PR-Bridge

The Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport is taking place this weekend in Cleveland — a gathering of some of the smartest people exploring these issues on the planet. I spent yesterday chairing two research sessions at the conference, as well as taking in the fascinating keynote address by sports historian Robert Bellamy, a professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

The multitude of topics provided for a day of intense thinking among panelists, chairs, and the audience. I found the summit intellectually stimulating, but simultaneously disconcerting. On the one hand, I feel personally indebted to my own limited sports career for developing some of my leadership skills and ideas I hold about the necessity of hard work. I have also written quite a bit about sports, particularly in the book: Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan’s Game and Beyond. In fact, I will continue working on sports-related topics, including a three-volume anthology examining the history of sports in America across its broad history, which will be published by Praeger.

Yet, on a deeper level, I also revile the public’s intense preoccupation with sports. The NCAA Tournament and resulting “March Madness” is a perfect example, as it seems the round-the-clock coverage of the games feeds directly into the 24×7 news cycle, basically diverting people’s attention from virtually everything else. Most troubling is the role sports plays as a tool for establishing the way people view others.

One of the most intriguing ideas that scholars at the Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport returned to repeatedly was the way sports directly or indirectly shapes the public’s most fundamental beliefs. For example, Meredith M. Bagley, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas - Austin discussed how the idea of female athletes playing a “pure” version of sports such as basketball and hockey is actually coded language that inhibits the perception of women athletes and pushes the notion that they are less athletic than men. In another session, Bagley spoke eloquently about how sportswriters shape the public’s understanding of WNBA athletes by discussing them in terms of how they act as mothers and their looks, rather than as gifted athletes. Placing them in this narrative enables the public to view them in “acceptable” terms.

In these instances and thousands more, one sees sports and sports communication accentuating negative stereotypes. For example, I tuned into a couple minutes of the first half of the St. Mary’s–Villanova men’s basketball game and heard the announcer waxing on regarding the intelligence and “smart play” of St. Mary’s center Omar Samhan, the kind of talk that is often used to describe non-black players across sports, just as in the NFL, white quarterbacks are noted for smartness and the ability to strategically manage a game, while black quarterbacks are described with coded language, such as “athletic” or “quick.”

What seems increasingly more apparent in my own life is that fascination or obsession with sports amounts to a monumental waste of time. As a kid, growing up as ESPN launched, I remember watching the game recaps all summer, while playing the board game All Star Baseball and keeping in-depth statistics on my make believe leagues. Then, I would meet up with my friends and play whiffleball, basketball, baseball, and other sports until sundown. Most nights, we would turn on the garage lights and shoot baskets late into the night.

Now, so many decades later, I wish I would have put that kind of effort into more productive avenues. And, when I consider the future of my now-four-year old daughter, my fervent hope is that she does not obsess about sports the way I did. If the choice is between basketball star and math league captain, I pick the latter, if nothing else in hopes that she avoids many of the nagging injuries I sustained and pay for daily.

The more I think about the role of sports in society, the whole equation seems like little more than a giant shell game to make small numbers of people a whole lot of money off the backs of the many, with the added bonus of diverting the attention of people from issues that need attention, such as joblessness, the national debt, warfare, injustice, and the millions of other points that need addressed.

I understand that it is somewhat hypocritical to complain about sports and its role in society when I am actually contributing to the problem. However, when I look back at a lifetime of true sports obsession on my part, I am ashamed that I wasted this time. Certainly, there were physical benefits and perhaps psychological ones too, but I can’t help but come to the conclusion that I am deluding myself.

Perhaps the real issue at hand is that the more I study and think about popular culture, the more I am forced to see it as a bad thing. At one point earlier in my career, I promised myself that I would not become one of those older scholars who disparaged popular culture. Yet, the distraction it causes as a means of diverting attention from important issues nearly forces me to that conclusion. Since sports is such a central feature of popular culture, then it is logical that my feelings about sports would change too.