Linsanity Runnin' Wild at the USPTO

Jeremy Lin apparently is caught in a trademark battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office over the term "Linsanity". Some enterprising lads (or "trademark trolls", depending on one's view of government-granted economic rents) already filed to own the term soon after Lin took a starting role for the Knicks several weeks ago.

A search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office's online database shows an entertaining set of hucksters who filed the term "Linsanity" in the month of February. (Some of the text below for Proposed Use includes my paraphrasing from the original.)

1. Owner: John S. Yuan, Lexington, MA. Filing date: 2/20/2012. Proposed use: Eyeglasses, spectacles

2. Owner: Parace, LLC (a New York company**). Filing date: 2/20/2012. Proposed use: Sports drinks, advertising services, action figures, head bands, wrist bands, watches, visors, sporting towels, back packs, duffel bags, thermal flasks, computer gaming software, social networking internet platforms, virtual goods, and more...

** A further internet search reveals that Parace, LLC was organized in 2004 and is based in Westchester County, New York. This company has filed, successfully and unsuccessfully, for several other trademarks over recent years, including Xopod (whatever that is), Achieve the Ultimate, Teeped, and Snoopermarket.

3. Owner: Parace, LLC again. Filing date: 2/19/2012. Proposed use: Computer game software, computer software platforms, downloadable electronic game programs, computer software to enable uploading for virtual communities, blah, blah, blah...

4. Owner: Empioneer Corp.** of California. Filing date: 2/19/2012. Proposed use: Cell phone backplates, cell phone cases, cell phone covers, cell phone faceplates.

**A further internet search shows that Empioneer Corp. was organized in 2006 and does business in Los Angeles as an importer of Chinese-manufactured sunglasses.

5. Owner: Empioneer Corp. again. Filing date: 2/19/2012. Proposed use: Sunglass cases, safety eyewear, sunglasses, spectacles, etc....

6. Owner: Roger Montgomery. Filing date: 2/14/2012. Proposed use: Business management of sports people.

Note that Roger Montgomery is Jeremy Lin's agent (and has been since the beginning of Lin's pro career). According to the USPTO, Montgomery filed an abandonment form soon after initially filing this application, so his claim is apparently null and void now.

7. Owner: Yoonsoo Stephen Kim of Duluth, GA and Wesley Kwong-Yew Tang of Los Angeles, CA. Filing date: 2/14/2012. Proposed use: Jewelry, namely, bracelets, wristbands and necklaces that also provides nitification to the wearer of a pending medical-related task; rubber or silicon wristbands in the nature of a bracelet.

8. Owner: Jeremy Lin himself, filed by his attorney from the Arent Fox LLP law firm in Washington, DC. Filing date: 2/13/2012. Proposed use: A bunch of stuff including duffel bags, knapsacks, cups, mugs, aluminum water bottles, plastic water bottles, insulating bottle sleeves, T-shirts, jackets, hooded jackets, coats, headbands, sweatbands, belts, shoes, slippers, sandals, toys, drinks, beverages, and so on and so forth...

9. Owner: Andrew W. Slayton of Los Altos, CA. Filing date: 2/9/2012. Proposed use: Athletic apparel.

Slayton was the men's basketball coach at Lin's Palo Alto high school after Lin left Palo to matriculate at Harvard. Apparently Slayton, likely without Lin's permission, has been operating a website at the domain name WWW.Linsanity.com (a solidly constructed site, actually) since 2010. While he might have the best basis for filing of any claimaint, as he is already commercially exploiting the term "Linsanity", his claim will fail (like all the other filings save Jeremy Lin's) due to the statutory principle that a trademark cannot refer to an actual person without that person's permission.

10. Owner: Yenchin Matthew Chang of Alhambra, CA. Filing date: 2/7/2012. Proposed use: This list is a doozy, including apparel for dancers, baseball caps, button-front aloha shirts, camouflage shirts, chef's hats, fishing shirts, golf pants, hunting shirts, leather hats, moisture-wicking sports shirts, paper hats, rugby shirts, toboggan hats, triathlon clothing, turtleneck shirts, woolly hats, yoga shirts, and much more.

As a side note, other recent trademark filings in the USPTO database include "Linning Is The Only Thing", "Linspiration" (also advanced by our friends Wesley Kwong-Yew Tang and Yoonsoo Stephen Kim), "I'm A Linner", "Be A Linner", and "Lin-credible".

Antoine Walker: Not A Bust, Now Bust

Antoine Walker, a former Boston Celtic, Dallas Maverick, Atlanta Hawk, Miami Heater, and Memphis Grizzly, apparently filed for bankruptcy last week under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The linked article from the Wall Street Journal does a good job of outlining Walker's financial woes: $12 MM in personal debts but only $4 MM in assets. Yeah, this guy lived a bit too large. He generally lived up to his promise as the #6 pick in the 1996 NBA draft, scoring over 20 PPG for five years and helping the Miami Heat win the 2006 NBA title as their starting small forward. Although he took a lot of foolhardy three-pointers, his biggest disappointment was in his financial prudence.

Under 11 U.S.C. §523 and §727, a Chapter 7 case results, after liquidation of the debtor's estate, in discharge of all the debtor's debts that arose before the bankruptcy petition (with certain exceptions like tax obligations and domestic support obligations). Secured creditors get the value of their collateral, up to the amount of their secured claim, and unsecured creditors get whatever is left over from such collateral and the debtor's other assets. Walker is going to wind up with nothing going forward, other than his income-generating ability, whatever that may be.

What's more, it seems that Walker's biggest real estate liability is a $2.3 MM secured mortgage on a Chicago-area mansion. Illinois allows deficiency judgments (see 735 ILCS §15-1504(f)), which means that even if Walker's mortgage lender foreclosed on his house under ordinary non-bankruptcy procedure, they could still sue him for the difference if the market value of the mansion came in below $2.3 MM, which is likely given recent real estate trends. In Chapter 7, that potential deficiency claim by the bank will be discharged along with most of his other personal debts. This would not be the case in a Chapter 13 filing.

Under 11 U.S.C. §707(b), Walker's Chapter 7 filing might be deemed presumptively abusive and thus dismissed, or converted to Chapters 11/13, if his monthly net income (after deducting reasonable living expenses, mortgage payments, and domestic support obligations), multiplied by 60, exceeds $10,000. In other words, if his monthly net income exceeds $167, his case may be deemed abusive, unless he can show "special circumstances" such as military service obligation or a serious medical condition. It is hard to believe that Walker cannot bank a couple hundred bucks per month, but I suppose that is what you get when you live like Antoine Walker. In the WSJ article above, he claims to have zero income.

Flash, Superman, and Latifah?

Several months ago my co-blogger Dr. Doughboy detailed some of his favorite NBA movies. Continuing this theme, the forthcoming Hollywood movie Just Wright, which will debut in May of this year, features rapper Common, playing a NBA star, choosing between two love interests, played by Queen Latifah and Paula Patton. Personally, I found the trailer rather captivating, not least because it portrays the player as having some semblance of maturity, able to engage in a grown-up relationship. Popular portrayals of NBA athletes generally (and not necessarily accurately) show the typical player as a backwoods brute with plenty of hops but little charm. Another mark in the favor of this flick is its depiction of Queen Latifah (née Dana Owens), who, true to her name, carries herself regally though she does not resemble a usual Hollywood "babe" or an archetypal NBA wife, as a legitimate love interest for the jock.

(I found the title somewhat lame, though, but that is a minor quibble. Titles based on punning an invented character name are way overdone. Good Will Hunting? House of Payne? Saving Grace? Yuck.)

Here is what really inspired me to flee from more quotidian tasks to my bloggin' refuge. I note from the trailer that the new Latifah movie features, at the least, Dwyane Wade and Dwight Howard in cameos. (The IMDB cast listing also reports Elton Brand and Rashard Lewis playing themselves.) How is every NBA movie able to secure so much participation from real pro hoopers? For example, Forget Paris (1995), which only tangentially depicted the NBA in its opening scenes, featured a host of stars including most of the mid-'90s Suns (Barkley, Majerle, KJ). The following year's Eddie (1996), a fairly forgettable movie starring Whoopi Goldberg as a rags-to-riches NBA coach, also featured NBA players, albeit B-listers such as Malik Sealy, Greg Ostertag, and Dwayne Schintzius. Films including Blue Chips (1994) and He Got Game (1998) included NBA players in serious starring roles: Shaquille O'Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, and Ray Allen all portrayed high school seniors choosing where to matriculate. The children's movie Like Mike (2002) packed seats by showing Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Tracy McGrady, Steve Nash, and a host of others doing their thing on the court.

(Even the odious Juwanna Mann (2002) featured cameos from WNBA stars Cynthia Cooper and Teresa Weatherspoon, but the less said about that movie, the better.)

So again, how do these NBA movies consistently score league talent for cameos (or more)? One possibility is that the director/producer of each movie happens to, idiosyncratically, have a connection to the NBA world that he exploits to recruit talent. Perhaps a director without an NBAer stored in his mobile phone would not even bother to make a hoops movie.

Alternatively, we must consider that making an NBA-themed movie requires obtaining the NBA's consent, lest the Association seek injunctive or monetary relief for infringement of its trademarks. In other words, the league gets an effective veto power over which pro hoops movies get made; they are likely somewhat circumspect in their choices of which film projects to grant IP licenses to. (How the heck did the NBA/WNBA approve Juwana Mann, then?) All NBA intellectual property is housed with NBA Properties, Inc., a corporation chartered in New York state. Most of the above movies include a special thanks to the National Basketball Association in their ending credits. With this bargaining power over would-be hoops auteurs, the league likely can insist on including any particular lineup of players in the movie.

The smoking gun is Article XXXVII, Section 2 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which allows NBA Properties to require a player to make up to four appearances annually for licensing purposes. I would not be surprised if this covers cameos in movies. Interestingly, players shall be paid $2,500 for each such appearance, but can be fined up to $20,000 for failure to comply. Additionally, Article II, Section 8 also allows teams to require players to make up to 12 promotional appearances annually, of which 2 may be assigned to NBA Properties. Pursuant to Section 8(a)(i)(A), a player may be required to make only one off-season appearance, and it must be in his town of residence or in the location where he happens to be. (Presumably, in practice, players are more pliant than to reflexively refuse a non-conforming request, but the CBA protections are probably useful for players.)

I am not privy to the convoluted negotiations between the league, movie directors, and players recruited to appear in such cinematic gold. However, if you wonder why Dwight Howard and D-Wade are in the newest Latifah movie, it is likely because Commissioner Stern (or Deputy Commissioner Silver) wanted it that way.

Seems Like The Movies

Gilbert Arenas's recent legal problems have thrown light upon Section 16(a)(i) of the standard NBA player contract:

The Team may terminate this Contract [...] if the Player shall: [...] at any time, fail, refuse, or neglect to conform his personal conduct to standards of good citizenship, good moral character (defined here to mean not engaging in acts of moral turpitude, whether or not such acts would constitute a crime), and good sportsmanship, to keep himself in first class physical condition, or to obey the Team’s training rules.

Several pundits have suggested that the Wizards should void Arenas's contract under this "moral turpitude" clause. To my knowledge, no NBA team has ever attempted to invoke that clause, and it has never been litigated, either within the NBA's private appeals process, or in a real court. Unfortunately, "moral turpitude" is not defined further in the contract; nor is "first class physical condition". If Arenas were to be convicted of a felony, that might qualify as "moral turpitude" in the eyes of a judge or jury, but really, who knows? Construing an ambiguous contractual (or constitutional or statutory) clause is tricky business, especially when the document provides no helpful context.

Why didn't the NBA or the Players Association insist on defining the meaning of "moral turpitude" further, during the last negotiation in 2005? If they agreed on some negotiated set of taboo behaviors (murder, rape, spitting on the flag), however outlandish, it is likely that a player would eventually breach one of those covenants. Heck, NBA alum Jayson Williams killed a man just a couple years after retirement. Perhaps the NBA doesn't really want to the power to void contracts; owners would rather not wield such a veiled threat, lest players push for even more money so they can bathe in such a risky pond. And it's clear why the Players Association would rather keep this clause fuzzy. Status-quo bias has likely preserved the clause over a number of years.

[As a side note, it feels a bit surprising to contemplate that a real court could in fact pronounce on what the "moral turpitude" clause in NBA contracts actually means. I think that often, individuals living in an all-encompassing community (a university, the military, a pro sports team) tend to forget that ultimately they and their patron are subject to public laws, just like every other citizen and organization. The private entity may purport to lay down its own law and order, but ultimately, we are all part of one community. The only entity that US courts have consistently refused to regulate, oddly, is the legislature.]

On Stephen Jackson

Incidentally, wouldn't it be cool if I could demand a trade from my employer?** I would insist on a warm-weather city where I could play a featured role and reunite with my college buds. I would act "disgruntled" and refuse to bill any hours until my demands are satisfied. I would be curious to see if I would be traded for a rookie fresh from law school, or a grizzled vet playing out his contract as an "of counsel".

Darn at-will employment.

As academic theorists and lay observers have noted, guaranteed contracts provide poor incentives to employees, and make it very difficult for employers to sever relations with non-performing workers. Guaranteed contracts that include provisions allowing limited firing, "for cause", inevitably give rise to costly disputes about whether the agreed-upon cause was triggered. In turn, this makes employers more reluctant ex ante to hire. Extensive due diligence on prospective employees is one partial solution to the incentive problem with guaranteed contracts; in a way, this may help to explain (to answer my blogmate's recent query) why NBA owners support the age limit. No one wants to gamble on a raw 18-year-old, hand him 10 million dollars, and see him wither away to twigs.

(**I don't mean to suggest that I am anything but content with my current employer.)

Twelve Angry Men

The Portland Trail Blazers issued a rather nasty email to every other NBA team recently, threatening legal action against any team that attempts to sign Darius Miles for purposes of clocking a ninth and tenth game for Miles this season, which would result in (i) Miles’s $9 million salary for 2008-09 going back on Portland’s rolls for purposes of counting against the salary cap, and (ii) as a result thereof, Portland being required to pay several million dollars of luxury tax.

Here is the basic regulatory background of this situation. Under Article VII, Section 5 of the current NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement, a team may (subject to various exceptions and complications) sign a free agent from another team only if such free agent’s prospective salary would not cause the team to exceed the salary cap calculated for a given season.

Under Article VII, Section 4(h) of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, if a player is deemed by a physician selected jointly by the NBA and the Players Association to have suffered a career-ending injury, then the team can apply to have such player’s salary excluded from its salary-cap calculation. But, if the player ends up playing 10 games the following season, then the exclusion is void, and the player’s salary goes back into the salary-cap calculation. Let us note that the player is still entitled to get his money nonetheless. In this case, Miles’s contract was covered by insurance, so Blazers owner Paul Allen saved cash payment on Miles’s $9 million for 2008-09.

The January 8th email from Blazers President Larry Miller said the following:

Team Presidents and General Managers,
The Portland Trail Blazers are aware that certain teams may be contemplating signing Darius Miles to a contract for the purpose of adversely impacting the Portland Trail Blazers Salary Cap and tax positions. Such conduct from a team would violate its fiduciary duty as an NBA joint venturer. In addition, persons or entities involved in such conduct may be individually liable to the Portland Trail
Blazers for tortuously interfering with the Portland Trail Blazers' contract rights and perspective economic opportunities.
Please be aware that if a team engages in such conduct, the Portland Trail Blazers will take all necessary steps to safeguard its rights, including, without limitation, litigation.

Reportedly, after the Blazers’ intemperate missive, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert responded to the NBA owners’ group email list (side note: Can I be blind-carbon-copied on this list?) with the following rejoinder: “A pre-emptive threat of 'litigation' directed at all of your partners through a group e-mail does not sit well with me and seems to be incongruent with the spirit of keeping a 'fiduciary duty' and good 'partner-like duty' to your 'NBA joint venturers.'” That’s a fair point, but Gilbert, who like most businessmen surely disdains lawyers, had little to say about what Portland could actually do to him. Putting the warm fuzzies aside, what is really going on here?



As John Hollinger has explained, signing Miles and paying him for a couple games is an individually rational decision for any given team. Under current projections, about 7 teams (including the Blazers, if Miles plays ten games) will exceed the salary cap in 2008-09 and will be required to pay luxury tax, (see Article VII, Section 12(f) of the Collective Bargaining Agreement) which is split equally among all the 23 non-tax-paying teams. At the veteran’s minimum of $1,141,838 annually for an 8-year veteran, Miles would earn roughly $28,000 for two games. Any team that plays Miles in a way that triggers the Blazers’ luxury-tax liability will receive its 1/23 share of the Blazers’ luxury-tax payment, which would be about $9 million (the amount of Miles’s salary), as right now Portland’s calculated salary roll is just slightly below the cap line. Earning $391,000 of tax transfer for a $23,000 investment seems like a pretty good ROI – better than upgrading your luxury boxes!

Given that the Blazers are threatening some legal action against any team that challenges Portland, it might be useful to consider the strength of their legal claims. First is their claim of tortious interference. According to the Restatement (2d.) of Torts, Sections 766 and 767, the tort of “tortious interference with a contract” consists of (1) a contractual relationship, or an expectancy thereof, (2) an intentional act of interference with such relationship or expectancy, (3) causation of harm, and (4) quantifiable damages. The first problem is that Portland has no more contractual relationship with Miles. They severed ties with him early in 2008 when the doctor opined that he was not fit to play ball any longer; and insurance is now paying the contract for Portland. Even if the payments are coming over time rather than in a lump sum and there is still some outstanding contractual arrangement governing the payments, it is hard to see how a team that signs Miles now would be interfering with such arrangement. They wouldn’t. The issue of the salary-cap implications for Portland is separate from the actual cash payment of Miles’s salary. Could Portland argue that a team that signs Miles is interfering with Portland’s prospective contractual relationships, i.e. a free-agent deal with Shawn Marion, say? Perhaps, but the possibility thereof seems so sketchy and ill-defined as to make a legal claim very weak indeed.

The other potential claim is some sort of alleged violation of a team’s fiduciary duty to its partners. I do not have access to the partnership agreement that NBA team owners are party to, but it seems ridiculous to argue that part of each team’s fiduciary duty is not to take all permissible actions to compete with other teams. Furthermore, as a practical matter, how could the Blazers ever prove that a particular team, say the Grizzlies, signed Miles purely to trigger the Blazers’ luxury-tax liability and salary-cap exceedance? It's not clear how a good-faith signing would look different from a bad-faith signing. In fact, the worse the team is (and Memphis sure is bad), the more plausible it is that they could really use Miles. Boston's signing of Miles seems more likely to be a bad-faith move.

If the Blazers ever sued the Grizzlies for these alleged torts, the judge should rule for the Grizzlies on summary judgment. But can you imagine one NBA team taking the other to court? Really? I sure can’t. Without that background threat, any threat of a lawsuit is toothless.

In essence, Portland is saying with their letter that they don’t want Miles to ever make a living in the NBA again. I don’t believe he ever asked anyone for a medical opinion that his knee was finished. He wanted to keep playing! It is well-known that judges do not fondly regard attempts by an employer to prevent a former employee from finding work elsewhere.

The psychology at play with Blazers management is worth comment, as well. They may genuinely feel that Miles and other teams are attempting to screw them in bad faith. This reminds me of a situation I recently experienced where a colleague, whom I know somewhat vaguely, asked me to take care of her cat in my home for a year while she embarks on a trip around the world. I said, sure, I would love to, but the problem is that I’m already taking care of another friend’s three cats for several months, and I’m not sure if the existing three cats will be gone by the time you embark on your trip. Eventually, a few weeks before her trip, I told the world-traveller that I can’t do it because my existing three cats don’t seem to be leaving anytime soon. And instead of saying, OK, I understand, that’s too bad, she contacted the owner of my three cats to find out if she can expedite the departure of the three! Rather than taking the presence or absence of the three cats as an autonomous external parameter that is out of her domain and control, she took it as a bit of a personal affront. I suppose I would feel a sense of loss too in her situation: a liability that you thought you had eliminated is suddenly back on the books for what feels like a bad reason. Given that losses generally hurt worse than the equivalent gains, it would have been better for Portland to never get rid of the salary-cap liability in the first place, rather than having the liability, then enjoying the windfall of ditching it, then getting socked with it again. But ultimately, Portland should bear some moral responsibility for signing Miles to such a rich contract, just as this cat owner is responsible for deciding to leave the country for a year.



I read somewhere that perhaps Portland’s letter can be read as an implicit threat not of a lawsuit, but of future blackballing by Portland of any team, say Boston or Memphis, that chooses to sign Miles. The problem is that this is clearly a non-credible threat; Kevin Pritchard will surely not hesitate to swing a deal for, say, Rudy Gay if the price is right.

In sum, I would say that Portland’s leadership team is full of it. They need better lawyers and better psychologists to help them through this disappointment.

True Contrarian

My co-blogger H.O.S.S. knows a thing or two about securities litigation, so I will await his insights, perhaps in comments, but in the interim I just want to comment about the irony of Mark Cuban’s legal troubles for selling some stock after allegedly receiving a confidential tip that it was about to tank. Isn’t that how Cuban got rich in the first place? He helped to build Broadcast.com, which was a brilliant website for its time, and struck it rich twice, first through the IPO and then when Yahoo acquired 100% of the company shares in an all-stock acquisition in 1999. Cuban timed the transactions almost perfectly, as the NASDAQ crashed about one year after he sold out. Presumably as a savvy operator, he knew to sell high; he knew based on his inside knowledge that his business had nowhere to go but down, at least in valuation.

Live by the bear, die by the bear…

Satisfaction Or Your Money Back

Just a few days ago, John McCain stepped up his game, claiming that there is no chance of his losing the election. Governor Palin guarantees that her side will take Pennsylvania. I think most people reflexively pay little attention to that. Do undecided voters really want so much bravado in their leaders? But it reminded me that politicians are not the only competitors who like to guarantee victory.

Last May, Jameer Nelson “guaranteed” that his Magic, down 3-1 to the Pistons, could eke out game 5. Oops, that didn’t work out so well. Speaking of the Pistons, their starting F-C is known for his hastily issued “Guaran-sheeds” of victory. His most famous guarantee, I think, came before the fourth game of the 2006 Eastern Conference Semifinals. Whoops again: LeBron took over the final quarter and the Cavs eked out a victory. Since then, Rasheed doesn’t make a lot of guarantees.

In business, third-party guarantees are usually used when a borrower (whether an individual or a company) lacks the credit-worthiness to give sufficient comfort of repayment to a lender. Guarantees can also be used in ordinary commercial sales or services contracts in place of a letter of credit, to provide comfort in case the seller doesn’t sell or the buyer doesn’t pay. A guarantee is just a written contract: a promise to pay. The guarantor, often a family member (of an individual) or corporate affiliate (of a company) pledges to pay the borrower’s obligations if the borrower fails to. The point is that the guarantor really will be on the hook if the borrower defaults or otherwise screws up.

The most famous guarantee in modern sports came when a young Joe Namath, pilot of the New York Jets, guaranteed victory against the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl 3. These boasts were then quite novel (who could be so brash to question the right of reign of the great Unitas?) and Namath surely would have lost much face if his team had not come through. Accounts of that game since then still center on Namath’s audacity. It is fair to say that if the Colts had pulled out the win, Namath’s subsequent image as a James Bond-esque son of a gun would never have arisen. Namath would probably be forever known as the kid who ran his mouth too much.

It is fair to say that a third-party guarantee promotes (value-adding) transactions not only by giving comfort of performance to the recipient of the guarantee, but also placing an extra burden on the original obligated party. The obligated party now really doesn’t want to screw up, lest he (or it) cause reputational and financial loss to the guarantor, which may be a close family member or a corporate parent. This dynamic is unquestionably found in sports. When R-Dub makes a “guaran-sheed”, his team wants to back him up, lest he suffer embarassment. Also, fans of the Pistons now may be more likely to invest emotionally in the next game with the comfort that Sheed has put his credibility on the line, and why would he do that unless he knows something that the fans don’t?

As a practical matter, a guarantee before a sports match might actually have counterproductive effects by inspiring the opponent to play better and prove the guarantor wrong. Here is an essential difference between sports (or politics) and business: In the economic realm, most of the time an actor wants to see its counterparty get the job done as agreed and expected. In competition, There Can Only Be One.


But I don’t think guarantees are a bad thing. I think on the whole, guarantees could be useful devices to spice up sports matches and encourage better play by the side whose performance is guaranteed. But under current practice, NBA guarantees are meaningless.

In politics, the guarantees of McCain and Palin are particularly weak precisely because neither one has much reputation to lay on the line. Neither candidate has been particularly lauded for truth-telling in this campaign. McCain will almost surely disappear from the public stage after his likely loss next week (if he does not resign from the Senate, he will no longer be seen as a legislative lion). Palin will disappear from the national stage and return to Alaska, perhaps to rise again in 2011 or -15 after memories of the last two months have faded. All they have right now is cheap talk.

The problem with guarantees in professional sports these days is not that athletes have little reputation to lay on the line. Reputation is the stuff of endorsements, of locker-room sway, of positive coverage by reporters, and probably of success with the ladies. We certainly have seen NBA players suffer ill repute for other reasons, like punching a fan, shooting up a parking lot, getting a friend killed while driving, striking his wife, dissing the national anthem, refusing to shoot in a key playoff game, or drugging it up. The problem, rather, is that nobody seems to pay any attention anymore to breached guarantees. Attention spans are short, and especially in the playoffs, another story line is just a game away. And maybe guarantees happen too often. Like a steel cage match, they should be trotted out on the scene only about once per year.

In real (commercial) life, a failure to make good on a guarantee (after the original obligor fails to come through) results in a lawsuit. What happened when young Jameer’s teammates failed to win game 5? Did angry Orlandistas call for J-Nel’s head? Did SVG announce that Nelson would lose his starting job to Keyon Dooling? Well, no, actually; Dooling signed with New Jersey and Orlando signed 33-year-old Anthony Johnson as their backup 1. I thought Rasheed might get traded after his guarantee failed so spectacularly in ’06, but nope, three summers later he’s still around. And, no doubt, he will give us more guaran-sheeds this year.

Here is how it should be. In 1998, Mario Zagallo, coach of the Brazilian national soccer team, guaranteed a victory before the World Cup final match against France in Paris. But les Bleus took the match 3-0. Just like that (even after delivering a World Cup win in 1994) Zagallo was out of a job.

If you’re an NBA player and you want to guarantee a victory, tell us what exactly you’re going to sacrifice if you’re wrong. Or keep your mouth shut!