Every once in awhile you forget, because the money obscures so much. Because they get paid so much to play children's games, or so we tend to overly simplify.
We forget. We forget that, no matter how much professional athletes make in this country, they're still just commodities. They're still just bloodless pieces on a chessboard, routinely moved about by owners who give no more thought to how they do so than they would to moving rook to rook's level four.
And so Johnny Unitas, the Mt. Rushmore face of the Baltimore Colts, found out from a sportswriter he'd been traded to San Diego almost 50 years ago, his employer not having the decency to give him a heads up first. And last night, while he was playing in a game for the Dallas Mavericks, Harrison Barnes found out the Mavs had traded him to Sacramento.
Think of that: Because of the eyeblink way news travels in the age of social media, people sitting in the stands knew Harrison Barnes had been traded before Harrison Barnes did.
Whereupon Barnes injected the only human element in the entire scenario.
Rather than immediately bolt after being taken out of the game, he stayed on the bench. He hung with his teammates, even though they weren't really his teammates anymore.
That's called class, for those who may no longer recognize the species in an age of supreme classlessness.
"He's a better man than me, for sure," Mavericks icon Dirk Nowitzki said later. "Everybody else would have bounced. He's just a generally good dude. He's obviously got bonds with some of these players here for life, and that's the kind of guy that he is."
Indeed.
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