Sports are beneath you

Stereotypical
City Newspaper readers don’t open the
paper to read about sports. They sit in coffeehouses debating the world’s
injustices while ignoring the NBA or Stanley Cup Finals, even the NFL training
camps that get started next month. They might not even know what sports I’m
talking about.

But I don’t
blame them.
I often wonder what it is about sports that captivates people, especially when
many of the stories are recycled.

            During the Summer Olympic Games,
hundreds of athletes will overcome obstacles and achieve their dreams. Those
stories will be pumped our way at the volume and frequency of wartime
propaganda. They’re not bad stories, but they’re everywhere. By searching hard
enough, you’ll find that nearly everyone endured some hardship to get
somewhere.

            Case in point: I recently underwent
non-cancerous scrotal surgery. And, yet, I’m writing this piece right now. Just
call me Lance Armstrong.

            Sports are cliché. If you yearn for
originality, they’re not going to appeal to you. Sports are about the comforts
of familiarity. Mention the Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs and many people
immediately have a context to understand the decades of frustration those teams
share.

            Sports are like pro wrestling. The
games have a few built-in storylines people can easily digest — storylines as
basic as “boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back.”

            Why do sports fans find that so
compelling? I remember the days I’d sit and write in the Bills’ press box nine
hours after a 1 p.m. game and wonder how many more years I’d be doing that. The
storylines were repeating themselves after just five seasons. I questioned why
fans never got bored. As it turned out, I didn’t cover the Bills much longer.
In some ways I was relieved. Interviewing coaches, players, and team
administrators isn’t exactly the same as interviewing Confucius.

Author Paul
Gallico,
a New York Daily News sportswriter in
the ’20s and ’30s, has said the country’s sports fascination began after World
War I. Americans were giddy because they felt they just “saved the world for
democracy” and there were no immediate problems.

            As Gallico told Jerome Holtzman in No Cheering in the Press Box, “You could
let yourself go on sports. A heavyweight championship fight, the build-up, was
tremendous. It was like the Israeli-Arab war, the way one approached it. Your
side and their side. The goodies and the baddies. Whether it was a ball game,
or boxing title, or a tennis or golf match, there was this built-in conflict
and struggle, and we were witnesses to these struggles.”

            When American tennis player Helen
Wills faced Suzanne Lenglen in a 1926 match, Gallico said “you would have
thought that the world was coming to an end if our fine American girl got
licked by this dreadful frog, this awful Frenchwoman. That’s stupid when you
look at it now, but in those days it was all played that way for high drama.
You try that today, and you’d be laughed out of the newspaper office.”

            I only disagree with that last line.
Holtzman recorded the interview in 1973. Perhaps then, editors might have
laughed sportswriters out of the office. Today, thanks largely to ESPN, sports
are portrayed exactly that way. Shows such as SportsCentury and SportsCenter regularly overstate the games’ importance, lending them the significance of the
war in Iraq.

            Incidentally, Wills lost that match
to the dreadful frog. The world, surprisingly, survived.

I recently
flew back from San Francisco next to veteran Phoenix labor lawyer Robert Deeny. Deeny
represents companies in negotiations with trade unions. It’s his business to
know about American attitudes so he can negotiate pacts that, in theory, appeal
to both sides.

            I lamented that people generally
seem to care more about sports than they do about issues that actually impact
their lives. They believe in sports so much they even feel they control the
outcome of games if they cheer a little louder in the stadium. They believe
they have more control over the Bills than they do over the government that’s
supposed to represent them.

            Deeny referenced the old Karl Marx
line, religion is the opium of the people. He suggested changing “religion” to
“sports” to understand where America is today.

            Sports teams have ingeniously
convinced us we have control over outcomes. Yes, a fan might feel helpless when
it’s obvious Ricky Williams is having a career day and won’t be stopped. But,
at the same time, many Dolphins fans think they’re actually doing something to
help Williams run. Government, on the other hand, has somehow convinced us we
have no control over anything. So I propose we encourage civic participation at
every public meeting with sexy cheerleaders, booze, burgers, legislative
gambling lines, and easy-to-read box scores with stats detailing legislative
outcomes.

            That should make mundane things just
as compelling as Bills vs. Dolphins. And then stereotypical City Newspaper readers will have a whole
new group of people to debate.

This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2004.