The world of sports is evolving rapidly into something that I don’t recognize. I was a competitive athlete in high school (and very briefly in college). I lived sports. I felt that the teams and activity saved me in high school where I was a barely successful athlete but a miserable scholar.
The world of sports today has been inundated with money in various ways that have changed it and made it much less interesting to me. First, there’s matter of how much athletes are paid and the way it impacts teams. There was a sense, perhaps artificial, of team loyalty. Today, it’s all about the highest bidder. So-called amateur sports are following the same path as the professionals though NIL (Name Image Licensing) money. A few highly recruited college kids are getting seven-figure payments. Soon (already"?) it will filter down to high schools.
Watching or listening to sports requires you to sit though an endless stream of commercials and promotions. I only watch sports that I can record and watch later—and skip through the commercials and endless studio chatter. (The Super Bowl (hate that name) is a rare exception.)
There’s the whole business of sports analytics; hundreds of new ways to measure and assess an athlete’s performance. The old days when a manager had a feeling about matchups and when to sub for another player are gone. Analytics dictate everything and that leads to another thing I can’t bear—the emphasis on gambling. The endless commercials and promos that accompany sports broadcasts? A large percentage of them are for sports bookmakers. Online gambling makes everything so easy, It’s not just who’d going to win—it’s what player will do what, when and so much more.
But I am an outlier. This modern world of sports has engaged the eyes and ears of millions, and it is making lots of individuals and companies lots and lots of money. In this section of the Angertainment draft copy is the end of Part 1 of the maybe/someday book. It Develops the background for the very important connection between Angertainment and sports—especially televised sports.
Spectator Sports and Television
Money, money, money! That’s what it’s all about.
From the very dawn of the age of television, the decade of the 1950s, spectator sports provided an important programming element. Baseball, football, and basketball games had all been televised by 1950. The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports aired boxing from Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday nights from 1946 through 1960. The pseudo-sport of professional wrestling gained an eager following via television.
DISCLAIMER: My father, Edward R. Kennedy, worked at the Columbus Citizen newspaper in the late 1940s where he also became involved in early television production. In later years, he said he encouraged the local TV station to televise professional wrestling and took credit for helping decide which wrestlers should win.
Spectator sports and television were made for each other. Sporting events provided hours and hours of content. No scripts were needed, no actors needed to learn lines and rehearse. Sports provided programming that was, at least in those early years, relatively inexpensive to license and easy to produce.
The payoff for the sports and the individual athletes themselves was wide exposure. The largest sporting venues in the world topped out at around 100,000 spectators. Sports on television reached millions. Television spectators, the people who introduced the term “couch potato” to the American lexicon, meant that the television industry could command better prices for advertising.
The athletes themselves benefitted as well. Sports provided a path to celebrity and even in the early days, athletes found ways to cash in. They starred in commercials, endorsed products, made personal appearances and sometimes become actors or sports commentators themselves.
Spectator sports was becoming a big business. But the best was yet to come.
The 21st Century has brought an exponential increase to the financial value of spectator sports. Every element of spectator sporting events is being monetized. Television channels invest enormous sums for the rights to broadcast games. Leagues and teams, both professional and (sort of) amateur, divide up the proceeds. The media companies earn money from their investment by selling commercial sponsorships; old fashioned commercials along with screen crawls, plugs, mentions and product placements like the brand name logos on football coaches’ sideline headphones.
Stadiums are emblazoned with sponsor’s names; every football bowl game seems to have a sponsor associated with it; and players earn vast sums with endorsements. Michael Jordan, considered the wealthiest athlete in the world, earned close to $90 million for playing basketball from 1984 until 2003. He has been paid more than 10 times that sum—over $1 billion, by the athletic gear manufacturer Nike. Numerous reports say that Jordan earn $150 million annual from Nike today—nearly twice as much as he earned for playing basketball.
The monetization of sports for has transformed the world of athletes and agents. The old value system of sports has been altered. Teamwork, team loyalty, the virtues of hard work and importance of fair play certainly still exist, especially in low-level amateur competitions. But as soon as athletes gain any notoriety, they are drawn into a new world where name recognition can be translated into financial rewards and everyone in the high-level ecosystem wants to figure out how to get paid as much as possible.
The world of pre-professional sports has been turned upside down with the arrival of NIL (Name Image Licensing) for American college athletes. In the new college sports world, a would-be college athlete can receive a commitment of $1 million in NIL money before enrolling in a university. The money game is filtering down to high school and perhaps earlier. Professional soccer academies begin snapping up talent with players are in their early teens.
Games have become media content, and they are altered, as necessary, to make them more television-friendly. Rules are changed to accommodate commercials. Contests are scheduled for the convenience of television broadcasters, often in conflict with the best interests of the athletes and team supporters who attend the games in person. Athletes are entertainers while playing their games or any time between games..
Not all of these kinds of sponsorships are mega deals. There are scraps as well; the Old State U. offensive line may earn a few hundred dollars apiece from a local burger joint plus free meals for mentions on social media, for example. Players may earn modest sums for signing gear at shows. A benchwarmer may earn something when a team signs an NIL deal with a video game manufacturer.
Spectator sports have become a constant presence in modern American life—available 24/7 on cable television channels and via streamers. This huge business is also integral to the growth and popularity of legalized sports betting. In some of the most controversial sponsorship arrangement, universities—through their official athletic fundraising arms—are partnering with online gambling businesses. The deal: encourage university alumni (and students who are old enough) to place their bets with the official university bookmaker.
Why is all of this important? How does the world of modern spectator sports intersect with politics and the angertainment industry?
It begins with one simple reality. A lot of money is being spent in the spectator sports industry. The people who are spending this money are not throwing it away. They are getting something back. In fact, they getting something extremely valuable. They are getting people’s attention.
Supporters & Fans
In England, the people who root, root, root for the home team are generally known as supporters. In the United States, however, the typical word for someone who cares about a sports team is “fan.”
The word fan, used in relation to followers of a sports team, appears in the United States in 1889. The word fan is likely to have coined as a shortened version of the word “fanatic.” (Lexicographers say the term might have been rooted in the word fancy: as in someone who fancies” a person, sport or team. Fanatic seems a lot more appropriate for modern breed of sports fan.)
By the middle of the 20th century, fan was a well-established term. Celebrities lived in a world of fan mail, fan clubs and fan magazines. The followers of sports teams were the fans in the stands. Residents of big cities that hosted more than one professional baseball team divided themselves into loyal factions; New York Giants fans had no use for the Brooklyn Dodger faithful; and they all hated people who rooted for the Yankees.
That same kind of partitioning has occurred everywhere. Alumni of Auburn University and the University of Alabama lived at the heart of a great football rivalry. Over time, residents throughout the state—even if they were not alumni—became fans of one side or the other. These kinds of rivalries grew everywhere: Michigan and Ohio State, Duke and North Carolina; Yankees and Red Sox.
Rivalries are one of the great pleasures of sports. Reporters and commentators may talk about the “hated” rivals and conjure up animosity; but for the most part the competitors enjoy rivalry games as a heightened moment of competition. A rivalry game may even be a way to salvage a season. A team may lose every preceding game before upsetting a rival and end the season feeling like big winners. Even a tie game can feel like a victory, as when undefeated Harvard met an undefeated Yale team in 1969. The game ended in a 29-29 tie score when Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds. The headline in the Harvard Crimson newspaper the next day said “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.”
Rivalries emphasize the binary nature of sports competition. Two individuals or two teams face each other with the expectation that there will be one of two outcomes. One will win and one will lose. There are sports such as soccer in which a tie (draw) is a frequent outcome. In that, soccer is an outlier. Spectators don’t like ties; and most sports, over the years, have developed tie-breakers, to eliminate or at least minimize the number games or matches that end in a draw. Most sports one will win and one will lose.
Good and Bad Rivalries
Sports rivalries, on the whole, fall into a basket that we can think of as good rivalries. The rivalry heightens the competition and interest in a game; the competition is primarily for “bragging rights” for another year, and at the end of the day, the teams’ supporters have amicable relationships with each other.
The Army-Navy football rivalry stands nearly in a class by itself as a good—even a great—rivalry. The competition is fierce, the student bodies attend the game in mass, the atmosphere is electric. It’s not a contest between future professional players; merely a spirited competition between very good players who, in the not too distant future, will be comrades in arms defending their country.
The most remarkable part of the Army-Navy rivalry comes at the end of the game. No matter the score, the teams gather in front of one student body and sing their alma mater. Then they go to the other team’s student body section, and sing the other school’s alma mater. It’s a ritual, a tradition; and it says a lot about how a rivalry can encompass a wonderful set of human virtues.
Spectator sports in general as consumed today, tend to push rivalries in a different direction. With other exacerbating factors such as alcohol and gambling, sports rivalries and spectator sports in general, can produce a very different, ugly aftermath.
Rivalries, even good rivalries, place the participants on opposite sides of a great divide. You, your champion , the team you support—are the protagonists in a drama. They are the “good guys.” The other side becomes, by definition, antagonists. They are your adversaries. They are “bad guys.”
In televised rivalries fueled by weeks of hype, wagering, and alcohol, a friendly competition for bragging rights can morph into gloating and taunting. On the losing side, disappointment can fester, become an open wound, and turn into an angry infection
There are even some fans who, no matter what the outcome of the competition, choose to remain angry and want to cause destruction and disruption. Soccer has been beset with the problem of “hooliganism” since the very earliest days of the sport. Relatively small groups of male fans, sometimes knows as firms or ultras—attend games fully prepared for brawls and riots. These fans (true fanatics) provoke fights before, during and after matches. Their behaviour leads to additional unruly conduct from other fans and can cause panics in the stands. As a result, dozens and even hundreds of people have been killed with many more spectators injured at soccer games.
An incident in 1985 sparked by English hooligans at a stadium in Brussels left 39 people dead . As a result, the European Union of Football Associations (EUFA) banned all English clubs from its important annual championship tournament for five years.
Fan violence in the wake of a championship—sometimes even after a win—occurs in the United States with some frequency. The threat of bodily harm at games is much lower in the U.S., but there are still high levels of animosity that lead to violence and vandalism.
In one example, an Alabama football fan named Harvey Updyke used a powerful herbicide to kill two 80-year old live oak trees on the Auburn University campus because Auburn fans celebrated wins in their rivalry by “rolling them”—draping the trees with toilet paper. After serving a little more than two months in jail, Updyke gave an explanation for his actions in a radio interview. “I wanted Auburn people to hate me as much as I hate them.”
Spectator sports, fueled by rivalries, gambling, alcohol, social media, and incessant media coverage have put the fanatic back into the fan.