Dear Commissioner Goodell,
I’m not sure how closely you follow Houston sports, but we've had a pretty
rough 2011. You know about our football team, of course, the best in the
history of the franchise but beset by injuries: We lost our quarterback for the
season. We lost our star defensive player for the season. We lost our back-up
quarterback for the season. We lost our punter for the season. We lost our star
receiver for six games to a hamstring injury and then he returned and injured
his other hamstring. Our
defensive coordinator, the one who has helped us move from 30th in Total Defense
last year to 1st this year, announced this week that he is going on medical
leave. Our defensive coordinator
is injured, Roger. Since you've been commissioner, how many teams have
lost two starting quarterbacks, their all-time sacks leader, and their
defensive coordinator in one season? Has that ever happened? I'm assuming you're not a big reader of short
stories—because who is?—but the Texans situation reminds me of a story called
“The School” by the great Houstonian Donald Barthelme (see: Barthelme, Sixty
Stories). In the story this slightly goofy elementary school teacher recounts
how things keep dying at his school. Some trees the kids planted die, plus their
snakes, their herb garden, their gerbils, white mice, a salamander, tropical
fish, a puppy, and a Korean orphan the class adopted through the “Help the
Children program.” It gets worse after that. And finally the kids, after all their
losses, ask the narrator, "Where did they go?" And he doesn't know
why it happened, just as you, Roger, don't know why this is happening to our
Texans, and we don't blame you. But at the end of the story, after the narrator
has declined the kids' request to make love to the teacher's aide, there's a
knock on the door. These are the last lines of the story: “I opened the door,
and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.” It’s a happy
ending. T.J. Yates is our new gerbil, Roger.
Point is, injuries happen and Houston fans are getting used to dealing
with it and remaining hopeful. In 2011, as you probably know, Yao Ming
officially retired, unable to come back from his injuries. This is no one's
fault. But he was a great guy and it hurt us, bad. This is a guy who, when
asked to name his favorite song, said, “The National Anthem...I listen to it at
least 82 times a year.” A guy who had 28 points and 10 boards in a Game
One victory on the road against L.A. in the 2009 playoffs and looked primed for
more of the same until he broke his foot in Game Three. A guy who, early in
his career, pretended he hadn’t yet mastered English, just so he could continue
to hang out with his translator buddy. A guy who gave a Lakers fan a
reluctant-but-kind fist bump in the middle of a game, while riding a stationary
bike (see: Google, “Yao Ming Fist Bump”). A guy who, unlike Carmelo Anthony,
would never say, “I take my hat off to myself,” except maybe as a joke. A guy
who was absolutely loved by all his coaches and teammates.
But here's the thing, Roger. Our basketball team has a great GM, Daryl
Morey, who made it his mission to find a quality big man to replace the crippling
loss of Yao. Last year our starting center was 6'6". Chuck Hayes, a
low-center-of-gravity beast of a defender, but still: 6’6”. That’s a foot
shorter than Yao. Determined to fix this, Morey made some big, big moves last
week. You might've heard about it. He orchestrated a deal in which we'd lose
three of our guys and a draft pick, but get Pau Gasol in return. Pau Gasol! A
truly elite big man, Roger. This was huge. And huger still, multiple NBA
reporters were circulating a rumor that Morey had convinced Denver free-agent
big man extraordinaire Nene to follow Gasol to Houston after the trade went
through, to complete a new version of the twin towers. And Chuck Hayes was
going to re-sign with us, too. We'd have the best frontcourt in the West, and
possibly the league. One NBA analyst predicted we'd be a number one seed.
Houstonians exchanged elated phone calls, euphoric text messages. Local talk
radio rejoiced. Good news! Finally!
But then your basketball counterpart, David Stern, screwed us. Absolutely
screwed us. As the
edited-for-TV version of The Big Lebowski says: “This is what happens
when you fight a stranger in the alps.” That’s what Stern did to us. He blocked
the trade, even though he'd given full authority to the Hornets front office to
make any deals they saw fit. And he blocked the trade only after our man
Morey had worked his butt off to make everything happen, only after our two
leading scorers had been informed that they were being traded. (Luckily, Luis
Scola, the most veteran Rocket involved in the trade, is a great guy on par
with Yao, and mostly joked it off, noting via Twitter that he was glad the
Toyota Center is on the way to the airport, just in case.) Anyway, Stern
could've prevented all this mess, easily. Or he could've kept to his word,
staying out of it, and the city of Houston (and maybe a few other cities, too) wouldn’t
despise him as much as we do now. Take that as an object lesson, Roger.
But instead of refraining from screwing us or just staying out of it,
Stern insulted our team in
particular after he blocked the deal, saying our end of the deal wasn't good
enough, implying that our players were old. Excuse my language, Roger, but what
an asshole move. And the worst part is that the Hornets did end up getting a
good (and in the long-term, yes, maybe even better) deal, Chris Paul gets to
play with Blake Griffin in a big market, the Lakers will get Dwight Howard or
at least continue to be the Lakers, and Lamar Odom gets to play with the
defending champs. The only team who will be truly set back by Stern’s fiefdom
is the Houston Rockets. No Gasol, no Nene, not even Chuck Hayes. Two starters—Scola
and Kevin Martin—who know the team wanted to trade them. And no one outside of
our city will notice the damage. Certainly not the league itself. The league
office will continue to release statements like “basketball reasons,” using the
vague, misleading phrases of devious governments (see: Orwell, “Politics and
the English Language”). Stern will continue to run the league like certain
oil-rich, freedom-poor nations, and Daryl Morey will not be able to
protest.
But Stern isn’t the only commissioner who does whatever he wants with no
regard for how it might screw the city of Houston. In fact, Easy Bud Selig is
just as bad. Maybe worse, actually. I admit that Bud Selig had nothing to do with us
losing Lance and Roy and then Bourne and Pence. Nor did he have anything to do
with our management assembling (in the loosest meaning of the word) a team that
ended up with the worst record in the league and the worst in the 49 year
history of the franchise, a team with a roster that looks mostly like the
roster of one of those early Nintendo games that couldn't afford to pay for the
names of real players (see: Baseball, NES, 1985). Selig has nothing to
do with this, but he took advantage of our bad situation to screw us royally,
to screw us in a way that was previously unthinkable. Suddenly Bud Selig decides
to move us to the American League. The American League. We hate the
American league. We hate the DH. The recent National League victories in the
all-star game have been our only baseball victories of late (unless you count
cheering for Berkman in the World Series, which I do). How can a commissioner
move a team to a different league after 50 years, especially when no one
associated with that team wants to move? How can a commissioner move a team to
the AL after 50 years, when another team in their division, which the
commissioner used to own, just moved from the AL in ‘97?
And that's still not even the worst part. Selig was able to make this
happen because we were transitioning owners (another commissioner taking
advantage of a franchise with ambiguous ownership!). Agreeing to move to the AL—getting
bullied into moving to the AL—was part of the conditions of the sale. There’s
more: the new owner, who Selig approved, owns a company that, according to our
local paper, had to settle out-of-court for nine million dollars for
discriminating against minorities and "women of child-bearing age."
Women of child-bearing age, Roger. And according to Forbes, one of
our new owner's companies was also sued four times by the Department of
Justice for war profiteering. War profiteering! ("Certainly war
profiteering is something most all Americans frown upon," Forbes wisely
notes.) The commissioner let this guy buy our team! This situation is even
worse than the NBA trade fiasco, even worse than the Texans’ injury troubles,
maybe even worse than our old buddy Shane Battier signing with the Heat. And soon
we're moving to the AL. This is what it means to be a Houston sports fan in
2011.
We are the city that commissioners screw because no one else will notice,
Roger. But we still have T.J. Yates, and we still have you. The other commissioners
are soulless old men; you are young and golden-haired. You are the only one who
hasn’t screwed us yet, the only one who hasn’t made our lives as Houston fans
worse by abusing your powers. One day, though, and we don't know when that day
will come, you will have an opportunity to screw the city of Houston. On that
day, all we ask is that you consider the year we’ve had and show some mercy. We
will notice, and we will thank you.
Sincerely,
Burke
