Both sides in NBA dispute lack perspective

The rhetoric revolving around the NBA labor dispute reached epic proportions Monday afternoon.

Sickening proportions, too.

This was mere moments after the players announced that they rejected the owners’ latest proposal and “disclaimed” the union, whatever the flip that means.

First of all my personal response to the latest development: I don’t care.

Seriously, am I supposed to give a hoot over the possibility that the NBA season will be delayed further or not played at all?

Sorry, gentlemen, as far as I can tell nobody in this disagreement is being sexually abused, dodging bullets in a foxhole or living in a cardboard box.

Neither am I so, please, nobody be concerned that the newspaper business is in a perpetual struggle, our mortgage payments also are due and on top of that some of us are caring for sick pets.

Yet David Stern had the audacity to go on ESPN with that held-hostage look of his and cry “poor old us” to poor old us.

“We’re about to go into the nuclear winter of the NBA,” the league’s commissioner actually said.

I immediately looked out the window to see whether north winds were blowing mushroom clouds in the direction of the United Center.

No, not as far as I could tell.

Stern also referred to the predicament as “really a tragedy.” My goodness, and I thought the people at Penn State lived in an insulated environment until last week.

Tragedies are a security guard being shot to death in a supermarket robbery and the diabetes rate increasing dramatically.

By comparison, sports owners and players squabbling is a parlor game. Think of Derrick Rose as a white piece and Jerry Reinsdorf a black piece moving around the board in a human chess game.

A tragedy? Not at all. A nuclear winter? Not even close. Little more than modern sports? Bingo!

All that’s at stake here is money, or more precisely who gets the money, or most precisely who gets more of the money.

I’m not taking sides in this NBA mess. The players’ leaders aren’t any more sensitive to what’s going on elsewhere in the world than the owners’ commissioner is.

Union chief Billy Hunter did a great job Monday of sounding like the players were victims of some, well, some nuclear attack.

Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and other dribblers don’t care about the so-called little guys any more than Jerry Buss, Mark Cuban and other bean-counting owners do.

By “little guys” I mean team and league employees who will be laid off now, workers who service NBA arenas and people whose livelihoods depend on businesses surrounding those arenas.

All of us who are fortunate to have incomes should worry about them, along with all others already visiting unemployment offices.

Life will go on without the NBA this season. Believe it or not, Christmas will remain on the calendar even if the league doesn’t flood living rooms with games that day.

Stern said of basketball fans, “I understand they’ll be angry with both sides.”

The commissioner, owners and players should be so lucky. Most of the public will be apathetic, especially until the NFL is done playing.

The only thing anybody should be angry with is anybody’s rhetoric making this labor dispute out to be anything but a labor dispute.