Frank's Place: Dark side of sports harder to ignore
Time and history have long since confirmed Maxim Gorky's dim view of the Soviet Union. So perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to something the Russian novelist said about sports.
Time and history have long since confirmed Maxim Gorky's dim view of the Soviet Union. So perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to something the Russian novelist said about sports.
"Sport," Gorky wrote in 1928, "has a single clear purpose: to make people even more stupid than they are."
(Before anyone asks, it's merely coincidental that I ponder this intersection of sports and stupidity during a week in which Chris Berman has revealed his pending retirement from ESPN.)
What Gorky specifically meant was that by devoting so much energy and attention to essentially meaningless pursuits, the average citizen - his "bourgeois" - was neglecting those issues that really mattered.
While that may be so, surely the dumbing down of its fans isn't the only purpose of sport. Our pastimes are also designed to provide occasions for civic parades and to sell alcohol, team jerseys, and pizza.
"There is something beautiful and touching about watching fellow-members of what is fundamentally a klutzy, badly engineered, and underpowered species perform difficult physical acts," the writer Louis Menand pointed out in a recent New Yorker review of two books critical of sports. "A squirrel watching a gymnastics routine would just laugh. On the other hand, squirrels can't endorse pizza. We're way ahead of them in that department."
Sports, of course, can occasionally lift us up. But more frequently, it seems, they makes us look silly and ridiculously gullible. For every inspiring tale of a team or athlete achieving some higher purpose, there's another that highlights moral debilitation.
In 2016, thanks to social media and a 24/7 news cycle, it's never been easier to validate - as well as to expand - Gorky's premise.
If you don't care about the disgusting saga at Baylor, where officials at that Baptist university apparently conspired to cover up a series of sexual assaults by athletes, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the wider crisis in college sports, where in a headlong rush for television dollars our institutions of higher learning have abandoned their last pretenses of integrity, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the bacchanalian scenes depicted in photos posted by and about the well-oiled Preakness spectators in Pimlico's hellish infield, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about all the shameless maneuvering the National Football League has undertaken over the years to avoid blame and liability in a concussion epidemic that threatens both its players and its existence, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the hateful, ignorant comments sections that, like malignant growths, lurk just beneath most online sports stories, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care that an NBA star kicked an opponent in the groin during a playoff game, or that an NHL player jabbed the butt end of a stick into a competitor's abdomen, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the new doping allegations involving 23 athletes from the London Olympics in 2012 and 31 more from the Beijing Games four years earlier, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the savage spectacle of ultimate fighting, where in the manner of Roman gladiators, half-crazed men and women kick and punch each other to sate the blood lust of a paying audience, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care that a recent CBS Sunday Morning segment noted that Americans spent $44 billion in 2015 on fashionable athletic wear, when gym shorts, T-shirts, and Chuck Taylors could easily have served the same purpose, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
If you don't care about the growing trend to sell alcohol at collegiate sporting events, when study after study has shown that binge-drinking is a major factor in the many problems plaguing American campuses, you're the sports fan he was talking about.
In the face of all this negative evidence, sports seem more popular than ever. Are we too dumb to notice? Or care? Are we, as Gorky suggested, simply addicted to sports, abetted by the marketers who peddle their opiate to the masses?
But maybe sports aren't as popular as its deluded followers believe. In that New Yorker piece, Menand argues that we're in the midst of a bubble.
"If any industry looks primed for disruption," he wrote, "it's sports."
As he pointed out, every league but the mostly network-bound NFL depends on cable money. And because of the way cable systems bundle, these leagues are being subsidized in large part by the majority of subscribers who don't watch sports.
"Fewer than three percent on average watch their local NBA games, he wrote. "Fewer than two percent watch their hometown NHL teams."
And in 2014, the average age of a postseason baseball viewer was 55.
When, as seems inevitable, cable operators start "disaggregating" - offering subscribers an a la carte menu of channels - those sports leagues could find themselves in financial crisis.
That's pretty basic math - so basic, in fact, that even the most dedicated sports fan can grasp it.
@philafitz