Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once famously said, “A date is an experience you have with another person that makes you appreciate being alone.” The disillusionment may have had something to do with his on-air divorce (and real off-air one) as his art imitates his life.
For me, my great love affair with athletics is going through a serious estrangement, and no imitation of life. The drama of athletic competition is increasingly sullied by political sermonizing. That’s just what I want to see: ill-informed millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires (billionaires?), and their managing corporate suits, who know little beyond the playing courts and fields, giving us their chic ruminations on today’s issues-of-the-moment. It’s disgusting when each big event is turned into an opportunity for agitprop. I’ve joined the legions who’ve abandoned Big Sports, Inc., for the pleasures of other diversions – – with the occasional sneak peek, to be honest.
Big Sports, Inc., is in trouble. The problem for them is more long-term than short-term. In the near term, though, their losing older viewers like myself (a baby boomer), whose habits and loyalties are hard-wired. Sports-viewing and sports-playing are in our blood; yet, radical left political demonstrations that were thought to be relegated to college-campus romper rooms were brought into our homes just as we settled into watching the championship run of the Golden State Warriors or SF 49ers or SF Giants. Our sports stars began spouting slogans of the Marxist BLM and besmirching our flag and anthem with open displays of their radicalism. Provocative effrontery will illicit provocative reactions. It’s like they are courting resentment toward their product when they ought to be selling it. Shameful acts started piling up each year after 2016.
Older fans were taking many punches to the gut of their enthusiasm. The 2016-2017 kneeling protests ignited a fan protest of the player protest. Rasmussen at the time found 32% of adult respondents “are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field.” Some undoubtedly returned, but many didn’t. Another slice of the fan base gone.
Then George Floyd hit the air waves. The tendentious sermonizing became less ad hoc and more systematized with the full participation of corporate headquarters. It swept across the world of Big Sports, Inc. My beloved SF Giants behaved like college snowflakes down to the coaches at the start of last season. I cancelled my MLB streaming contract. The rest of the oligopoly were equally as giddy about sliming us and our views, taking their cues from the worst of the demagogues in our academic and political worlds. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary’s “deplorables” and Biden and company’s “white racism, white racism, white racism everywhere”?
According to Forbes in December 2020, in the 2020 sports year, the NBA Finals saw viewership collapse by 49%; the Stanley Cup saw an astounding 71% fee fall; and the NFL’s week 14 ratings dipped another 7%. Surveys at the time pointed much of the finger of blame at player politicization of the athletic field. A Harris poll in the fall of 2020 found 32% of sports fans chose “The league has become too political” among the ten options for their disenchantment. Does LeBron James sense something damaging is afoot when he took to microphones and cameras to condemn the Houston Rockets’ owner for daring to come to defense of the beleaguered citizens of Hong Kong? James, one of the most outspoken of the NBA’s player mandarins, saw evaporating dollars in Red China’s expanding market as he and others of the politicized left in the league ironically worked assiduously to shrink the domestic one. What other plausible explanation can there be for running interference for one of history’s most brutal totalitarian regimes?
Certainly, another political act – the authoritarian shutdowns in panic response to the virus – has taken its toll. People commanded to conduct life without much of a schedule, zooming at leisure, are more willing to be more impulsive in their viewing habits. Cutting the chord is rampant; Netflix memberships lift off. Combined with the younger generations unaccustomed to games without a hand-controller, Big Sports’ long-term prospects look grim. The leagues are challenged by broad and threatening currents, and their stars go on a jihad to smear a chunk of the fan base. Go figure.
The behavior has tarred March Madness, and this just at the time when the PAC-12 had its best showing in years. Four of the five entrants made it to the Sweet Sixteen. But the coaches’ incessant fiddling with their masks, the gym not much more populated with live human beings than an ancient Roman catacomb, and endless ads based on the juvenile theme of “diversity is our strength” would drive away anyone but the die-hards. Just anticipating that this stuff is coming is enough to dampen the desire to see more. So, I no longer whip myself for missing a game. Que sara sara.
Coming this weekend is the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. I am planning to watch it, but, then again, I won’t seek counseling if I miss it. Que sara sara.
A postscript: As I write, MLB is facing tremendous pressure from lefty CEO’s and our doddering lefty president to join them in punishing Georgia for voter ID, more secure absentee ballot drop-boxes, early voting even on weekends (something absent in Biden’s Delaware), broadening access to voting in a myriad of other ways, and a ban on shot-gunning ballots to all. And they have the moxie to call this Jim Crow? I didn’t know that a Bull Connor lurked in the heart of every legal voter who worries about their elections becoming a Woodstock bacchanalia. If MLB caves, I’ll put myself in the same place in regards to MLB, and its well-heeled collaborators, when dealing with a nasty relative: in a location far away from them.
RogerG