Go Sox!
It is time to come out of the cupboard? No, not closet, that’s a different issue. I mean the cupboard I hide in during bowl games, march madness and – yes – the World Series. Forgive me for being a spoil sport (pun intended), but I cannot get excited about the corporate- fueled hype surrounding the battle of the bulging, steroid-enhanced biceps that occurs thrice a year as the team sport seasons close.
Let us examine the reason behind professional sports as matters stand in the twenty-first century: Pools of investors buy a Team; other investors, as unrelated corporate entity, buy a Stadium; together they have a singular goal – to enhance investor share value. To accomplish this, the sign talented young people who own a passion for the Game, pamper them, feed their egos, and generally treat them as demigods. Then there’s my personal issue with players salaries.
Professional sport salaries are as inflated as the hype, as untenable as the illusion of spectacle surrounding the whole industry. The hyperbolic value that is placed on whether Team A wins over Team X, fed through the feedback loop of paper-pushing news media, exacerbated by the unanswerable frustrations of Joe Sixpack, echoes with its own intrinsic emptiness. None of this has import.
I’m not saying this because I grew up in a family stigmatized by Chicago Cub fandom. Not at all. I say this as I read new reports about war, genocide, political corruption and the dissolution of the American Way; all the good stuff in the news these days. If we had but ten percent of the wasted money poured into the gaping maw of Professional Sports, Inc., and diverted it into (insert name of favorite global charity), we could be building a better world for our children by addressing hunger, disease, illiteracy or any other rampant social ills our highly mechanized, ultra-technological global society cannot find in their hearts or pocketbooks to conquer.
So as I stretch my cramped limbs, blink in the light outside my cupboard, hearing reports of how a Home Team swept the World Series and I yawn: Big Deal. Now we can get back to life, and shake ourselves of the self-indulgent illusion of fandom. As Buddhist say to maintain their perspective: “Will it matter in 100 years,” I say will it matter next year? If the answer is “No,” then it does not matter today, either.
Go, Sox.