The Kinsol trestle in Vancouver island, Canada. It has been abandoned since 1979.

By Bryn Tassel

(via abandonedography)

Look, I’m a sports junky. I know too much about too many sports. I know shit about the inner workings of leagues I don’t even particularly like to watch. I religiously follow sports that I believe to be morally repugnant. That said, the more I learn, the more the public relation to teams becomes sickening. Owners are, as a class, avarice driven shitbags and the deck is stacked in their favor. No amount of internet whining or drive time sports radio griping is going to change that. And while the average bitches about how “Millionaire X” doesn’t play hard enough or love the game enough, it is the average fan who makes that person a millionaire and makes the owner 100x more than that. It is precisely the focus on what happens on the field that obscures the deeper systemic problem with our relation to the industry. The owners’ most brilliant sleight of hand is keeping to focus on competition within the game, when it is their own lack of competition that is truly killing us.  

Nowhere does the disconnect between what the fan thinks the game is about (competition) and what the owner thinks the game is about (more $) become more apparent than in stadium negotiations. Despite having prohibitively punitive salary caps, mandatory salary floors (NFL), and generous revenue sharing, owners still hold their host cities hostage for 100’s of millions in subsidies for their private enterprise. This despite ample evidence that stadiums are a financial loser for the cities that build them. When coupled with their cabal power to leave and never come back municipalities are threatened by the teams they support at an increasingly frequent rate. 

I can’t do justice to the issue nearly as well as the indispensable Field of Schemes but there is one very real take away from the reporting done at that site (seriously, read 6 months of archives, or better yet, follow their coverage of one stadium deal) and that is the need to end the public subsidy of professional sports. Collectively the major sports leagues are the largest monopoly in this country and “our” continued underwriting of their operating infrastructure needs to end. It doesn’t provide a better product and it doesn’t help the community. So start with something boring and structural like reforming the tax exempt status of municipal bonds used for arena financing (present cost: $4 Billion) or do something really simple like let a team leave. Seriously, there are only so many relocation boogeymen out there. Besides, what’s the old saying, if you love something set it free?

“The Thunder will be title contenders as long as Westbrook and Durant are around, but the pressure’s only going to get worse from here; both will be asked to do more and more with less. In two years Sam Presti and the OKC management have taken what seemed like an endless reservoir of potential and drained it away to leave us with something cheaper, not as good as it should be, and nowhere near as fun. All while Clay Bennett continues to make ungodly annual profits on a team that was bought for $350 million and could probably sell for at least $500 million tomorrow. This is what I couldn’t stop thinking about while OKC’s season faded to black Wednesday.

Biggest picture? Last year, the Thunder were the team you could point to if you wanted to make someone fall in love with the NBA.

This year, the Thunder turned into a team that embodies everything that should make someone cynical about loving the NBA.”

~Andrew Sharp on Grantland with a bigger picture look at the Thunder. Spoiler: Its not positive.