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March 19, 2006
On Any Given Payday...
The World Baseball Classic is coming to a dramatic and successful close, with Monday's final between Cuba and Japan at San Diego's Petco Park. If you're a baseball die-hard, it's been a fun tournament, with thrilling finishes and the Korean team's surprise run to the semi-finals. But casual fans -- at least in America -- aren't paying much attention; the United States was eliminated in the quarterfinal round.
The WBC flop follows similar disappointments for the United States in other sports. The US men's basketball team laid an egg in Athens at the 2004 Summer Olympics, settling for a bronze medal. (This came after the humiliating debacle at the 2002 World Championships, in which the US lost three of its last four games and finished sixth.) More recently, the US Olympic Men's Hockey team went to Torino as medal favorites, and promptly defecated in the sleeping area and was bounced from the tournament without looking like a remote threat for even the bronze.
What gives? The United States is home to the major sporting leagues of the world, the most developed college athletics system anywhere on the globe, and has a wealth of resources to throw at sports. How come all of a sudden we can't win in international team competition? Actually, we don't just "not win;" we tend to crash and burn like the Six Million Dollar Man's spaceship. What the heck's the problem?
In a word, it's money.
Sports in the United States have become carictature. Be it baseball, basketball, hockey, football, soccer, or any other sport, sport has strayed far from the spirit of team competition and become business -- a simple chase of money. Be it in the nominally "professional" leagues (whose players rarely behave "professionally"), or in the college ranks where we still keep up the ridiculous facade that the players are "amateurs," sport in the United States is all about the Benjamins. Fans, owners, and especially players care not for the game, but for themselves -- if we love home run chases, who cares if the players are cheating? If butts are in the seats of the stadiums our owners have built, who cares if the players cheat to deliver? And players... they live in a me-me-me world more suited to two year olds in day care than alleged professionals.
Want a couple of prime examples? The baseball season starts in two weeks. New York Yankee Gary Sheffield is already giving interviews from spring training complaining about the pressure he feels before the season begins. Is the pressure because the Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2000, and he as one of the team's leaders is expected to return the trophy to his team and city? Nah. Sheffield feels pressure because he "only" has one more year remaining on his contract, and despite making $13 million this year and being a 39 year old player with durability questions, he's unhappy that the Yankees haven't yet signed him to a longer contract.
“I'm still not comfortable. The thing is, I'm not allowed to be comfortable," he said before the Yankees played the Florida Marlins in a spring training game. "And that's the reality of my situation. I always have to play with my back against the wall."
Here's another. After the US hockey team whimpered out or Torino, you'd think that team "leader" Mike Modano would have been most upset about the fact that his heaviliy favored team lost badly, playing uninspired hockey. Instead, he complained loudly about his travel accomodations.
"You'd think USA Hockey would be a well-oiled machine, but it's not," he said. "Basically we were on our own for hotels, tickets, flights, stuff like that. Normally we wouldn't have to worry about stuff like that."
Hey, Mike, guess what? The fans who buy tickets to see you play -- whether in Torino or Dallas or anywhere else -- are on their own for hotels, tickets, flights, and stuff like that. They manage to do their jobs every day.
Frankly, sports in the United States today can't be bothered with something if it doesn't involve major amounts of money directly to the players and owners. The World Baseball Classic? It's an exhibition; it distracts from the business of spring training. The Olympics? The NHL grumbles its way through a two week break in the season every four years to begrudgingly accomodate them. The biggest question about the US basketball teams most often is whether Nike or Reebok will sponsor the team and get their logo on the uniforms.
Believe it or not, as much as I may sound like it, I am not writing this post to complain about the state of sports today and how it was purer when I was a kid. Nor am I trying to place blame on Mike Modano for US hockey's flop or Gary Sheffield for the US performance in the WBC. Sports as a business and not a game has given us thrilling wild card races and rotisserie leagues in baseball (the FLAKS league draft is now less than two weeks away, and my binders and magazines full of notations sit in the Do Not Lose This Place of Honor on my desk, so I fully admit to enjoying the fruits of the system here). The current set up has given us March Madness, the spectacle that is the Super Bowl, and has ingrained ESPN so deeply in our culture that having a cable system without it is literally unthinkable for 96% of American males. I watch Sports Center from the treadmill on those mornings I actually make it to the treadmill. I'm not pretending to be above it all... I'm a part of it.
I am, however, trying to explain why a US sports team has not won a major international competition since 1999 (and even then it was the Women's World Cup soccer team -- a team from an environment not yet driven by and obsessed with money).
American sports fans must wake up to the fact that our system -- our athletes, our organizing committees, even ourselves as fans -- simply is not about winning any longer; it is about money. Where winning abets the bottom line, so much the better, but our system does not value winning for winning's sake. International competitions like the World Baseball Classic or the Olympics, for as much money is behind them, are still about competing, and about winning. If you don't think so, observe the passion and excitement that players -- not just fans, but players -- on the teams from the Dominican Republic or Korea have shown for winning games in this tournament. Even though many of the Latin players in particular also play in Major League Baseball, they're still from a culture not as dominated by money and individual payout. Winning, even without a massive payday to serve as motivation, still matters to them, for its own sake. And so they've won. And so the US has lost. And as long as the system remains as it is, it's hard for me to imagine the US not losing. The days of the US dominating international competition are over. We simply don't care enough. Winning for its own sake is no longer what American sports are about, unless there's a big check involved. Without the money, we just don't care. And without change, it's going to be a long time before the US wins another major sport international competition.
The United States has more resources to throw into athletics than any other nation, resources designed to build supertrained, highly tuned athletes and the very best programs on earth. It's ironic that it is the very abundance of those resources that keeps us from doing the very thing that sports were supposed to be about all this time: winning.
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Comments
very true. We need more teams like the Visigoths, who demonstrate that winning is not everything, but competing (badly, at many times, I am afraid) IS everything.
Posted by: anonymous at March 19, 2006 03:32 PM
One local sports columnist partially agrees with you.
Posted by: Linkmeister at March 19, 2006 09:01 PM
