The way we talk about sports salaries is a sickness.

Day after day, sports commentators toss astronomical dollar figures around, de-sensitizing the audience to the scale of the wealth they're describing. It's disgusting.

I try to consume at least a little bit of sportstalk once a day. It’s probably my favorite way to unwind or give my mind a break while eating a meal in-between bouts of writing.

As far back as childhood, I’ve always loved listening to people talk about sports — even when I had no interest in sports themselves, and even when I didn’t understand a word of what was being said.

One thing that’s always irked me to no end, though, is the way sports commentators talk about player salaries. Salaries are a subject of constant focus in the sportstalk ecosystem, so if you listen to any show, it’s only a matter of time before a pundit starts throwing around astronomical figures as casually as if they were talking about Monopoly money.

Like in this clip, which aired the same day I wrote this:

Now, I’m a huge fan of Speak For Yourself hosts Marcellus Wiley and Emmanuel Acho. I watch them quite often, and they bring a great deal of enrichment and edification to my life. I don’t say that lightly — Overall, I love the job these guys do. It’s also unfair to single them out because I’ve never heard a sports analyst who didn’t speak about salaries this way. So this is obviously the protocol — to normalize sums of money that are inconceivable to the people in the audience.

But why?

I’m not about to join the chorus of “isn’t it so terrible that people make so much money for playing a child’s game.” Do I think teachers should be among a society’s most highly compensated people? Sure, but sports are multi-billion dollar industries, and it’s only fair that the people doing the actual physical labor should be compensated fairly in proportion to what these leagues rake-in. And why should superstar athletes make less than superstar musicians and actors when athletes typically have much shorter careers. (Or, to be more precise, it’s at least possible for musicians and actors to sustain careers into old age in a way that’s simply not an option for athletes.)

But talking about the money in a way that ignores the exponential gap between what star players make and what the average audience member makes is just… in poor taste, especially in an economy where bare supermarket shelves and sky-high gas prices are the norm and the threat of hyper-inflation looms.

Moreover, for as much as these analysts harp incessantly about money, they talk about it as if it has no value. Over and over, the train of thought goes something like this: player x is being offered 45 million dollars a year, but because player y just signed a contract for 48.5 million dollars, player x should hold out for at least 52 million because player x is clearly more skilled — and thus more valuable — than player y.

To us watching, these sums are basically meaningless. Some of these analysts, like ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, like to be very demonstrative about their pro-capitalist ethic. Players, Smith often argues, should always look to maximize their earning potential. Pretty much all of Smith’s peers work off the assumption that, because players have the chance to earn “generational wealth,” they should get as much as they can while the going is good.

That would be fair enough — if we were talking about a situation where the difference resulted in a demonstrable drop in the laborer being able to provide for themselves and their family. But what’s so odd and incoherent about this line of thought is that it ignores the question of what money actually buys you — which, apparently, is not much if you take these shows at face value. Because making, say, 25 or even 50 million dollars a year isn’t enough to stop you from stressing about whether someone else makes more than you.

If these commentators had their way and players followed their prescription for how to do business, no amount of money would ever be enough to insulate the players from coveting what other players are making. Never mind the fact that the scale of some of these salaries, even after deductions, far exceeds what someone needs in a single lifetime. (Just to be clear, that’s not the case for all the players, and the deductions add up quickly.)

Marcellus Wiley, a former player who by his own admission has been even more handsomely compensated as analyst than he was as a player, has scolded people on his show for even daring to imagine practical limits on what someone else should make.

This line of thinking, aside from being crass and tone-deaf — it’s not multi-millionaires, after all, who watch these shows — completely ignores the quality-of-life component that should be just as prominent in the conversation. Hearing these discussions, they’re plagued by a denial of the basic question: “What does a human being actually need to lead a healthy, fulfilled life?”

Worse, it’s almost like these discussions are intended to create a mentality of lacking, not just in the audience but in the athletes themselves. Players are encouraged to take umbrage whenever their team offers them less than their market value — regardless of the fact that teams in the NFL and NBA limit their ability to surround superstar players with other quality players by allocating most of their financial resources to pay the superstars.

According to this deprivation-focused mindset, money serves not as a platform to ensure generational security, but as little more than a bragging right and a salve for egos that should always be on alert. More than the money itself being viewed as a necessity, it’s the respect that becomes the vital currency, because at this scale the salary offers are simply a barometer of how much a team respects the player and acknowledges their market value. So multi-millionaire athletes making generational wealth are trained to still view their situation as if there were a carrot being dangled on a stick.

What a shame. I mean, shouldn’t athletes just be encouraged to look on the bright side and feel secure about their good fortune? The same analysts who look at money in such a detached way would be the first to chastise athletes for not being grateful enough. How could they be in a professional environment where all their energy is focused on the threat of not making enough, even when they’ve made a king’s ransom?

It makes me wonder if professional sports is a bubble that’s going to burst sooner than later. It also makes me wonder why the sports-going public is interested in player salaries at all. I can’t imagine that it feels pleasant for working people to listen to sportstalk on their way to work and get their nose rubbed in the reality that there are people who make orders of magnitude more money than they’ll likely ever see in their lifetime. But these shows wouldn’t feature the topic so often if there weren’t a robust demand for it — which I think is indicative of a sickness.

Marcellus Wiley has been very insightful in other segments when he’s spoken of how radically de-stabilizing it is to be thrust from poverty into wealth beyond one’s wildest dreams — especially as a young person, and especially as someone who has no reference point in their family history for how to live with financial prosperity.

This short clip gives you an idea of the sudden, drastic shift in the dynamic that occurs in all of a player’s personal relationships when the player signs their first big contract:

Why, then, do we love hearing about people in that situation so much and talk about their income in such a flat, unsophisticated way when we should look at their circumstances with alarm, and even some concern for their well-being? Marcellus Wiley is not a shallow thinker by any means, which is why I love his commentary so much in other contexts. Why would he, his show producers, and his network keep feeding and fostering an appetite for us to look at young people in a treacherous life-changing circumstance without engaging our understanding for what they’re going through?

Not only do rising-star athletes find themselves with more money than they literally know what to do with (former NFL player Brandon Marshall recently described what it was like to feel so paralyzed by receiving his first batch of statements that he flew his financial advisor out to Denver to open the mail with him), but they’re also plunged into the crucible of overnight celebrity. In an age where fame entails an intensity of attention, scrutiny, criticism, and personal attack that no human beings in history have ever faced prior to now, it just seems idiotic to the point of cruel and barbaric for us to keep talking about athletes the way we do.

As far as the money aspect goes, I can think of five reasons why the public prefers to keep discussion as senseless and de-humanizing as possible:

1. It stokes our envy.

I went to school with mostly wealthy kids from 4th grade through senior year of high school. I don’t think I ever harbored much envy for wealth to begin with, but my school experience basically immunized me against envying the rich and being impressed by wealth. It just doesn’t faze me in the slightest. So hearing analysts dangle these huge salaries in front of the audience as if we’re supposed to drool in our seats feels like someone trying to get a dog to do a trick with a toy prop. I’m not buyin’ it.

2. It gives us a sense of ownership.

If players make more money than we think another person “deserves", and if the money is so ridiculous that it stokes low-level resentment in us, in exchange for the inequity between us and the players, we get to have a sense of ownership over them and heap all of our projections onto them. This is unhealthy in the extreme, not to mention lame.

3. Schadenfreude.

Deep down, this whole discussion about player salaries is geared towards hooking the audience on the bait of taking satisfaction in someone else’s failure. If the audience secretly stews over the fact that most of us will never get the chance to touch fame and fortune, then we can at least enjoy watching these kids flounder and stumble. That’s just a shitty attitude, and it actually hurts us too.

4. It restores the social order.

Like rock stars, superstar athletes restore our sense of the social order by flying too close to the sun and getting burned before falling back to earth. If you feel trapped in your life, you’re going to want to live vicariously through the excesses of people who are afforded the opportunity to become untethered from social rules. That they suffer and get punished for it is ultimately reassuring. We get to take delight in their excesses, but then we get reassured that they suffer for those excesses while we’ve stayed exactly where we need to be.

Believe it or not, though, as rich as some of these players can get, they don’t have a great deal of control over their own lives. Again, I don’t think it’s healthy for so many people in the general public to walk around with a sense of feeling trapped in their lives and then look to others for temporary relief from that feeling. If mega-rich, mega-famous people aren’t making decisions from power either — if even that much money doesn’t buy you autonomy — then conversely there must be grounds to take-back autonomy on the comparatively modest scale that most of the rest of us live. In other words, it’s time for average people to take inventory of what they have.

5. It justifies consumerism, corporatism, and the rat-race.

These salary discussions normalize the machinery of hyper-capitalism and keep us from exploring other ways that we might find ourselves “rich.” If sports analysts started focusing more on a player’s quality of life, then that would spark people in the audience into thinking about their quality of life. People in the audience might — gasp! — start to ask themselves the question “What the hell am I doing spending all my time earning someone else money? And what am I doing spending that money on the things I buy? And why am I devoting so much energy to watching athletes fulfill their dreams while they make thousands of times more than I do?” Of course, it’s not in a corporate entity’s best interest to promote these questions or even open the door to their existence. So it’s no accident that networks like ESPN and FOX Sports present the idea of earning as much as possible in such a light that it takes-on the aura of a religious commandment, robotically spouted over and over and accomplishing exactly what it’s meant to do, which is to lull both the person saying it and the person hearing it into a state of mindlessness and lack of reflections.

Talking about sports salaries in this way is not just an insult and a tragedy. It’s also a sickness. Luckily, it’s a sickness we can opt-out of at any time.

Here’s a fantastic, candid, highly entertaining discussion that goes way in-depth and presents athletes in more of a human light than we’ll ever hear on the talk shows — this includes the Brandon Marshall bit that I mentioned above:

<3 $RK