Man Page Writing: Life/Times of Man Page Writer

For years I'd thought that I'd live to see the decline and, perhaps, a near total eclipse of pro sports in the US. My thinking was that the owners and players would price themselves to a point beyond the reach of their customers. Concomitant with this, there'd be "excitement overload", wherein the volume and frequency of sporting events would exceed fans' capacity to absorb them.

While large segments of the population (at least in the US) have been priced out of attending pro sports events, and I still see pro sports declining, the industry has surprised me with its tenacity. Pro sports have become part of the fabric of the US economy, as part of our entertainment industry.

I guess it's that old devil, greed, that is doing in pro sports, causing the industry to lose its indispensable magic. That magic was the vicarious pleasure of watching people in the prime of their physical lives playing children's games in the same spirit (or so we allowed ourselves to think) as we played those games ourselves. Now, try as we might to keep the veil of "love of the game" in place, it's torn away at every turn.

By the way, I'm a lifelong sports fan, so I have no predisposition to wish for the extinction of pro sports. And when I speak of "magic", I hope I am something more than an old guy indulging himself in nostalgia. While I'd assert, there was more genuine passion in the games in the period before, say, the early 80's, I'd also acknowledge that the athletes in my "good old days" were indentured servants, were not morally superior to today's athletes, and that, most importantly, there are a million better things to do with your time than spectating. The last point was as true then as now.

Now, when you talk about individual players in a major sport, the size and duration of his contract is as much a part of the conversation as batting average, points per game, or save percentage. Every major sports web site has a "business of sports" section. The athletes themselves, at least the stars, have become corporations unto themselves.

Our obsession with celebrities spoils things, too. Who knew that Mickey Mantle was a drunk? Who needed to know?

I noted with interest that my own children, who all played high school sports, were not the sports fanatics I was at their age. Of the three of them, only one of them is a big fan now and he, only of baseball.

A given sport can't make it pitching only to the dedicated fan. I infer this from the presence at every pro game of various distractions--overly loud p.a. announcer, cheerleaders, jumbotron, deafening music. It's an admission that the game itself is not enough.

Btw, under the rubric "pro sports", I'd have to include college football and basketball (mens, Div. 1). While the athletes are not paid (usually), there is such a quantity of money sloshing around (for schools, coaches, and various hangers-on), that the lucre plays a major role in how the sports are conducted.

Pro football deserves a special mention here because, with their gigantic TV revenue, they've gotten around the outpricing-the-live-audience problem. Still, at some point, you can't completely do away with the roar of the crowd. The NFL has some dud franchises (including two right here in the Bay Area). It can afford only a distinct minority of these, beyond which the entire sport--industry segment--is dragged down.

Where I thought before that pro sports would be a leading indicator in any economic retrenchment, my guess now is that they'll decline in tandem with the economy as a whole.