SCOTT JACOBS

Sports are our escape.  They give us hope, they allow us to dream, and they give us that something special to latch on to, good times and bad.  It’s like that line in Fever Pitch, where Ben proclaims that the Red Sox are his family.  If a game gets rained out, they make it up to you.  How many other people in your life do that?

But our escape from the real world, is quickly escaping through the back door.  Sports teams are not bullet proof.  Contrary to their staggeringly large and expensive stadiums, and their wildly rich owners, and plethora of team employees, sports teams are not recession proof.  They have the potential of falling, just like any of us.  They have the potential of going under just like any small business.  Only they don’t make a cartoon sounding splat as they crumble.  They leave their city shaking from sadness.

After 9/11 happened I remember them cancelling all sports events.  I didn’t understand it.  Why in this time of horror and despair, would we cancel the entertainment that allows us to escape?  I couldn’t make sense that these larger than life franchises were comprised of people, even some regular people at that.  And so they stopped playing.  For almost a week.  When they took the field, I felt that everything could move forward again.  Shallow thinking, but who could blame me, for wanting to get immersed in something that wasn’t life or death?

Fast forward to the present day.  The economy is drowning in it’s own misery, and small businesses, just like big businesses are going down the tubes left and right.  Circuit City, previously that well known company that competed with Best Buy for television ad supremacy has now stooped to a level of selling broken TV’s and making all sales final.  NBA teams are taking loans.  Eleven of them in fact.

The whole country is in shambles.  Some people are worse than others.  The Phoenix Coyotes are losing their shirts, and apparently since 2003 they’ve lost upwards of $200 million.  But it’s only getting worse.  Despite huge, lavish contracts that stars like C.C. Sabathia and Albert Haynesworth are getting, all is not well in our favorite entertainment field.

Being a sports fan is tough. When you commit to a team, they become part of you.  A friend of mine is a diehard Eagles fan, and considered Brian Dawkins a part of his family (they weren’t related), so it had to of killed him when the longest tenured Eagle signed with Denver on Saturday.

But it goes beyond that.  The econony is a joke.  The people paying for tickets to watch their favorite teams play are losing their shirts.  Their teams are trying not to lose money.  “You play to win the game,” has turned into, “You play not to go under.”

In the NFL the average price for Super Bowl XLIII was the cheapest in years, even though it still hovered around the $2000 line.  In the NBA expiring contracts are more popular than popular players.  Get me the guy who can’t play, but is soon going to expire, and I’ll trade you my in his prime super star.

The NBA in particular has become really hard to watch.  How can you root for a team when its owner is pinching pennies, and has been for a few years now, even when they had the opportunity to truly do something special?  Yes, I’m talking about the Suns.  Even when they thought Amar’e Stoudemire would be healthy, they still tried to deal him.  Don’t want Amar’e?  How about Shaq?

Once upon a time teams tried to get better.  Now it seems, they’re trying to get worse.  Because to lose less money they have to get rid of salary.  It’s tough to watch during a time where hope is at a premium, and gas prices are a solid two dollars less than what they were over the summer.

Sports is supposed to be our escape.  But in Freemont, they don’t want the A’s.  Reportedly, the Kings are losing tons of money in Sacramento.  Even winning teams like the Heat with a star atraction like D-Wade can’t fill up the first few rows of their relatively new arenas.

They say that everyone is priming themselves for the 2010 offseason when LeBron and Wade will become free agents, but I’m starting to believe that less and less.  Is it possible that teams don’t know what the future holds, and want as few obligations as possible as they navigate themselves through this rough financial time?

Is it possible that winning is not everything?

Teams aren’t doing everything possible to win anymore.  Fans are too broke to witness it in person.

Sponsors are pulling out left and right.  Suddenly, a team like the Florida Marlins, who’ve been penny pinching for years, look like the trendsetters.  They spend nothing, and somehow every now and then they get something.  But even their future is uncertain, for no one wants to give them that dream stadium of their’s in Miami.  At this point can you blame ‘em?  They don’t draw fans, they don’t have a good owner, so who’s to think that a stadium would be a wise financial investment at this juncture?

Guys like Jerry Jones are few and far between.  The Cowboys will open up their brand new palace of a stadium this coming season, and Jones paid for it himself.

But it sucks.  It truly does.  I wrote that a few months ago, when the Knicks and other teams were trading good players for garbage cap space.  No one pays to watch cap space.  They pay to see the best teams that their owner can put on the floor.

But there is no true escape anymore.  Because our problems can’t be solved by turning to their franchises. Their franchises are suffering in the same way that we are.  Sports teams are laying off employees left and right.  A Secure job?  That’s a thing of the past.

Some say a lockout in 2011 in the NBA is inevitable.  Others point to the NFL as a league also heading towards a lockout.

I like to think that sports will go on forever.  That the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL could never die.  They could never just shut down.  But that reality seems murkier now than ever.  The solid ground those sports once built their success on is now shaky.  The uncertainty in the air is much scarier than its been in a long time.

Maybe I’m just over-reacting, and getting caught up in the scary idea that sports, our escape, are having trouble alluding their own Shaquille O’Neal shoe sized problems.  Maybe I’m jumping the gun here.

And maybe everything will sort itself out.  Because in times like these we need sports.  Never underestimate the power of escape.

Photo: AP by Eric Risberg

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