Here we are again at the annual day of insanity. Super Bowl Sunday means the ingestion of grotesque amounts of chips and beer and tacos and “special recipes” for foodstuffs each more ghastly than the last. Money is spent in horrendously excessive ways on TV commercials.
Here in the San Francisco Bay area where I live, one particular football player is getting death threats for flubbing two punts, causing the San Francisco Forty-Niners to lose their chance to play in this particular championship game.
In Egypt, soccer fans are killing each other in their zeal to support their teams.
I hate it. I hate it all.
I’ve always hated sports. This is not, of course, something a civilized person admits in polite society. (Not without running the risk of a lynch mob.) But I do. Organized sports, team sports, professional sports, in my humble opinion are a monumental evil perpetrated upon a bored and listless society for the purpose of artificially inducing excitement.
It’s a fraud.
To say that is a contrarian opinion is probably the world’s biggest understatement. When I was in high school, for a while I played clarinet in the marching band. (Until the demands of play rehearsals made that impossible.) I used to bring my Latin book to study while the game was going on, putting it down only for our half-time performance. Granted, I was a smart aleck kid, but still, the sentiment was sincere. The game, to me, was clearly a waste of time. With a built-in heartbreak. Somebody was always going to win and somebody was always going to lose.
When the time drew near for college, and the star athletes began garnering scholarships that we theater folk could only dream of, my ire rose. Because they could out muscle other kids on the football field, they were being rewarded with that which to me was the most valuable of all commodities, an education.
I haven’t mellowed with age, on this subject, as you can see. I’m all for physical activity. I still remember my pride when my son Rich, in junior high, decided not to try out for the track team, thus to have to compete, but instead got up early enough before school every day to run the track, by himself. Rich has grown up with full measure of the values that organized sports are supposed to impart. He plays well with others. He knows how to cooperate with colleagues to put forth a team effort. (As a matter of fact, he won an Emmy not too long ago; the work that won it involved this exact quality.)
The recent Penn State horror story illuminates what happens when the tail wags the dog of organized sports. Values are distorted, not enhanced. Why did no one blow the whistle on that child-molesting monster? Because the sport, the team, was more important. That’s a value?
Now comes news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has named basketball super-star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a global cultural ambassador. Among his tasks, “using sports as a means of empowerment.” He will, the State Department says, “travel the world to engage a generation of young people to help promote diplomacy.”
He may be a lovely fellow. I’m guessing from his long list of good works that he is. But he will be promoting sports, and that means somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. Is that really how we as a species are going to move toward peace?
Bonnie Remsberg is an award-winning writer of books, magazine articles, films, television scripts and plays. She holds the Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Her plays, for puppets and people, have premiered at the National Puppetry Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. She and her husband, Rev. Raymond Teague, an Interfaith wedding officiant in Northern California, (www.californiaweddingjoy.com) are writing a book together: "Chocolate Foreplay -- Loving More and Being Happy.
