Bottom of the Bird Cage 3/8

This weekend ranks as one of the slower times on the sporting calendar.

Pro hockey and basketball are moving without much excitement to the playoffs. College basketball is a week away from conference tournament action and 10 days away from the start of true March madness.

Baseball is trying to get pitchers and hitters into shape with meaningless games.

And there is no football on the field to entertain us.

But there is always football off the field at this time of the year, and thus we have this weekend’s edition of droppings from the bottom of the bird cage.

From the Los Angeles Times:
(T.J.) Houshmandzadeh signed with Seattle this week, picking the Seahawks over the Minnesota Vikings. And check out the lengths the Seahawks went — above and beyond a five-year, $40-million contract — to convince him he was their guy.

First, they dispatched one of the jets belonging to Seahawks owner Paul Allen, the Microsoft mega-billionaire, to pick up Houshmandzadeh and his wife and kids in Los Angeles and fly them to Seattle. Then, once the family arrived, they hopped on Allen’s seaplane for a tour of the city, including a pass over Qwest Field, where the scoreboard was lighted with a shot of the receiver and his career stats.

Also onboard the seaplane were Seahawks Coach Jim Mora, offensive coordinator Greg Knapp and a couple of Seattle defensive backs, who, Mora joked, “didn’t want to have to cover T.J. if he went to the Vikings.” After the hour-long tour, the plane swooped down and landed on Lake Washington, directly in front of the Seahawks’ massive new training facility, where Houshmandzadeh got a full-court-press sales pitch about how he would be featured in next season’s offense.

This type of free-agent visit — far more elaborate than one for a typical player — is choreographed to the last detail. For instance, one of the Seahawks’ equipment men used to work in Cincinnati, and knew the kind of shoes and gloves that Houshmandzadeh prefers. And there they were, the same brand of shoes and gloves, complete with the lime-green Seahawks detail, positioned just so on a table where Houshmandzadeh couldn’t help but notice them. “It was perfect,” Mora said. “T.J. walked right past that table and was like, `Hey! These are the kind I wear!’ ”
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All this for a receiver who is closer to the end of his career than the start, will be 32 years old in September and hasn’t always been his team’s No. 1 target. It’s only natural for a performance driven business that wants an asset to go all out in attempts to get that asset. That’s understandable. Like new Jets coach Rex Ryan and couple of his assistant coaches showing up at the home of LB Bart Scott a few minutes after the start of free agency.

But decisions in free agency 99.9 percent of the time come down to one thing and one thing only: money. It’s how much, it’s how much is guaranteed and it’s how much comes in the first years of the deal. Private jets, seaplanes and coaching visits mean squat when it put up against money.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: While the NFL salary cap climbed from $116 million last year to $127 million this year, the league and some of its teams responded by announcing layoffs. The league itself was trying to reduce its employees by 14 percent. Teams such as the Redskins, Browns, Jaguars, Panthers, Colts and others have laid off employees. The Steelers so far have kept their work force intact.

Why are others laying off secretaries, public relations workers and such? Because the Redskins and Browns and the NFL are losing money? Hardly. They’re using the economy as an excuse, for one, and there are suspicions that with the lack of a collective bargaining agreement, the NFL and its teams are trying to lay down a poor-me track as they head toward a conflict with the union.

But by using the economy as an excuse, the most successful pro league in sports has set a poor example for others. They’re throwing people out of work, not because they’re losing money but because, at best, they fear the future — although it won’t stop the owners from staying in $500-a-night rooms at their meetings on the California coast later this month.

That is precisely the kind of thinking the country does not need now, and if we’re getting it from one of the nation’s thriving businesses, what can anyone else expect? Instead of leading in tough times, the NFL has cowered.

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It’s not just the fact that teams will lay off employees who have salaries of less than one percent of what some high-dollar free agent receives in a new deal. It’s not the fact that teams spend money on private jets and various inducements to try and sign those high-dollar free agents. Fans pay to see superstars and winning teams, they don’t pay to see office workers. But too many NFL teams right now are deciding to save what amounts to chump change for most of these owners because they can. The door has been opened by a bad economy and a potential labor dispute, and teams are walking through and putting good people who do necessary work on the unemployment line. The decisions aren’t going to guarantee these teams a profit. The black ink (profits) flows because that’s already been set by the nature of what the football business has become.

These layoffs are a short-sighted approach by a business that used to be run with long-term vision.

From the Kansas City Star Sunday Magazine:
To really see the Kansas City Chiefs, you have to find the man who’s spent more than 35 years watching them through the device that most defines him. His name is Hank Young, and he’s waiting in the lonely building on the right, the one that looks abandoned, behind thick brick walls and a security door. The buzzer sounds, the door rattles, then it flushes open and the 63-year-old stands before you: the ice-blue eyes, the round, thick glasses, the tall athletic build and the gravelly voice saying, shyly, “Come in, come in.”

For decades Young, who’s leading you up the stairs of his studio on Southwest Boulevard, has kept his artistic eye on the Kansas City Chiefs — his camera capturing the official moments as the team has shifted from world champions to struggling losers to sporting touchstone for a Midwest town devoted to its football.

If Len Dawson is the Chiefs’ grand old man, if Scott Pioli and Todd Haley are its future, and if Lamar Hunt is its founding father, then Hank Young is the unseen artist who’s been asked to capture the essence of all of them: Year in, year out, he has followed and observed this football team, looking for whatever truth his lens could capture.

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You’ve seen his pictures right here on this site and now you can learn a little bit more about Chiefs photographer Hank Young. The Star magazine story really doesn’t do the man justice. Had the writer really spent some time on this story he would have discovered two things. First, there are very few people in the land who possess the heart and soul of Hank Young. Second, he would have found out that few people in this land are as creative and talented with a camera as our Henry. He sees things that others cannot and he has the ability to capture those visions so all of us can enjoy.