Sports Is Porn
I haven't seen a full tape of the Indiana-Detroit melee. I saw from the foul through the first fight in the stands on the local sports last night. It's nice to know that we will never run out of things to moralize about in the sportsworld, especially sports talk radio. The one silver lining in all this for Ron Artest is that it looks like he'll get his time off to promote his album.
As people griped about who was to blame, why fans have become willing to attack athletes (and vice versa) on the field (e.g., White Sox fans, Cubs fans), near the field (e.g., Yankees bullpen and Red Sox ground crew), and off (e.g., David Wells, Charles Barkley), and people spouted theories about resentment towards players for their salaries, it dawned on me the essential problem is that professional sports is essentially pornography. Socially acceptable porn, but porn nonetheless.
- A collection of wealthy individuals and/or companies hire freaks of nature to engage in an activity that anyone can participate in (and does participate in at some point in their lives), but with more skill and technique than the normal person is capable, for enormous sums of money. People watch with a combination of envy and awe. A combustible mix of desire, passion, and frustration, win or lose.
- In no other industry are employees as perfectly commodified as they are in sports. Television itself is alienating because it reduces the performers to mere characters in a t.v. show. But we then take their likenesses and sell them in the form of jerseys, baseball cards, magazine and newspaper photos, highlight reels, and talk shows.
- Nothing is more reductive than the video games: the person's performance is reduced to a creative representation of 1s and0s that the audience member controls; the players are literally under our thumbs.
- What this game's not good enough? Let's switch to the other channel and watch the other people and see if we can get off.
- Compare the average career length of a porn star and a pro athlete, especially football. Yet everyone points to the superstars as people who "made it" and ignores the hacks who fill out the rosters or don't even make the rosters.
- In no other industry are the employees called on to do the equivalent of an Inside the Actor's Studio before and after performances or even practices with journalists. Porn stars do not have to suffer the indignity of meeting with the press every day. Even politicians might go a day without conducting an interview when in session.
- And now players have to answer to the amateur reporter, the blogger, the obsessed fan who centers life around the performance of a particular player/team.
- We want our women to look and fuck like porn stars, yet when they do, we fault them for being whores. We do the same to pro athletes. When athletes perform poorly or behave inappropriately, we call them out as social pariahs. When they perform well, we heap ridiculous amounts of praise. But sometimes even winning isn't enough. They should have won by more. They should have called the timeout sooner. They gave the other team a chance to win or make it close.
- I won't even include the homoerotic undertones of the performances and descriptions by analysts, attire (e.g., who decided on the tight see through pants? who decided on the loose, off-the-shoulder tank-top for the NBA?), and social customs (e.g., the ass-patting, chest-bumping, the dances over the vanquished).
There are virtues in sports and competition. People can play for reasons other than those virtues: the love of the game; for fun; to earn approval or praise from others. However, the business of professional sports has divorced the virtues from the act in favor of what matters most: making money.
posted by RSaunders at 1:55 PM
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