Sports law's Michael Jordan is helping Michael Jordan sue NASCAR
Why you should be rooting for a lengthy courtroom battle
Welcome to Club Sportico! Thanks for joining—please do reply with any critiques/comments/compliments! Jacob leads off this week…
There’s an old canard that us journalists root for blowouts. Let the fans in the stands pray for triple-overtime, back-and-forth, down-to-the-wire, instant classics—the thinking goes—while us press box pests just want an easy game so we can hit deadline and get home.
It’s honestly probably true. 😊
But not for lawsuits! When legal battles arise, it’s the writers’ turn to hope for drawn out affairs that spin off stories for months if not years. Give us the allegations of wrongdoing, the emails and contracts filed as evidence, the high-stakes testimony from the stand.
Those documents and statements shatter corporate facades to shed light on how sports businesses actually work. That’s why we love them, and why defendants often do everything they can to wrap up cases before they can begin. Tidy settlements announced with handshakes and smiles? BORRR-ING.
Thankfully for us, there are a number of spicy litigations ongoing in our world. Sport’s newest lawsuit, 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports v. NASCAR and James France, has the potential to be a doozy too.
A lot of the appeal comes from the names involved, headlined by 23XI co-owner Michael Jordan. “Everyone knows that I have always been a fierce competitor,” Jordan said in a statement. “I’m willing to fight for a competitive market where everyone wins.” Team co-owner Denny Hamlin has been even more vocal.
Equally as notable in this case is the aforementioned attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, fairly referred to as “the nation's most influential sports lawyer.”
Kessler has had a hand in shaping the way American sports operate, having helped create the NBA, NFL and NHL players associations and working on past fights for NBA and NFL free agency. More recently, Kessler has represented Tom Brady during Deflategate, supported the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s efforts to achieve equal pay, and been involved in numerous high-profile legal battles between college athletes and the NCAA.
The plaintiffs’ first complaint, filed this week, already delivers some smoke.
The France family and NASCAR are monopolistic bullies. And bullies will continue to impose their will to hurt others until their targets stand up and refuse to be victims. That moment has now arrived.
NASCAR “teams” are different from NFL and NBA “teams” because they are not in control of the league. They don’t collectively appoint a commissioner and instead are subject to the rules and revenue sharing procedures outlined in multi-year agreements signed with the sanctioning body. To vastly oversimplify the new lawsuit, two racing group owners are trying to transform the way the sport does business, making it more economically viable for competitors. Our Michael McCann has a full, must-read breakdown of the laws in question.
Kessler has said his new clients are prepared to fight in court for years if necessary. Of course, that could be viewed as a negotiating tactic. NASCAR meanwhile has yet to formally respond; we’ll have to see how aggressively the company defends its practices. It’s possible that the complaint is quickly dismissed. But if the case does go to a jury trial, we’d likely get unprecedented access to racing team finances and NASCAR’s inner workings. Big names. Big stakes. What else could you ask for in a marquee matchup?
For now, we’re rooting for mayhem.
tl;dr: Lawyering is most definitely a sport
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Now turning it over to Eben for his Pick Six, with some social media trolling, a soccer x streetwear collab, and a “crock of shit.”
Story of the Week 🏀: There’s hypocrisy running through the veins of college sports, but few anecdotes sum it up better than the lede to Daniel Libit’s new Sportico profile of Christian Dawkins. If you recall, Dawkins was made out to be the principal villain in the FBI’s 2017 investigation into corruption in college basketball, and was given an 18-month jail sentence for orchestrating pay-to-play deals for players. Now, less than two years from his release, Dawkins is back on college campuses, representing young basketball recruits who are getting pay-to-play deals.
What do you make of that? Libit asks. “It shows that what happened in 2017 was all a crock of shit, basically,” Dawkins says.
Story of the Week (Non-Sportico Division) 🎰: Another longer read here, but my former Bloomberg colleague Ira Boudway wrote a fascinating story last week about how professional bettors deliberately pretend to be addicted amateurs in order to gain the trust of legal sportsbooks. Gambling operators publicly preach responsible gaming, Boudway writes, “but when pretending you can’t help yourself becomes a strategy for getting more leeway, that seems like a sign that these measures aren’t enough.” (🎯)
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