Warm Up Before The Game...
I have two teens in high school this year that started classes last Monday. My sons (one a freshman) have left the house at 7:30 a.m. and come home after 9:00 p.m. on three of these first five days. Now, it is not that my boys are spending extra time in the library. They are not in study groups, or working on getting ahead in math. They have not decided to get a jump start on a term paper, or chosen to volunteer helping students with special needs. It is something much more important that has them holding the hours of a Fortune 500 CEO. Something much more integral to ensuring they grow up to understand the importance of community, hard work, dedication, unity, and leadership. They are involved in something without which their childhoods would be considered dangerously lacking by many in todays society. They are playing sports.
Rules Of The Game...
When I was a teenager I did not participate in organized sports very much, but I did spend a decent amount of time playing basketball in the park and watching football and basketball on television rather than doing my homework. I enjoyed it. I understand the pull. Competition, exercise, community, teamwork. I get it. As a parent I also see the importance of teaching our children to work together while also learning to lead, to work hard while also enjoying what we do, to follow instruction while also learning to contribute, and to respect others even when we disagree. It could certainly be argued that these things could be taught through sports, so I do not believe sports are intrinsically evil or devoid of any positive elements.
Technical Foul
Unfortunately, America is addicted to sports. As with any addiction, you take something that can be beneficial in certain circumstances and in proper measure and you misuse it until it becomes destructive. More importantly, you refuse to accept that there is anything wrong with it in the first place, or that you have problem. Sports on every level from grade school to professional has become the realm of fantasy, narcissism, greed, and indulgence. It is an addiction of first order.
The simple truth is that humanity did not come out of the womb playing basketball, and there is nothing external to the game that it can teach us that we cannot learn in other ways. Sports outside of leisure is not needed to survive or even to thrive. Indeed, in its current form the positive possibilities provided by participating in sports are being quickly replaced with yet another system that provides humanity a way to attach their identity to something superficial.
Imagine a universe where my fourteen year old son practiced soccer two or three times a week and played a game on Saturday afternoon. A universe where he benefited from the community, team building, and all rest, without requiring him to literally spend more time kicking a ball than he spends reading, doing homework, and spending time with family combined! Our priorities are hugely off balance. As I mentioned, their schedule looks more like that of a CEO than a kid.
The Super Star In The Rough
Out of the millions of children we send through the public education system, and the hundreds of thousands that participate in sports, a tiny percentage of them will become professional athletes. Let's face it, in all likelihood it will not be your kid. Frankly, I would not want it to be my kid. I know I am standing on dangerous ground here. I realize you can effect change and be truly successful as a human being by being the best professional athlete you can be. But the bottom line is that at the end of your life you have spent it moving a ball from one place to another. I want more than that for my children. I want them to find a deeper meaning, and a deeper purpose in their lives. I would also prefer they were not tempted by materialism. Maybe it makes me a bad parent to hope my children do not end up rich, but so be it.
While we are talking about super stars, how about what they have done to corrupt sports? When you do think about the character building aspects of sports you are thinking of the amateur sports of days gone by even if you do not realize it. The problem is that there are thousands of kids and parents that spend their time on the field and in the stands dreaming of the fame and fortune of being a super star. If sports in general is less than ultimately meaningful, professional sports is almost completely devoid of meaning. We have elevated a minority of individuals from our society to the level of role model, molders of pop culture, and even policy influencers, based solely on the fact that they can take a ball of varying sizes and manipulate it in a certain way better than other human beings! This is insanity. It is the ultimate embodiment of a society who has lost track of its moorings. It is a shallow, greedy, unthinking, society that spends most of its time complaining about how hard they work while spending inordinate amounts of time entertaining themselves.
Game Over
Of course this issue is bigger than this. Of course there are caveats. And most importantly, it does not apply to anyone reading this. If you are reading this, your kids are living a life of balance, sports are doing things for them that nothing else can do, and if they do happen to make it big in sports they will never be caught up in the superficialness of it all. Naturally the people reading this agree with some of what I am saying, they get where I am coming from, but... The truth is that all of this is just another symptom of a bigger problem. We are a society of hedonistic, narcissistic, unbalanced, anti-intellectual, people.
The truth is that the only way sports can take its rightful place as an activity that excels at building character is for the the coaches, the administrators, the parents, and the fans to snap out of it. Instead, the coaches volunteering their time (which makes them a martyr I should never dare attack with my venomous anti-sports rhetoric) will defend having my kids practice five times a week, and being absent from the home longer than most adults are for their jobs. The administrators will continue to pretend that sports is necessary for kids to thrive instead of admitting they bring in too much money to dispense with when the choice is sports or anything else. The parents will continue to find their identity in sports, and will continue teaching their children to do the same (just as I am complicit in doing). And of course the fans will continue to spend billions of dollars, thousands of hours, and an inordinate amount of energy on supporting, arguing about, and in some case physically hurting each other to defend their teams. In short: game over.