Sport for Sport's Sake

This has been quite the winter of discontent in the world of sports.

Many of the stories blaring from the top flap of your local sports page often have nothing to do with what's happening on the field. We have seen the personal implosion of the great golfer Tiger Woods. We have seen Washington Wizards All-Star guard Gilbert Arenas suspended indefinitely from the NBA for his attraction to handguns.

We have seen Texas Tech coach Mike Leach fired for putting a concussed player in a toolshed. And we now know that Andre Agassi, in his wild-haired prime, wore a wig and used hard drugs. We were told this by an unimpeachable source: Andre Agassi.

Couple these heartwarming tales with the parade of candid photos of athletes in a state of undress or inebriation, and we have enough so-called sports stories to fill a tabloid rag with no room for the Jumble.

This kind of off-court/off-field drama normally takes center stage during the dog days of summer. But this isn't August. Now is the time of the NFL playoffs, the college football bowl season, men's and women's college hoops and the upcoming Winter Olympics. To have the personal drama of players seize our national mind, dominate discussion over Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and become fodder for the sports page and beyond, says far more about us as a Sports Nation than the actions of athletes themselves.

A top athlete unfaithful to his wife? An NBA player with an unlicensed gun? A Texas football coach who sees winning as just next to breathing? We have seen these movies before, and yet now they're box-office smashes instead of red-light-district peep shows.

What we are experiencing is the complete US Weekly-ification of sports. Athletes have become more like Paris Hilton than Chip Hilton, the protagonist of the famously wholesome young adult sports novels written in the 1950s by coach Clair Bee. We have become more obsessed with their fame than the exploits that made them famous.

The true sign of this was the news that the parasitic gossip Web site TMZ is starting a new venture: TMZ Sports. Yes, catch an athlete coming out of the bathroom, zap a picture, and TMZ will be there with a checkbook.

This cultural shift is in many ways the result of the new ways athletes speak to fans. Jocks have spent the last decade attempting to define themselves and create their own brand, cutting out the journalist middleman. Personal Web sites, Facebook and now Twitter have allowed athletes to contact fans directly and speak to the world unfiltered. They have created an appetite that has become insatiable.

The thirst by fans for athletes in all their reckless verisimilitude also comes as a reaction to a sports status quo where images were managed, personalities were molded and athletes would tell reporters that they play one game at a time and little else. No coincidence that the Tiger Woods hysteria has been visited upon an athlete who has spent his prime asserting the right to his personal privacy.

The mere notion that Tiger might have an inner life, inner demons and outward scandal - that he was human - became a major part of the story. Fans demand that kind of raw proximity, because every other aspect of the dream factory provides it: Hollywood, politics, and the music business now run as seamlessly as reality television.

As a country, escapism has been scheduled into many of our days as a function of basic survival. According to recent poll conducted for the Conference Board, less than half of workers - 45 percent - feel satisfied with their job, down from 61.1 percent in 1987. And those are the people working.

Couple it with 10 percent unemployment and we have a Sports Nation with a need for escape that the games themselves cannot provide on their own. Workers play fantasy sports. They are fantasy general managers and fantasy owners. And of course, like any good owner, they want to know every last detail of the off-field lives of their players. They demand the truth.

But there is nothing truthful about what we are being served. Instead, it is 24-hour coverage by an army of journalists, amateur and professional, with the worst moments of athletes becoming collectivized for our consumption. It's quite the thin gruel.

It's also not the truth. Here's a New Year's resolution: Let's enjoy sports as an end unto themselves. We might find that athletes and coaches don't behave so badly if no one stops to gawk.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Dave Zirin is the author of the book: "Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports" (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by going to dave@edgeofsports.com.
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Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com