The Trouble with Sports

This post was adapted from something that I had previously written.

America views sports as having two purposes. One of these purposes is propaganda. If American athletes perform well in international competition, the government and their controlling media can use that to manipulate the public. They can push a blind loyalty to the country.

Take a look at Michael Phelps. We were supposed to root for him in 2008. Why? because he is an American. Even before the Olympics that year, the media was cramming him down our throats. I knew the consequences of his success and rooted against him. When he succeeded, we got the usual “Our country is the greatest in the world because of the accomplishments of one person.” It’s not very compelling, but that argument is actually effective.

Money is the larger purpose for American sports. Becoming professional athletes is considered by many to be the ideal job. These people can make a fortune by playing games that they love... or think that they love. Of course, we push national anthems before games so that we can still get a little propaganda out of these sports.

Both of these purposes have something in common. They require the greatest athletes that this country can produce. Our current setup has completely devalued the recreational aspects of sports in favor of developing the elite.

How do athletes become the greatest in their sports? There are a number of factors. During the early ages, kids who want to participate in sports are already expected to have a strong sense of how the sport is played. If a child doesn’t have the same interest in sports as their parents or the parents have not spent enough time helping the child learn how to play, that child will be at a huge disadvantage. For this reason, professional and Olympic athletes generally show their parents’ interests more than their own. People who truly love the sports that they play instead of simply accepting their parents’ interests rarely succeed at those sports.

After kids establish the ability to play the handful of sports that their parents enjoy, they are pressured to enter leagues. At this point, nobody who is unfamiliar with a sport can justify the commitment. Additionally, those who want to search for their own favorite sports are being pressured into committing to a single sport that may not be ideal.

Little League Baseball can be for children as young as 5 years of age. The league has a fairly high profile. Anyone who doesn’t go through the league will be at a disadvantage if any attempt is made to go pro. With their yearly Little League World Series, having fun takes a back seat to the importance of winning.

Of course, it gets worse than Little League. Most athletic development in America is tied to the unrelated schooling process. In many ways, athletics is a mechanism to force people to conform to the misguided ideal that the schools insist is best for everyone. Those who fail to abandon thought are frequently prohibited from playing sports. This is unacceptable.

Since American colleges are based off of the system used at lower levels of schooling, they try to take over athletics at later developmental stages. Personally, I will never show any support for college sports. They frequently maintain the academic ties to sports and they are discouraging to anyone who feels that schooling is not a good fit.

Looking at the entire path to athletic greatness, good people who can enjoy sports are not even trying. Basing your athletic interests on the interests of your parents is a huge advantage over having a mind of your own. Also, if you’re ten years old, it’s essentially too late. Our elitist attitude has seriously damaged the availability of sports as a form of recreation.

In many ways, these issues discouraged me from getting involved. My parents tried to push me into basketball. I never enjoyed playing. On top of that, basketball has a crippled defense. It’s non-contact with personal possession of the ball. You can easily outrun the player who is in possession of the ball, but there’s not a whole lot you can do to prevent that person from scoring.

I eventually started forming my own interests. My sport of choice is the inaccessible sport of hockey. By the time I developed this interest, I was too old to start playing. I spent some time with a group that played informal floor hockey games, but those games are no longer being played. Even in the lightweight version of the sport, it seems to have the two ideal components of exercise. The game wears me out, and I love playing.

While participation in athletics is seriously flawed, there are other problems in the sports world. Professional sports are supported by obligation more than entertainment. Those who enjoy playing sports feel that they have to like watching the sports as well. Golf is horrible to watch, but there are a lot of people who play. The people who play tend to watch the sport, and this has allowed for the success of a professional tour.

If enough people watch a sporting event, others will watch just to avoid being left out. The Super Bowl is a great example. While I don’t watch, those who do seem disappointed every year.

People are more likely to watch a game if a record is on the line than if a game is likely to be exciting. Major League Baseball’s transformation into a homerun derby took away strategy, base running, and defense while contributing to a spike in popularity.

Hockey was the last entertaining sport, but even the NHL is now sacrificing entertainment value for marketability. Ever since the lockout, they have sacrificed skill and work ethic in an attempt to generate a run on the scoring records. Although the game looks really good on paper right now, I have cut back on the number of games that I watch.

You can argue that the purpose of sports is to create entertaining forms of exercise. In a country that has seen increasing problems regarding obesity, catering to the elite and neglecting everyone else is a huge mistake. There are a lot of sports out there, and everyone should be able to find something that they can enjoy.

In recent years, I have worked on a sports project indicating how I would like to address the flaws that are destroying sports. I’m not going to detail my ideas here, but I would like to point out the primary areas that we need to focus on. I understand that we can’t force people to enjoy playing sports, but there is no question that we can reduce the amount of discouragement that keeps people from playing. Key ideas follow:

• Disconnect Athletics and Academics
  
• Provide Options Beyond League Play
  
• Improve Accessibility of Lesser Known Sports
  
• Add Opportunities to Start at Older Ages