The Pooper Bowl
Professional sports, like so many things, has been overtaken by corporate interests and a tiny population of global elites. It's time to take it back.
There’s a great South Park episode called “You’re Getting Old” in which Stan, upon his 10th birthday, starts seeing everything as big pieces of shit. According to Wikipedia’s description of the episode, “from ice cream to movie trailers, Stan can now only see the bad in things.” Stan sees a doctor, who diagnoses him as being a “cynical asshole.” Stan’s cynicism puts him at odds with his friends and the world, who still enjoy pop music, blockbuster movies, fast food, and other pop culture fare. The episode resonates with me, and reminds me of the time I visited Disney World as a 16 year old, when my youthful enthusiasm for cartoonish fantasy was replaced by adolescent revulsion for Disney’s devotion to crass consumerism and corporatized culture.
On the topic of cynicism, I watched the Super Bowl last night. I wasn’t brought up in a big sports household, but living in Chicago during Michael Jordan’s heyday and Colorado during the Broncos late 90s NFL dominance made me appreciate the athleticism, skill, and strategy that’s involved with top-level professional sports. While I still appreciate the profound skill and athleticism involved with professional sports, that appreciation is undermined —and often downright negated —by why professional sports exist: selling overpriced tickets, merch, sponsorship deals, keeping fans fat, numb, and drunk, and so forth. In general, I’ve observed that a person or community’s enthusiasm for professional sports is inversely related to that person’s or community’s enthusiasm for their own athleticism. Johann Kurtz’s piece “Don’t Watch Sports” explains the phenomenon well:
The relationship of modern man to sport is an unusual one. The playing of sport has been neatly removed from the life of the average adult. In ages past, engaging in sport was both an intrinsic part of the noble individual’s life and a constituent part of the social fabric within which he operated….Professional, commercialized sports, conversely, place the activity entirely outside society —both omnipresent and yet totally alien and untouchable, impossible to participate in except as impotent observer, without any wider metaphysical, ethical, or religious significance.
In short, when everyone else was watching Patrick Mahomes tossing a football last night, I saw a propagandizing, insurance-peddling piece of shit.
My professional sports cynicism is not limited to the NFL. Professional cycling, a sport I’ve followed off and on since 1987, is now dominated by teams backed by petro-states like Bahrain, UAE, and Israel, multinational chemical firms like INEOS, and other commercial interests of dubious repute. Like the NFL, the excitement of competition is undermined by the fact that a handful of dominant riders, riding for extremely well-funded teams, win most races (e.g. two riders have won the Tour de France in the last four years).
Yesterday, world marathon record holder Kelvin Kiptun tragically died in a car accident. His 2:00:35 minute marathon is stuff of legends, but like Eliud Kipchoge’s previous low-and-sub two hour marathon records, the new benchmark redefines running greatness as something “totally alien and untouchable” to the everyday road racer and hobby jogger.
The Joys of Doing Hard Stuff, Often
A new friend and I did a running workout last night. For non-runners, a workout is a structured run with timed run and rest intervals. Last night’s workout included a 20 minute warm up followed by running one minute hard and one minute easy eight times back to back. Common workouts include 200, 400, and 800 meter repeats, mile repeats, and randomized in…
My solution to making athletic competition meaningful again and for diminishing the role of the industrial sports complex is similar to my solution for economics, politics, and many other things: re-localize it. In much the same way the media begs us to pledge our fealty to far-off, powerful, rich governments and economic institutions, industrialized sports begs us to pledge our fealty to a handful of far-off, powerful, rich players and teams. Lost in this attention is the athletic greatness within us and in our backyards. Local football, baseball, running, and other competitions can be every bit as exciting as professional sports, and often more exciting since we and/or our communities are participating. My most remarkable competitive athletic moments centered on finishing unremarkable running races in unremarkable times*—no pomp, sponsors, TV deals, or world records, just the love of competition and sport.
*Unremarkable relative to top athletes.
HT to Joe for Kurtz piece.
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