Dark Bilious Vapors

Being asked by your employer to wear a jacket and slacks when representing the company shouldn't cause this much drama. Not when you make, on average, $4 million a year. The dress code being proposed by the NBA doesn't ask players to wear a suit and tie every day, just to look like working professionals: a jacket with lapels instead of a throwback jersey and a do-rag, a pair of loafers instead of high-top sneaks. And we're talking game days and official public appearances, not eight hours a day, five days a week.

But the sound of the rebellion has been heard from Portland to Miami.

Don't get me wrong, there are players who not only don't oppose the dress code, but like it. "I know a lot of people will say we're in the entertainment industry, but we represent franchises that are sometimes among the biggest businesses in that city," the Wizards' Antawn Jamison said the other day. "I'm fine with a jacket and shirt with a collar and pants that aren't jeans. We're professionals and we should be putting forth a professional image. I don't see what the problem is."

That's because Jamison has some sense that he's paid a lot of money to represent more than himself. A lot of his peers don't have that sense. Some of them don't have any sense of anything, starting with Marcus Camby, now of the Nuggets, who said he can't see adhering to the dress code "unless every NBA player is given a stipend to buy clothes." Camby makes approximately $8 million a year. And he wants folks to believe he cannot afford a suit. It's too bad a judge can't order Camby to spend the rest of this season in New Orleans's Ninth Ward.

Camby's "stipend" speech is now officially the dumbest and most offensive thing uttered in the last five years, surpassing Latrell Sprewell's "I've-got-to-feed-my-family" speech as a reaction to why he was outraged at not being offered more than $10 million a year by the Timberwolves.
--Michael Wilbon

Len on 10.16.05 @ 02:26 PM CST