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The Vikid Truth's avatar

Wow. That was phenomenal. I stopped watching sports 20 years ago. Just an instinct that it was no good. Nice to see that instinct so throughly fleshed out in this analysis.

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MoodyP's avatar

Very interesting. Certainly one of the things that has destroyed ‘sports’ is commercialization. For example, when the Olympics was all amateur competition it was (IMO) way more interesting, with the human interest stories regarding the personal and financial sacrifices made to get to that level. Today most of the competitors are getting paid to do what they do. I guess that doesn’t diminish their skill and dedicated, but it changes the entire equation. And don’t get me started on NIL…

Seems like most of his references (at least per your summary) have to do with sports that involve teams. I wonder what he would say about ‘individual’ sports. In other words, the only sports that have ever interested me (one exception*) are solo sports. Golf. Skiing. Sailing. Cycling. Sure there might be a ‘team’ involved in some of those by tallying the results of individual contests. But participating can mostly be done alone, and success or failure is determined by individual performance. And the competition is the participant against the clock, the course, the weather, and his/her mental state.

*I do admit to being a huge hockey fan back in the day. Growing up in Detroit if you weren’t a Red Wings fan as a kid, you were an outcast. LOL. I stopped paying attention 20 years ago.

Lastly, one thing not in the summary (so I don’t know if it’s in his write up) is TV and/or streaming and the impact these technologies have had on the ‘bread and circuses’ timeline.

My wife and I are both in our late 60s. We haven’t had a TV for more than 20 years. And we don’t have any streaming services. Hence there is no temptation to just waste some hours glued to the screen watching some meaningless contest.

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