or maybe for ten million. I mean, you don’t want to go cold turkey.”

“Who’s a turkey?” asked Mr. O’Neal, and they both laughed.

Then, perhaps just before the chorus from Goldman Sachs could chime in, I woke up.

Tags: Commentaries, MLB, NBA

Sara

I just listened to the podcast of this commentary.

The fact is, for some reason, people enjoy following sports. Your own show is based on this fact. For certain sports in particular, people will buy tickets to watch and broadcasters will pay fees to show the competition.

So who should receive the gains from providing the entertainment? If the players don’t get those lavish salaries, what will happen to the money? It won’t result in lower ticket prices, because tickets are priced according to what people will pay. Players refusing to accept what they could earn would simply result in greater profit for the owners. I personally would rather see the players get as much as they can from their talent and effort.

Are star athletes fortunate that they can earn such huge sums for doing what other people do just for fun? Yes, certainly. As a professor of economics, I’m paid more than my friends in sociology, philosophy and Romance languages. On a far smaller scale than Shaq and Kobe, I happen to be good at something that pays well. It’s not $125 million that’s silly. It’s the idea that people shouldn’t accept or should feel guilty about what someone is willing to pay them for their services.
Bill Littlefield

Sara, I wasn’t trying to make anybody feel guilty when I imagined the scene above. Certainly players deserve to be paid for their work, and you’re right about where the money would otherwise go. The world of Major League Baseball before the advent of free agency provides evidence for that. But these days, don’t we have to recognize that the compensation of a lot of people is ridiculous? And not just athletes at the top of their professions. Think of how lavishly the top executives of companies that have gone under or otherwise failed their stockholders have been rewarded. But I digress. Yes, in a system where the ability to generate money is the primary measure of one’s worth, athletes and other entertainers who put money in the pockets of those who employ them are bound to be paid millions of dollars. But isn’t there room to recognize that this circumstance is at once completely logical and utterly absurd?