For a little writing project I am fiddling with, I already asked elsewhere about popular culture in the united States since 1 January 2000, but few people mentioned anything about sports.
Let’s see, Tiger Woods has dominated golf. Baseball has the steroids thing. Boxing is an unorganized mess. Football seems stagnant. Basketball is no longer in its Golden Age. NASCAR and motor sports in general seem to be on the rise, but no so much on television. Soccer still has not caught fire. Michael Phelps is the hero of the Olympics. Anything else?
Mixed martial arts has exploded beyond belief. It is bigger than boxing ever was and become the big mainstream combat sport in America.
International basketball, after lots of changes and upheaval over the past couple of decades, has entered a new phase. There are lots of contenders now, but only a few teams that are truly champion-caliber, and while the Americans are now beatable, they’re used to that now and should never be underestimated. In all, the sport is the most interesting it’s been in a long time.
After all the talk about major league baseball being killed by the strike, outrageous prices, lack of parity, interleague play, etc. etc., it’s become obvious that the fans simply will not let it die. If anything, the sport has achieved stability; it has its fans, it has its stadiums, most people involved have gotten used to the changes, most people have grudgingly learned to tolearate Bud Selig, etc.
Soccer is making slight inroads in America, but it remains a fringe sport, and no superstar is going to change that. Brazil is still the nation to beat, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
Danica Patrick won her first race, which is extremely bad news for IRL, because it killed the one reason for anyone to watch.
Uh, no. It’s nowhere near boxing at its peak. I’d say it’s bigger than boxing now and that gap is likely to increase, but it’s got a ways to go.
Zidane headbutted an opponent in the 2006 World Cup final in what is one of the two most shocking sports moments in my mind (Tyson biting Holyfield is the other).
In tennis, Pete Sampras set a new record for Grand Slam titles and was generally proclaimed the best player of the last 40 years, if not longer. Andre Agassi went from a punk to a fanatically devoted player and probably the most respected guy on tour before he retired.
A few months after Sampras’ last match, Roger Federer started winning Slam events and has now broken Sampras’ record. He finished a career Grand Slam this year and the general consensus is that he’s better than Sampras was. From 2003 to 2006 he won more than 90 percent of his matches. Meanwhile Rafael Nadal might be the best clay court player ever, and won the French Open the first four times he played there.
The women’s game has been dominated by Venus and Serena Williams. Other players have come and gone, and the sisters are sometimes criticized for a lack of focus, but in the last nine years nobody has touched their level of success. Their power and toughness are unmatched and have changed the way the sport is played. For a while they seemed to meet each other in every major final- five in a row at one point. Serena won all four Grand Slam events in a row starting in 2002 and ending in 2003, and has 11 majors; Venus has seven, including five Wimbledon wins. When they team up in doubles, they’re pretty much unbeatable - they don’t play many tournaments together, but they’ve won all four Slams as a team, and two gold medals in the Olympics. Venus also has a gold in singles.
Russia is to women’s tennis what it used to be to chess, as the country has been churning out players like clockwork. China is attempting to replicate this success. The big-hitting Russian women sometimes lack style points and few have broken through to top-level titles, but it’s not unusual to see a large assortment of them in the late stages of a major. The most successful has been Maria Sharapova, who surprised everyone by winning Wimbledon in 2004, became the number-one ranked player the next year. She added a U.S. Open title in 2006 and the Australian Open in 2008. She’s struggled with injuries since then, however.
what can I say about Tiger Wood’s dominance in golf? He has won more ____ in ___ years than ___ did in ___ years, a record that may never be broken. Is he good or bad for golf?
Not even close, dude. Muhammad Ali was arguably the most famous sportsman of the 20th century. He’s certainly among the top five.
On the other hand, if you asked people who Randy Couture is- even Americans- most people would probably say he’s a fashion designer.
MMA isn’t even as popular as pro wrestling was at its height.
LeBron hasn’t won a championship yet. Basketball might be entering a new Golden Age, though.
Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Lance Armstrong are the sports stories of the decade so far. Tiger might surpass Jack Nicklaus’ record for most major championships by the 2012 season- he’s got 14, and needs 4 more to tie; Federer already has surpassed Pete Sampras’ record for most Grand Slam wins, with 15.
Michael Phelps seems to be a big deal, but swimmers seemingly come along every Olympics and win a half-dozen medicals (see Ian Thorpe, for example) and he’ll be forgotten in five years.
The Patriots were unquestionably the NFL team of the decade, with three Super Bowl wins and an undefeated (regular) season. I have an 18-1 t-shirt (from bustedtees.com) and even non-football fans chuckle when they see it.
Let’s not forget Barry Bonds, who admitted using steroids, broke the all-time home run record, and was indicted for perjury all in the same decade.
The remarkable thing about the baseball steroid thing is the Commissioner has just ignored it. No asterixs in the record book (yet). (The other remarkable thing is the President mentioned in the State of the Union.)
I’ll go you one better: Ali is STILL the template many black athletes emulate. (Mostly it’s the jerkish ones, but still, MMA has not produced anybody even a tiny bit comparable to his stature.)
Overall, relating to boxing, the sports landscape is more fragmented than ever because of the proliferation of cable. Ticket prices are at record levels, athletes are larger celebrities than ever, even if a greater number of them are competing with each other.
The NBA story of the last decade probably goes like this: the game became more international than ever (Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker, Yao Ming). Domestically the story is the Western Conference and the partnership and then destruction and separate successes of Shaq and Kobe.
The Cavaliers scored huge by drafting LeBron James, who was from Akron, out of high school in 2003. He was such a huge success that the NBA naturally decided to ban high school players from the draft. He hasn’t won a championship, but has generally lived up to his billing and then some.
Huge, surprising trades for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce brought the Celtics to the title in 2007-08. The Lakers returned to win the championship the next year over the Orlando Magic. The Magic had been cast as a foil for LeBron’s Cleveland team, and the preponderance of potentially strong teams - L.A., Cleveland, Boston, a rejuvenated San Antonio, Denver, and perhaps Portland - is the basis for Really Not All That Bright’s enthusiasm.
Also inspiring optimism is a crop of young and mostly likeable players, including LeBron and a strong crop of guards like Dwyane Wade from Miami, Chris Paul in New Orleans, and Deron Williams in Utah. There’s also Carmelo Anthony in Denver and Dwight Howard in Orlando.
The “likeable” thing is important. After a fight between Indiana Pacers players and Detroit Piston fans in late 2004, the league’s image really suffered. These days a lot of fans and journalists believe that the league is headed for a period not seen since the heyday of Michael Jordan at least.
Other people will do better than me at baseball - and the NBA too, probably - but - and this hurts to say - a summary of baseball this decade has to start with the fact that the Red Sox won a championship after 86 years. Of course, the White Sox won one after an 88-year wait, but nobody really cares.
It’s more about the glut of young stars in the making than the strength of the top teams. Basketball is a face sport, and the guys you listed are very good faces for a league which could use a good bunch of frontmen.
Between Lebron, D-Wade, Chris Paul, and Dwight Howard you have young kids who are great players and I know at least two of them (Howard and Paul) are DEVOUT Christians. The other two I don’t know…but overall they aren’t dicks, so that’s good.
Also: Two of the most storied and legendary franchises in all of American sports have gone without a championship. They are the Yankees and the Cowboys
So was Eugene Robinson, the safety who decided to visit a prostitute the night before the Super Bowl in Atlanta - and the same day he’d gotten an award for morality from a Christian group. People do dumb shit sometimes.
But yeah, I agree that they haven’t done anything terribly stupid so far in their public lives. Since the league was so desperate to get away from the gangsta image - to the point of forcing the players to wear suits when addressing the media, which was moronic - it’s helped them that these guys have been decent in their early years in the league.
In college football, the SEC has been dominant in the BCS, winning four titles since 2000, including consecutive wins the last three years.
In the NFL, the 2007 New England Patriots came close to matching the perfect season posted by the 1972 Dolphins. The Pats finished 18-1, losing the Super Bowl to the New York Giants after some late game heroics by Eli Manning & company.
You don’t even have to go to Ali. Most Americans, even non-sports fans, would recognize the names Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard. I like MMA, but it hasn’t had anywhere near the cultural import that boxing had at it’s height.
The real story is that the Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino to win the World Series in 2004, and again in 2007. Even the Chicago White Sox won the World Series on 2005. The Chicago Cubs, however, still haven’t won a World Series since 1908 and haven’t even been to the series since 1945. The nearest they came was 2003, until the infamous Steve Bartman incident. (Not that I personally blame Steve Bartman; but many still do.)
The Florida Gators (my alma mater) have been especially dominant in both football and basketball the last few years, although the basketball team has slipped considerably lately. At one point after April 2007, they held the most recent football title AND the two most recent basketball titles.
He hasn’t won a championship, but has generally lived up to his billing and then some.
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