Let’s talk about Professional Sports

I followed professional sports regularly when I was a kid.

But when I was no longer one, I stumbled upon this Black Flag song:

Black Flag — TV Party Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Saturday Night Live!
Monday Night Football!
Jeffersons!
Vega$!

[Verse]
I wouldn’t be without my TV for a day (Or even a minute!)
I don’t even bother to use my brain anymore (There’s nothing left in it!)

[Chorus]
We’ve got nothing better to do
Than watch TV and have a couple of brews

[Verse]
Hey, wait a minute! My TV set doesn’t work (It’s broken!)
What are we gonna do tonight, this isn’t fair! (We’re hurtin’!)

[Chorus]
We’ve got nothing left to do
Left with no TV and just a couple of brews

[Bridge]
What are we gonna talk about?
I don’t know!
We’re gonna miss our favorite shows!

No That’s Incredible!
No Monday Night Football!
No Jeffersons!
No Fridays!

While it didn’t single-handedly brainwash me into not watching TV in general and professional sports in particular, it did coincide with the changes I was going through:

I wanted to be conscious, wanted to learn and do ‘substantial’ stuff. Not live my life on mere entertainment!

And so I slowly drifted away from professional sports with this song being my reminder.

Come today, I think I am capable enough to talk about — not professional sports’ content, stars, teams, gossips and rumors but professional sports as a whole.

I do not follow professional sports anymore, apart from watching occasional international matches that have political-entertainment for background. For example, India-Pakistan cricket matches.

Turns out, professional sports is a ~400 billion dollar industry. The up and coming Esports industry is also becoming a massive entity on its own with valuation getting well over a billion dollars.

That’s a lot of money!

For What?

A bunch of blokes competing for their success being manipulated by a bunch of blokes competing for THEIR success being manipulated by a bunch of blokes competing for THEIR success and SO ON…!

With this amount of popularity, there is sure to be a lot of interest and involvement. And hence, this industry employs a wide variety of people.

But what does it have for anyone who is not involved in either playing, managing, reporting, broadcasting or gambling?

I have identified three major reasons why anyone who doesn’t have any kind of stake follows professional sports. I hereby coin it — Three Es of PS

1. Escapism
2. Entertainment
3. Ego

Let’s follow each one by one.

1. Escapism: Good old Merriam describes Escapism as

habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine

Professional sports live-off and thrive making people and teams go after each other. This process generates tons and tons of storylines with plots and sub-plots. This process also generates lots of numbers, statistics and opportunities for forecast and prediction. Add professional/personal gossips and rumors and you’ve got a world that is vast enough to suck the reality out of you for your entire life.

For routines, they can act as good breaks, but because of the fact that they are such vast worlds — the danger is that they themselves become routines.

While, yes, the successes and failures of parties involved do manage to motivate or inspire people facing hurdles, it is of minute scale compared to the amount of time and life professional sports sucks out of you. It is like going to a volcano just to light a matchstick. It’s not worth it. Read a Coelho book instead!

2. Entertainment:

amusement or diversion provided especially by performers

Another crucial function of professional sports is to provide entertainment. The events, storylines, plot/sub-plot, numbers, statistics, predictions, gossips,etc. are well tuned to provide us with solid content for our boredom or make us bite that nail of ours, visit stadiums, stare at screens and refresh pages every 10 seconds.

While similar to escapism in providing a world that is vast enough to suck the reality out of you for your entire life, PS provide entertainment in other ways too. It doesn’t have to be just through escapism. It could have real reasons.

Which brings us to the third and final E,

3. Egotism:

an exaggerated sense of self-importance

Professional Sports manage to hit on our egos in a couple of ways: a. Identity b. Prestige

Identity implies relation or identification with race, ethnicity, religion, ideology; continent, nation, state, city, town, community, organization…We might love or hate certain identities. PS is the perfect commodity to passively engage in such sentiments. We can even call PS the toy version of politics. Miniature Politics! This strikes us right in our egos as we bite our nails anticipating our loved entity to win and our hated one to lose. Enough to engage us for a long long time. This is the other aspect of entertainment I talked about earlier.

Prestige implies the social-value of following PS and possessing information about it and its subtleties. Prestige is high mostly among children and those adults who do not get to grow-up and remain forever child-like.

Down here in Nepal, we haven’t got much going when it comes to professional sports (or anything for that matter!)

But we do get heavily influenced by Indian Culture and Media which has allowed me to taste the craze of Cricket in India. Whatever I have tasted has made me stare emptily for a while — reciting to myself the lyrics of that song again:

We’ve got nothing better to do
Than watch TV and have a couple of brews

…

[Bridge]
What are we gonna talk about?
I don’t know!
We’re gonna miss our favorite shows!

However, I have occasionally watched and will continue to watch professional sports. But not for the reasons above. Just as political-entertainment!

Whenever I watch, I do remind myself of the context behind the content. This reminder is crucial because I have already fallen prey once upon a time.

I understand that:

For this industry, just like for every other,

Once a prey, always a potential prey