Muddled priorities

[unixronin]

OK, so you want to become an officer in the Army.  You make it into West Point, you graduate ... and then you go to play pro football for the Detroit Lions?

Uh, no.  This is wrong, IMHO.  You volunteered, you got your way paid through West Point, you committed to serve; now it's time to serve.  You want to play pro football, you can do that after you get out.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess, lacking any interest whatsoever in team athletic sports, I have a tendency to think of them as being completely irrelevant in the real world. It makes it easy to overlook the fact that there are a lot of people out there to whom things like baseball, football, NASCAR racing etc are not only relevant, but actually important to their lives. I've always tended to consider the idea that "pro sports are important" more as a delusion than anything else, and I have to honestly admit I'd never really considered that kind of trickle-down effect. I've always thought of the massive pro-sports "industry" as a distraction that consumes time, resources and effort that could better be used elsewhere, rather than as anything that actually produces anything but overpaid celebrity athletes.

It's an alien perspective to me, but a thought-provoking one.

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find what Julie said - about the football team having a good season being directly linked to the quantity of applications and resulting other stuff - to be scary and foreign.

I mean, you basically have people going "I am not a football player. I am nevertheless going to apply to a school that has recently been successful in football, when I would not have applied otherwise."

To me, that's incomprehensible and totally illogical.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

You *seem* to draw distinctions between individual and team sports, and between amateur and pro sports. Why? I think there are good arguments why pro sports and team sports are valuable, if any sport is valuable.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I have rather more interest in individual-performance sports than in big-field team sports, yes. Team field sports, honestly, have never interested me (and in many cases, oddly, for similar reasons to why I could hardly care less about NASCAR). Seeing Colin Edwards make up 14 places and almost 30 seconds in 12 laps on the Moto-GP circuit, or Max Biaggi successfully recover from a power wheelie that actually put his bike beyond vertical, fires my interest and admiration at his skill far more than any two-million-dollars-per-advertising-minute major league final ever could. This may be partly because I know first-hand what's involved, and perhaps partly because in an individual sport, you can't swap out players at the coach's whim according to the needs of the upcoming play; the individual athlete has to be good across the board. (And, honestly, my schools managed to completely turn me off team field sports very early.)

As for amateur vs. pro, it just seems to me the extravagantly-paid pro athletes, together with the teams' constant demand for bigger, newer and more extravagant stadiums, are a bigger waste of time and money than the amateurs who play more or less for the love of it and more or less wherever they can.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Proponents of team sport can counter that synergy between individuals is a beautiful thing, and that there is something intrinsically rewarding in working together towards a common objective.

As for paying athletes, I don't think it's avoidable as long as we have a market-oriented economy. Athletes (or their agenst/promoters) understand their wide importance, and so internalize the resulting profit and attract more top talent to their sport.