Sports and Money - Part 3

MONEY IS THE PROBLEM

            I don’t have an issue with great players making millions of dollars.  Those guys work hard, and it’s not like they can play their sport for all that long.  I can even understand why the owners are millionaires (obviously you’d have to be rich to buy a sports team), even though, of all of those stodgy dudes, only one, Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavericks), seems like he’d be a cool guy to have a beer with. 

            The thing is, they’d still all be rich even if the tickets only cost twenty bucks.  Every blade of grass now has corporate sponsorship.  “Oww, that was a monster hit Simmons made with his Under Armour helmet, wasn’t it, Bill?”  “It sure was, Phil.  Let’s watch it again on our Publix Slo-Mo Rewind.”  “Simmons is wearing a blue armband today in honor of Walmart’s patriotic contribution of second-hand underwear to our armed service men and women, isn’t he, Bill?”

            Corporate sponsorship is so out of control that they get to just invent bowl games now.  First there were a few college football end-of-the-season, playoffesque bowl games.  They’d invite the best teams to compete in pageantry-laden games with familiar names like The Rose Bowl and The Cotton Bowl.  Then companies started buying the rights to some of those bowl games.  They could have just advertised heavily during the games and splashed their logos around the stadiums, but no, they had to add their names to damn titles, as in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.  As if that weren’t greedy enough, then they just started making crap up.  The Chick-fil-A Bowl?  The New Era Pinstripe Bowl??  And they act as if their fake bowl games are just as important as the real ones, as if there’s some long and storied tradition of tough, leather-helmeted football players in the 40’s playing in a game sponsored by a company that won’t be invented for another thirty years. 

            That kind of hubris would be laughable if it weren't so successful.  And we’ll watch these things, because football is cool and maybe our team, even if they weren't all that good this year, will get to play in a bowl game.  We’re loyal, especially to college teams which represent our alma maters.  We’re loyal, and so the losers at the NCAA (a truly ridiculous entity whose pronouncements make about as much sense as voting for Rick Perry for president or letting your dog drive) and the corporate remoras who surround sports now know that they have us over a barrel.

            Money is the problem.  Every day, one more of my beloved sports talk radio guys gives his opinion that college athletes should get paid.  That used to be a minority opinion.  Not anymore.  Now that top-tier coaches make millions and the colleges make millions off of the players, it does seem, on the surface, kind of ridiculous that the players who earn millions for the school get in trouble when they sell their jerseys to some shmuck in a memorabilia store for fifty bucks to earn some beer money.  I’m all for the purity of sport in theory but, honestly, why not give those kids a small stipend?  Just make it part of the scholarship.

            Money is the problem.  We don’t need to get all money removed from sports, but we do need to push the raging beast of greed back down to a manageable size.  My sports talk radio guys spend half of their time on the air talking about money---how much this player earns, including his bonuses---how much room under the salary cap would allow the team to draft this guy versus that guy---how much this linebacker was fined the last time he made a helmet-to-helmet hit---how much money the team gets in NFL-shared revenue---and so on, and so on.

            It’s gotten out of hand.  I’m worried that money’s well on its way toward destroying one of the best things we, as a species, have come up with so far: sports.  We cannot let that happen.  Or, at the very least, we need to start inventing some new sports.  Maybe something with tossing live baby alligators at rhinos.  I think I’d pay to see that…at least until “gatorball” gets bought up by Tony Lama.

            And we haven’t even mentioned NASCAR.