Sports Over All?

First and foremost athletic competition, call it sports, is social control, for contestants, but especially for spectators, who are representative of us all. Sports are distractions from the many unresolved societal problems that the ruling elite wish to ignore or dismiss. Also, athletic programs, in school physical education and other organized sports, train youth to accept authority without question. An athletic coach is the father figure, par excellence!

Physical education at public schools was mandated after many WW I military applicants were disqualified for being physically unfit to fight in wartime! It was determined that sports programs would prepare the Nation's youth for the wars that would surely come.

Athletics is important in keeping youth on ice during an ever-lengthening adolescence, a characteristic of a moribund economic system. Young people have to be kept busy because society offers them so little. The wait to be full participants is long and frustrating. Let the anger out through competitive sports. Youth has to wait, actually, for the ruling generation to retire and die off. Sports act as a preoccupation and to quite youthful discontents.

In the military context, sports serves the purpose of training boys and young men to accept authoritarianism, to do what they are told. The coach is commander-in-chief. Team sports and an Army infantry platoon function under similar rules. State indoctrination comes easier when athletic goals merge with national values. The Greek Olympics serve as sports model; and interestingly, the Greek states were engaged in perpetual wars!

The modern Olympics are deeply political. The 1936 Berlin Olympics might as well been the Battle of the Somme. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics with the demonstration by Tommie Smith and John Carlos was one of the most dramatic examples of free-speech in all of sports history. Sadly, President Carter, who later was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize used the 1980 Olympics to further aggravate Cold War tensions by withdrawing U.S. athletes from the Moscow games. Stripping the two gold metals won by Jim Thorpe in the 1912 Stockholm, Sweden Olympics was racially motivated.

Speaking of Color and politics, Avery Brundage was a colleague of Thorpe's on the Pentathlon team in the 1912 games. He went on to dominate the IOC for many years with his brand of politics. He was an admirer of the German leader who officiated over the 1936 Olympics!
Another great moment in the history of Olympic politics was when Muhammad Ali threw his 1960 Rome gold metal for boxing off a bridge in reaction to racism in his own country.

Sports in the United States has been an arena in which the Color Line has had a persistent presence! For all minorities, it has been a battle field. Baseball is a case study. The industry first excluded Blacks; and, they set up their own Negro League in 1860, and professionalized in the 1870s. The talent in the Negro League was to great to ignore when professional baseball resumed after WW II. There were three black candidates considered for entry into Major League baseball. Jackie Robinson was chosen, I believe, for his noted athletic career at UCLA. He had academic credentials, as well. His poor health later in life testifies to the enormous pressures he endured as the first Black in what had been a White bastion. In recent decades the focus on talent has shifted from the U.S. to the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic is by far the main attraction, grooming young ballplayers is an industry with a cash crop in great demand.

There is a fine line between exploitation and slavery, with a materialistic and growth-oriented economic system the two are intertwined. Minorities have few opportunities to obtain status and financial security through regular employment channels. The entertainment field and sports offer a very few recognition and wealth. But, success in these endeavors rely on an individual's innate talents and sheer determination. Luck of the draw is another important element. Goal attainment requires superhuman effort and concentration.

Joe DiMaggio comes to mind for various reasons, ancestry and community included. What I remember most is his mother's admonishment to always look and act as one's best. DiMaggio was exemplar, even in his final days. I remember seeing him in an entirely empty section of a baseball stadium, wanting to be left alone, but harassed by a television cameraman. The pressures he endured as a sports figure and in continuing his hitting record in 1941, was not without consequence: he had, I believe, a stomach ulcer during his playing years; and, as a heavy, but secretive, cigarette smoker, he died of lung cancer. Sports gods are, after all, mortals.
The fact that some athletes have a sad life after their careers should not lead me to conclude that all do or that there is some causal factor within stardom that is a fault. But, as I run down the list of regretful endings, I wonder about balances in a person's life.For many notable sports figures, there are, unfortunately, some with sorrowful endings.


(We have heard about "late bloomers", undistinguished young people who, later in life, become somebody. Personally, I could not write reasonably well until I reached adulthood. I maintain that I simply didn't know enough about issues to write anything remotely original, or express what I did know in a grammatically and stylistically acceptable manner. It wasn't until issues became understandable and meaningful that I could muster up the motivation to learn how to write. Well, this is an example of something quite positive, but considerably off topic.)

Paul Robeson, a multi talented Black American, was put to the test during the McCarthy Era. And his fate was not unlike that of the Rosenberg's, but still a death sentence of sorts. The events of Robeson's life and his many accomplishments are well known. Of the many official acts of violence against him, one of the most blatantly racist was the removal of his likeness from photographs of the All-American football teams of 1918 and 1919. And I believe that he was the only African American while matriculating at Rutgers University. One of his most moving performances that I have heard was that with singers in Wales. Robeson was an outstanding performer in every undertaking. Other great talents have had to endure state oppression in other nations. But, we in the U.S. always expect better in a supposed democracy with a constitution of such clearly delineated individual rights and privileges.

Sports are two contraversial for me. I am uncomfortable with ownership structure, who owns the operations, what they extract from community budgets, the ethnic and racial groups that bring them power and profits. If sports are used for purposes of social control, for perpetuating the economical and political status quo, then I have no time for sports, professional or collegiate. I have other things to do with my time.