| Monday, February 4, 2002 |
12:13 - And a new day dawns...
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Okay. I wasn't in any kind of shape last night to talk about this rationally, as any of my (very patient) friends who bore with me through my rantings and ravings can attest. But now that I'm a little calmer, I'll see if I can't explain just what it is about sports-- specifically organized professional team sports, and more specifically football-- that gets under my skin like a syringe the size of a turkey baster.
Hiker has a post which does a good job of explaining what's so slimy about pro football in a much calmer way than I could do-- to give you a hint, I would talk about double-Y-chromosome prison escapees and drug addicts being paid salaries the size of some countries' GDPs to ram their heads against each other in a gladiatorial arena and break each other's legs for the entertainment of millions of pot-bellied, bald, beer-stained couch primates who will go to bars and discuss pointless statistics with each other and drink till they pass out if their team wins, and go into furious rages and beat their wives and children and crash their cars if it loses. It's about the most quintessentially debasing thing that we as a country do, and it's held up as the Pinnacle of Twentieth-Centry American Culture and the advertisers' paradise, the start of the new sales fiscal year.
But I'm not going to do that. (Hah! See, I didn't really say anything in the preceding paragraph.) My problem with sports is rooted in academics. I spent my high school years trying to find a university to attend where my $30,000 tuition wasn't inflated to that level by athletic scholarships being handed out by scouts at the high-school football games, giving kids with single-digit IQs a free pass to go to Stanford or UCLA just because it would make their sports teams better. These universities have to staff remedial Geometry classes so the schools can pretend their athletes are students, while they're really just rewarding them for never having even bothered to go to classes in junior high with a free ticket to some of the most prestigious places on earth to learn, while kids with 1550s on their SATs can't go because the school won't pay their tuition, no way. Why foster a genius at your temple of learning when you can recruit a thug to help you get a trophy?
My high school didn't have much of a problem with the "jocks vs. nerds" mentality, but a lot of my friends did. They grew up in an environment where the jocks could do no wrong; a star quarterback could get away with date rape or breaking some math nerd's arm simply because he was going to take the school to the finals, and the coach ain't gon' have none o' that persecution happenin' to his boah, no way! So meanwhile, while the schools pretend to value education and academic excellence (silly me, that's what I thought a school was for), all they do is send signals to the kids that all being smart will do is get you beaten up, and if you were so smart, you shouldn't have provoked him, you whiny little geek. Only the Strong Survive.
I specifically went to a college where the only NCAA-level sports were badminton and fencing, and where I knew that my and my parents' $30,000 per year wasn't going to subsidize some gorilla who would lower the school's academic standards and turn the social atmosphere of the campus into just a bigger, less regulated version of high school. I seriously think more people should consider Jesse Ventura's proposal that colleges should-- not get rid of their athletic programs, keep those-- but stop pretending the athletes are there to be students. If the colleges want sports teams, let them hire one right out of high school, have 'em play in their stadium, feed 'em whatever drugs they need-- but don't conflate these two completely incompatible goals, of fostering academic excellence and of fielding a winning football team.
Then they go on to the pro leagues, and many will speak in proud, chest-puffed tones about how these are men at the top of their games, after a lifetime of achievement, that these are the less-than-one-percenters who have succeeded beyond all hope while the others are now pumping gas (a nicely quaint little statement, now that I think about it). Well, come on. These guys will leave their home team for the hated rival if offered a bigger contract. They'll steal your pen instead of giving you an autograph. They'll get caught over and over on drug charges, parole violations, and a hundred other scandals that traditionally ensnare the Rich and Dumb-- all because their teams and their fans are willing to support them taking home quarter-billion-dollar salaries to slay each other on the field in front of hundreds of thousands of live shrieking drunk spectators and millions more at home. You may call that "hero worship", but I have a different name for it: pornography for sadists. And I want no part of it.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't hate all sports, not by a long shot. I certainly don't hate playing sports. I've always greatly admired baseball for its elegance-- you can memorize the rule book in an afternoon, and everything is based on "X occurs before Y, therefore Z". None of this ridiculous "3 seconds of man in motion, but if the ball touches the line 5 yards back from the line of scrimmage more than 3/100 seconds before the snap, three coxswains and a giant flying eyeball can be admitted to the field and the defensive mascot must open the Gatorade and plant a flag before crossing the Maginot Line" nonsense you get in football. Besides, in baseball it's all about skill and speed and the ability to execute a perfectly turned play-- not about who can break each other's skull open the most graphically for this year's Sports Illustrated video. I'll certainly watch the skiing at the Olympics, though I'd rather be doing it myself; I'll play squash for two or three hours on a Friday night, and if Chris is reading this, c'mon-- 2AM wasn't that late. But I just get very, very discouraged to find that no matter where I go, who I live with, or how long or horrible the movie is that I go to to try to escape from it, there is no getting away from the horrible brain-scraping squall of basketball buzzers, football whistles, the muffled abdominal impact grunts of hockey, the crowd roars, announcer patter, and the aforementioned choruses of "AAAAAOOOOOOOOWWWWWWHHH!" from the appreciative crowd in the living room whenever anybody gets their head ripped off and kicked through the goalposts on TV downstairs.
... Oh, right. Political relevance. Political relevance... Ah! I know.
See, I can sit here and fume about this Great American Institution, and anybody reading this will probably just shake their heads and cluck their tongue at my misguidedness. But dude, if this were 1955, I would probably lose my job and be tailed every day for the next five years by FBI spooks in black cars just for daring to mouth such opinions-- let alone to post them where just anybody can read them. (Imagine what would have happened if the Internet had been developed when McCarthyism was rampant! ...No, actually don't, unless you're a morbid sort.)
So that's why Super Bowl Sunday for me is like the Christmas season for a Jew-- the entire country going nuts over something that's actively hostile to me and that I can't escape. Now at least I know that next year I'll have to go for a nice, long motorcycle ride or something, long into the night, until the topics of discussion have moved on to something blessedly, mercifully quieter.
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