Sports: When You Can't Handle Real News
I've always been baffled by the "sports page" of newspapers. Let's face it: sports are recreational activities, and professional sports are spectator sports. They are entertainment. And yet, somehow the events in the world of sports are newsworthy while the events in the tabloid press are not. I'm not talking about general sports news either. It's perfectly typical to find an article about an up-and-coming football player in nation-wide newspapers, but that same paper wouldn't consider running a piece on some Hollywood actor's wedding party.
Its not like sports are "less escapist" than celebrity fixation. The proliferation of magazines about celebrities in the last few decades make clear that people want to know all about their personal lives, but in the end, your typical played-football-in-college middle-aged couch potato isn't at all more likely to play in the NFL gridiron as a college theater major is to star in the next $150 million piece of garbage to come out of Hollywood. Sports isn't going to change foreign or domestic policy, it isn't going to make a better world for your children, and it isn't going to help win the War on Terror/Drugs/Porn/Video Games/Republicans. It's just entertainment.
"But wait!" shouts my imaginary friend who likes sports. "The conflict is real! It's like watching a battle, with cunning generals and mighty warriors!" Let me make this abundantly clear: competition is only 'conflict' in the sense that someone's not going to be happy with the outcome. Professional wrestling, for example, is entirely fake choreographed and entirely scripted. The 'conflict' there is nonexistent. In competitive sports, there is indeed conflict and uncertainty, but it's artificial. Why should this team try to outdo that team at moving an inflated sheep's stomach to one or the other end of the field? Whether a game is checkers or multi-million-dollar football, it's still just a game, and still an artificial contrivance to distract, relax, and engage the interest of people. Just because someone really wants to win (or wants someone else to win) means their victory is a great deed or their failure to do so is a tragedy.
And yet, we have the sports page: a declaration to all and sundry that sports is just as much a part of vital current events as war, famine, pestilence, and death. And his country believes it, make no mistake. People let their fixation on these stupid games ruin their marriages. They go on shooting sprees because their teams won or lost. Most Americans can tell you more about their local sports teams than they can about their local government. And you know what? It's pathetic.
The sports industry (and make no mistake: it's an industry) exists for one purpose: to make money. The star salaries, the lucrative construction contracts, the pollyp on the organ of higher education that is college football: these all exist because, in the end, people pony up billions of dollars to glimpse sports. To see a game from hundreds of feet away, or to own a shirt that announces "I like this [generic athlete] more than others!" or to gamble on the outcome of a game. It's an industry that has it in its best interest that people never find something better to do with their time (like read a goddamn book). The game itself is just a means to an end.
Now, I'm not opposed to free enterprise in principle. If people pay that kind of money to see games, then athletes have the leverage to ask absurd wages. Just don't tell me that the game is "pure." Watching a football game is no more a spectacle of skill than it is a spectacle of greed, just like Hollywood. It is not a Good Thing in and of itself, any more than selling cars or sitting in a cubicle is. As Reality TV has so elegantly demonstrated, people are just as eager to watch cleverly edited reality as they are to watch fiction, and sports fills that need.
The cost is subtle, but sizable. An astonishing number of Americans are at a loss without sports to fixate on. It's like people who can't figure out how to have fun without getting drunk: it's a sign of a deeply, deeply limited perspective. Sports has not, can not, and will not change the world or improve lives. A society that refuses to remain informed about basic issues of political, social, and technological importance, but can tell you who pulled off a tremendous pass play the night before is in trouble.
So my advice to sports fans is: grow up. It's the same game you were obsessed with as back when you were obsessed with scoring a keg after prom. It's as irrelevant now as your keggers were then. Not that sports and drinking are fine as hobbies. But for the love of God, pay attention to the stuff that matters, first!
Its not like sports are "less escapist" than celebrity fixation. The proliferation of magazines about celebrities in the last few decades make clear that people want to know all about their personal lives, but in the end, your typical played-football-in-college middle-aged couch potato isn't at all more likely to play in the NFL gridiron as a college theater major is to star in the next $150 million piece of garbage to come out of Hollywood. Sports isn't going to change foreign or domestic policy, it isn't going to make a better world for your children, and it isn't going to help win the War on Terror/Drugs/Porn/Video Games/Republicans. It's just entertainment.
"But wait!" shouts my imaginary friend who likes sports. "The conflict is real! It's like watching a battle, with cunning generals and mighty warriors!" Let me make this abundantly clear: competition is only 'conflict' in the sense that someone's not going to be happy with the outcome. Professional wrestling, for example, is entirely fake choreographed and entirely scripted. The 'conflict' there is nonexistent. In competitive sports, there is indeed conflict and uncertainty, but it's artificial. Why should this team try to outdo that team at moving an inflated sheep's stomach to one or the other end of the field? Whether a game is checkers or multi-million-dollar football, it's still just a game, and still an artificial contrivance to distract, relax, and engage the interest of people. Just because someone really wants to win (or wants someone else to win) means their victory is a great deed or their failure to do so is a tragedy.
And yet, we have the sports page: a declaration to all and sundry that sports is just as much a part of vital current events as war, famine, pestilence, and death. And his country believes it, make no mistake. People let their fixation on these stupid games ruin their marriages. They go on shooting sprees because their teams won or lost. Most Americans can tell you more about their local sports teams than they can about their local government. And you know what? It's pathetic.
The sports industry (and make no mistake: it's an industry) exists for one purpose: to make money. The star salaries, the lucrative construction contracts, the pollyp on the organ of higher education that is college football: these all exist because, in the end, people pony up billions of dollars to glimpse sports. To see a game from hundreds of feet away, or to own a shirt that announces "I like this [generic athlete] more than others!" or to gamble on the outcome of a game. It's an industry that has it in its best interest that people never find something better to do with their time (like read a goddamn book). The game itself is just a means to an end.
Now, I'm not opposed to free enterprise in principle. If people pay that kind of money to see games, then athletes have the leverage to ask absurd wages. Just don't tell me that the game is "pure." Watching a football game is no more a spectacle of skill than it is a spectacle of greed, just like Hollywood. It is not a Good Thing in and of itself, any more than selling cars or sitting in a cubicle is. As Reality TV has so elegantly demonstrated, people are just as eager to watch cleverly edited reality as they are to watch fiction, and sports fills that need.
The cost is subtle, but sizable. An astonishing number of Americans are at a loss without sports to fixate on. It's like people who can't figure out how to have fun without getting drunk: it's a sign of a deeply, deeply limited perspective. Sports has not, can not, and will not change the world or improve lives. A society that refuses to remain informed about basic issues of political, social, and technological importance, but can tell you who pulled off a tremendous pass play the night before is in trouble.
So my advice to sports fans is: grow up. It's the same game you were obsessed with as back when you were obsessed with scoring a keg after prom. It's as irrelevant now as your keggers were then. Not that sports and drinking are fine as hobbies. But for the love of God, pay attention to the stuff that matters, first!
posted by Belarius at 6:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home