Please don’t feed the giant
Professional sports may be hazardous to your moral health
By Gerry Bowler • Special to ChristianWeek
For my sins I am a devoted supporter of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, a.k.a. "The Little Team That Couldn’t." I caught this disease from my father and have passed it on to my children: three generations of Bowlers writhe every summer and autumn in the agonies of defeat (and the very occasional joys of victory). We wouldn’t have it any other way; support of this professional sports team is part of my family’s culture.
And so it is with millions of individuals and families in Canada and the United States: professional sports are woven into our lives. We cheer for particular teams or players; we buy their labeled apparel or other merchandise; we seek their autographs; their actions occupy our coffee-break conversations; we are glued to the television during playoff time. In doing so we have collectively made sports into a multibillion-dollar industry.
But success has done something unpleasant to professional sports–it is suffering from a nasty case of giantism that will eventually kill. In the meantime, it is harming our culture.
Sports appeal
Humans throughout history have loved sports for a number of reasons. There is the competition that brings out the maximum effort in performers; the roller-coaster excitement of emotional highs and lows that comes from long-standing identification with a team; and the beauty and grace of superbly conditioned athletes playing under pressure. Most of all, as our children would tell us, sports are fun.
There is a moral core to all this. At the heart of sport is the idea that self-sacrifice, effort and bravery are rewarded. Even if it isn’t always victory, glorious moments remain frozen in our memories: a headlong steal of home, a desperate last-second throw to the end zone, a quadruple jump performed by a skater with a torn groin muscle.
But the stakes involved in professional sports are now so excessive, the amount of money involved is so indecently high, that this fundamental sense of morality is being lost.
•What do the examples of Latrell Sprewell and Dennis Rodman tell us about pro basketball? That you can strangle your coach, kick photographers and assault referees without being dropped by your employer or jeopardizing your chance to be paid millions of dollars.
•What do the owners of the Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns tell us about pro football? That you can try to extort free stadiums and lucrative deals out of communities that have supported your teams for generations and when these are not quickly forthcoming you can move your operation to some city a little more gullible.
•What do Charles Barkely’s thuggery or Gary Suter’s cross-check or Don Cherry’s apoplectic ranting tell us about the relationship between televised sports and morality? That as long as you are contributing to the profits of the entertainment industry you will be courted by sycophantic journalists and eager employers.
This is not just a nostalgic bleat by a couch potato who yearns for some imaginary golden age. This dysfunctional industry costs each of us a great deal. What is happening when CBC’s Brian Williams repeatedly calls Donovon Bailey "a classy individual" just after the sprinter has cruelly taunted an injured opponent? Or when a Nike advertisement tells little girls that it’s "fun" to trash talk when playing basketball? Each time these attitudes are promoted we suffer a depletion in our moral currency and our civilization takes a small step backwards.
When the price of a single NFL franchise is $500,000,000 (stadium and batteries not included), that amount of money is extracted from every purchaser of deodorant, automobiles or beer advertised on television. We pay when we shop, not when we watch (or even if we don’t watch).
Sweet dreams
I dream of the day when some pro athlete says, "I’m not worth the amount of money I’m being offered. I’m already making more each year than 200 nurses combined, so I’ll take a little less to set a good example, keep seats affordable for families and ensure this team stays in the community that loves it. And I’ll tell my friends to do the same." But until the day that happens (and the infernal regions require snow plows), there are some things you and I can do.
We can insist that those who coach our children are instilling virtues instead of just ways to win. We can take our kids to the park rather than the SkyDome. We can support local teams rather than distant pro franchises. (There is surely as much fun in games involving the Melville Millionaires, the Wadena Sand Hill Cranes or the Saskatoon Hilltops as there is in a season of the Los Angeles Clippers.) We can refuse to buy pro teams’ paraphernalia until they show us they care as much about the morality of what they do as the profitability. Who knows? It just might work.
Gerry Bowler teaches history at Canadian Nazarene College, Calgary, and is director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Contemporary Culture. He can be reached by e-mail at: bowlerg@cadvision.com
