July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Contrary to popular belief, hitting a baseball isn’t the most difficult thing to do in sports. Nor is getting Allen Iverson to show up, on time, for practice.

What is, then?

Persuading athletes to save their money.

I was reminded of that last week when the National Football League Players Association launched a financial preparedness program, dubbed 25/25. The goal, said the union, whose members face the prospect of a lockout in 2011, is to encourage members to save a minimum of 25 percent of their salaries in each of the next two seasons.

“A financially sound membership represents a strong bargaining group,” the union says.

Chester Pitts, a lineman for the Houston Texans, says the 25 percent figure is “absolutely doable.” So doable, in fact, that he’s suggesting a fatter percentage. On top of that, Pitts doesn’t want players taking on debt. Not homes, cars, jewelry or business ventures.

If only I had a nickel for every time I heard a sports union leader or player representative promote frugal over free- spending.

NFL players aren’t the only athletes facing labor Armageddon. Longtime player agent David Falk, whose clients include Michael Jordan, says the National Basketball Association’s financial system is broken. Repairing it, he says, will require radical changes. That all but guarantees pain in 2011, when the collective bargaining agreement expires.

Getting Touchy

“The idea of a work stoppage is an abstraction to most guys,” says retired NBA player Pat Garrity, a former union treasurer who now attends Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. “The best the union can do is make sure it has the financial resources to hire the best consultants and lawyers to mount a formidable defense and to be in the ears of all of its members about how contentious things might get.”

Negotiations are already touchy between the NBA, which says more than half its 30 teams lost money last season, and the union, which threatened legal action over the league’s morose financial projections.

NBA owners, whose ranks include billionaires Paul Allen, Mark Cuban and Bob Johnson, will push for a number of significant alterations to the labor contract, including a strict salary cap and a reduction in the length of player contracts.

Owners turned to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon for advice.

Rainy Day

NBA Commissioner David Stern wouldn’t tell me what Dimon said during their April meeting. That’s OK. Let’s instead look at what he’s doing at the second-largest U.S. bank, which last week said profit rose for the first time since 2007.

JPMorgan said it boosted its loan-loss reserve by $2 billion in the second quarter, adding to the $28 billion in money set aside to cover credit losses. Tier 1 capital, a gauge of the bank’s ability to withstand losses, climbed to 9.7 percent from 9.3 percent in the first quarter.

Dimon is doing what the NFL union is advising: saving money in case of difficult times ahead.

Anyone who follows basketball can see that the owners listened and learned. Most of the trades we’ve seen this offseason haven’t centered on adding talent. They’ve been about shedding salary.

You have to wonder if NBA players, who are paid an average of $5 million a season, are behaving like the rest of the U.S., where the saving rate climbed to its highest level in 15 years. And that’s just 6.9 percent, far from the 25 percent sought by the NFL union.

Lessons Not Learned

Something tells me that active athletes didn’t learn from former basketball player Kenny Anderson, who during the 1998-99 NBA lockout demonstrated how a player making millions can struggle financially.

Anderson had eight cars, including a Mercedes, Porsche, Lexus and Range Rover. Insurance and maintenance alone ran him about $75,000 a year. Toss in a mortgage in New York, rent in Los Angeles, four daughters, a fledgling business, agent and legal fees and it is easy to see how a $6 million salary leads to a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.

Deep down, I’m a union guy, a blue-collar backer.

But these labor wars pit millionaires against billionaires. And, fair or not, the millionaires, the players, are the faces of their sport. They, not the owners, wear the greedy label when fed-up fans speak out. Players can’t win the public relations battle.

Poor House

What they can do is save, save, save, so that a work stoppage, even one that lasts a full season, doesn’t put them in the poor house.

That said, here’s what’s going to happen. Players in both leagues, at the outset, will talk about being committed, unified and galvanized. Then, little by little, as one missed paycheck becomes two, cracks will develop. Someone in dire straits will pop off. And then another and then another, forcing the union to make once unthinkable concessions.

Most owners, remember, generate revenue from other interests, giving them the flexibility to outwait players missing their most significant source of income.

Maybe things will be different this time. Maybe LeBron James learned something about saving at this year’s Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and maybe he’ll pass along the info to the rank and file in both leagues.

Maybe 25/25 will become a reality.

I’ll wager a bunch of those nickels on “no.”

(Scott Soshnick is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Scott Soshnick in New York at ssoshnick@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 20, 2009 21:01 EDT