The State of Sports, by a Casual Sports Fan.

I agree with Chuck Klosterman when he says that the most important part of liking sports is hating sports. The general respect for sports in society reflects the wish to be perceived as athletic, and it is this crucial break between reality and myth that I think tells us a lot about what our myths are, as a people of these United States. As I believe there exists a degree of consciousness in each casual sports fan, and hopefully, the capacity to understand in those unversed in sports), I'm going to try and write so anyone understands.

My first example is the sport of basketball, played in the National Basketball Association (NBA) between five-man teams.

In the NBA, the perception is that players who score many points by shooting the ball through the basket whether from a two-point range, a three-point range, and a one-point "free throw" that occurs when a referee deems a foul has been committed against a player while that player was in the process of attempting to score one of the aforementioned two shots. In fact, many of the players who were stars on very successful franchises, like Bill Russel with the Boston Celtics teams in the 60s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbarr with 1980s Los Angeles Lakers teams and Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls franchise in the 1990s. These are players who are the elite players because they win the most games, and they take home the most trophies.

Then comes a two-pronged deception: sports don't actually measure athletic ability. They are, fundamentally, a show of athletic ability, and therefore the perception is more important than the reality. When a team wins a championship, it can reasonably say that it is a great team, but all the other teams have to jockey for position in other ways, always only definitively submissive to the most recent champion, and to a team that had recently beaten them. It is the players who are not elite who score many points that the system unfairly favors. The importance of efficiency in scoring, and seemingly auxileury skills like rebounding and turnover aversion is mightily undervalued by the people who watch sports, and therefore by the corporations that pay the players. Points! Points! Points! in the media. Points! Points! Points! in the mind.

So a player's incentive is to become a good scorer, whether it helps the team (and the rest of its players) succeed or not (rising tide etc.). Whether that mean withholding practice techniques or other "tips of the trade" to his less successful teammates, or adopting any consideration of them whatsoever, he attempts to create the perception that he is a good player, because as long as it is perceived by customers that certain players are better, they will be treated as such by the owners. Sports therefore become the competition of attempting to be perceived as althetic.

This is the obligatory "persona adoptoion." All legendary sports stars have "personas," created and supported by the press, allegedly revealing their inner feelings about being a legendary sports star. It's like he's Jesus all of a sudden and has got all these disciples to "bring tha word" to the folks back home about how they, too, can advance in this pyramid scheme, and what it's like and how nice it is to be at the top. Lesser players have personas, too, and the medicore scorers wind up being like those really loud small dogs. When players don't win, they lack credibility and don't get paid as much. Players who are lucky early in their careers, the rookies-of-the-year and early peakers, gain credibility at that time that they often turn into respect over their whole career, earning more later on, when they had tanked, than they deserved. Tracy MacGrady, Allen Iverson. At the end of the day, though, all players are the same, only at different levels of the hierarchy demanded by the game's rules.

"Catch that quote from Canada's foremost free agent-to-be? "I haven't been this encouraged in a while," Bosh said. And that was before Hedo's clutch drive and FTs pulled out a one-point win over the Lakers. " - ESPN.com

(http://espn.com/nba/powerrankings?year=2010&week=13)

Okay, let's do this line by line, word by word. "Catch that quote?" It's like this message just something you're supposed to have heard already just because it historically happened and they have been talking about it. It's a judgment, saying "if you didn't know this already, you're not following sports well enough. Around a competition to be perceived as having athletic ability revolves a competition to be see as connected to the world of manliest men. Instead of really coming from a love of sport that creates an emotional need to follow them, however, it's about the perception of being in tune with that data stream, and emotionally connected to it, to themselves and also to others. This in an age where the overwhelming majority of the viewers of sports are not in the stadiums they're held at, so what they're watching is a group of people watching a game the way people used to watch games.

"from Canada's formost free agent-to-be?"

This tells the casual basketball fan that this message refers to a player who plays for the Toronto Raptors, the only National Basketball Association (NBA) team in Canada. Casual sports fans also know that the only other Canadian franchise they care about at all is the Toronto Blue Jays, especially because they play in the same division of teams as the New York Yankees, a very popular franchise, in Major League Baseball (MLB). The National Football League (NFL) has no canadian franchises, and indeed very few foreign players at all. Hmm...

Part of the reason that the NFL is so popular in the United States is that most of its employees are United States citizens. Citizens are seen as being worth at least respect, at worst fear, and at best, admiration. The Central- and South American and European players who have begun to become more important in Baseball, and Basketball, respectively. Hockey has always had many Candian players, but hockey is not a respected sport among casual- or team specific sports fans, whom I assert make up the vast majority of sports fans. I mean, if you go to Hockey games, you see your team's guy fight the other team's guy. You get into it, it's barbaric. And that leads to team-specificty. The casual sports fan, however, never goes to Hockey games, so they never think about the existence of all the Canadian (or any other, really, except Wayne Gretzky) hockey players. So, by clinging to Football, Americans can express nationalism.

The central deception of sports is that they mean anything. Any critically minded person could tell you that sports are part of the entertainment sector of the economy, the fantasy-realm. Sports are exposed as one of the myths of our time, the practical polytheism demanded by consumption of entertainment. This is the realm of the celebrity-god, the pinnacle of success as an entertainer, presenter, forger of mythical identity. At the same time, the casually critically-minded casual sports fan will also consider that sports are meaningless, and that this individual is very lucky to be in his very wealthy position (as luck and wealth are directly correlated). The phrase "free agent-to-be" fuses references to the player's status as a "free agent" and the phrase "bride-to-be" and similar phrases. The player being designated a "free agent" refers to the fact that this player's contract with his current team will expire at the end of the season. Players sign with a team for a set amount of seasons, the last of which becomes the player's "free agent" season. The "bride-to-be" reference connects the player's situation to that of the mythical young girl, finally coming into the world and taking her place as a lovely wife, living nowhere but in our heads. So banal is too the player's situation, part of a cycle of spectacle's that keep sports interesting. If ever game were the same, people wouldn't watch.