The fans always come back - Ingles

The moment the National Football League lockout ended, it was as if democracy had taken hold in a tyrannical land, ruled by a madman, breathing free air. People went crazy, and we’re not just talking about the poor NFL reporters who were forced into an endless deathmarch of transaction reporting. Hopefully, someone took care of their families.

No, the appetite for the NFL was immediately insatiable. The lesson, as always, is that for all the apocalyptic talk about work stoppages hurting sports, it is rarely the case, whether in the short or long term. In this case, the NFL lockout was a blip — four months that would have otherwise been spent speculating about what would happen in the fall, when the air cooled and the cleats hit the turf. All that is now being crammed into one orgiastic week for NFL fans, and all that is missing are rose petals being tossed at players as they arrive at training camp.

But every sport comes back, eventually. The NBA lockout is a trickier bit of business, and more like to hurt the league due to its presumed length and bitterness. People who know say the league is willing to firebomb an entire season; that will hurt. For a while.

In the long run? Unlikely. Remember when people said the NHL would never recover from the erasure of the 2004-05 season? Well the league is boasting record revenues for the fifth straight year even as smoke rises from its more problematic franchises. Baseball’s erasure of the World Series in 1994 required a recovery, but by the end of the decade the sport was flying again, if while wearing a suspicious sort of cape. Basketball’s lockout in 1999 came right after Michael Jordan retired and rendered the electric Shawn Kemp as fat as a Buddha, but the NBA spent 12 years setting various attendance and revenue records before the owners decided guaranteed profits are a birthright.

The lesson of lockouts and strikes has become this: Sports are forgiven. The love of a sport can be dimmed by a neutral-zone trap, or by a lack of stars, or by a work stoppage. But if a sport was loved before, it will be loved again. It’s one of the last bastions of must-watch live TV; it’s a compelling drama that is increasingly hard to find as traditional drama is mined to extinction (The movie Battleship, based on the board game involving pegs and holes and guessing, has a trailer out). If there is an overarching danger to professional sports, it comes from the combination of extortionary prices combined with the convenience and comfort of watching at home with ever-better televisions.

And since work stoppages never seem to get around to the ticket prices thing, they are really not the problem. They’re inconveniences, with consequences. Yes, the NBA lockout will hurt the employees caught in the crossfire, and that stinks. Yes, it could hurt the careers of the guys closer to the end than the beginning: Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Kevin Garnett, and so forth. But, hell, maybe they need the rest.

It’s not just “people will come,” as James Earl Jones once rumbled. No, it’s this: People will come back. This article was written by Bruce Arthur and appeared in The National Post.