Easier said than done for most people.-Renegade
This may be another thing that is lost without context. These players are
rich.
Wikipedia alone:
Off the court, Paul is a notable ten-pin bowler and a sponsored spokesperson for the United States Bowling Congress (USBC). He has participated in numerous celebrity and youth bowling events as the head of the CP3 Foundation to benefit programs in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and charities in Winston-Salem.
With his contract expiring at the end of the 2011–12 season, the Hornets had been working on trading Paul, rather than let him leave in the summer of 2012 and get no players in return.[32] On the afternoon of December 8, 2011, the day before the 2011 NBA lockout ended and players could move between teams, the Hornets, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets agreed to a trade that would send Paul to Los Angeles. That night, after opposition from several of the other owners, who co-own the Hornets, which had been acquired by the league from former owner George Shinn, league commissioner David Stern nullified the trade.[33] On December 12, the Hornets submitted a trade for review that would send Paul to the Los Angeles Clippers and Chris Kaman, Eric Gordon and Al-Farouq Aminu of the Clippers to the Hornets,[34] but the Clippers pulled out of the talks after the Hornets asked, at the league's direction, for Gordon and the Minnesota Timberwolves' first round pick in the 2012 draft, in addition to Kaman, Aminu and Eric Bledsoe.[35]
Endorsements
Paul has national endorsement deals with PowerAde sports drinks, Right Guard deodorant and Nike's Team Jordan brand, where he has released several editions of his shoe "Air Jordan CP3.#". He also has several partner brands and organizations which includes Topps, Fox 8, Upper Deck, and Vitamin Water. The deals collectively earn him around $4 million annually according to Forbes.[43] In 2007, Paul was the cover athlete for the video game NBA 2K8.[44]
Paul has been represented by agents Jeff Austin and Leon Rose under the agencies LRMR Marketing and Creative Artists Agency since 2010. Paul had been affiliated with Octagon Worldwid
SalariesSeason Team Salary
2005–06 New Orleans/Oklahoma City $3,144,240
2006–07 New Orleans/Oklahoma City $3,380,160
2007–08 New Orleans $3,615,960
2008–09 New Orleans $4,574,189
2009–10 New Orleans $13,520,500
2010–11 New Orleans $14,940,153
One thing to keep in mind with modern rich athletes, they learned from MJ's marketing. The average talent in the NBA today is in itself a singular corporation. You just don't see it because it's hidden behind agents, managers, sponsors and other hidden entities.
In the last season alone:
Blake Griffin won a controversial Slam Dunk contest because it was necessary for him to make KIA look good by jumping over their car. (A dunk that not only has been done before but he didn't even jump over the car which is how the dunk should have been done to be impressive.)
Lebron James, Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade got away with so many non-calls that even in the Finals, it led to an embarasing Dwayne Wade situation where he pretended to have gotten his eye poked when he missed the last minute shot against Dallas. A move he did only after seeing the shot miss and not only doing the motion but staring at the ref.
When something is beyond the size of capitalism, every entity within it even singular entities that we still consider humans rather than personal brands such as celebrities, athletes and billinoaires are in fact in reality just the same as corporations.
To paraphrase something someone once said "Just because you put more money in it doesn't mean it's going to be better".
The same applies to a single individual homo sapien. The moral desire to subsidize the poor or make everything equal like in a communist system does not only fail because it does not consider the flaw of humanity but also fails because it aims to make everyone extremely rich/luxurious/long living.
It's really like what you said earlier:
So I have a hard time when people start talking about "fairness" or "ethics" in relation to professional sports.
You only have to omit "in relation".
All things such as professional sports are a cultural vanity mirror to humanity in some way or another.
It doesn't mean laws should just be set aside but it also doesn't mean just because you make everyone rich that those rich people stay human. Extreme richness is the road to training a normal (as normal as psychiatry claims normality is at least) and convincing them to act (if not be) sociopaths.
It's why the housing bubbles create so much suffering. It's why people, even poor people, vote the most corrupted politicians rather than get it at least 50/50 right when it comes to voting. It's why large corporations becomes abusive at top and end up treating employees as pawns. It's why people buy shares from evil corporations.
This perspective of seeking extreme richness for everyone and for those blessed with extreme richness to compete to be even richer and more in pleasure creates evil because it transmutes the singular physical body into a CEO that decides for the mouth what chocolate they need to eat or decides for the feet which shoe they want to wear rather than human nature deciding for the brain what they should do to survive.
This is not to say being rich makes you bad but definitely wanting to be rich makes you want to forget about thinking evil given enough reward and the human body is no longer just the avatar of the human brain. It is the avatar for government, corporations, etc. and in turn it can easily be made into one either. It's like jail. At a certain point, given enough imprisonment, one not only becomes a prisoner - he starts becoming the abyss and becomes an animal in jail. Just because jail can train victims doesn't mean it can't also train future jailers and that's what we have with athletes and that's what we have with the fanbase. We're no longer passive receivers of the evils of corporations. It's very possible for us to become avatars of new corporations and bureaucracy
on our own. Context (IMO) is more important than classification nowadays at determining who is the real victim and who is a pseudo-victim. The internet has allowed the stage for hysteria to assume a grander stage that it is possible to just as rally better against evil as it is to pity better against someone who does not need to be pitied in such exaggerations that we morally attempt to make their situations into something that isn't really that way.
