Sports-pocalypse: Hoping for a grand slam of lockouts

It's a relatively quiet weekend in sports. The Olympics are starting, the NHL is winding down, college basketball is rolling, Daytona week is finishing up, soccer teams are going bankrupt left and right, and the NBA has its Dallas bacchanalia, in which the sounds of Cristal bottles being opened at barbecue joints mingles with David Stern whining about how the sport is in such trouble that everyone has to take a pay cut or a long and horrible lockout will ensue.

All this, against the backdrop of the NFL's oh-my-God-it's-an-uncapped-year panic, and suddenly it hits you. If only the NHL and Major League Baseball -- whose CBAs expire in 2011, right along with the NBA's and NFL's -- could get busy with their labor problems and make this a glorious quadrifecta of labor-management disillusionment. Why, even the Mayans would sit up and take notice, if they weren't dead.

In fact, this would be one of the great social experiments of the new century -- to see if we as a society could go cold turkey on a massive industry that often treats us worse than we treat it.

Now we would probably have to expand it to include college football and basketball and even NASCAR, because those are sports that thrive with fans who don't really need the top four, but let's be honest here. All this potential strike and lockout talk, scripted as it is in the same tired and dishonest way that it always is by the people who make our games, ought to be rewarded one time with everything they like to posture about -- no games.

Which means no income, which means no television, which means the risk of going out of sight, out of mind. Which means that maybe the public can detox on the things that annoy them about sports and get a well-deserved break from the sniveling that so dominates sports when the games aren't actually happening.

In other words, there is something liberating about America saying, "You don't want to play? Don't play. And take your friends with you."

As the great Lennon says, "You may say I'm a dreamer," and on this I am the only one, but when you hear a commissioner or labor leader say they are prepared for no games, I tend to say, "No you're not, you lying liar, and you ought to get your wish this one time so that maybe you'll see what happens when you get what you're posturing for and shut up about it for awhile."

From there, the realization that the NBA and NFL were choosing this path at the same time caused me to wonder about the sports Armageddon -- baseball and hockey, too -- and then to take the most popular viewing opportunities after them, the college sports, NASCAR, golf, and imagine a sports general strike.

Just to see what we as a nation would do about it. And the suspicion is that we would be OK with it. In fact, not just OK. We would thrive. That the games we would miss would even out with the B.S. and nonsense and stupidity that come with them, and the fan bases of America would look around and say, "I'm OK with this. I can actually function. I can see again!"

And then, freshly infused with perspective and the knowledge that their lives needn't be consumed by the idiocies that go with the games we love, they can learn that most valued lesson of the consumer culture -- take it or leave it.

It's already happening now with the economy. Attendances are down. Revenue is lower. Events aren't being held. Owners who live on loans are in trouble. Minor leagues are disappearing. Tiger Woods is in sequestration. The mega-large operations are still doing fine, but the smaller ones are suffering.

That's not enough. The experiment we advocate here would want to see what Alabama fans would do without football for a year, or Yankees fans without a season, or Green Bay without the tailgates, or Southern California without the football and basketball scandals. We would want to see if we could do without for a year, to see if the sports operators we enrich could take the hint.

In short, that we are capable of needing our fix a little less than we used to, and if we need it less, maybe it isn't a fix at all, but a habit. And habits can be broken. And those who want to sell us the habit have to try a little harder and be a little less venal about the relationship between supply and demand.

Maybe two simultaneous work stoppages would help prod us along that path, but we suspect it would take something more concerted to shake up the relationship between the purveyors and customers. Like all four team sports. Like the colleges. Like everyone except the golfers. They're way too status-quo and risk-averse to join our little informal insurrection.

But we don't live that well. Not yet, anyway. But we can dream ... especially when Stern does his news conference saying that the league is teetering on collapse while being as strong and vibrant as it ever was. You know, the old negotiating slap-and-tickle. The same one that happens every time, the one we're tired of taking at face value. The one that makes us think that maybe everyone needs a good long timeout.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.