Hopefully this is in the right forum, so if it’s not, you can move it as applicable. I’d like to know why it is that when my father looks at his old Westerns, I hardly say anything of it (as I realize that he relishes such things), but when I look at a DVD of an old sporting event that has already been decided, he’s on my case about the fact that I relish those at least as much as he relishes Westerns (if not more so). That, ipso facto QED, sounds very much like a double standard to me. I don’t think that he realizes why I relish old games that have already been decided, and that’s for two reasons:
The sports were played better/had better players then. Example: the NBA. I have a DVD release of the 1985 Finals, and back then, there were greats such as Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, et al., and they displayed a lot of the fundamentals (shooting, passing, rebounding, defense), not to mention that fact that a lot of the greats probably went through 4 years of college and fine-tuned/polished their games over that interval in order to display those skills in the pros. Nowadays, you have 18, 19, and 20-year-olds entering pro ball off high school or one year of college, and they do not know the first thing of what it’s like in the NBA, let alone know how to play ball like Bird or Magic or Abdul-Jabbar.
The sports were also covered in a much better fashion (television, radio, newspapers). Again, with that DVD release of the 1985 Finals (known then as the NBA World Championship): back then, CBS had the NBA, and they knew everything (or at least a lot) about how to set up camera angles, catch players’ jerseys, do play-by-play and color commentary, etc. Nowadays, we have ESPN, ABC, and other channels and networks who quite honestly know next to nothing about how the NBA and other sports are supposed to be covered. I’ve read online where people have complained about ABC setting up the cameras to where the players look like ants on the court; that’s been a common gripe with the NBA as it’s covered now, among other things.
This is why I truly enjoy the NFL and NBA and MLB (heck, even college sports) as they were then: because of the players and the coverage. If these leagues and networks don’t wake up and get better in terms of those two things, I strongly believe that they are going to be 6 feet under before they know it.
You’re welcome to enjoy whatever sports you like in whatever fashion you see fit, of course, but this particular claim gets made a lot and I think it’s just ridiculous.
The thing about college doesn’t apply to your example, for one thing, since Magic and Bird went to 5 years of college between them. Beyond that, it just doesn’t make any sense that you’d believe that players were actually more skilled 30 years ago. It’s one thing to say that you *liked *the way they played better back then, but you’re saying that players today actually couldn’t compete back then, and I’ve never understood how this belief can be so popular. Without even getting into what it subjectively looks like to your eye, can you name another specialized field that’s still competitive and profitable where the overall skill level has objectively declined over time?
I don’t have any DVDs of 80s-era NBA games on hand to challenge this assertion, but in other sports I am absolutely certain this is false. The quality of baseball in the 1980s was lower than it is today, and the quality of hockey was significantly lower, especially in terms of the skill of the goalies.
I could not disagree more. While I have my complaints with the sports media, the broadcast quality of baseball and hockey, at least, is better now. It’s not that much better (well, the quality of the picture sure is, but that’s a different matter) but it’s better.
In terms of media coverage, there’s certainly a hell of a lot more of it now, and while there’s arguably more crap, there is also more quality stuff than there used to be. ESPN and whatnot may have a lot of filler but people forget than it was hard back then to get sports information. In the early 1980s if I wanted to know the baseball scores I had to wait until the next day, or the 11PM sports update. No internet. No sports channels.