the degradation of american sports
I just got a new television set for my new place (which will surely be stolen, defaced, or teepeed sometime soon- read earlier post), and decided to save a little money on
Saturday night and stay in, basking in the glow of 43 inches of pure Japanese
love- on a lot of weblogs, that would be the close to a really interesting story that
I’m sure some of you aren’t old enough to read, but here at alternate.org, it’s just the beginning…
I’m not a huge fan of football, but the erstwhile governor of Minnesota had somewhere along the line convinced me that the program onto which
I was to stumble that night had a little something extra to offer. He was right.
As my remote control fell from my hand in amazement, my mind reeled. Awash in colors, shapes and sounds, this event was unlike anything
I had ever seen (short of that one parade on the hill in Denver where there was that thing with the stuff, but that’s another weblog, too).
It’s as if the marketing executives of the WWF have flat out admitted that we’re morons who simply want
explosions and T&A involved with every event we watch… the cheerleaders were strippers (which
I didn’t mind, really), fireworks shot off after every touchdown, and you could put any nickname you wanted on the back of your jersey.
You used to have to be good enough that Chris Berman gave you a nickname on Sports Center.
Now anyone can have one? Fine, from now on I’m “leader of the naked monkey clan“, a 6 foot 1 inch soph-o-more from
aaaaaal-a-bama…
Now I don’t want to go George Will on you here, but it seems to me that entertainment and sports used to be a little like church and state.
Do I think it’s any coincidence that Dubya gets into office and all the sudden I’ve got strippers on NBC during prime time? I don’t really want to
comment on that, but I’m almost certain that we’re making less of the few great games we have left
every time we figure out how to project a sponsor logo onto the court for the home viewers (tennis), or develop a technology that lets people who don’t really care watch the game without having to really think about why it’s important (hockey’s stupid
pucktracker). If you lower the bar, we simply jump lower. Then if you try to raise it, we just go play another game, because now it’s too hard, and they’ve got a cool new 360-degree camera over on the other field.
God, I hated that thing at the Superbowl…
Like I said, I don’t really care one way or another about sports… it just makes me feel bad for
the people who do that the powers that be would treat them this way. Except for
the strippers… they were okay.