Lebron and New ball

Well, you can add another NBA superstar to the growing list of players who hate the new ball. James was quote as saying, “Sometimes you can grip it, and sometimes during the game it sticks to your hand. It won’t bounce, it will just roll on you. I don’t know why we can’t get used to this ball. But it’s just not good.” He also said that, “You can shorten our shorts, tell us how to wear wristbands, things like that. Change the dress code. But the one thing we care about is the basketball. When you start changing the thing we play with every single day, it doesn’t make sense to me — at all.” Commissioner David Stern is already on record as saying the ball will stay the same but I wonder if more and more of his league’s stars keep complaining will that change his mind. I think the players should have had more of a voice in the decision to change the ball, since they are the ones who will be using it. You already have Shaq and Steve Nash voicing their displeasure with the ball, now you have Lebron James, who to many is going to be the face of the NBA for some time to come.

Lebron James DVD

I’ve been reading Slam Magazine since I was in middle school. I have a subscription. I just got the most recent issue about a week ago. Inside the cover of the magazine was a DVD promoting Lebron James new sneakers. It shows how apparel companies are finding new ways to promo their products. The DVD has features on how they made the shoes, the commercial, and fans in Cleveland reaction to the new sneaker.

Bill Walker and Kansas State

Ohio prep star Bill Walker has sign scholarship aid agreement and will play this year. And the great news is his first game will be against our Kennesaw State Fighting Owls. Walker was teammates with prep superstar OJ Mayo. The Ohio High School Association ruled him ineligible for this high school season because he had already played eight semesters of high school basketball. Lets hope his twists his ankle during practice and can’t play that first game.

More on new NBA ball

On the request of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Physicists at the University of Texas-Arlington have found that the new micro-fiber ball doesnt behave like the old NBA ball. The test ran by the physicists showed that the ball bounces 5 to 8 percent lower than typical leather balls when dropped from 4 feet. It also found that the new ball bounces 30 percent more erratically. Alot of NBA stars like reigning MVP Steve Nash have openly complained about the ball. Commissioner David Stern has already stated that the ball is staying. I guess we will see what happens next.

Carl Pendleton and Ray Ray McElrathbey

This blog isn’t about economics or sports and its relationship with the apparel industry. I think that the media likes to paint all athletes as steriod using criminals who only think about themselves. I want to write about two collegiate athletes who should be talked about more.
Oklahoma Sooners DT Carl Pendleton has decided to give up football after his junior year, so he can continue his education and take care of his 10 year old brother, whom he is the legal guardian for. The Draddy Trophy is awarded to the top scholar athlete in college football.

“With the new responsibility of raising my younger brother, I realize that football is not the best choice for me,” Pendleton said in a statement Thursday. “Football was a way for me to get my education. Graduate school will allow me to further my education and allow me more time to spend raising my brother without having to play football. He has become my center.”

Clemson DB Ray Ray McElrathbey is raising his 11 year old brother. Nearly $50,000 has been raised for a trust fund to aid McElrathbey. McElrathbey and his little brother were recently feature on the Oprah Winfrey show. The NCAA granted a waiver to allow the brothers to receive help and not violate rules against extra benefits. Their mother has drug problems and McElrathbey decide to adopt his little brother instead of him being placed in foster care.

Most athletes are people just like you and me. They have emotions, they feel pain, they are human beings. So, the next time you try to lump them all together with the few that are causing trouble, take a minute to think. Do I truely know this person or am I just going by what the media says I should think about this person?

Sale of Seattle Supersonics and Storm.

The NBA owner approved the sale of NBA and WNBA franchises the Seattle Supersonics and Seattle Storm to a group lead by Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett. Bennett claims that he plans to keep the team in Seattle. I wonder if this will change if the city of Seattle doesn’t build a new arena before the end of the 2010 season. The sale was reportly worth $350 million. The former owner was Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz.
The lease agreement with the Key Arena expires after the 2010 season. Commissioner David Stern called the lease agreement the worst in the league. Reportly, Schultz had threatened to move or sell the team when it expired after the 2010 season if they didn’t have a new or renovated arena.

Kansas State Men’s Basketball

I had a blog a few weeks ago about Kansas State and Nike. In the blog, I mention that Ohio prep star Bill Walker was trying to graduate from highschool early and enroll in to Kansas State. Walker has been admitted in to the university but has yet to enroll. How this will impact Kansas State men’s basketball this season has yet to be determined.

Oracle and Golden State Warriors

Software giant Oracle has come to a 10 year agreement with the Golden State Warrior for naming rights to their arena. The terms of the deal were not released. Golden State has been trying for to find a corporation to buy its naming rights. Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, has been rumored for years that he desired to purchase the San Francisco 49ers of the NFL.

NBA’s new ball

NBA commissioner David Stern announced a few days ago that the NBA is going still use the new ball despite complaints from players like Shaquille O’Neal. Last years MVP Steve Nash is also one of the players who don’t like the new ball. O’Neal says the new ball “feels like one of those cheap balls that you buy at the toy store — indoor-outdoor balls.” I, personally, think that the commissioner should take into consideration the feelings of the people who will be using the ball.

Ticket Prices and Terrorist Threats

Add in threats and when is the cost too high for fans?
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com

So, seriously: When do the fans say when?

Around the NFL this weekend, those trying to get into stadiums will face heightened security and longer search lines, these the apparent result of a Wisconsin man’s wayward attempt to ace the terror equivalent of the Bad Hemingway Contest by writing the scariest stadium threat he could think of. And they say the blogosphere isn’t paying off.

The heightened security, thus, is not only expected, but, some will say, welcome. Certainly, it makes all the sense in the post-9/11 universe to err on the safe side, and to do so continuously.

Still, hearing that fans will face one more layer of resistance between them and the games they want to attend this weekend got me to wondering: How much, for us average schmoes, is really enough? How long before we just stop going?

Consider the last several years alone: Security is tighter. Ticket prices are into the stratosphere. Parking, about half the time, is either soul-strippingly expensive or remote to the point of needing a shuttle to get within the same ZIP code of the stadium. The venue itself is louder, cruder, crunchier, ruder. The guy next to you is drunk, and the one two rows behind keeps dropping F-bombs on a section that includes you and your kid.

It’s like they lost the volume knob on the P.A. system right after the thing dialed up to Earbleed. You are bombarded by commercials when you’re sitting at the real game, which may or may not begin before about 9 p.m. local time. Night night, tots of America — if your workday-beaten parents don’t pass out before you do.

You really need all this? Listen, you’re no old goat — but you do have a plasma screen at home, with a private bathroom down the hallway. You’ve got your high-def and your stocked fridge, and after the game ends, your commute is, let’s see here, zero.

So, why bother?

Anecdotally, that’s a question being asked all around the pro sports circuit, and with increasing frequency. I could bore the head off your shoulders with stories of friends who once had season tickets and now content themselves by splitting those tickets six or seven ways. The option to watch from home never looked better, especially relative to the price of seeing a game. The live experience ought to be as vulnerable as it has ever been.

And yet, when the Tigers and the Cardinals play Game 1 on Saturday night in Detroit, Comerica Park won’t merely be filled, it’ll be stuffed. And the people will be there for the right reasons, only some of them having to do with the fact that it’s a World Series.

They’ll be there for the same reasons we all started going to games (or concerts or theater, or any of that, really), including the fact that nothing — nothing — compares to live. As magnificent a moment as Magglio Ordonez’s walk-off against the A’s in the ALCS looked on television, most of us would have traded a dozen replays to be in the building in Detroit when Ordonez’s bat met Huston Street’s pitch.

Christopher Christie
U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie took the stadium threat hoax seriously, charging Jake J. Brahm, a 20-year-old grocery store clerk from Wauwatosa, Wis.

And I believe in that value, absolutely. A whole bunch of us still insist on taking our kids sporadically to live games, damn the cost, because then they’ll know exactly what they’re missing when they’re watching via TV or computer. When the crowd goes wild, they’ll know what that feels like, and even if they aren’t in the stadium that day, they won’t have to guess at how loud white noise actually is, or what it feels like to have the air sucked out of a place the way it was in Shea Stadium on Thursday night. Once you get that memory, it can stay with you for a while.

So there is a live market for live sports. But how rich a market, and for how much longer? How long before the whole model collapses?

I used to find that concept ridiculous. Now it’s beginning to creep up on me.

Let’s forget the big events — Super Bowls, World Series and the like — and talk about the everyday stuff. What is the future there?

A sports futurist once laid out a business model in which, over time, virtually all of a pro league’s money (let’s say it’s the NFL) came to be derived from its broadcast contracts and its advertising tie-ins. The crowds were really window dressing, just people needed to make sure the venue didn’t look devoid of life. All the money action was occurring at home, over the Internet, via cell phone — whatever.

In that scenario, then, the truly savvy game programmer simply jammed into one or two seating sections the fans who were still willing to trek to the stadium, and kept the cameras focused almost exclusively on the action on the field. Pumped-in crowd noise simulated a full game experience. Presto! Close enough for TV.

A little too “Wag the Dog?” Maybe, but it isn’t beyond the realm. Already, certain venues have been slapped for artificially enhancing the crowd noise, and cameras sometimes pan away from empty seating areas (say, the upper reaches of Mount Davis during a Raiders game) in order to convey the impression of a capacity crowd.

For now, that’s all it is, some isolated stuff that we brush off as annoying. Still, with every year in which more people write to tell me that they’ve finally given up their season tickets or no longer can justify that mini-package, I wonder just a bit louder. If the live game experience truly is the gold standard in sports, then it is a true wonder that so many things seem to be conspiring to make it extinct.

Mark Kreidler’s book “Four Days To Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland” will be published by HarperCollins on Jan. 23, 2007, and may be pre-ordered on amazon.com. A regular contributor to ESPN.com, Kreidler can be reached at mkreidler@sacbee.com.