You’ve got to take the good with the bad. When you do something good, if it gets magnified, you’re some Jesus. And then when you do something bad, you become Satan. But two years later, if you’re still talking about a mistake I made, then something is really wrong with you. Like when you write an article, if you’re going to bring up the gun thing, then bring up that I adopted somebody when his parents died in a fire. Put that in there, too.

I guess negative things sell, and we can tell because we’ve got these reality TV shows where everybody just beats themselves senseless and we just keep tuning in. That’s where my iffiness comes back and the reason I stayed away so long, is like, “Do I even want to be a part of that anymore?”

I’m happy now. I’m a race-car driver.

Stern’s concern for his league’s fans was as transparently phony as was Carnegie’s concern for his workers. (Hearing the commissioner’s unctuous solicitude for the paying customers must have occasioned rueful chuckling, and projectile vomiting, in Seattle.) His primary constituency is a group of 29 men who don’t have to deal much with unions in their principal occupations anymore and who, therefore, are not accustomed to reacting well when the help gets, well, uppity. The lockout was THE perfect oligarch’s answer.

“For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property,” Goodwin said, “fining them over how they dress, act, everything. This is the first time the players have the opportunity to say no.”

Whoa. For months and months, bubbling beneath the surface of the posturing and rhetoric, buried under anonymous leaks, veiled threats and everything else that makes any professional sports lockout or strike so insufferable, a dynamic had been swelling that was entirely, 100 percent personal.

Psychic benefits describe the pleasure that someone gets from owning something — over and above economic returns. In discussions of pro sports, the role of psychic benefits doesn’t get a lot of attention. But it should, because it is the key to understanding all kinds of behavior by sports owners — most recently the peculiar position taken by management in the NBA labor dispute.

The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment — the same way they would view buying stock in General Motors. And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent. In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn’t. There aren’t many Van Goghs out there, and they are very beautiful. If you care passionately about art, paying that kind of premium makes perfect sense.