Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

13 страница из 41

Post-game, we slip into the sports bar at the corner, watch the highlights of the game we’ve just come from, and I then review the situation on espn.com before bed. There’s scarcely been a moment over the last six hours when I haven’t been a zombie-bug wandering in a manically-consumptive formicarium.

Most decent people instinctively act with revulsion in the face of this insane, corporatized, spectacular shit-show. And totally justifiably. The micro and macro-economic logics of the pro sports world are crazed and infuriating. Triple-figure tickets, billion-dollar franchises, $3 million Super Bowl ads, $13 million a year for middling pitchers, a quarter billion for A-Rod (twice!), stadium deals in the high hundreds of millions, that freaking $300 jersey, the commodification of players … there is almost nothing about the economics of the professional sporting world that makes any sense, or bears any rational relationship to the everyday lives of everyday people.

Capitalism has grotesquely distorted the sporting world, but what hasn’t it maimed? What cultural quarter hasn’t been reduced to corporate shilling? Think of dance centers named after banks, cigarette companies sponsoring operas, theater awards given out by mining companies, folk singers sponsored by Starbucks, and artists of every stripe controlled and traded as commodities. Professional sports have been wholly jacked by corporatist economics and neoliberal ideologies like everything else, just maybe a little more vibrantly and effusively—in part because sports are so powerful: where else are you going to find 100,000 people every Saturday afternoon?