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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Sport, That Immutable Tool
I was confused as to why I didn't enjoy school sports more. Didn't the coaches tell us that we were there to learn physical skills while we built teamwork? I guess I just didn't feel comfortable with them bellowing at me and calling me names while I tried to be a team player. And why did physical education inevitably involve extensive personal insults? I wasn't sure. Despite my athletic abilities, I avoided sports as much as possible throughout my schooling to avoid yet more humiliation, like most of my peers.
Sporting events and televised sports are fun, right? There's a lot of beer drinking and yelling, and people gathering at each other's homes to bust their guts with junk food and lie around on LA-Z-BOYS and couches. Some people get really drunk and do a lot of howling before they become violent or pass out. They show their neighbors that a winning team is a lot more important than a tacit agreement to respect one another's privacy. Many sports enthusiasts feel a sense of personal accomplishment when a team hired to represent their city is winning. I am told that this is called "civic pride."
Growing up in the Bay Area offered numerous opportunities to love sporting events, as there were several consistently winning teams. Primary among them was the football team known as "the 49ers." These hunks of two-million-dollar-a-year-earning man-beef seemed to win the Super Bowl practically every year. Apparently lacking a sense of civic pride, this was to my chagrin. Riots would invariably break out, making it difficult to get home, or impossible to leave. One riot in my neighborhood involved drunken men roaming the streets and molesting a number of random women, including myself. Police were on hand, not to arrest the naughty men and dissipate the crowd, but confusingly, to beat homeless people on the heads with billy clubs. Another winning night, joyful celebrants surrounded my car at a stoplight. They climbed on the fenders and hood, hitting my vehicle with sticks. Some reached in my open window, grabbing at me and screaming, while I tried desperately to roll the window up. The damage to the car was minimal, the police said, so try not to be a killjoy. The violation of my person I would just have to swallow for the sake of my city's glory.
One thing many sports enthusiasts do not often realize is that our industrial-sports complex was created to control our citizens, just as it did in ancient Rome. By providing a social distraction, while convincing everyone of its primary significance, true political and global concerns can be masked by sports. The inflated salaries of the players, our gladiators, are there to construe the bloated importance of commercial sporting enterprises. That American physical education feeds into this mentality is no surprise. Is there ever a time when a major sporting event does not receive front-page news reporting, despite whatever else may be going on in the world? War, disaster, political upheaval? An American audience is trained to believe that national and global events are just not as important as the current Yankees triumph.
This is not to say that I don't enjoy playing sports and feel that it is important to many of our social and recreational lives. I love the release of physical activity and game playing. I just feel a tad strange about watching a game that I can't physically participate in, played by grossly overpaid people that I don't know, and knowing that this was created in order to incite or control certain human behavior. It perverts what should be wholesome and healthy, the human desire to develop and maintain a good physical condition.
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COMMENTS
Thank you for yet another well written piece!
Alas the worship 0f "sport as god" is not merely limited to the US. Here in Australia sport is no longer something you do with friends for fun but instead something that you pay for and watch. Curiously enough this very topic was discussed between myself and some friends a week ago.
Many theories were proposed ranging from the increased 'branding' of specific events making the event more important than the activity, through to an increased population density reducing the availability of open green areas. The consensus seemed to rest though with an increase in passivity in people, in part caused by excessive unpaid overtime (Australia has recently overtaken Japan in terms of average unpaid overtime per person per week), and in part by an increase in individuals not feeling able to actually achieve anything.
Of course, what do I know - I'm just a long-haired ex-punk rocket scientist that never truly fit in with the football playing culture that seems to dominate the mass media here.
Posted by: Michael C at November 12, 2008 9:30 PM
I'm guessing that you lived in the Mission or otherwise SoMa, as I was down around there back when the Niners won on at least one occasion and witnessed similar assclownery.
The only thing I could add to what you've already pointed out: around here in my lil' burg we have yet another push for a new arena for our NBA exercise in mediocrity which is estimated to end up costing at least half a billion dollars.
Just before reading you, I watched a YouTube video where someone was interviewing folks in a homeless encampment just over the river from the proposed site of the new arena.
So we let the homeless rot on the river and blow a half billion to watch adults play an adolescent game because we think that it will make us look cool in front of the rest of the world.
This situation is yet another piece of the reality of what you have expressed here.
So yeah, thanks for giving us something relevant to think about.
Posted by: MP at November 13, 2008 1:04 AM
You are a fabulous writer. As a fellow Bay Aryan I was charmed to see that Piedmont High's Highlander football team is making national news with their revolutionary A-11 play. I've also heard that the Oaklna A's golden era was something to behold-right out of a Will Ferrell film!
Posted by: Super Amanda at November 25, 2008 2:56 PM
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