April 6, 2003, was the last professional sports contest that I watched in its entirety – Michael Jordan’s last game. While my sports season – the football season – came to an official close with the Super Bowl, I was still watching Olympic curling (seriously) this past week.
Over the years, I have been asked many times why I don’t watch the Super Bowl or any other professional sports. Not that it makes one speck of difference to anyone, but I’d like to share the answer.
Make no mistake, I’ve always loved sports. I love the competition and the athleticism and the passion that are a part of them. I grew up loving pro sports. I was a huge O.J. Simpson fan, and of course, growing up in Florida as a young kid, the Miami Dolphins were the epicenter of the pro sports world. Mercury Morris was my favorite player, and Larry Csonka was just behind him.
I watched the NBA anytime Julius “Dr. J” Erving was on. And with Major League Baseball, there was no bigger Hank Aaron fan than me. In fact, my 10-year-old self decided that Jacksonville (where I was living) needed an ‘official’ Hank Aaron fan club – so I called the Jacksonville Times-Union newspaper and told them I was starting one. They included our home phone number as part of the story, and with me having no idea Jacksonville had around a half-million people in it, some 150+ calls later, I was compelled by my grandfather to call the paper to print a retraction.
In other words, when football season ended, I started following basketball. When basketball ended, I started following baseball until football began again in the fall. The year was, in a word, full and seamless from one sport to the next.
So yes, you could say I was a pro sports fan. In fact, I actually followed pro sports far more intently than any college sport at that time. To my innocent eyes, it appeared that all of my heroes were in pro sports because it was the highest level of competition, and they just happened to be getting paid to be in them.
But at some point along the way, the sports involved in pro sports became secondary to the money to be found in them. It seemed that the passion for the competition, for the challenge of the game, was delegated to a place of far less priority and importance than it had been before.
When professional athletes started actually having strikes to get more money, there was something about it that basically flew in the face of my love for their sports. I watched my family bust their rear ends to make ends meet, with men like my grandfather driving trucks all over the country, or my stepfather being an engineer for the railroad.
To me, those were the folks who needed to go on strike for more money, not people who were actually getting paid to play games.
I will never forget the moment it all came to a screeching halt for me. In flipping back and forth between major league baseball games around 2000 or so, one of the commentators mentioned how much per bat one of the players made. It turned out he was making more money in one at-bat than I made in a year as a teacher with two degrees. Right then and there, my interest in pro sports came to a sudden and screeching end.
Oh yeah – and he made that money even if he struck out.
See, we have no more valuable commodity in life than time, because time is something that simply cannot be made up in any way. From that moment forward, I basically vowed I could not in good conscience underpin pro sports with any more of my time – and I haven’t.
Now I don’t begrudge any professional athlete for making whatever they can. Most of them come from backgrounds where financial stability is nonexistent, and they are using a God-given ability to take care of themselves and their families.
But just like with this past week’s Super Bowl, the sport involved has become secondary to the event surrounding it. I heard far more about the halftime show with all of the political fertilizer revolving around it, as well as the commercials, than I did about the actual game itself (mind you, a 30-second commercial cost $8,000,000 this year). For someone who simply loves the competition involved, the entire equation feels totally backwards.
Make no mistake, college sports are coming dangerously close to losing me as well. When you know that some colleges are offering certain players more money than some of their professional counterparts, again, I am quickly approaching the line in the sand. The saddest part of that? It’s just a matter of time before we will see high school sports impacted, as we are already seeing players forgo their senior years in high school to protect themselves in the interest of big money promised to them by colleges.
And, let’s not even bring into the conversation the impact of nearly out-of-control sports gambling, which has the potential to bring the entire sporting universe to its knees.
