Sports and Money - Part 2

                American professional sports is still a great thing, even with the heaping amounts of non-sports-related crap that now comes with it.  We, the fans, can still relate to pro athletes.  Most of them weren’t born into their careers.  (Ken Griffey, Jr. and Peyton Manning were, but they still worked hard.)  Michael Jordan shot hundreds of free throws a day.  Steve Nash used to be seen dribbling tennis balls around his college campus.  Football quarterbacks all had an old tire hanging from a tree in their backyards growing up and spent hours throwing spirals into it.  It takes a lot of practice to run a 4.4 forty-yard dash. 

               Other than those sports where it’s just two guys beating the crap out of each other, like boxing or MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), football is about the most potential-injury-causing activity anyone can do in life.  Maybe volcano bungee jumping is more dangerous, but nobody does that yet, at least not professionally.  It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get to the pros in any sport.  Nobody disputes that.  It’s all that other stuff, that remora stuff that comes with the shark of hard work, sweat and athleticism that pisses off the average sports fan like me.   

                 Half of all major league baseball players are fat.  That’s relatable.  A lot of those fat baseball players are good, too.  Babe Ruth was shaped like Mr. Potato Head and he revolutionized the sport.  Baseball doesn’t have a patent on churning out athletes with that “Average Joe/it’d be cool to have a beer with that guy” quality, but I think, overall, a lot of baseball’s continued popularity can be explained by that aspect.  More so than professional basketball or football, baseball players seem like human beings, larger than life, but only made so because of their hard work and their being on television.  If their lives had taken one minor turn, they’d have wound up on the Jiffy Lube sales team with you.

                I’d bet that most hockey players have that Everyman quality, but I’m from Georgia, so I don’t know anything about hockey and don’t feel qualified to talk about it.  I once went to a minor league hockey game.  I couldn’t follow the puck.  I’m not even entirely sure that there was a puck.  For all I know, hockey might just be action-packed, violence-infused, creative narrative storytelling.

                We love our teams.  We stick with them even when our favorite players get traded or move via free agency.  Hell, we’re more loyal to our sports teams than we are to our spouses, our religions, or our political parties. 

                So we’ve got relatability, admiration, and loyalty.  What’s the problem?  The problem can be summed up in one word, money.  Have you been to a live professional game lately?  It costs a small freaking fortune to do it.  Tickets, parking, beer, and a soft pretzel is going to run you over a hundred dollars, and that’s if you do it on the cheap.  Compare that to going to a ball game in the 1920s.  You could go to thirty games in the Depression (thereabouts—in a real dollar, then to now, value comparison) for what it costs to go to one now. 

               Our local pro football franchise, the Atlanta Falcons, has the seemingly unbelievable gall to build a new stadium (less than twenty years after their last “new” stadium), complete with vibrating seats and a 100-yard sports bar, and pay for it partially with tax dollars (hotel/motel tax).  This team, owned by a millionaire, that exists so that we poor people can watch other millionaires run around and hit each other, needs our help to build a new office?  Are you f***ing kidding me?  If they were going to let each of us onto the field to kick an extra point, or do something else that wouldn’t give me a concussion, maybe I could see paying for a new stadium.  But they’re not.  They’re going to charge us to build the stadium and then charge us to go inside and then charge us more to park near it and then charge us more to eat and drink while we’re inside.  And they expect us to look forward to it.