That’s why I don’t even have favored teams. My father and I used to go to the state high school basketball tournaments. Occasionally a local school would be there, and we’d give a bit of a cheer for them, but for the most part we had no preferences going in. It was just about watching people playing a sport.
I person could paint a canvas blue with a line down the middle and call it fine art. They can sell it for 40 million bucks. As long as they never change their stance. As long as they never let onto the con, they get to claim they are as good at art as a person who can realistically paint a human face. A face so well done that it can trick our brain into feeling emotion and empathizing with paint.
You can’t bullshit sports. You are either good or you’re not, and if your not good you go home. I like that.
I envy you for that. I can watch random games with no rooting interest in either team, but if I want the high of seeing my team succeed it seems like I have to risk the low of seeing them fail.
Even this Bears season, which I knew would be about rebuilding and in which losses are beneficial for draft position and future success, I still get pissed when plays or calls go against them.
I live on Limmin’s planet. I have never broken through Velocity’s 4th wall, because I have always been on the outside it.
I’m amazed at the money sports generate not only within the sport itself, but also in gambling, corporate & individual sponsors, clothing, and other related paraphernalia. It’s billions. Millions of adoring fans literally worship and make demigods out of these athletes.
I was thinking of that essay, too, as well as another one he wrote. The one you paraphrase is in the 1986 Abstract, in a comment on the Atlanta Braves on the End of the Free Agent Boom:
“One of the unwritten laws of economics is that it is impossible, truly impossible, to prevent the values of a society from manifesting themselves in dollars and cents. This is, ultimately, why we pay athletes so much money: that it is very important to us to be represented by winning teams…The hard, unavoidable fact is that we are, as a nation, far more interested in having good baseball teams than we are in finding a cure for cancer.”
Later, in his essay on the Pittsburgh Pirates (and Chuck Tanner), he states “the sporting world is a refuge in a world of laziness and sloth, indecision and lack of commitment, hedged values and shortcuts, a corner in which individuals are commanded to reach down inside and find the best that’s in there, and apply it to … this nothing, these games, these silly rules that tell them where to run and when to run there. Athletes are heroes; that is their job.”
You left off a lot of what he was saying, though.
James WASN’T saying baseball players weren’t valuable. He was saying that they apparently were but that many people won’t admit it. His point was not that it is wrong that baseball is more important to him than cancer research, or that it was wrong it was more important to other people than cancer research; his point was that people are simply not telling the truth when they claim to value cancer research more than baseball, or whatever diversion they like, when they expend more time and money on the diversion. He was criticizing hypocrisy, not values.
Do we though?
Last year the Province of Ontario, which represents maybe one thirtieth of the population of the USA and Canada combined, spent more money on medical care for its residents than all of North America spent paying every single professional athlete in every major professional sports league plus all individual athletes in golf, tennis, and every major fighting sport. North America as a whole spent more on medical care than all professional sports by so much it’s absurd. If you took the entirety of the medical care industry and subtracted all the money spent paying top pro athletes it’d barely make a dent. As rather a lot of medical spending is spent on cancer, the truth is we do spend more money fighting cancer than we do on pro sports. By a wide, wide margin.
Professional sports is a big business but it’s not THAT big. The NFL, which is the biggest sports league to ever exist in terms of revenue, would, if all its franchises were one company, makes less in a year than Walmart makes in a month. The NFL added up would not be one of the 100 biggest companies in the USA. There are companies biggest than any sports league that you have literally never heard of. Any individual team, even the Cowboys or Yankees, is dwarfed by hundreds and hundreds of companies. Those franchises aren’t even in the neighborhood of being in the top thousand in the USA.
Of course other companies derive revenue from pro sports, like ESPN or sports apparel companies, but the truth is pro sports just seems bigger than it is because it’s talked about a lot and covered in the media, that’s all. No one tunes in to see how Plains GP Holdings or Nucor - both much larger than any sports league - are doing, but they’re out there.
Exactly so. We can’t just all sit around talking politics and stuff. Being passionate about sports is no more silly than being passionate about a TV show or movie or novel, IMO.
But do TV or movie aficionados froth at the mouth, deliver death threats and occasionally assault people who like different shows and films than themselves?
It’s the arbitrariness of pro sports and the effect they have on the fans that’s the biggest dissonance.
Given the polarized reactions of the Star Wars fanbase to the Prequels and Sequels, and the social media trolling in which angry fans engaged against some of the actors (as well as directors, producers, and journalists) in the Sequels, I’d say, “in some cases, yes.”
I disagree with the cause/effect here. Baseball is more profitable than curing cancer, that’s why it gets more “interest”.
Also see: the entire kpop fandom
Thanks for the refresher on what James said, it’s coming back a bit clearer to me now. Yes, he was criticizing hypocrisy.
Maybe our priorities are not mixed up after all. At least as far as providing medical care is concerned. Let’s just say things are imbalanced as far as importance and value some individuals provide to society vs what they earn. I understand a hospital, a company or even a government cannot pay a researcher $10M a year who will eventually find the cure for a disease such as cancer, but they do deserve it, as much if not more so than someone hitting 60 homeruns. At the very least, when that goal is reached, they should get a share of the revenues. The Astros each got $500K+ for winning the Series, even Mauricio Dubón who hardly anybody knows and will not be remembered in ten years for playing in 83 games with an OPS+ of 56.
I have my own issues with professional sports, but I have to agree with your point here. A single professional athlete makes as much as they do because there are so few of them, and each one is seen by far, far more fans than a doctor sees patients.
And that’s because there are more sports fans than there are cancer patients.
Indeed they do. Or take music on social media, which I’m a little more familiar with. Certain fandoms are known to be absolutely vicious when denouncing their rivals.
Or what recently happened with Taylor Swift concerts using Ticketmaster.
Not to mention to ole East Coast v. West Coast rap feud back in the 1990s.
Hair bands (e.g., Van Halen) had similar feuds. But as David Lee Roth noted, none of the ‘combatants’ ever seemed to get hurt.
Yes, it’s a question of supply and demand, that’s why athletes salaries are in the millions, there are so few of them. But we are talking here about world-class researchers who could find a cure that affects millions, not your average family doctor.
The counter argument of course is as you pointed out: there are more sports fans than cancer patients. In any one year. The stat is that half of women and one third of men will develop cancer in their lifetime.
But cancer patients will cheerfully spend more money on treating cancer than a sports fan will spend on a ticket, cancer patient’s FAMILIES will spend money on cancer treatment, and people are willing to spend lots of money just insuring themselves against getting sick even if they’re not sick now. It’s indisputably the case we spend more money on cancer than we do on pro sports. It’s not close.
Pro athletes (some of them) make a lot of money simply because the labor arrangement is different. A new cancer treatment is going to be worked on by thousands of people, all of whom are pretty important. In pro sports, one particular group of employees - the players - are wildly more important than anyone else involved; in a very real sense, they basically ARE the business. Their skills are by definition exceptionally rare, since in a competitive sport only the X best players, where X is the number needed to fill the teams, are worth employing.
I’m not sure how cheerful they are about it. 