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Magazine Column: GQ and Forbes throw the NFL for a loss
Thursday, September 09, 1999 By Bill Steigerwald, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
"But before we start the NFL's last season of the millennium, folks, let's go down to our Hall of Fame social conscience, Oliver Stone, who'll be working the sidelines during the game.
"Ollie? Your new movie 'Any Given Sunday' presents an unflattering -- some would even say 'un-American' -- picture of our national pastime. What's the problem with the NFL as you see it?"
"Well, Pat, as you know, when I write and produce my films, such as 'Platoon' and 'Natural Born Killers,' I work for free -- for the love of the movie game, if you will.
"But, as I stand here at Texas Stadium, not far from where the CIA conspired to murder a young president before he could pull America out of the quagmire of Vietnam, and -- if I can quote myself here -- as I told that writer chick from GQ, pro football 'isn't about honor or sport; it's really about money.'
" 'Ego' -- and I know something about ego -- 'is promoted over the team. You're looking for the star, which is wrong. And once you have that salary cap and free agency, your loyalties have to diminish. You betray everybody. You betray your coach, you betray your teammates' -- "
"Thanks for those insights, Ollie, but we've got to go to commercial. We'll be looking forward to your thoughts on the exploitation of women in sports when you interview the Cowboys cheerleaders at halftime."
Yeah, well, so the sportsmedia-industrial complex would never hire Oliver Stone. But he isn't the only one saying nasty things about the corporatization, commercialization or nutty taxpayer subsidization of pro football in GQ's all-football special issue, "Why We Love Football."
Overweight at 448 pages, sporting its first-ever triple-gatefold cover (Tyrrell Davis, Doug Flutie, Rickie Williams and Bill Parcells), the September GQ delivers 10 football features and more than a dozen other columns, essays and even a 1941 football-themed short story by Irwin Shaw.
There are interviews with Parcells and NFL czar Paul Tagliabue. Plus Peter Richmond's visit to Cleveland to meet with Al Lerner, the man who resurrected the Browns. And an article on a growing influence in modern NFL locker rooms -- God and his Divine Playbook.
There's also a list, in order, of the top 50 pro players of all time (Jim Brown and 49 others in an old-timers'-dominated ranking). Included are three Western Pennsylvania QBs -- Joe Namath, Joe Montana and Dan Marino. Marino, along with Jerry Rice, is the only player ranked in the top 29 still in cleats.
As in life, GQ's passes are not all perfect spirals. But its overall game plan was thorough and contains enough stuff to keep the average football fan busy until the holy week of Super Bowl comes round.
Meanwhile, Forbes marks the start of the NFL season with "Cowboy Capitalism," which explains how "a new breed of debt-laden, swashbuckling owner is changing the way the football business is played."
It may surprise Oliver Stone to learn that the NFL as it's constituted now -- a collective/cartel that shares TV and ticket money equally -- is more like socialism than capitalism. In fact, says Lamar Hunt, that well-known lefty who owns the Kansas City Chiefs, "the biggest single reason that the NFL has been successful is that we have in effect a form of socialism."
But, to Hunt's lament and as Forbes makes clear, greedy/smart/aggressive capitalists like Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones are trying to take over the league. Hustling, creative marketeers like Jones and Billy Joe McCombs of the Minnesota Vikings want to change the rules so they no longer have to share their teams' larger-than-average merchandising revenues with the have-nots.
Forbes' package of articles and charts shows how debt-saddled many team owners are. It also ranks the NFL's 30 teams by value (Dallas is No. 1 at $663, the Steelers are No. 13 at $397 million, and the poor Detroit Lions are last at $293 million).
Even Jones, who Forbes estimates takes in $24 million a year from outside promotional deals and squeezes $29 million a year out of Texas Stadium's 389 luxury suites, is $170 million in debt. Still, Forbes estimates that the Cowboys took in $162 million in total revenue in 1998 and had an operating profit of $57 million -- a bottom-line even an anti-capitalist movie producer like Oliver Stone can appreciate.
Bill Steigerwald's e-mail address is bsteigerwald@post-gazette.com.
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