Sports fans continue to pay outrageous prices for tickets, souvenirs, parking and refreshments. And broadcast networks and advertisers stand in line to reach millions of potential customers fixated on everything involving gross motor skills.
How can those ridiculous windfalls of athletes, owners and sponsors be returned to more reasonable levels without outright confiscation?
Simple. Legally require the athletes, owners and sponsors to fork over a reasonable percentage of their earnings--after taxes and legitimate expenses--to reimburse the nonprofit institutions that provided formative athletic training in community, school and college "farm clubs."
Hey, sports franchises--baseball and hockey possibly excepted--don't have profitless training organizations to subsidize. They just let the youth-club organizers and sponsors, public-school taxpayers and private-school parents and benefactors pick up the tab for training athletes from childhood through early adulthood.
And don't even suggest that their financial efforts already are rewarded because the young athletes eventually go on to play collegiate or profeessional sports.
That's bullshit. The number of athletes picked for collegiate or professional competition represent a miniscule fraction of the total. Most youth, school and collegiate programs can count their number of ultimate successes on the fingers of one hand--most likely on no fingers.
The bottom line is that fans of professional sports are paying more than once for the privilege of watching athletic contests. They and nonfans have been getting ripped for billions of dollars for decades.
Think about that the next time you pay your school taxes or volunteer to sell an ad, recruit a sponsor, man a concession stand or hold a bake sale to pay for uniforms, equipment, coaches, facility rental, officials, maintenance, medical and liability insurance and medical attention.
Then think about making professional athletes and sports franchises subsidize those costs. (13 JUNE 1999)
