Complain while you can—corporations are coming for your jerseys

Forget the NFL bounties and Auburn basketball point shaving. The most disturbing sports story this week was barely noticed. And that was just fine by the NBA.

Coming eventually to an arena year you:

The Nabisco Lakers vs. the Wal-Mart Heat!

Cover your eyes, the NBA might be putting ads on uniforms. Its Board of Governors will consider the proposal at next month’s meeting, according the Sports Business Journal.

— SBJ: Vote could be coming in April

I’d like to say it ain’t so, but you know it is. And every sports fan who has been half-alive the past 20 years knows it’s futile to complain. But just for old-time’s sake, let’s do it anyway.

Nooooo!

First those advertising greed-mongers came for the stadiums. Then they came for the bowls. Now they are coming for the last unspoiled spot on the American sports landscape.

The uniform.

“I am not suggesting this is an easy issue,” Golden State Warriors COO Rick Welts said. “But I feel like it is inevitable.”

Is it ever. And now that we’ve vented, let’s be honest enough to admit we’d do the same thing if were in Welts’ Italian loafers.

The money is too big to ignore, especially when you’re paying guys like Gilbert Arenas $19 million not to wear your uniform.

The English Premier League makes $155 million a year off uniform ads. LeBron James’ jersey alone might be worth half that. And what would corporate America give to plunder the Yankees’ pinstripes?

That’s the real worry here. As soon as one of the big three sports sells out, the others will surely follow. And no part of their uniforms, buildings or souls won’t be for sale.

There will be backlash at first, like when baseball considered decorating its bases with Spiderman II in 2004. That promotion was too bald of a money grab, so MLB had to back off.

It did allow sponsor patches on Team USA jerseys during the 2009 World Baseball Classic, and nobody seemed to mind. Corporate ads are like termites. They subliminally eat away until the whole house collapses in heap of Poulan Weed-Eater Bowls.

Everybody joked about that at first. Now you can’t swing a dead mascot without hitting a Chik-fil-A or Little Caesars Bowl.

AmericanAirlines Arena, American Airlines Center? They’re all the same. We don’t even notice what used to bother us. One day you’re going to be watching NBA Classics with your grandson, and he’ll say, “Did the Oprah Network Bulls really have ‘Chicago’ on the front of their jerseys?”

The NBA won’t go that far right away. But it has sold the fronts of WNBA jerseys to the highest corporate bidder. If you learned geography from a WNBA guide, you’d think the Mercury are located in LifeLock, Arizona.

When purists gripe, the standard response is everybody does it, especially the Europeans!

So what? European women also don’t shave their legs. We (hopefully) will never go that route.

And it’s not like all those soccer players have been wearing ads since The Reformation. Liverpool first turned its uniforms into NASCAR-like billboards in 1979.

Some networks refused to show those teams, but they eventually gave up. You can’t fight progress, or whatever you want to call it when a team wears BIMBO on the front of its jerseys.

Yep, the Chivas de Guadalajara soccer team is sponsored by Bimbo bakeries. Please, God. Let the bakery sign a deal with the WNBA.

The British national diving team is now officially the “British Gas ASA Diving Team.” That probably explains all the bubbles when the divers hit the pool.

You hope the leagues will show a little discretion and taste when it comes to uniform ads, but history isn’t promising. That could lead to unforeseeable dilemmas.

Imagine if Benihana had been plastered on the Knicks’ uniforms the past month. Would ESPN have fired any cameraman who showed Jeremy Lin?

“I’m suggesting this would be a process,” Welts said. “Not a 0-to-60 rush.”

Either way, they’re feeling for the accelerator. There’s no telling where we’ll end up, but I have a bad feeling Nestle is already secretly negotiating with the Steinbrenner family, and it won’t be long until we pull into The House that Baby Ruth Built.