An open letter to Bally Sports, AT&T, and Spectrum:

Hello fellow cocaine enthusiasts!

This is all my fault, really. I grew up watching a niche sport – ice hockey – and a good reason why I came to love the game was because I could watch it on KPLR. On bunny-eared antennas. For free.

I know that phrase strikes fear into what used to be the heart of any business executive. Don’t worry, I always donate a portion of my salary to an ivy-league school in order to keep your species alive and reproducing as nature intended behind dumpsters at country clubs. I would very much like to pay for the cable you offer, and I would very much like your scrappy little firms to make healthy profits.

I took a break from my job of smacking large boulders together at the poor-people-rock-factory and
I went on the FTC’s website. A monopoly, according to them, is conduct “by a single firm that
unreasonably restrains competition.” I went over to my best friend’s cave (it is near Mitt
Romney’s underground venture capital lair) and he showed me his cave drawings about
his Spectrum account. I could not believe the animal shapes I was reading. Please
tell me he is not telling the grizzly bear truth. I have only two products to choose from?
There are no other competitors in your market? Sometimes, even if I buy one of those two,
you still take the sport away from me?

In America, we have sort of a cultural deference to your kind. Whenever us poories want a loan,
or want to buy a big not a cave above the top dirt layer, we have to prostrate ourselves
in front of your discount Brooks Brothers slacks and beg like happy little servants. “Please let us have some walls the kind what with you put a roof on top of them?” Sometimes we also need loans to
buy rolling machines that take us to the buildings you own for the working times. Other times,
we need to go to the book learning warehouse to get the learnings into our heads so we can
operate those expensive machines if you let us.

I’m not saying this social contract is good for you – it isn’t my place to say as a poorie rock-smasher – but you’re only a few more years away from completing construction on Elysium and Elon Musk has already told me that I cannot afford the Tesla I’ll need to fly there when it’s done.

In oldy times, the wealthy and powerful were wise enough to let us peasants have unfettered access to sport. It placated and entertained us, made us forget about the pain of our existence for a few special moments before our bosses would return with whips and productivity reports. It was an outlet for our lowly and savage desires – much like the cashiers at your Saks Fifth Avenue stores – and when that coping mechanism is taken away who knows what could happen?

I understand business is very complicated and is not at all comparable to rock smashing. But at the factory I starting selling pelts and no one was interested in buying my bear, otter, or Ann Coulter leg shaving drain pelts. Those three didn’t do a good job of protecting from rock chips or angry Mitt Romney slaps so I had too many pelts. My co-smashers only wanted the fox pelts, but my wife said unless I sell all of those bad pelts I cannot sleep in the cave anymore. So I did what you did and sold a pelt package. You want fox? Too bad, you get Coulter pelts with fox only! This market strategy was very effective until a couple of co-smashers started making copies of my fox pelts. (On an unrelated note can you please let Ms. Coulter know she can stop sending me her leg shavings as I can no longer keep such a large inventory on hand anymore.)

I am not sure if this is true or not but I heard that in business school you are taught that if you have a thing many people want you should make it as difficult as possible to get that thing. It is this journey that gives you a big boat and me a big debt from pelt supplier. Don’t get it twisted – I want to give pelts to you for sport times, and I want you to have boat times because of pelt givings. I am starting to believe, however, that you will never be happy with size of boat and I will never square up with Peter the pelt man.

Your white wig aliens have been arguing quite a lot with each other about who gets to put a camera in front of the low-class things I like to watch. It is becoming stressful to have to wonder if I will be able to see my favorite sports times, and since I never went to an expensive learning warehouse like you, I am not smart enough to navigate the complexities of contract law negotiation. I assume it is much like our cave conflict resolution rituals where the weakest wig alien is forced to fight his or her way out of a gauntlet of starved but overweight attorneys holding a $700 entrée from a SoHo popup that stopped taking reservations last month.

I know that by law all business executives must have gold-leaf food every day otherwise their superior business brains will no longer be able to come up with cool and creative ideas like ‘What if we made the Big Gulp bigger?’, or ‘Ad-Free Streaming that has ads but not very often’ and ‘simply hitting poor people with sledgehammers,’but I am asking if you will consider a slightly smaller boat or perhaps fewer sex tourism vacations.

For many of us, sports are incredibly important. We learned critical lessons about others – and ourselves – on the playing field, and those lessons have stuck with us ever since. Some of the things we love and care about the most are tied up in sports, and some of our fondest, most powerful memories are forged watching a game we love with the people we love. For you, these sports are another thing to put into your portfolio. We’re too simple to a price on it. We don’t want to imagine life without it, and in the past, we relied on your ability to contain your greed so we could keep watching, but that doesn’t work anymore. So this season I will not give you any more pelts.

-May Mitt Always Guide My Rock Smashing Hand,

Adam