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''I have seen sports future'' 4 visions The greediest By Michael Holley Someone tells me the year is 2010. I have to believe them because I don't know how long I have been in this room. Three years? Five years? Have I been here since The Problem truly began to annoy me, back in 1999? I am surrounded by padded walls. There is a poster in the corner, an action shot of 37-year-old America Online/New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe. I know it is him because I can see the back of his jersey, which reads: ''[email protected].'' I want to rip the poster off the wall, but I can't. I am in a straitjacket. The rampant marriage of sports teams and corporations has not priced me out of arenas and stadiums; it has simply cost me my sanity. You ask me what started this. You ask a good question. Maybe it began with the innocuous Prudential Halftime Report on one of the television networks. And then there was this guy Phil Knight from the Pacific Northwest. He ran a sports giant named Nike which, fittingly, rhymes with psyche. That is appropriate because the Nike logo became so prevalent back in the '90s that it was seared on our psyches. Even the Boston Celtics, one of the most historic sports teams in the world, splashed the Nike swoosh on their warmup suits. New Year's Day certainly didn't help. It's not that the football bowl games bothered me. I even became numb to the dreaded swoosh on all the players' uniforms. It was the games I was watching. The FedEx Orange Bowl. The Nokia Sugar Bowl. The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. There was even the Insight.com Bowl. Insight.com? Yes, I believe '99 did it for me. That's when the New York Yankees merged with the New Jersey Nets. YankeesNets they called it, or some lunacy. (Perhaps you wonder who am I to question someone else's sanity, since I am in a straitjacket. Well, it's them, not me. Please remember that.) YankeesNets now play in a $1 billion arena-stadium called The House That Bill Gates Built. Around 2004, Bill Gates bought YankeesNets, back when he was still running Microsoft. He moved them to Redmond, Wash., to be closer to Microsoft headquarters. As everyone knows now, Bill Gates is president of the United States. And, as everyone knows, Redmond, Wash., is now our nation's capital. In 2002 the Anaheim Angels, owned by Disney, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, owned by Rupert Murdoch, met in the World Series. Each team had a payroll of $250 million. The star of the Angels was an underpaid, scrappy first baseman named Mo Vaughn. That same year, after one season in Hartford, Bob Kraft sold the Patriots to Steven Case, CEO of America Online. Now the Patriots have the AOL symbol on their helmets. Their coaches no longer use headphones to relay plays. They simply e-mail their plays to the field. Once, an assistant coach was fired for e-mailing a joke play and writing the on-line shorthand for raucous laughter - LOL - at the end. But Bledsoe didn't see that part, ran the unsuccessful play and the Patriots lost home-field advantage in the Nike/NFL playoffs. The New York Jets, coached by Bill Parcells's daughter Jill, then went on to the Super Bowl. That is my story. I have been wearing this straitjacket since the day I caused a disturbance at the Downtown Athletic Club in New York. That's where they presented the Sony Heisman Trophy. I began cursing about excessive cash and corporations tainting sports. The so-called sane people put me in this room with padded walls. So now I am looking at my straitjacket: Even it has the Nike swoosh on it. Holley's 4 visions: [ The greediest | The neediest | The biggest | The greatest ] Michael Holley covers the Celtics and writes occasional columns for the Globe.

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