After last night’s draining display of NFL failure by the Green Bay Packers (nice comeback, though, btw), I’ve decided that sports are stupid. This decision has been months in the making: Baseball has been dead to me for a long time now, and not even the Brewers making the playoffs last year could suck me back in to a sport that long ago abandoned me as a consumer. The NBA is in its January doldrums, and even if it wasn’t, their games are all rigged anyway. The spirit of NBA competition has died, slain by a system that rewards stars with calls so much that you can’t tell if the stars are actually stars or just good players who have been given artificial illumination. You can’t tell, therefore, if the narrative of the NBA is a lie. Hockey? Soccer? The World Cup is exciting, but not because of the actual play on the field. I’ll watch the Olympics, but probably not as much as I did in the past. Silly me, not being able to get past the fact that figure skating isn’t an actual sport.
Also, Tiger Woods may come back to golf, but golf will never be the same. Is it wrong for me to stiff-arm an entire sport because of society’s attitude toward its biggest star? I’m talking about the hero-worship. Why do we venerate success at all costs? What does this say about us? Hmm? And when our heroes show themselves to be the lowest of the low (off the field/court/course), why is the choice always to a) make excuses for them, or b) crucify them? Isn’t there a different way to view these things, one that views Tiger properly as the scum of the earth, but one that also realizes he’s just the product of a success-driven sports-crazed culture? If Tiger didn’t have a buhjillion dollars, there would be no Elin, no famous half-swedish Tiger-spawns, no Jamie Grubbs (unless you watched Tool Academy, that is), no 11-plus other mistresses, no debate on what constitutes a mistress, and no national race to be the first to say that when one has a buhjillion dollars, being a horrible person is not just understandable, but expected.
This is why they should cap the maximum amount athletes make. Of course, that’s a horrible idea. Also, it’s unconstitutional. But guess what? I don’t have to support these athletes and their sports. I don’t have to fuel their addictions with me money. In fact, I can anti-support them. I can sit all alone on here and criticize the behavior of athletes every day, and nobody can stop me. But they will try. They will call me a “hater.” They will say I’m “just jealous” of their money. They will call me a bitter, sad, old, washed-up never-was. And they might be right. However, the rightness or wrongness of their hateful chirping doesn’t change the validity of my criticisms, which I guarantee would be spot-on. Maybe I’ll start a satirical blog that says that all athletes are awesome all the time, and we should worship them and stop noticing their bad behavior. Only nobody would know its satirical, because it would just be expressing the prevailing wisdom around here these days. So you see why I have to give up and just not watch.
I’ll start watching again when the NCAA tournament comes around. I’ve, after all, got a pool to run. And those poor college basketball players probably don’t get all that much money, not even from the undoubtedly corrupt programs like Jim Calipari’s Kentucky. I might also watch women’s golf, because those girls don’t make crap. But any of the other sports can just suck it.
