Wealth & Money Quote by Will McDonough

McDonough isn’t romanticizing a golden age of sports; he’s itemizing the machinery that killed it. By naming television money and courtroom labor fights as the two real tectonic shifts, he strips away the usual myths - better training, smarter scouting, “the game evolved” - and replaces them with a blunter thesis: modern sports weren’t remade by athletes or owners in isolation, but by capital and law.

The line works because it links two forces that fans often treat separately. TV cash is the obvious villain/hero: bigger contracts, bigger leagues, bigger everything, with games bent toward the camera’s demands. But McDonough pairs that with something more morally charged: players “went to” courts to “win their freedom.” That phrasing is pointed. Free agency isn’t framed as a market tweak; it’s liberation from an older, quasi-feudal system where teams functioned like employers and gatekeepers rolled into one. The subtext is that the “business” of sports was always a power struggle, and the players had to use the judiciary as a battering ram because the system wouldn’t willingly loosen its grip.

Context matters: McDonough wrote from the era when TV deals exploded and when free agency, arbitration, and union power became the defining backstage drama. He’s reminding readers that every on-field rivalry sits atop off-field revolutions - and that the modern sports economy was engineered less by tradition than by lawsuits and broadcast checks.