Pippen Syndrome - or battling with worthiness
At the apex of his career, Chicago Bulls player Scottie Pippen was for every statistical purpose the second best basketball player in the game. For all of Pippen’s indisputable talents, however, he was the 122nd highest paid player in the NBA. To put that in perspective, there were 27 NBA teams at that time, each with five starting players for a total of 135 starters. On many of these teams, starters are chess pieces that get switched up over a season, both due to performance and injuries. While some starters are standout players whose names, like Pippen’s, are remembered for years after they retire, plenty of them were good enough . Only a handful came close to Pippen in terms of what they would accomplish in the course of their career.
And yet of those 135 starters across the league, only 13 of them were paid less than Pippen.
The reason behind this gross iniquity can curtly be encapsulated as capitalism. Basically, when he was hired by the Bulls, Pippen negotiated a seven-year contract, which was longer than most and locked him in. He did it for good reason — he wanted to ensure a solid paycheck to help take care of his people. Pippen came from a large (he was one of twelve kids) and fairly poor family. His dad had had a debilitating stroke and a brother had been injured as a kid; both men were wheelchair bound and unable to work. Pippen understandably gambled on the side of safety.
What he didn’t know was that the NBA was about to enter a new phase of popularity (largely thanks to him) and salaries were going to go up—way up, crazy up!-- for most players. Nor did he fully foresee that he was about to evolve into one of the most important “number twos” in history, the invaluable sidekick to the person who would propel the Bulls to six national championships in seven years. Did Pippen try to change his contract? Yes, he spent a while publicly pouting about the situation and going on a one-man strike. But in the end, a deal was a deal and whether it was fair or not didn’t play into the equation because that’s not how a “deal” works. Eventually, Pippen saw that he was not going to win the battle and he might as well get on with doing his job. (Sidenote: The Bulls’ owner Jerry Reinsdorf, the man with whom Pippen would have negotiated, started his career as a tax attorney for the IRS.)
I heard this story the other night while watching The Last Dance, the documentary about the Bull’s final championship season. It has stuck with me not because I’m in love with Scottie Pippen or feeling too upset for a professional athlete whose two million+ a year paycheck was considered shit pay. But because it’s a story about worthiness in a culture that has pretty messed up ways of allowing any of us to feel valued.
Each year I choose a word that represents what I want to focus on and embody. This year, it’s WORTHY.
Figuring out one’s worth can be really difficult in a capitalistic system that decides a person’s value, especially what their time and talents are financially worth, in a very whimsical manner, to put it kindly. There’s so much unfairness baked into what we’re paid. From valuing the work of athletes and celebrities and CEOs more than that of teachers and mental health workers and farmers, to a lack of transparency around salaries in any given sector, it’s fucked up. Big time. When we have a chance to pull back the curtain and look around at the incomes of others who seem to be doing work similar to ours, it’s often maddening to discover huge and confusing discrepancies.
These off-kilter differences are usually the result of all sorts of subjective happenstance — one boss’ ability to get more for their employees than another who is more timid or clueless in that area; if one was hired during a supposed ‘lean’ period they might be paid less and then it never gets rectified; gender; race; age. So many things. So many random things!
At the end of the day, whether you care about money or not, the fact is that we live in a society where we are taught from a very young age that the numbers on a paycheck equal our overall worth. Ask kids what they want to be some day, and their answers often reflect this knowledge. Some will even brazenly just say, “Rich.” Our income allows us to buy things that further provide and signal a sense of worth—housing, clothes, haircuts, vacations. Even when we know / think / believe this is all insipid, we get caught in it like spiderwebs clinging to our arms on an early fall day. Invisible. Sticky. Nearly Unavoidable.
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I had two conversations on Sunday that speak to this, the same day I saw the Pippen story. One was with a farmer friend who told me with excitement about a new activity she’s gotten into via her son — dumpster diving. They had just hit a grocery store dumpster before coming to my house and scored a carton of 1/2 & 1/2 that didn’t expire until March, cottage cheese, oranges, and a dozen eggs — not a single one cracked! She was sad because there were avocados, too, but they had all browned in the cold. She said that they never buy fruit, only eat the fruit she cans from the summer, and considers all of the products she just named to be luxuries. It was clear that an avocado was as dear to her as perhaps a good bottle of wine might be to me.
I rarely eat out and consider myself a fairly economical cook, but I admit that it doesn’t occur to me not to buy 1/2 & 1/2 and I live off of quality apples that I buy from a local farmer via our coop. Have I blinked at the price of eggs recently (WTF!!)? Definitely! And do I pause before buying an avocado, making sure it’s really necessary to improve a meal? Yes. But I was surprised and schooled by her response. It reminded me again — an important reminder that I appreciate relearning — of what real thrift looks like.
My friend’s worth cannot come from what she earns. If that were the case, most farmer’s self-esteem would be beyond repair. Her worth comes from what she makes with her hands, her connection to growing plants and tending animals. Her worth comes from teachings she provides to other farmers and rural people as a speaker and writer. Her worth — and this is all my sense of her tremendous worth — is self-understood in part because she lives, to some extent, outside the system of salary and institutional numeric value.
The other conversation that occurred on Sunday was with my son. He continues to unpack his decision to leave the University of Michigan after one year there. Throughout high school, his goal was to get into a prestigious university. The process, which I’ve written about before, was painful. He recently went back to Ann Arbor to visit some of the friends he made there and was reminded of that school’s culture and how it is different from the one he’s in now.
“I think I can count on one hand the conversations I had at Michigan that started in a normal way,” he said, alluding to introductory conversations with people he met at parties or in class.
They all began with trying to figure out the other person’s worth. What clubs are you in? What positions do you hold? What internships are you trying to get? What business fraternities are you in or trying to get into? As he described it, every time you met someone new you viewed them as the competition and you were trying to sum them. It was non-stop pecking order. And it got old.
Sum them up. Just that saying. It’s about connoting worth with money — or in the case of a bunch of college students, their prospective earnings. It discredits the myriad of ways in which any of us can be of worth, including our mere presence as human beings who breathe and feel and have magical cellular action occurring in our bodies right this moment.
We are all worthy. Many of us agree to this statement. And yet … and yet, we don’t live it. We allow ourselves to be swayed by income and financial signals of our own value.
I left my longtime job about a half year ago. I am approaching 60. I am no longer “mothering” in the same on-demand way I did when my kids were at home. So what is my worth as an older woman in a society that assigns worth via so many things I am not? With a changed income, a lack of a really clear job title (including the underpaid but deified title of “mother”), and an aging body that goes against our culture’s sense of physical beauty, I am deep in the woods of questioning my worth. I’ve got a flashlight and a water bottle and I’m walking in deeper. I’ll let you know what I find! Maybe even Scottie Pippen will be curious to know!
