SPORTSMANSHIP REVISITED

Way back on April 5, 2008, some eight months ago, this Blog started with its first essay, SPORTSMANSHIP IS DEAD. I have written some sixty-eight different commentaries covering a wide array of subjects with a heavy emphasis on the operation of our government. The work has been very rewarding and I am pleased to see that a growing number of individuals are reading Frobertsworld.

While I have never been a super athlete, I do love sports. I recognize the importance it has to our youth, and our daily lives. There is a natural beauty to a superb sporting performance and purity to an honest sporting effort. Imagine where the world of broadcasting would be without sports and its huge financial impact. Consider the influence sports has on our economy, and the staggering amounts of money that are generated for University, State, County, and City coffers.

While I still hold season tickets to a local university’s basketball games, I no longer attend many sporting events due to physical limitations, the exorbitant ticket prices being charged, and the growing lack of sportsmanship being demonstrated by both fans and players.

If you are reading this essay you can easily look back in the Frobertsworld files, and read that first commentary. I urge you to do so, because being the first work it had little readership. My comments were quite strong, but came about after careful consideration of the state of sportsmanship.

Not much has changed since my April 5th comments. Sports continues to be a very dangerous world physically, and a business model that is fraught with avarice. Little consideration by schools or owners is being given to the individual sports fans or the participating players. I was heartened to see two players ejected from the recent Notre Dame/ USC football game for fighting. It was disgusting to see an NFL Referee fail to penalize a Chicago Bear lineman who leveled the Minnesota Viking quarterback well after a play was over. Then there is the sick story of the New York Giant player Plaxico Burress who shot himself in a nightclub. The New Giants have made a good start by removing Burress from the active rolls, but the legal influences are now taking over and the issue will not be resolved for a long time. It is my opinion that Plaxico should not return to professional football.

Some thugs continue to roam the fields of sports, but little or nothing is done to prevent the accidents that are waiting to happen. Watch the indignation that will follow when some poor individual is killed. What kind of a message is sports sending to the youth of America? Fortunately only a few players are bringing discredit to the sporting world, but they tarnish the clean efforts of the majority.

There is so much money flowing into and around sports that it has poisoned the well. Player salaries, coaching salaries and contracts, team clothing sales, ticket prices, broadcast rights fees, bowl team fees, and the University Presidents greed to secure revenue through sports have all contributed to the corruption of sports. Little constructive leadership is coming from the heads of the NCAA, the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball or the Players Unions. Even the Olympic movement has been bought out by the desire to secure the inflated broadcast rights fees to the Games and the individual pressure to cheat to win the Gold. There is a smell to sports that is far worse than the aroma of hard earned sweat.

Greed rules all of sports today from the Universities, the professional team owners, the individual player’s excessive salaries, the fan’s demands for victory, the players’ unions, failure to enforce the rules by the governing bodies, etc. It will not stop until we stop feeding the pig.

COMMANDER GRANGER