Questioning the value of sports is seen as blasphemy
nautil.us
nautil.us
NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.
This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.
Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2] In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year’s top 10 has seven.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-b... [2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most-ch...
And for the money sports, the Olympics have become a side-show. It is, economically speaking, idiotic for a professional athlete to put their career, and millions and millions of dollars in earnings, at risk for nationalism. So in many cases, the best in the world don't bother to show up.
Also, the NBC coverage is just awful. No wonder nobody wants to watch when it is wall-to-wall puff pieces, talking heads, and a few chopped and spliced highlights of the actual events.
Never mind, YouTube or Facebook will have it. And, I'm on a desktop computer with a fast connection. I presume that the experience on mobile without an ad blocker borders on glacial.
Holy spaghetti monster, Batman. Make your website STICKY. Feed me more until I'm ready to explode. You have the most amazing athletes in the world on video, MAKE USE OF IT. Top 10 judo takedowns. Best soccer highlights. Worst wipeouts. And THEN give me the ability to drill into longer and longer videos.
It's not that hard to make me want to click things on your website when I already came there. But, this is what happens when it's about the ad revenue instead of sports coverage.
NBC has only themselves to blame.
As for the sports themselves, the other perennial problem is subjective vs objective judging. One thing that MMA has over boxing, for example, is an objective measure of victory. A lot of the olympic sports that have "busyness and spectacle" also have judging and we see in boxing what happened. Gymnastics has similar issues.
I do agree that the NBC coverage is awful. Their commentary could be much more subdued and intelligent. Fortunately it is possible to mute the inane audio.
It's really a poor excuse for nations to come together if no-one cares. Football is popular all the time, nearly everywhere - it's much more organic as a global come-together-watch-together event.
I can't personally understand the interest in sports beyond the personal experience - i.e. if one has familiarity in any skill or discipline it's incredibly enticing to observe true masters performance - but I do value in the philosophical sense the fact that all cultures come at the same playing field and speak the same language and share the same context in the form of the sport.
In addition, while it's great watching the best get their medals, the thrill is in the upset. Upsets are getting much rarer nowadays.
No one is going to throw their smartphone on in the background. And NBC sure doesn't make it easy for me throw their website on in the background in high-def and just let it play. So that, when something happens, I can scrub it back a minute or two and watch actively.
NBC is guilty of not understanding that, with the internet, people don't need to tolerate being bored.
If you have cable TV, which I don't.
I tried a Sling.tv free trial. Ok, so it starts at $20/mo. But that didn't include NBC Sports. Ok, so upgrade. Ads. A lot of ads. And a little bit of Olympics. Wow, this is...awful, and I completely remember why I stopped paying for cable TV.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c...
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/gold-medal-wo...
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Of the colleges I've attended, they spend more money on the sports programs than any two or three other programs collectively, even though very few players would be able to move on to a higher level than college football or basketball.
It's maddening and frustrating to be surrounded by that culture and unable to convince anyone that a little bit more emphasis on academics would pay far greater dividends. I'm not against sports for the health benefits, but beyond that, it's mostly luck and I just don't buy that it's worth it.
Our football coach was still grossly overpaid, though.
Life was less pleasant for non-sports guys out in the 2A and 3A districts - I was able to switch to my big high school from one of those semi-rural "white flight" ones, and I'm so glad I did.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20160819-mckinney-...
I am ... I don't know how I feel about this. Certainly not happy. Probably a good thing I don't live in McKinney.
The academics were outstanding there, but about 1/3 dropped out before graduation. Wasn't a lot of effort put into retention, either. We left around the the they were building that massive Allen sports complex and the new high school.
My youngest was still in high school at the time, and moving her out of it was the best thing we could have done, as it turns out. But I think that's mainly that she got to reinvent herself, and she really liked where we moved to.
Plus, the Internet was beginning to make social media (MySpace) available, which really helped her socially.
I'm pretty sure the land for the Allen monstrosity was donated by the founder of one of the companies I worked for. Guy lives extremely frugally, but he was worth untold millions.
The whole Dallas area has dumbed down a lot in the wake of the first dotcom bust. It's all $20 an hour contract Java work now; $30 if you're lucky.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--OsmROR7...
Oh, and in states where it isn't the football coach? second most common? A college Basketball coach is the highest paid in half.
Fortunately the mechanism of feeding pro sports (TV advertising) is fading somewhat, as people's attention is drawn to other activities. But I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook bought the rights to e.g. basketball.
The article also mentions youth athletics which is the worst. Parents are overly harsh on their kids. The events are overly competitive when it's just 9 year olds playing what should be for fun. The games aren't designed very well for small uncoordinated kids, and many kids get excluded.
So there are many things to criticize sports over. The main point the article was making was not that sports suck. Just that they aren't allowed to be criticized in our society. Suggest that you should change youth sports, or that the football team doesn't need a brand new million dollar stadium, and people will give you a funny look and ignore you.
One, the value of exercise and friendly competition. I don't think anybody is discounting that. Two, the social construct of forming into teams for purposes of increased participation. I'm a little iffy on whether this is at play in the article or not. Three, the institutional nature of sports, specifically professional sports. This seems to be what all the hubbub is about.
The other issues are just normal human problems that happen to occur in sports. Yes, subsidies are an issue, but as I addressed in my other reply you shouldn't blame sports for that, blame the politician that uses sports to placate the masses. Yes, some sports parents are too harsh on their kids, but I have seen just as many parents have a similar attitude towards their kids when it comes to other pursuits like music.
I also don't by that sports "aren't allowed to be criticized in our society." None of these issues should be news to anyone. One of the US's recent Olympic bids was squashed by public outcry over the cost it would take to fund it. The architect of the most recent deal to give public money to build a new stadium was just voted out at the first chance the public got. For the first time in my memory an NFL team just moved to a new city and is building a new stadium without any public money. The reason these things are happening is because we are starting to wake up to these issues exactly because people have been criticizing them for a decade plus.
When you boil it down, sports are play, it's a "childish" activity. Which is fine for adults to engage in, but then you have all of these absurdities built up around play which can even go so far as to ruin the whole purpose of play (fun, camaraderie, personal excellence, teamwork, etc.) People get overly attached to their favorite teams, living or dying based on their success or failure on the field, and loving or hating those who like the same team or rival teams. There is so much money in the mix that players can not only make a living playing games but can become enormously wealthy in some cases, which distorts sport in odd ways sometimes. One of the worst examples being the ways that athletes injure themselves for their sports, such as those in boxing or football who endure brain trauma which shortens their lives and the quality of life, or those in many sports (baseball, football, running, bicycling) who take performance enhancing drugs in order to get ahead. Then you have cities that spend hard earned tax dollars to subsidize sports, with no good economic data to back such choices.
Sports are definitely taken far too seriously today, often to the detriment of sport itself. And that creates numerous situations that are rife for parody and derision.
Imagine an article detailing how some folks dedicate a huge portion of their life toward following, oh, let's say Magic the Gathering. How they spend every weekend dedicated to it. How they spend so much money on the hobby, and on various accouterments related to it. How they regularly get drunk while watching matches. How they will refuse to be friends with someone if they enjoy playing the wrong color deck. How they have gotten into several fights over the game. We would view someone like that as being outside the bounds of normal society, as being an unusual person, and as someone who engaged in pursuits that justified derision. But when people engage in precisely the same sorts of ludicrous behavior when it comes to sports, we see this sort of behavior as normal and even borderline acceptable. Merely because it's familiar and commonplace. But it is ridiculous, and it is worth pointing out how ridiculous it is.
Literally. Without commercial sports, people who need to connect to other people for a variety of reasons, couldn't.
I find it annoying and wasteful, but I understand the societal need, especially among those who aren't engineers. (Sales, BD, etc.) Engineers can typically connect over their specialty, but that doesn't work when talking to other specialties.
And if sports are wasteful, all forms of entertainment are. Why do you think like that? The thoughts in my mind are not so precious to the world that it shouldn't be distracted by 'useless' entertainment, and I guess neither is yours.
Yes, of course there are a few other things to talk about, but even "news and weather" is dangerous, because some think Louisiana is currently showing us the future of global warming, and others think it shows that people who choose not to insure their property should not be rewarded with a bail out, lest there be moral hazard.
Sports is the safe bet.
Of course friends can discuss whatever they want. But in less familiar company, one may want to avoid topics that can lead to disagreements. Politics and religion being the classic examples.
Or, as the Professor told Eliza: "Stick to the weather, and everybody's health".
I would assume that once the two people get to know one another the window of safe topics would become broader
For example, if I state gymnastics isn't a sport, just as ballet isn't, and that watching it means condoning child torture, is that a safe bet?
(Edit: and that's ingoring the really contentious subjects such as whether England really scored that third goal in 1966)
Or electronic gaming? Where are the League events? The Olympics are in Rio, but everyone's watching Seattle for the DOTA 2016 International tournament.
Commercial sports often go way too far in their excesses and lack of criticism, but many, MANY people enjoy watching the highest level of sport like any other art. It may not be your cup of tea, but saying it's wasteful to me is the same as tossing out any great artistic or creative endeavour.
That explains why people play sports, but I don't think it explains why so many people watch them. Most sports fans don't play the sport themselves.
Plus, when you're 60 and out of shape you can't go out and play a game of football, watching football is as close as you can get to doing it.
Sure you can. There is nothing stopping an out of shape (but otherwise healthy) 60 year old person from going out and playing touch football. I mean, they might get dirty, sweaty and have aches or cramps the following days, but hey, that's life.
Especially for sports that can be divided into local, regional and national tiers.
It becomes something of a clan system, where you squabble locally, but support each other regionally and nationally when a outside "threat" shows up.
Pretty much any music or drama student has had to endure years of being some derogatory term, only to find out that when they graduate, society expects them to starve, while athletes can get by quite easily just on former glory.
Quite the subsidy so that some people can break the damned ice, don't you think?
Odd that it's impossible for us to talk about our different hobbies with one another. I wonder if that's ever happened in human history. Probably not, I guess. But hey, how 'bout them Bearhawks?! Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Glad that whole process is long behind me, and I wonder if sports are continually going to be prized as time goes on.
An intelligent friend of mine told me that she figures that I don't enjoy watching baseball because I was just a nerd in school and don't realize the value of sports.
I was captain of my swim team in junior high and lettered every year in high school in swimming. I also pole vaulted in high school (not very well). In college I did one year on the swim team and one year on the gymnastics team (I wasn't very good). I did Judo for around 20 years and competed in the state championships in my 30's (not very well). I qualified and ran in the Boston marathon in my 50's. In most races i was in the top 15% of my age cohort.
I was never a great athlete in any sport, but overall more active than most; however, because I don't want to drink beer and yell for players that I have no connection to other than that they live in the same city she thinks that I'm too nerdy to appreciate the value of sports.
Things like national sporting events are put on in part to showcase the accomplishments of the group and to encourage affiliation to it. They are ritual. They are like church services. They are like parades.
If you go out of your way to denigrate them, you are showing disrespect not just for the event itself, but for the group that put them on. And if you persist in these acts of disaffiliation, don't be surprised if that group increasingly excludes you in ways large and small. You want to see what it's like to be an outsider in your own country, someone who really truly is considered one of THEM rather than one of US? Try asking an African-American, particularly an old one. It isn't pretty.
You are not so strong and wise you can build a good life for yourself, alone. All through your life, you need to lean on what your family, your town, your people, and your state have built and are willing to share with you. So try to be civil and show a bit of respect when they are celebrating.
I can't even number how many people touched the parts of this laptop.
The promises don't materialize.
Nowadays it looks like Olympics and its ilk (Pam am games) are just fraud by global construction contractors on the masses.
entertainment vs real sport for everyone