Saturday, February 19, 2005
The conventional wisdom about the National Hockey League strike seems to be that the obliterated season demonstrates that there really isn't much fan interest in the sport, but I'm not so sure. Perhaps what it shows is who sport really belongs to, and if that message gets through maybe we will be able to start down the road to a saner Sports Word.
I enjoy hockey, but it has been at least three years since I have been to an NHL game. I had a great time at the Bemeji-Niagara game earlier this season, and have been trying to get it together to see another college game. It probably won't happen, but I've been following the local college hockey season with interest. It has been an interesting year in local college sports generally, in the usual bi-polar way that sports are always interesting: Canisus College, the local Jesuit institution has been in a state of meltdown, firing its long-time hockey coach when the students pressured the school's athletic director to do so. (The Buffalo News called them "players", not students, which gets at the heart of that problem quite nicely.) On the other hand, UB's basketball team has been playing well, and might get a bid to the NCAA Tournament.
And there you have it-- I read the sports pages because I enjoy reading good news-- stories about people striving, stories about hard work being rewarded, stories about the extraordinary positive things that people are capable of-- even if, in the end, these things are really just games. In an important way they are not "just" games-- athletes apply themselves to their tasks as methodically and rigorously as anyone working on something covered in the other parts of the newspaper, so why shouldn't we take what they do seriously? In fact, we do-- sports is big business, and we all follow it, and what that means is that sports belongs to all of us. The NHL seems to think that it owns hockey, but that's demonstrably untrue: the NHL hasn't dropped a puck this season, but there has been hockey, and there will continue to be hockey. The NHL is run like a Ponzi scheme, but that has nothing to do with the sport. Jerry Seinfeld has famously said that following professional sports is really just rooting for laundry, and I have to say that I agree-- when people talk about how the Red Sox waited 86 years to win the World Series I fell like looking around to find the octogenarians on the team. These guys haven't waited 86 years, and it isn't really true that the fans have, either. Who owns the World Series? Well, the collection of players that won last year-- the athletes themselves-- accomplished it, so you'd have to say that it was theirs. In doing it, they made a lot of people quite happy, so in a sense those people, as beneficiaries of the victory, so to speak, also have a share. And then there are the team owners, who benefit financially. Of course they are the real owners of the sport in the economic sense, but what they really own is the platform for the athletes to perform on, and for the fans to witness the performance. Sports business is terribly run-- as a business-- but the athletes perform brilliantly, and we care passionately. Although it is probably true that the fans are exploited, and while it is arguably true that the athletes do not receive the full, fair economic share of the fruits of their effort in the end the athletes and the fans are the ones that sports belong to. The platform owners-- the NHL, for example-- can't take sports away, even if they think they can.
I like Anil Adyanthaya's idea: the trustees of the Stanley Cup should "award the Cup to this year's champion of the American Hockey League, which is the best league in North America now that the N.H.L. is gone for the year." Or award it to the winner of the NCAA tournament.
Sports belong to the people who care about them-- care enough to work to become athletes, or just care enough to care. In a perfect world everyone would be personally invested in sport by virtue of participation. I have said before that I've always considered myself an athlete, so I feel that my sports participation makes me a shareholder. We had dinner at Cole's tonight, and at the next table was the Oswego State basketball team, in town to take on the Bengals of Buff State. It was a heartening scene-- they were with their coaches, and the trainer. Behind them, on the television, UAB and Cincinnati were playing, and from time to time one of them would glance at the game. They were quiet, but cheerful. There aren't too many levels of basketball lower than Buff State vs Oswego, but they were getting into their game heads, you could tell. Their sport plainly belongs to them-- these are not college athletes who drive Humvees. They are at school to be at school, and while they are there, they are playing a game that they love.
The economic owners are the stewards of sport, and quite often they are bad custodians of something that I think we all agree is valuable. Because it is valuable, the poor stewards can only really end up hurting the economic component of the games that we love. People care about hockey-- but we may be learning that it is hockey we like, not laundry.
I enjoy hockey, but it has been at least three years since I have been to an NHL game. I had a great time at the Bemeji-Niagara game earlier this season, and have been trying to get it together to see another college game. It probably won't happen, but I've been following the local college hockey season with interest. It has been an interesting year in local college sports generally, in the usual bi-polar way that sports are always interesting: Canisus College, the local Jesuit institution has been in a state of meltdown, firing its long-time hockey coach when the students pressured the school's athletic director to do so. (The Buffalo News called them "players", not students, which gets at the heart of that problem quite nicely.) On the other hand, UB's basketball team has been playing well, and might get a bid to the NCAA Tournament.
And there you have it-- I read the sports pages because I enjoy reading good news-- stories about people striving, stories about hard work being rewarded, stories about the extraordinary positive things that people are capable of-- even if, in the end, these things are really just games. In an important way they are not "just" games-- athletes apply themselves to their tasks as methodically and rigorously as anyone working on something covered in the other parts of the newspaper, so why shouldn't we take what they do seriously? In fact, we do-- sports is big business, and we all follow it, and what that means is that sports belongs to all of us. The NHL seems to think that it owns hockey, but that's demonstrably untrue: the NHL hasn't dropped a puck this season, but there has been hockey, and there will continue to be hockey. The NHL is run like a Ponzi scheme, but that has nothing to do with the sport. Jerry Seinfeld has famously said that following professional sports is really just rooting for laundry, and I have to say that I agree-- when people talk about how the Red Sox waited 86 years to win the World Series I fell like looking around to find the octogenarians on the team. These guys haven't waited 86 years, and it isn't really true that the fans have, either. Who owns the World Series? Well, the collection of players that won last year-- the athletes themselves-- accomplished it, so you'd have to say that it was theirs. In doing it, they made a lot of people quite happy, so in a sense those people, as beneficiaries of the victory, so to speak, also have a share. And then there are the team owners, who benefit financially. Of course they are the real owners of the sport in the economic sense, but what they really own is the platform for the athletes to perform on, and for the fans to witness the performance. Sports business is terribly run-- as a business-- but the athletes perform brilliantly, and we care passionately. Although it is probably true that the fans are exploited, and while it is arguably true that the athletes do not receive the full, fair economic share of the fruits of their effort in the end the athletes and the fans are the ones that sports belong to. The platform owners-- the NHL, for example-- can't take sports away, even if they think they can.
I like Anil Adyanthaya's idea: the trustees of the Stanley Cup should "award the Cup to this year's champion of the American Hockey League, which is the best league in North America now that the N.H.L. is gone for the year." Or award it to the winner of the NCAA tournament.
Sports belong to the people who care about them-- care enough to work to become athletes, or just care enough to care. In a perfect world everyone would be personally invested in sport by virtue of participation. I have said before that I've always considered myself an athlete, so I feel that my sports participation makes me a shareholder. We had dinner at Cole's tonight, and at the next table was the Oswego State basketball team, in town to take on the Bengals of Buff State. It was a heartening scene-- they were with their coaches, and the trainer. Behind them, on the television, UAB and Cincinnati were playing, and from time to time one of them would glance at the game. They were quiet, but cheerful. There aren't too many levels of basketball lower than Buff State vs Oswego, but they were getting into their game heads, you could tell. Their sport plainly belongs to them-- these are not college athletes who drive Humvees. They are at school to be at school, and while they are there, they are playing a game that they love.
The economic owners are the stewards of sport, and quite often they are bad custodians of something that I think we all agree is valuable. Because it is valuable, the poor stewards can only really end up hurting the economic component of the games that we love. People care about hockey-- but we may be learning that it is hockey we like, not laundry.
// posted by Bill @ 3:56 PM 
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