On Sporting Events

Thanks @Piece2YourPuzzle for your post about Idolizing sports stars, it reminded me of my own feelings towards sports which I felt was different that your original post and needed it's own.

Here it is;

Everyone who has ever been a spectator at a sporting event of any kind has, at one time or another, experienced the bellowing of obscenities, racial or religious epithets, abusive sexual remarks to women in the vicinity, fistfights between strangers and fistfights between friends.

A child who watches acts of violence committed by thieves, murderers, or sadists in films or on TV knows that society disapproves of these acts. The child who watches sports is taught that the athletes' acts of violence are approved of. Sports play a major role in reinforcing the concern with success, winning, and dominance to the point that on the sports field these goals alone justify illegal and violent acts. Children see these images on the field and believe it is okay for them to act in this fashion because their favorite athlete is acting in a violent manner. Competitors in violent sports may not keep the violence on the field, it's all too easy to find many stories of a major athlete who comes home only to beat his wife.

It is not just the violence and the image of fans baying for men’s blood, but the overall specter of moral decline that makes Roman Gladiatorial games such a potent comparison with Modern Sports. Moral decline will inevitably result from the final abandonment of amateurism as arête and civilization give way to professionalism’s profit, corruption, and brutality. Audiences, owners, and gladiator-athletes are all complicit in this decline by choosing money over the moral high ground. The focus on stardom and spectacle have ruined nearly every level of sport, not just professional or collegiate: Call it a gladiatorial class. Families, schools, and towns wave 12-year-olds through the toll booths of life. Potential sports stars, who might bring fame and money to everyone around them, are excused from taking out the trash, from learning to read, from having to ask, ‘May I touch you there?’ It is a class of pampered sports stars trapped in permanent adolescence by the lack of any expectations or duties beyond entertaining the public and playing well.

The similarities between Roman Gladiatorial games and Modern Sports can be made as early as, if not sooner, with college sports. Of course, student-athletes are not paid for their labor, but others make enormous profits from their efforts. This is particularly true for the most lucrative of college sports, football and basketball. For many, this amounts to exploitation, one reason for comparing college athletes to gladiators because most true Roman gladiators, that is, those trained to fight and not criminals or prisoners condemned to execution in the arena, were slaves. And, although they received monetary prizes and other gifts for their victories, the overall profits went to their owners. Gladiators, like modern student-athletes, incurred the risk of serious injury or death while performing this valuable labor for their masters. And like slaves and gladiators, more bodies can always be found to take the place of an injured or dead one. A university can rescind a student-athlete’s scholarship if he or she suffers a career-ending injury or does not perform up to expectations. The student-athlete is thus caught in the same paradox as the gladiator: in one breath, they are active agents doling out violence, and in the next, passive pawns in a system that denies them any rights or recourse.