News - On Sports: It’s the money, stupid!
The dwindling group of media covering the Hawks gathered on a deserted balcony at Philips Arena the other day, all our usual press conference sites having been commandeered by the Millennium Conference of the Salvation Army. (Don’t you love it?) We were there for the introduction of the Hawks’ first-round draft pick, a pro forma annual event. The head coach, general manager and team president file in with a really tall guy wearing the latest Hawks’ logo baseball cap and a suit that’s too big for him. The execs talk about how amazed they are that such a great player fell to them. The pick says he’s always been a winner and he’ll do whatever the coach asks him to do. They pose for pictures and we all leave.
Really, it’s so predictable, a reporter wouldn’t actually have to attend. Except for that little thing about ethics.
This year, though, there was drama. Mainly, the spectacle of the Hawks using the No. 6 pick to chose 6-foot-8-inch, 201-pound guard DerMarr Johnson, 20, who left Cincinnati after only one year.
One tape recorder-wielding soul was shocked — shocked! — that Johnson would do such a thing. He delivered a monologue, disguised as a question, on how detrimental such defections were to the NCAA, the NBA and the pick himself. Think what he’d be missing by not spending four years in college!
“Was it,” this guy demanded to know of Johnson’s motivation, “the income?”
This is the kind of question that gives the media a bad name. Of course it’s the money.
Why shouldn’t it be?
Why shouldn’t a 20-year-old make millions of dollars, guaranteed, over the next four years for playing basketball? What should he stay in school for? Parties? The yearbook committee? Catching rays in the quad?
Johnson is a serious, determined young man who has plotted his path to the NBA since junior high. Knowing his high-school grades weren’t good enough to get into a big-time basketball program, he played a year at Maine Central Institute, a prep school, hitting the books and the court. He chose Cincinnati because he thought coach Bob Huggins’ tough program would ready him for the NBA. He’s here now because he thinks that if he spends next season in the NBA rather than at Cincinnati, he’ll become a better player.
He’s right. And he’ll be richer, too.??