In Praise of Training Camp Holdouts

According to the logic of capitalism, what you're paid reflects the value of your skills. In practice, this logic sometimes breaks down in absurdly warped ways—how is the labor of a CEO hundreds of times more valuable than that of a factory worker?—but it holds up within individual workplaces and among people who have more or less the same job. Or at least that's how it can feel. For example: Let's say I'm sitting here creating some monetizable content for a website, and over there is another monetizable content producer who is getting paid twice what I am. Is his content more monetizable or better than mine? Do union or company rules mandate he earns more because of seniority? If not, I might feel aggrieved. I might gripe that clearly he's valued more than I am and that's just fundamentally wrong. I might feel that way even if monetizable content producers made pretty decent salaries, all things considered, and I was already making enough to own an apartment, a hi-def flat-screen TV, one of those chairs that massages you when you hit a button, and so on. It's not that I need the money, it's that capitalism, or at least my boss, says I'm less valuable than that guy sitting over there.

So when Marshawn Lynch says he won't report to Seattle Seahawks training camp until the team pays him more money, it's not particularly useful to note that this is a dude whose life might include such sentences as, "Somebody put velvet ropes around his Lamborghini as part of the filming of the movie he is making about his own life." What matters, at least in Lynch's world, is that he looks around at his coworkers, who just got raises, and the other guys who have his job, some of whom who get paid more than he does, and he feels less valued, like the world is cheating him of something he deserves.

You can argue, if you like, that no one "deserves" to earn the $5 million-plus per season that Lynch is already raking in, at least not when there are still starving people in the world. But if we accept the logic of capitalism, even grudgingly, we have to acknowledge that people want to watch powerful men run with a ball in their hands, and advertisers will pay to reach those people, and thus the team that employs Lynch, one of the elite running-with-the-ball guys, will naturally compensate him incredibly lavishly.

To talk football for a second: Lynch has carried the ball 901 times and caught the ball 87 times in the past three years. (It adds up to 4,775 yards from scrimmage if you're counting, and Lynch probably is.) That's nearly 1,000 times he's cradled the ball only to be brought to the ground by a padded, impossibly muscled defender, and given the way he pushes through tackles and shrugs off blows that would knock most men down, he's probably been hit by 2,000 professional athletes, all of whom want to separate his dreadlocked head from his body. He's been continuously abused and pounded and thrust into the turf more times than you or I can imagine, and he's also done this:

Lynch is 28, around the age many teams look at their running backs and their decaying bodies and tell them their services are no longer required. It's not like he'll have a long post-playing career as a commenter or pitchman either—it's hard to picture the famously camera-shy back hawking diet plans and laughing along with Howie and the gang at halftime like Dan Marino. He's just about that action, boss. In other words, Lynch's sole salable skill is running really, really hard with a football, and it's his good fortune that that skill has been his ticket to millions. As former Seahawk Michael Robinson, who Lynch tasked with telling the press about the holdout, said, "I'm all in for players getting their dollars, man, because you have a short life."

Non-players rarely share that perspective. In a column posted today by ESPN's Matt Teicher that praises Kansas City Chiefs running back Jamaal Charles, the writer takes pains to emphasize how despite threatening to become a training camp holdout, the back "isn't a greedy, me-first diva" and in fact "cares about giving the Chiefs their money's worth." (That column is headlined "A Holdout Isn't Jamaal Charles' Way," though it would have definitely been his way had his team not caved on Wednesday and given him a better contract.)

Fans embrace the sort of narrative that Teicher advances: We like to imagine franchises and players as being united around the singular goal of winning a championship; we praise the selfless teammates who take pay cuts so their squads can add fresh talent and jeer the mercenaries who whore their services out to the highest bidder.

To sum up a vast contingent of Seahawks fans on Twitter right now: "Why is Marshawn being mean?! It's not fair!"

— Seattle Sportsnet (@alexSSN) July 24, 2014

As holdouts demonstrate, however, a player's interests are often diametrically opposed to his team's and his league's—think about the NFL practice of cutting a player when his salary gets too expensive, or the MLB's Houston Astros possibly trying to get out of paying a draft pick what they promised him, or the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder trying to convince a player to take a D-League contract so the team can save $725,000, or the insane system by which the NCAA profits off players' likenesses but won't allow them to do the same. The sports-industrial complex exists to squeeze entertainment product out of talented athletes, and it'll pay them as little as it possibly can. Remember, players only earn the salaries they do now because lawsuits and unionization forced the monopolies that control professional sports to pay them what they were worth.

Players who hold out and renegotiate contracts aren't taking food from the mouths of fans, they aren't destroying the economy through their hefty salaries, they're just using the leverage they have one or two times in their lives to get billionaires to pay them what they're worth. If you happen to become an NFL player and get that kind of opportunity, take it. Make the system pay you. Cash in. It'll be your only chance. Just don't read the papers for a while.

Harry Cheadle is a Seahawks fan and he still thinks Marshawn is in the right. Follow him on Twitter.