I have never been interested in professional sports, but I came from a sports’ loving family. I recall fondly my father watching one ball game on TV while listening to another on a transistor radio plugged into his ear. Dad had been a high school athlete, and though baseball was his favorite sport he also enjoyed watching basketball and football, with the occasional hockey game tossed in. I can only imagine his reaction to seeing multi-millionaire athletes turning his beloved contests of sport into platforms for Leftist politics. There is a lot of money to be made by entrepreneurs who come up with politics free sport ventures.
As far as I can see, the source of this would be professional-managerial types who live in a social world where certain attitudes define in-groups and out-groups and they can hardly imagine the sensibilities of people outside the social bubbles they inhabit. (The fiasco at Gillette looks for all the world like a daisy-chain of principal-agent problems). Given these industries are oligopolistic and (in the case of professional sports) organized in cartels, they may not suffer much commercially as everyone else is assaulting their audience with the same rubbish. For people who find it repellent, there’s a choice to put up with it or find another hobby. (I’m hoping they do find another hobby; enough stupid team owners go under, the survivors will be people perceptive enough to dial it back).
Raymond Aron spoke of ‘the unification of the elites’ as a hallmark of totalitarian societies. Fifty years ago, you might have seen all sorts of asininity abroad among the faculty (and the media, and a section of the bar). Business executives, scientists and engineers, and the military were different. To a great extent, this was true 15 years ago as well. Very abruptly, you are seeing this stupidity all over. I’m not understanding why.
(It is agreeable that the ratio of Gillette’s sales to the sales of Schick and other competitors has fallen from 2.3:1 to 1:1.
I don’t buy Gillette. I don’t watch football, baseball, basket ball or any of the rest where grown children play with a ball for millions of dollars. It’s all excrement and a waste of money. That these sports are now turned into liberal media platforms and the players embrace this makes the players all the more reprehensible. I see any sports on TV, the channel gets changed immediately.
Agreed completely, Art and LQC.
I used to live and breathe team sports, especially baseball and basketball. The St. Louis Cardinals and San Antonio Spurs accounted for thousands of hours of my attention over the years. No more. To some extent I think I have become more jealous of my time as I grow older, but the grotesque politicization of sports has driven my decline in interest all the way to zero. The latest displays of stupefying wokeness were the last straw for MLB. The NBA lost me three years ago when Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr decided to become political pundits, at which they are largely incompetent, instead of basketball coaches, at which both have excelled. I’ll never understand why these people insist on killing their golden goose.
One further note on the TV ratings decline: Some of it may just be the realization by many viewers that team sports without fans in attendance are pointless, and even an individual sport like golf loses quite a bit when played in a near vacuum. NASCAR can get away with it because the noise of the vehicles drowns out everything else, but the others are not at all the same in empty arenas or ballparks. Might as well have the players compete via computer games, as NASCAR did during the lockdown. The result is about the same.
I find televised poker far more exciting and interesting.
MLB is BLM bass ackwards.
In a world where you are going to die!!! and you are a racist, watching over-sized, unlettered multi-millionaires disrespect our flag and way of life doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Even when slapped upside their heads with a wet trout, they don’t get it:
https://www.redstate.com/bradslager/2020/08/05/more-activist-lessons-for-the-nba-to-ignore-player-who-stands-for-anthem-now-has-a-best-selling-jersey/
Frank, that’s really interesting. Sports fandom relies on the superstition that me cheering in the stadium, or me wearing my lucky jersey while watching the game at home, somehow influences the outcome. If it doesn’t, then the players really are just people I’ve never met, from different places, who happen to have my favorite city’s name on their shirts.
Pinky, your point is also interesting, and I hadn’t thought of it from that angle for quite a while. I was thinking more of the general atmosphere of the event being highly dependent on crowd reactions. But from the players’ side…another matter, as is the superstition around fan behavior wherever they may be during a game. Lots of factors must be at work here. I am still quite sure the leagues are hurting themselves with their customers with the “woke” stuff, but who knows how much? As Art pointed out above, it may be that the leagues won’t even suffer that much unless larger numbers of people find it all completely repellent.