What book?
If it is proven there was any glint of recognition from Clipper ownership to these charges, any oblique Nixon/Haldeman discussion regarding What Went Down, then Steve Ballmer deserves suspension, everyone he's hired needs to be replaced. Because they knew better, did it anyway.
Pro sports, since the carny days, resists owners using outside capital to enrich star players. Teams are forever fighting either payroll boundaries or woes, 1945-through-2025, so what, every sport sez it is illegal for teams to pay players beyond their primary profession. This intensifies in the era of salary caps, so of course the Clippers should have the book thrown at them.
But, like, what book?
The NBA reads from the same chapters as the majority of people who fill the seats of its stadiums, its à la carte partners, simping (since carny days!) for owners twice before considering labor a single time. And the NBA words its work in the mold of its many (to use an expression stolen from the Clippers) provably unpatriotic (pay your gotdamned taxes, Jeff Bezos) television partners.
The NBA is ready to bend over backward again for the capital the league already teems with. And teams with, the 30-strong, a watertight club whether the NBA owner's wealth springs from computer tech or drive-in movie theatre tickets or computer tech for drive-in movie theatres.
Like computerized car scanners, to see if punks are hiding in the trunk, sneaking in. Maybe some motion sensor lights to keep the punks from sliding through that one part of the fence. Some form of uniform popcorn distribution, can't give these punks too much product. Computerized popcorn scanner, we can go car to car detecting outside popcorn, punks are always sneaking in outside popcorn.
America's thought leaders will respond with bloodlust for the poorest participant – Kawhi Leonard can't even slug through a few appearances for $28 million, this MAN plays basketball for a living and thinks he's so special – argue for billionaires to bend the rules because these BOYS are just tryin' to make the best ballclub they can. You know what the West looks like!
The Clippers didn't need any of this. There was no pressing requirement to be exceptionally Laker-like from 2021 through 2025 (as if Kawhi Leonard's health and availability were any certainty). Not when the Lakers themselves fail to meet exceptional expectations, the Buss family recently running through a 1990s-Clippers-like eight coaches in 14 seasons before cashing in. The Clippers were always going to get a stadium, they handed out all those backpacks.
And, no, he wasn't conned. The guys and gals under Ballmer's umbrella cooked up a scheme where everyone could make money and bail before consequences hit, and consequences only hit for the many at the bottom of the pointy-topped 'mid.
If the promotional company floated, Ballmer had outs. If it bombed, he could cry victim. Plausible deniability which only privileged get away with, via an all-responses-scripted-by-producers-and-journalists "interview" with ESPN, we don't want Steve to feel or look like he's under attack.
Mark Cuban is back to insisting that NBA owners have so much going on that they can't possibly know about all that workplace harassment or one-off max contract's worth of extra "outside endorsement" money (Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell made $28 million in 2021-22). "Shit happens," sez Mark.
Not this. Has everyone been scammed? Sure, and when they do they often lose jobs for their mistake. They lose their own cash, not merely buyback bloated "assets." They lose lifestyles, self-worth, status amongst family and friends, and for normal people there is no kind ear on ESPN for them to vent.
Want to speak on record? The Times or Post will happily interview a scam victim for Internet's Idiot of the Day, detailing the what-were-we-thinking-ways to give five-figure life savings to the stranger introduced over email. Coincidentally, the piece about someone's low point will be the Times' top-sent email!
ESPN lends ear when these are moneymaking stories, surely. Embarrassing old NFL players who made the networks millions in the 1980s (Bernie Kosar lost all his money, what a drip, watch 30 for 30 on ESPN2, replayed 22 times a year on for 22 years running), and team owners billions.
That's our times. I recently watched a newsclip of recently-defeated Jimmy Carter promising he wouldn't go back to his neglected peanut farming business after losing in the presidency 1980, Carter considered it a terrible look for a former president to capitalize on public servitude. He sold the farm a few months later to an American company for enough money to cover his debts, considering his bountiful literary opportunities and $207,000 presidential pension plenty. Nobody needed to see Jimmy's Goobers on their grocer's aisle, too tacky.
Holster that violin bow, this is not a plea for Jimmy Carter's sainthood, nobleepingway, but in my lifetime we've gone from Carter's conclusion to the current president and his shitbag sons bilking billions from his nation's poorest and/or dumbest, one bit-coin at a bit-time. At least with Jimmy we'd get some protein out of the deal, some delicious salt, yet these fellow Americans simply get the short sell from their own president.
No actor thinks twice about lending their face and pitch to a product, and nobody within our Quisling Clinic blinks at another sellout, we've already thought of ourselves in their famous shoes, concluded we'd do the same. Millions from Saudis to golf on their greens, or tell jokes on a stage paid for by murderers? That's generational wealth, man. Luckily for us they'll have idiot kids.
People hear about that apple and don't mind burning the entire garden down just for the chance to see it, tell their followers they saw it, though they know they can't take it home. We've been taught to let the the already-majorly powerful traipse boundaries first and demand the minor others make the effort to push back to legal norms, because, you know, there's actually nothing in baseball's bylaws that actually says Andro is banned. Billionaire trash does what billionaire trash wants, millions of thousandaires "just ask questions" on their behalf.
So Tylenol is bad, now, not vaccines, but maybe vaccines. I don't know but they'll make their unvaccinated kids look it up if they want a hope in hell outside home, maybe sneak a science search while tan mom and bearded dad my age adjust light for their own separate posts.
Then we'll destroy the way to look things up, patch the top one-third of Google with incorrect search results passing as "artificial intelligence." Lest those screen-addicted early-21st century kids with resurgent late-18th century diseases find out we're founded upon fat cats skirting tax revenue already spent protecting their lily-white wigs from French bullets fired from French guns, not merely representative democracy. We still haven't paid off the Seven Years' War and nobody can stream 'Dazed & Confused' without the app cutting off the cool beginning and end parts.
Steve Ballmer hasn't paid proper taxes in his entire life, but gets to slide across any stage he wants because all of us watched a clip of his sweaty armpits at Ebaumsworld and excused him forever, took him off The List. There is no List anymore, our obsession with celebrity wouldn't allow us to say anything sincerely cross about those who do famous for a fine-ass living, lest we become friends with these stars someday and they look us up. We only muster skin-level sarcasm that we'd instantly apologize for if ever given company with the famedoll or famedude we'd rudely (if accurately) posted about.
We have no firm savings nor firmer places to live nor backup generators for our incoming 2030s electric bills, no cans of beans stacked in a safe, dry space. The only thing we are ready for at the moment is to expend energy arguing away the misdeeds of someone we will never meet, someone who doesn't want to know us.
Anything else but a Timberwolves-styled wipeout would not serve this salary cap violation. Ballmer requires at least a year's suspension, like when MLB suspended that scumbag George Steinbrenner (the second time) for using the mob to look up dirt on Dave Winfield's actual charity. Lawrence Frank needs gone, not for Josh Primo and re-introducing Kevin Porter Jr. to the NBA, but for taking the buck like an adult.
Draft picks are gone. The Clippers get to keep their salary cap, go out to the market and pay workers, but no cheap 22-and-under help (hired into a collective bargaining agreement signed while they were in junior high). The Clippers need to be known as the team cut at the knees by their owner's greed, and for at least a decade after Ballmer returns from suspension. Minnesota had the same tag for just as long, earned it, and every other NBA team earned millions from it.
Prove me wrong, Adam Silver. The Clippers loudly promised these allegations provably wrong without proof, hold the Clippers to this account.
And if they knew, they're out.
PLAYERS PURCHASING CARS FOR AGENTS
I hope this salary cap betrayal is behind us:
Here’s [agent] Howard [Slusher], tooling down the San Diego Freeway in his Mercedes 450 SL. He’s on his way to see a client, an executive at Lorimar, who wants to cut a sweeter deal with the studio. The Mercedes is a gift from former NBA guard Paul Westphal, who, with Slusher’s assistance, signed a lucrative contract with the Phoenix Suns in 1975. At home in the garage of Slusher’s 27-room house is a White Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce, a token of appreciation from [Seattle SuperSonics star] Gus Williams.
Charge the Suns and Thunder retroactively with tampering. I don't care if the Thunder were in Seattle, I don't care if Sam Presti was in diapers.
“Howard Slusher’s not an agent, he’s a terrorist,” snorted New York Giants General Manager George Young at a recent NFL meeting.
Shit, if that's the George Young I know, that ain't all he's snortin' and that ain't all he's– what? Different guy? My bad.
Art Modell, who once called Howard “the number one thorn” in pro football’s side. Modell vowed never to draft one of Slusher’s clients, simply to avoid the anguish of dealing with him. “Personally,” says Modell, “I like Howard.”
“He’s always looking to exert the most possible leverage,” says Dan Rooney, president of the Pittsburgh Steelers. In particular, says Rooney, Slusher is a master of managing news to turn up the pressure. “A lot of agents leak everything that goes on in negotiations,” he explains. “Howard picks his spots and waits for the most opportune moment.”
More agents should be introduced at games:
As for the fans, Slusher sampled their opinion firsthand when he was introduced at a San Diego Clippers basketball game in 1982, not long after his Seattle SuperSonic client Gus Williams had held out for the entire 1980-81 season.
“A chorus of loud, loud boos sprang up,” Slusher recalls. “Suddenly I was in fear for my life…I guess,” he adds with a mock sigh, “it’s like being an antihero.”
FOOTBALL SEASON
It is here. I can tell because I was at a party on Thursday night and instead of dudes staring at the ceiling or into space while thinking about their future fantasy football league, dudes stared at their phones.
I could hear. Collinsworth.
I did learn some things in the NFL offseason, like the fact that NBC's old NFL Live! program from the 1980s was helmed on stage at Studio 6A, same as Late Night's Dave & Conan.
Just a little desk and set on the star where Dave did his monologue, stiffly.
Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad and Paul Maguire and sometimes Frank DeFord standing on the spots where singers would often uncomfortably perform their latest single not with their own band but with "the band and Paul" (Shaffer, not Maguire, though now we're all thinking it).
This means, when CBS' Jimmy 'the Greek' Snyder visited NBC's Dave Letterman, he was actually staking out enemy territory:
My picks, this NFL season?
I will never know the difference between Carolina and Jacksonville and it will never make any difference.
On a Thursday night in October I'm gonna post a silly, ten-word comment about a baseball playoff game nobody else is watching, something to make myself and only myself laugh. The timing will be such that everyone will think I came out of left field to make a killer comment about the Chargers' recent woes, as typified by that particular three-and-out.
I bet as always there will be awfully angsty pickup truck drivers on roads near me at around 4:58 PM on Sundays. Angrier than normal this year, bad enough they have to admit Trump was wrong after that NRA clapback, but now they have to watch Nick Wright's 1 PM slate of football picks go right? Tough to handle, as it grows darker outside earlier and earlier in the evening.
I bet I will think about the fact that my family was 1994 Cincinnati Bengals season ticket holders and I will laugh at the most random fact about me anyone could imagine, besides that time I met Kenny Anderson at Kroger and asked him who the toughest defense he ever faced was and of course it was Pittsburgh, I knew it was the Steelers even before I even finished spitting the phrase "you ever faced" and felt like an idiot when he gave me the obvious answer, and for spitting.
Anyway, anyone up for a delicious Kahn's hot dog? It tastes like a sour hot dog bun.
Got to watch Drew Bledsoe and the Patriots and their throwback helmets and uniforms. Throwing all the way back to the season before, when they wore the same helmets, uniforms:
Yeah man. I saw Live Klinger.
Feckless Dave Shula in his NFL 75 hat is, to me, comedy.
My little league football team got to play a game at Riverfront Stadium on a Sunday in autumn when the Bengals were out of town and I do not know how anyone played any professional sports on that turf, let alone (attempts at) two sports.
This NFL season I will remember the fact that most of us are doing George Wendt impersonations when we do that voice, and feel happy over this.
I bet I will watch more of this clip ...
... than I will actual NFL games, but I promise I'll learn the names as the season moves along because I'm tired of fake-laughing at NFL posts just to fit even if I don't get the joke, like, I didn't even know the NFL could make trades.
I bet I will think about the greatest launches I ever threw, real over the shoulder crankers, perfect rotations with arc and purpose, settling soflty into my teammate's hands.
These are baseball throws, basketball passes, nothing from football. Come on, nobody ever let me play quarterback. What are my counts going to be, Queen songs?
ROLL UM EASY
Didn't mention Cartman, not once. Second part of Barkley, soon.
