Posted by Ok – I am watching the Basketball playoffs right now. Football season is over and I’m not desparate enough to watch baseball.
I was watching the Cleveland series and was surprised how easily they went down when they were supposedly the #1 seed in the league! I was thinking that they lost because the Celtics had “Old Man Strength”. You know that hidden reserve which is the reason you’ll never be able to beat your dad. The old fart just won’t let himself lose to some punk a$$ kid
Then good ‘ol Jason Whitlock writes an article about it…..great! Whitlock’s the best!
Your dad comment made me chuckle. Dads the world over would rather cheat than lose to their kid!
As a society, I’ve always found it interesting the almost omnipotent value we place upon sports. Just as Gandhi once said, “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”, I believe there exists a parallel to our focus upon athletic competition.
Ancient Rome found it delightfully entertaining to throw innocent Christians into a pit filled with hunger lions – obviously, a true sport (?). And now we’ve evolved to some modern-day Christians finding it delightfully entertaining to throw innocent pigs into pits with fighting dogs. Taking this one step further, professional sport recruiters look for potential athletes with a “street edge”… tattoos, brandings, gang-related dress, a couple of adolescent assault charges on their rap-sheet, etc. make for the perfect target market. Is this what we, as a society, are championing as examples of professional athletes? We pay them ungodly amounts to perform for us – so we can sit and dream about our favorite players. We use them as our personal avatars while wearing jerseys with their names and team numbers on them. Then when they behave in a manner for which enabled them to be recruited in the first place, we silently detest their behavior (many seem afraid of being typecast as racist if they say anything “too loudly”) and move on to idolize the next thug.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its professional sports are held”
Why does it sound so strange to consider idolizing Dr. Venter who just digitized the genesis of life? Walking around in today’s society with a t-shirt with his face on it would simply get you strange looks and some comments like, “geek!”. Obviously, you get my “drift” from this example. Our priorities are completely upside down (and I’m part of it… mea culpa!)
I’ve longago accepted that sports is reality TV for guys and that athletes are just the actors/entertainers.
Do I stop watching X actor’s movies because he has tatoos/get’s caught doing drugs etc… nope. Same concept applies to athletes.
But the athletes would be alot more marketable if they didn’t have the tatoo’s and bad image – see Tiger Woods. If he had tatoos and bad attitude he never would have gotten his original endorsement deals.
If guys couldn’t drink beer and talk about sports……
Good points. It does seem that American Males (including me) have built the ideal of competition via professional sports as the primary social construct in which to relate to others. I guess this is good… because if it was knitting or gardening, it wouldn’t seem right.