Are big-time sports outwearing their welcome?

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: Column

SPORTS have a long and time-honored history from the Greek Olympics to the playing fields of Eton, where the British claimed future battles were won. Its proponents asserted that sports promoted fair play (hence the phrase, "to give one a sporting chance") and, through competition, produced excellence. Team sports taught the necessity and value of cooperation and the need of sacrificing one's own glory for the sake of the unit.

Fans, in turn, developed loyalty to a team, a city, indeed, a nation. There was a time, for instance, when the British Open in golf, or the tennis championship at Wimbledon, were won by foreigners, the British Isles practically went into national mourning. This cultural disgrace announced to all that England no longer was a world power. Supposedly, what happened in sports somehow carried over into real life.

Such may have been the case, but it no longer is true. This high praise now rings as hollow as the pious pronouncement that "it doesn't matter whether one wins or loses, but how one plays the game." (Is there a coach alive who could keep his job if he believed this?)

Overlapping seasons

Following the false adage that "if some is good, more is better," the plethora of sports today and the way the games are conducted soon may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. At one time, various sports each had a traditional season, but now they overlap as baseball extends into the football schedule, the latter into basketball and hockey season, and golf into all four.

Sociologists, normally not the most prescient of professors, now correctly view sports as the new religion and the stadium as its church. The lives of many Americans are centered around these events, as "Monday Night Football" has demonstrated. For a goodly number, though, it also coincides with nap time, and no one knows whether there are more snoozers or watchers while the game is on TV.

Conversations among men incessantly utilize sports talk as a common denominator, and no one is an insider unless he can quote players' and teams' endless boring statistics. The insatiable thirst for such data has prompted The Denver Post to put out two sports sections on Monday during baseball season. A friend of mine, upon seeing the news that the Cubs lost, refuses to read the rest of the paper. Americans are obsessed with sports talk and collectibles, and the disease has spread to kids, who pay big dollars for player cards, shirts, caps, jackets, and, most outrageous of...