Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow throws during the second half of an NFL football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, in Cincinnati, on Dec. 1.Kareem Elgazzar/The Associated Press
Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow is a good player on a bad team that’s getting worse. The NFL season’s still get a few weeks left to run and the Bengals are already sunk.
What’s Burrow doing to cope? Like most of the rest of us, shopping to fill the void.
In this week’s episode of HBO’s reality show Hard Knockscameras catch Burrow jawing with a couple of his wide receivers during practice. Burrow is bouncing from foot to foot. All three look bored to tears.
“Have I told you I bought a Batmobile?” Burrow says, like that’s a normal thing a grown man would say.
“Did you get it yet though?” says Ja’Marr Chase. This suggests that this isn’t the first time Burrow has been showing off about his toy habits.
“I don’t get it for like a year, but I bought it,” Burrow says.
The Batmobile Burrow’s talking about is a working model of the one Batman drives in the Christopher Nolan movies. They’re selling 10 of them. The list price is US$2.99-million each.
Burrow wonders if he should also buy “the expensive bat suit.”
“What if I wore it to every game?” he says.
Yes. What if.
When asked later to confirm that he just spent more than most people will ever earn on a life-size Hot Wheel, Burrow played it cute.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about” – followed by a sly smile.
This story made more news this past week than anything the Bengals have done all year long. Though he doesn’t see it, Burrow is in danger of becoming ‘You know, what’s his name? The guy who bought the Batmobile.’
Burrow makes a ton of money (about US$55-million a year), but three million bucks for a gag gift to yourself is wild. Even in a culture that has shed propriety, it’s hard to wrap your mind around.
Athletes have been very rich for years, but these days they are becoming incomprehensibly rich. Every decent NFL quarterback is edging toward US$50-million a year. Same with every promising NBA player coming off his rookie deal.
Some time in the next few days, Juan Soto will become the second baseball player to crash through the half-a-billion-dollar contract mark. In his second season in Saudi Arabia, Cristiano Ronaldo is making zero impact, but €200-million a year.
We have reached the point where top hockey players making north of $10-million per annum are being asked in all seriousness if they are underpaid. Toronto Maple Leaf captain Auston Matthews got that one recently. He gave a politic answer (“I’m not going to complain”), but he didn’t say, “No.”
Not so long ago, top pros were still exposed to the world of regular people. Larry Bird famously mowed his own lawn.
Now the pros can opt out of reality. They go from luxury homes to dedicated practice facilities to VVIP areas at the arena to the private airfield and back. When they get off the plane, their car is waiting for them on the tarmac.
Don DeLillo wrote an entire novel about an affectless banker trying to get across Manhattan in his limousine. It was meant to tell us something about how the remove between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has twisted both realities. That divide is visible wherever money is being blown on frivolities, but it’s nowhere more stark than in sports.
As the athletes grow more removed from the median, so do the people on hand watching them. The closest a modern pro gets to the working class are the security guards there to protect him from his admirers.
Live sports has become a bubble of wealth. The bigger the game, the more privileged that bubble’s occupants.
With that in mind, the modernization of sports facilities no longer focuses on making arenas and stadia better for sports. Its sole purpose is expanding the building’s cash-stripping ability.
When the whole business is built on one idea – that there is a lot of money and you should be laser-focused on getting as much as possible for yourself – no wonder a guy is standing around bragging about buying an undrivable $3-million car. This is how he signals to his colleagues that he matters.
Things have worked this way for so long that they don’t bear commentary. Until the day they do.
It’s always good to be rich, but there are better and worse times to let people know about it. This is shaping up to be one of the latter.
Donald Trump, civil wars that can’t be negotiated away, insurance executives getting shot in the streets. Are you not getting a late-60s, early-70s dissipation-and-chaos vibe from the current moment? The gyre’s always widening, but in this part of the world, the centre usually holds. How sure are you about that now?
A lot of people are waking up all at once to the fact that life hasn’t worked out the way the internet had promised them. They’re angry about it. Someone has to be blamed.
And here’s Joe Burrow announcing he’s spent a life-changing amount of money on something he won’t even get hold of for a year. By the time it arrives, you just know he’ll be bored by it.
There are greater villains in the world than cartoonishly materialistic entertainers. A basketball player is still far more likeable than a mewling actor or the scolds in the media. The basketball player feels less sorry for himself.
But they are also out there speaking unscripted in public far more. That means more opportunities to draw attention to their massive personal advantages. And that means more chance of tipping a critical mass of people into a 1789 mindset.
Were the revolution to arrive tomorrow, the lawyers would not be the first to be killed. They seem as miserable as everyone else. It would be the people who can’t shut up about all the cool things they have, and seem to have no idea what’s going on outside the stadium gates.
