Welcome to Deadspin’s The Sports Nihilist, where everything is pointless and we’re just accidental jerks of electrified meat stuck to the surface of a rock in an indifferent universe.
Let’s talk in a few hundred words about rich, powerful and selfish owners. How can one person ruin the lives of countless fans and employees, repeatedly make mistakes, maintain a leadership role and also sleep at night? I will tell you. They are nihilists, like me. The goal of life is to work your way to the top and ensure you have as few peers as possible. Born at the top? Even better.
As long as you have control over something, you’re set. James Dolan and Jeanie Buss would eat each other before exiting an escape room, and consuming the competition before resorting to a reasonable solution is the sign of a true CEO.
It is often the owners who are responsible for the most difficult tasks. Hiring, firing, rebuilding, restructuring all require a skillful and ruthless hand that very few people understand. And someone who doesn’t understand something technically isn’t intelligent, so if you can’t understand what Michael Bidwell is going through, generally speaking, you’re an idiot.
It’s extremely difficult to get to the top, and staying there is even harder. Do you think Sam Bankman-Fried is going to end up in the poor house once he gets out of the big house? Surely not. This guy is a winner through and through.
SBF employed Tom Brady and Steph Curry. What have you done, you miserable bastard?
I didn’t smother my employees face down in the mud so that the next righteous subordinate would question my decision-making.
All hail Dan Snyder, Robert Sarver, Donald Sterling and the rest of the ownership titans whose ruthless approach has led to decades-long renaissances for their respective teams and astronomical returns on investment. Owners like Mark Davis and Hal Steinbrenner are following the blueprints set not only by their fathers, but also by their contemporaries.
A good owner adapts to his environment, isolates himself with good scapegoats or finds a new fan base to take money from. Look at Dean Spanos. He saved San Diego residents millions, if not billions, of dollars by infiltrating SoFi and not extorting the community for a stadium. Spanos saw that Los Angeles was neglecting a huge fan base: fans of other NFL teams looking for an excuse to travel to Southern California.
Stan Kroenke is in the middle of a run of headlines that would make Robert Kraft blush. Do you know how he could do that? By having the courage to attack the city of Saint-Louis. He just crouched over Soulard and wiped his ass with the Ark on the way out.
So congratulations to the owners, the true visionaries. Without their greed, courage, intelligence and insatiable lust for power, sport would not be the ideal vehicle for drawing analogies to the real world, and how brutal and desolate it is.
Long live wealth disparity!