Sports
The game at its purest
America is a land of mass psychoses. Witness the Salem witch trials, the Red Scare, the War on Terror. the Birther movement, the popularity of Will Ferrell. There’s nothing Americans like better than indulging themselves in the comfort of communal delusion and calling it shared wisdom.
And none of these delusions is more absurd (or more persistent) than the belief that college athletics is purer than professional sports.
Talk to die-hard college sports fans and they’ll tell you that college athletes play for the love of the game while professionals play for the love of the paycheck. They’ll scream up and down (faces painted, team hand gestures at the ready) that professional athletes don’t care, that they’ve been tainted by the money and the cars and the women, that they don’t try hard, that they don’t play with emotion, that they don’t care about winning, and that they won’t put their bodies on the line and give their all because … well, why bother, right?
This argument makes me so mad I can barely dictate this sentence to my unpaid foreign intern before sending him out to pick up my dry cleaning.
In order to even make it to the pros, you need skills and talent and size and speed and ability and luck, true, but more than that, you need to be so competitive that losing feels to you like death. The faraway dream of professional glory and riches isn’t enough motivation to keep a kid going through years of drills, practices, injuries, games, shame, and general inconvenience. His desire to not lose has to get him through. Athletes who make it all the way to the pros have been winning their entire lives, and the idea that their competitive instincts would just vanish because they’re suddenly making millions of dollars is nonsense. (And besides, when did making money become a cause for criticism in this country? In every other walk of life we look up to people who make money – especially those who came from no money, like many of our athletes – as examples of the American can-do spirit. We don’t revere amateur rappers or businessmen or computer programmers. Is college sports fandom the last true bastion of socialism in America?)
If you don’t believe me, check out this footage from a recent preseason game between the Utah Jazz and the Chicago Bulls. Again, this is a preseason game. A game that couldn’t be more insignificant. A game where even the 12th man – whose job it is usually to demonstrate his mastery of the ancient arts of towel-spinning, overenthusiastic head-nodding, and chest-bumping – gets a chance to play. Just watch this video and tell me these guys don’t care about winning, that somehow their love of the game and of competition has been tainted by fame and wealth, that they’re nothing more than soulless corporate entities vying for bigger endorsement deals.
Go on – tell me.
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