Tag: the NFL

Obama worries about locked-out NBA season

We learned that President Barack Obama likes his Roscoe Chicken and Waffles when he travels to Los Angeles. Make his “The Country Boy Special” with extra hot sauce on his wings and syrup on his waffles, please.

And he also is concerned about the direction of the NBA lockout discussions.

During a visit on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” Tuesday night, Obama .” 

The president contrasted the NBA’s lack of a settlement to the NFL, where sides were able to agree without missed games.

“Well, look, if you look at the NFL, they were able to settle theirs — and I think they understood. Players were making millions of dollars,” Obama said. “Owners, some of us are worth billions of dollars. We should be able to figure out how to split a $9 billion pot so that our fans, who are allowing us to make all of this money, can actually have a good season. And I think the owners and the basketball players need to think the same way.” 

As the lockout stretches into nearly five months, Obama is worried about the entire season being lost.

“I’m concerned about it,” he said. “They need to remind themselves that the reason they are so successful is because a whole bunch of folks out there love basketball. Basketball has actually done well, but these types of lockouts a lot of times take a long time to recover from.”

Very wise words indeed from Obama, who met with his close friend, during his trip to California. Hopefully, he emphasized his instincts during their meeting.
 

Here’s NBC’s broadcast of his discussion on the lockout with Leno.

All’s quiet on Spurs’ opener that wasn’t

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

At precisely the moment the Spurs’ season was supposed to take life Wednesday night, the ATT Center stood dark and dead, its empty parking lot and bolted doors providing the most literal symbol yet of the NBA’s ongoing labor standoff.?

Three miles away at Tony’s Bar, the lights were on, and the night was young.

Eight patrons populated the snug, white stucco building a brisk walk from Alamo Plaza, sipping cheap Bud Light and $3 red wine. A Tejano number blared from the jukebox while a mirror ball sparkled and spun over a tumbleweed-vacant dance floor.

Above the bar, a television was showing a situation comedy on mute. Nobody was watching.

“Just a normal, unbusy day,” said Tony Lopez, the bar’s owner.

Wednesday was supposed to be anything but.

Had it not been for the NBA lockout, which has already devoured all of November’s schedule and has December in its callous crosshairs, the Spurs would have opened the season at 7:30 p.m. against Milwaukee at the ATT Center.

And then, Lopez says, you really would have seen his place jumping.

“I would have had people calling all afternoon, trying to reserve the tables close to the TVs,” said Lopez, who opened his bar in November 1999, months after the league’s last work stoppage was resolved. “That’s just not the case.”

Wednesday night — Opening Night that Wasn’t — found fans across town adjusting to a new normal, all the while rooting for the timely return of the old one.

A lifelong San Antonian, Lopez lives and dies with his Spurs. He wears his fandom on the walls of his establishment, which is speckled with Spurs memorabilia, some of it vintage.

A newer sign, handmade out of yellow poster board and Magic Marker and posted on the bar’s front entrance, belies its owner’s underlying bitterness about the NBA’s endless labor tug-o-war.

“Boycott All NBA Products,” it reads, in Lopez’s own scrawl.

“I think we need to ‘Occupy the ATT Center,’” Lopez joked, referencing the economic protests that have become en vogue across the country. “It’s really sad.”

At Fatso’s Sports Garden on Bandera Road, the city’s oldest existing sports bar, owner Steve Wilkinson has an equally dim view of the NBA’s labor struggles.

“I’m just hoping those greedy S.O.B.’s can come to an agreement,” he said.

Wilkinson expects interest in the NFL, college football and college basketball to help his business weather the absence of pro hoops through November.

If the lockout stretches much further than that, however, Wilkinson predicts he will begin to feel the pinch.

“After December and January, the Spurs games pay our bills,” said Wilkinson, who opened Fatso’s in 1986. “That’s where our survival is.”

Similarly, Mike Griffith, a spokesman for Buffalo Wild Wings, said that chain — which boasts seven area locations — is not expecting an NBA-related loss of revenue until football season ends.

“After the Super Bowl, I think that’s when we’ll see the biggest impact,” Griffith said.

One night into the Spurs’ postponed regular season, the difference was already noticeable at Fatso’s.

Wilkinson said no Spurs game Wednesday night meant one or two fewer waitresses, one or two fewer cooks, one fewer bartender.

“That’s four or five employees who are not going to make money because the Spurs aren’t playing,” Wilkinson said. “It’s like a snowball. It affects a lot of people.”

Over at Tony’s, where Lopez can usually be found manning the bar himself, Wednesday night was a little too typical. A little too “unbusy.”

It’s not just Spurs fans who fill Lopez’s registers on game nights. Among his in-season regulars are ushers, concessionaires and parking attendants who wander over from the ATT Center after the final horn.

“There’s no money for them,” Lopez said. “So there’s no money for me.”

For now, all Lopez can do is wait for millionaire players and billionaire owners to come to an accord on how to split their wealth, so he can maybe sell a few more $2 longnecks.

“Let’s see what kind of agreement they come to,” Lopez said. “Maybe then I can make up a lot of lost business.”

Until then, the lights remain on at Tony’s. The mirror ball spins. The jukebox sings.

The TV is on, with nobody watching.

Fans a casualty of NBA lockout

Every year since the early 1980s, Bill Melson and a handful of buddies would begin every Spurs season with the same ritual. The men would crack open the newly arrived season tickets they shared, line up on the court in Melson’s backyard and shoot free throws to determine who gets the first crack at the choicest games.

This season, Melson’s annual shoot-off has been postponed, the latest collateral casualty in the NBA’s ongoing labor dispute.

Citing a “gulf” separating the bargaining positions of NBA owners and players, commissioner David Stern on Monday announced the cancellation of the first two weeks of the regular season, which had been slated to open Nov. 1.

“It feels like a betrayal,” said Melson, 70, a retired San Antonio real estate developer who has owned season tickets since the team played in the now-demolished HemisFair Arena. “I don’t feel like they have the best interest of the fan at heart.”

A pall descended over the NBA on Tuesday, a day after negotiations to lift the owner-imposed lockout imploded again in New York, engulfing billionaire owners, millionaire players and rank-and-file team employees alike.

Caught in the crossfire are fans, gnashing their teeth at the prospect of not having their beloved teams to watch — for now and perhaps a full season.

The lockout, 104 days old, has now erased the first six Spurs games from the schedule, three of them at the ATT Center. The most notable one is a Nov. 4 visit from the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks.

The revised schedule has not gone over well among fans locally, where the Spurs have become as much a part of the cultural fabric as the Alamo and Tex-Mex.

“It’s disappointing to me that maybe greed on both sides would cause a disruption to something that means so much to people in San Antonio,” Melson said.

On Tuesday, the Spurs and other NBA teams began offering refunds plus 1 percent interest on a monthly basis to season-ticket holders for lost games.

Spurs officials would not say how many fans had requested their money back Tuesday, citing an NBA gag order on lockout-related talk. If charter-level season-ticket holder Barbara Finch is any indication, however, a number of prime seats could be opening up at the ATT Center.

“I’m not happy about it at all,” said Finch, a real estate agent whose late husband first purchased season tickets 25 years ago. “I have a mind to get my money back and cancel.”

That’s no small sacrifice. Finch’s tickets are 10 rows from the floor, at center court, just behind the seats reserved for the family of Spurs star Tim Duncan.

Spurs forward Matt Bonner, one of three vice presidents of the National Basketball Players Union, said players feel fans’ pain, especially at a time when interest in the NBA — at least measured by television ratings — is on the uptick.

“It’s disappointing and frustrating,” Bonner said. “From a players’ standpoint, we want to play. You’d think there could be some sort of compromise, but we’re not going to do a deal that’s not fair.”

While players blame owners for the impasse, owners predictably blame the players.

In San Antonio, and elsewhere in the basketball world, fans don’t seem to care who is at fault. They just want the stalemate resolved.

“It seems like fans are always the ones who suffer in things like this,” said A.J. Hausman, a local meat distributor and longtime Spurs season-ticket holder.

Once the lockout is finally lifted, be it next month or next year, the NBA will almost certainly face an uphill battle to win back disenchanted fans. Some, like Finch, will be a tougher sell than others.

“I’m really busy with a lot of other things in life,” said Finch, adding she might keep her tickets if the lockout ends soon. “I have other things to do.”

Others, like Melson, might not need much persuasion.

He says he attends most of the Spurs’ 42 home games a season. Frequent trips to the ATT Center between October and May (and June, should the Spurs go especially deep in the playoffs) have become a fixture of his yearly rhythm.

Given the location of his primary seats — front row, just behind the Spurs’ bench — many of the players have become as familiar to him as family.

“I’m one of those that probably would come back,” Melson said. “Maybe that’s what they’re counting on.”

With the NBA on indefinite hiatus, Melson says he will focus his rooting energies on the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. He’ll pay closer attention to the Major League Baseball playoffs.

He plans to run in the San Antonio Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon next month.

“I’m behind on my training,” Melson said. “I could use the time to catch up.”

Melson will miss Spurs games for as long as the lockout requires. Yet the game he will miss most is the one held annually just off his back porch.

Like the NBA, Melson’s season-ticket shootout will return eventually. One day, he hopes sooner rather than later, Melson’s partners will return to his backyard basketball in hand, hoping to score tickets to see high-profile teams like the Los Angeles Lakers or Miami Heat in person.

Or maybe not.

“I might just lock them out,” Melson said with a chuckle. “Make them come back some other time.”

An avid Spurs fan, Bill Melson says the lockout likely won’t make him stop going to games once the impasse ends. (Kin Man Hui/kmhui@express-news.net)