Poor Sports

There is no joy in Mudville.

Sports is on the front page of the newspaper after a horrible weekend here in Philadelphia, and to make matters worse, it gets re-played and analyzed on every TV station and sports talk radio station (of which there are 2 here). We even have a 24-hour sports cable outlet that will discuss little else for the next week. The mood of sports fans is sour, and it’s a shame that it has deteriorated to the point that sports has become so important.

Our hometown football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, laid an egg on Sunday. For the third consecutive week, they have disappointed the fans with a lackluster effort in losing to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Fans are calling for the firing of the head coach, cutting of players and generally beating themselves up over the (in)action of the team, who is a bland 4-4 entering into a challenging second half of the season. It could be worse, but it’s hard to imagine how.

Three things happened to make sports as big a part of society as it is today:
• Players started making huge salaries.
• Ticket prices increased (which went hand-in-hand with salaries).
• Television became an invasive part of the landscape.

To put it in perspective, if we go back to the days of my youth (the late 60s – **gasp**). Players had off-season jobs, tickets were reasonably priced (compared with the income level of the fans) and outside of the home team, games were rarely televised.

The fact that people get so worked up is what amazes me. After all, the minimum salary is more than some of us will earn in 10 years. What is lost is the entertainment value. With the advent of such widespread coverage and huge salaries, the fact that it is supposed to be entertainment is last on anyone’s list. They want blood, which takes one back to the days of the gladiators. Calls are pouring into the radio stations, letters are coming into the sports editors and people are talking about it at work as though it was a personal attack on a member of their family.

Meanwhile, there are wild fires burning in California, a war in Iraq, mid-term elections in a week and spiraling out-of-control costs of health care, auto insurance and property taxes. Not to mention the fact that about a third of the population cannot earn enough money to raise a family, let alone attend a game. These are real problems when compared to a sporting event.

I understand that fans spend a lot of money to attend games. Between tickets, transportation and assorted food and beverage expenses, they probably spend a few thousand dollars a year on their football team. In that respect, perhaps they should be upset. I feel badly for them, but they bring it on themselves.

What do they spend on property taxes, health care and auto insurance? When one weighs the return versus the expense, maybe they get less out of the latter than the games. That would make me more upset, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Most of them probably aren’t even going to vote next week, so they’ll bring that on themselves, too. That’s not to say that sports doesn’t have a place, because it does. I only wish people got as worked up over those other issues as they do about a 13-6 loss by some strangers on a corporate-sponsored football field.

Come to think of it … perhaps the fans are more worked up than the players are.

Whazupwidat?