No... you're definitely missing the point. All that I did was outline a way that they could frame up the subject so that it didn't immediately become a public relations cluster****. So when you say that I'm trying to make players adhere to a different system of values, then that's just you failing pretty fundamentally at reading comprehension. For starters, I have not stated my own position on how athletes should be valued, or what the 'proper' thing for them to say publicly would be. If you're interested, my answer would be that I don't really care. If someone's willing to pay Wilfork $12 million per year, then he's worth $12 million per year. I'm simply proposing what I think would be the best way for them to frame it up on a PR level, so any reference that you make to 'my' values is misguided and just shows that you missed the point.
The economic and civic senses of worth already exist. I'm not creating anything here: just pointing out the fact that there is tension between two different definitions of merit, and it is always the root of the PR quagmire when a highly paid individual has a salary grievance. Every single time, and they still just don't learn. Whether or not it bothers me is irrelevant, because it does bother the public, and the whole reason why they're making public statements is to try to come off at least somewhat sympathetically, so that they can put some pressure on the organization to sign them.
And one of the biggest hurdles to this is the whole concept of the overpaid athlete, which exists solely because the public insists on mixing its civic definition of worth into what would ideally be a strictly economic discussion. That's why athletes are always contrasted to teachers: because teachers have a ton of theoretical civic worth (after all what's more precious than our children?? and all that stuff) but very little economic worth, whereas athletes have a ton of economic worth and virtually none on a civic level (they play a game for a living). They're polar opposites.
So obviously, the best PR strategy is to clarify early on that you're not talking on a civic level. Render that viewpoint irrelevant before it has a chance to get going. So, when you say that you deserve 200 times a teacher's salary, you're not saying that you're worth more to society than 200 teachers, or 200 times better than a teacher, or anything like that. Even if it's true, that's PR suicide, and is exactly what they don't want if they're trying to use public sentiment as a leverage point. Rather than blurring the lines between economic and civic worth by analogizing themselves to teachers (which is a battle that they can't win), they ought to be moving the discussion as far away from that as possible.
Which means that you're claiming that I'm taking a position that I never even suggested. What I brought up was strictly a PR strategy, and it's a pretty basic one, at that. It always surprises me that they so consistently fail at it, and surprises me even more that you can't seem to differentiate between a an effective PR strategy and my own personal feelings on the subject. Trust me, I am fully aware that my personal opinion on the matter is irrelevant to them.
