#i tend to kind of steamroll games after a little practice but having the hard fights actually be really hard is like. rly fun!

[ruushes]

if i make my rook younger and less capable than the rest of the team, struggling to keep themself alive let alone lead older and more experienced colleagues while trying not to let slip their terrible fear of failure, is it really "me being bad at playing a rogue" or is it "emergent narrative"

[junker-town]

You can't overthrow an owner like James Dolan, but you can fight (a little)

How to combat your tyrannical sports owner.

James Dolan owns the New York Knicks and there is no telling how long he will own them. Lifelong Knick fans have already done this, but I’d like to tell you what that means in simple math. James Dolan is 61, and unless he sells the Knicks to someone else he will on average live another 23.5 years.

Let’s say this as a worst case scenario: If James Dolan lives as long as he is supposed to live, and doesn’t change much of who he is or what he does, he will own the Knicks until about the year 2040. A Knicks fan reading that probably just got the slack-shouldered, dead-eyed look men get when they receive long prison sentences. Their families in the gallery likely collapsed in each other’s arms, overwhelmed by reality.

If you happen to be a fan of a franchise with a bad owner, looking at a mortality table isn’t morbid. It’s practicing self-care, because some day, maybe before you do, the inept, insanely wealthy person owning your team will die and possibly free you. I repeat: This isn’t being mean, it’s quoting actual sentiments actual Washington fans have asked Dan Snyder through media intermediaries.

Knicks fans aren’t trying to be morbid when they think about these things. They’re simply coping with a world where sports tyranny is real and inescapable.

Until 2040 or so, barring some kind of ownership change, James Dolan will own the Knicks, and the Knicks will be a bad sports team as a result. The Knicks have won one playoff series since 2000 under Dolan's management. The league’s free agents flock to Miami, Los Angeles, and Cleveland over New York. Talent that leaves the Knicks inevitably flourishes once it leaves. Dolan’s reign may be best known for the tenure of Isiah Thomas, who was inexplicably allowed to coach and run a franchise into the ground, all while getting the company sued for sexual harassment. Dolan has somehow made Phil Jackson look mediocre, something Jackson has spent his entire post-playing career avoiding with great success.

Knicks legend Charles Oakley was thrown out of Madison Square Garden last week. When Oakley asked why, he said he was told, “You have to leave because someone ordered you to leave.” Oakley then got into a fight with security, and was thrown out and banned from the building. In response, James Dolan appeared on a local radio station and publicly accused Oakley of being an alcoholic. It got so bad that Michael Jordan and NBA commissioner Adam Silver had to step in to mediate between the two.

This is the owner of the franchise, and a 61-year-old man with every advantage in the world in terms of money, class, privilege, and resources to help him get things right. This is as good at being an owner as James Dolan will ever be.

It is not a unique situation. For years Al Davis kept the Raiders swatting at imaginary flies. Dan Snyder has tried to make Washington a good football team often to the detriment of the team, and with a business model that will one day charge Redskins fans for oxygen. Jed York, Jimmy Haslam, the DeVos family in Orlando ... they all exist, somehow, without dying of shame. Woody Johnson of the New York Jets may not even realize he owns the Jets. It’s the best explanation at this point.

This all leads to the extremely relevant and practical question: How do you survive when your beloved team has been taken over by the country’s least-fireable, least vulnerable, and meritocracy-immune people?

The Clippers eventually got rid of Donald Sterling, yes. That coup took three decades of humiliating franchise performance, public displays of racism towards his players, a TMZ leak, and the entire NBA working together to oust him. Even then, Sterling still got two billion dollars from the sale of the team.

Professional sports owners are too rich to lose. They are wealthy. They will stay that way, because the way American society works in 2017 is to keep the wealthy at a minimum threshold of wealthy while gutting the middle of the country like a fresh deer carcass for profit.

In the case of sports and probably much more, that carcass is you.

There’s no reason to not gouge the owner on your shuffle off this mortal coil, however. As long as you know this isn’t about winning, and as long as you know that you have some options, you can choose a noble death in battle against your overlords. The choices aren’t great. They are choices besides a default kind of serfdom under tyrannical rule.

I am Spartacus. You are Spartacus. We are Spartacus, and Spartacus is definitely not paying $16 for a large beer without some payback.

Disengage completely

It is an option, albeit a grim one. If you decide to abandon your team, know that it will be weird. Other hobbies will have to step up. Other sports may be an option, but know then that waiting around that corner could be another trap. Sure, I’ll just watch EPL soccer, surely their owners must be different! You should not think this, ever.

If you go full deserter, you make a statement. You take money and views and clicks out of the owner’s bucket. Empty seats in an era of television contracts don’t hold the same weight they used to, but they’re still embarrassing. Being one for your team is absolutely free, and requires even less effort than continuing to be a fan without complaint.

There’s also the dollars you don’t spend on jerseys, shirts, memorabilia, concessions, beer — oh man, all that beer money adds up, not just for you, but for owners too. Margins matter, especially if you have the kind of owner who watches the margins like a hawk.

Note: to make this kind of behavior really effective, you actually have to stop supporting the team. This is a note to Washington fans. Yes, it’s harder than you might have imagined, but you have to stop going to the games and buying overpriced gear to make this work. You have to stop, like, one thing you’re doing, and not hand Dan Snyder your money. If you hate the way he manages your team, just stop handing him money. Stop. STOPPPPP.

Make your fandom a protest

The Baghead route. Again, not entirely effective, but if you’ve already bought the ticket, the paper bag mask is ready when you are. Don’t try to bring signs in protesting ownership: they tend to get confiscated. Chanting works, though you may be asked to leave. This may be the team doing you a favor and improving your quality of life, for which you owe them a quiet thank you.

American fans don’t do this a lot in numbers because we’re too disorganized, for the most part.

However, British soccer fans have a long history of doing this at multiple levels of the sport. The results are mixed at best: Manchester United weathered a fan protest against the ownership of the Glazers with ease, while Newcastle fans did sort of prod owner Mike Ashley into spending money on the club’s roster after skimping on transfers for a while. Lower-tier team protests seem to work much better, but still: Owners don’t tend to sell teams because you ask them to, even if you do it en masse wearing color-coordinated t-shirts with anti-ownership slogans on them.

Make their life hell

There is so little you can do to accomplish this, but if you’re fond of tiny victories, then take it.

The choice for pissants determined to take just one chunk out of the dragon’s hide before getting smoked — making the owner’s life one degree more hellish than it is — requires discipline and stamina. You can’t just boo once: you have to boo, and boo, and keep on booing until the joke becomes a running joke becomes a tradition. You have to boo them about your team at the games of other, totally different teams in different sports. You have to boo them on the street and, if necessary, at a urinal at a public restroom next to you.

You have to commit to this. You can’t take anything away from the owner. The owner has more money than you will ever have, most likely. Barring some brave exception, they have built a bubble of highly paid sycophants, suckups, yes-men, consultants bland functionaries, and spineless running buddies. Their children don’t go to your schools, they don’t vacation at the same places, and they don’t do the basic functions of daily living that the rest of us do. You won’t be able to boo them at the grocery store. There is a very good chance they haven’t been to a grocery store in years. They don’t live in the same country you live in, and don’t want to, really.

The only vulnerability someone as wealthy as a sports owner has is vanity. Formally adored by default in every other space in life, it’s important to deny them that. They won’t get it from the media, especially if they’re an NFL owner. (“Mister [owner]” from the NFL universe remains the most toadying, repellent address in sports.)

You have to make them feel like a loser, in other words, because there is nowhere else they will see an exam, a test, or a challenge in their life. This is the only thing you can rob them of after they robbed you of the simple irrational diversion of fanhood. You can take the toy they bought, and turn it into a mewling, complaining chunk of expensive sorrow in their hands, one that might print money, but that will never, ever do it without spitting in their face. You can take any joy they might derive from being the boss out of their hands, and do it as often as possible.

Few communities could carry this off. But if and when the time comes, I believe in you Philadelphia. We all do.

Wait it out

It’s an option. In fact, it’s the option that involves the fewest actual changes in your behavior. Change is hard! And hard things are bad. You could avoid them and simply let the noble rot of time and tide do the work for you.

Waiting has a few natural advantages. Unlike a lot of other things in life where you might feel powerless, disenfranchised, and otherwise steamrolled by forces beyond your control, reality does catch up to bad teams. There is no rhetoric, no weird identity politics, no subverted prejudices wrapped in appeals to emotion capable of erasing basic facts about a team.

You can’t duck wins and losses, or make up records, or scream “fake news!” when your team is 1-15, or loses by 40 points to a half-empty arena every night. The Browns are bad. There is film to prove it — so much film to prove it, actually. Outright lies people will accept in almost every other area of their life, they will reject in sports.

Because dude: I don’t care what you said, we lost to Georgia Southern at home. AT HOME.

Sometimes the badness becomes so obvious that even ownership takes notice, though that’s not a guaranteed outcome. There are free riders out there, owners content to skim off TV contracts while making the bare minimum effort to contribute. Even worse, there are a lot of owners out there who bought a team with their money like you might buy new exercise equipment: first as an enthusiastic lark, and later as a thing that gathers dust in the corner while slowly rusting.

This can and does go on for decades, but let’s be cynically optimistic for a moment.

Eventually, a team might descend so far into the abyss that something has to happen, if only for a brief, glorious moment. Teams need you on the hook, one way or another, and the spreadsheet will kick in where shame fails. If they have to pretend to compete to do that, they will, one way or another. Jeffrey Loria, regarded as one of the worst owners in sports, did preside over one tantalizing World Series championship in his first year with the Marlins before robbing the city of Miami at gunpoint for a stadium. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers under the Culverhouse family did, at one point, attempt to compete in football, and made the playoffs before a long dive into the trough. The Clippers under Donald Sterling — yes, even the Clippers — built decent teams from time to time.

There’s a bottom, and eventually your team will hit it so hard even ownership hears the thud and has to do something about it.

And sometimes, just maybe, the sports fan living under the tyranny of the inept and wealthy benefits from the greatest disease of the aristocracy: Protracted familial cannibalism when the owner inevitably dies disputes erupt over large estates. In the estate sale, the team is often nothing more than another ornate lamp or painting no one really wants for anything but cash. The next owner might care enough to make a good product, or failing that at least want to sucker you in with a strong couple of seasons before falling back into the gutter of easy shared revenue and seat licenses.

A good solid family law dispute over ownership of your team might solve itself when the bad team, finally receiving its well-earned level of zero support locally, moves to a new city. They might sell to an owner desperate to bilk Las Vegas, San Antonio, or Los Angeles for a new monorail of a stadium. They might be the Cincinnati Bengals, and improve to the tune of “horrible to mediocre, but you can’t say that’s not improvement.”

Either way, the waiting fan’s outcomes are the easiest, emotionally speaking. The waiting fan is the sloth of the sports ecosystem. By not moving, the mold of indifference and pessimism grows on their fur. After a while, they begin to eat it, and maybe even get some natural camouflage and nutrition from it. They might even start to like it, after a while. When success comes, it probably tastes even better after all the fur-mold sandwiches.

If Cubs fans lived off them for over a century, anyone under the thumb of inescapable mismanagement can, too.