Sports Fans Are Serious Spenders

DO WE LIVE FOR SPORTS?
observed by Torrey H. Brinkley

The Olympic Games have ended for 2008, and perhaps billions of people worldwide had the opportunity to observe some of the athletic prowess and skills of hundreds and thousands of athletes from countries across the globe. Athletic contests are not new, as even the global Olympic games were begun back in Athens before the time of Christ.

Yet today we could perhaps question whether sports activities have become too dominating in our western culture.There is a proliferation of sports leagues and teams:
--the NBA men's basketball has spawned a women's pro league, and the college NCAA men's basketball goes mad in March all across the USA. Girls college hoops are very entertaining, and high school basketball brings out fans every year in noisy gyms in America.
--the NFL season begins in 32 cities soon for football fans, just as college football gets started as well on thousands of small & large campuses, with aspiring players also practicing at high schools from coast to coast.
--Major League Baseball has one more month left in 30 ball parks in US & Canada, while College World Series and even Little League World Series garnered attention on national TV. Rarely do big city folk know of all the scores of Minor League Baseball teams scattered from east to west coasts, but we do see how skilled Girls Fast Pitch Softball leagues have become.
--The NHL has more Canadian players and fans than in the USA, but big money insures that many folk know who are the best players around. College hockey, youth teams and minor league hockey also has its following.
--Auto racing has fans who watch their sport live from February to November in NASCAR, Indy Car, CORR truck, NHRA drag racing, motorcycle and motocross racing, Monster Truck, ALMS and other SCCA sports car events.
--Fans of golf like seeing men and women play for 3 days every weekend on gorgeous courses worldwide.
--Other fans pay attention to tennis tourneys for both sexes, X-treme sports competition, plus other events such as Beach Volleyball, Track & Field events, and Frisbee Golf.

Today there is a huge FINANCIAL committment required to make sports events happen. Grass-covered fields and lavishly equipped stadiums, uniforms and equipment, travel and transportation to & from venues, advertising & sponsorships are all involved. Sporting goods stores, sports magazines, athletic apparel shops, sports trading cards and other sports memorabilia are just a few ways that folk pour money into sports interests.

One is amazed at all the MEDIA coverage given to these sporting events: first there was just newspaper & magazine coverage. Then radio broadcasts were made of games across the country from the 1920s to the present. Starting in the 1950s one could see a sports contest or two on television. Films were shown of real and then staged athletic contests. But today, we have video games of sports, Wii semi-participation, internet coverage, and i-Phone hookups of contests. Direct TV even boasts some 44 sports channels one can watch (for a price). Sadly, some TV sports channels think that watching people "play poker" is a sport, and they broadcast such nonsense for hours at a time.

In recent years, besides the many spectator sports listed above, there are more PARTICIPATORY sports where folk do more than watch someone else get the exercise. We can gain muscles, endurance and feel accomplishment thru:proliferating golf courses nationwide, swimming, ski resorts, volleyball, basketball, exercise gyms, tennis teams, hiking groups, climbing walls & mountains, hang-gliding, water-skiing, bicycling, and off-roading on wheeled vehicles (with or without motors).

TIME involvement is enormous for for athletes: exercising, training, practices, actual game experiences, with the attendant pre- and post-game analysis. In our Denver area, a rabid fan could watch 420 games a year (times 3 hours each) for our pro baseball team, pro football team, pro hockey franchise, NBA round ballers, plus the college basketball and football games in town.

Even sports MEDICINE helps keep athletes in top shape for the games they play: conditioning, massages, surgeries, braces, and prosthetics are available. Countless sports talk shows on TV and radio even spend hours talking about the injuries, ages and condition of players of the various sports.

A major question might be: Who has time & money to dedicate to following all these sporting events?
1) Do you pretend to follow 200 college football teams, who each play 12 games each "before" bowl games yearly?One of the bigger programs, Ohio State University, has a $110 million athletic budget itself.
2) Are you one of those fans of the 32 NFL football teams who play 20+ games and pay $75 a ticket to watch them get exercise down on a grassy field, while you munch down on over-priced unhealthy food snacks? Total attendance would be 22,400,000 to regular season games, who pay out $1.79 billion in seat prices alone!!
3) Each of the 30 MLB baseball teams plays 162 games + Spring Training + playoffs, meaning well over 2500 contests are waged yearly. A season ticket holder of just 2 average seats would spend $3250 + parking + snacks.
4) Do you want to pay $40+ per game to watch your NBA basketball team for 41 home games? That would be $3280 for two season tickets + parking + snacks, for all that time you've "wasted" watching someone else get a lot of exercise. Folk do that in 32 cities in North America.
5) The 30+ professional hockey teams also play 82 games apiece + long playoff series, meaning a total of over 2500 games played.
6) Do you support a college basketball program for their games? Maybe 250 college teams play as many as 32 games a year + tournaments. That's close to 4000 games, where spectators are paying no less than $20 a night per seat.
7) NASCAR draws typically 100,000 live fans to many of its 40 Sunday races, which yields a cool $240,000,000 in seat revenue alone, plus TV advertising and other major corporate sponsorship donations.

We need to be careful in assessing our priorities in society:
a) Let us not become a nation of spectators; it is better to get some exercise than watch others doing it.
b) A soft society desires to be entertained, something that led to Rome's downfall centuries ago.
c) If we have so much excess leisure time with huge discretionary income, then why are we not showing compassion to the poor & helpless among us & around the world?
d) Since we have seen increasingly obese people in our country, why not push for more exercise for the masses instead of eating junk food while accomplishing nothing productive?
e) We need to be careful not to foster violence amongst spectators watching sports that border on agressive competitiveness. If there were no referees on the field, many games would turn chaotic & barbaric. Many fans in various countries have rioted watching soccer contests in the last 10 years, with ugly and even deadly results.
f) So much emphasis on sports and outcomes has fostered a gambling habit, where sports betting has become a huge industry and an addiction on many college campuses. The number of folk wasting money & time on "Fantasy Football" again indicates too much time & excess money going to something which produces exactly nothing for the good of society.

Are you exhausted yet reading of all the time and effort we regularly put into sports? Imagine that we have been sports fans for over 100 years now as a nation? We do this year after year after year. We have the following to show for all this expenditure of time, exercise and money: voluminous record books, perhaps mis-placed hero worship, and some memorable moments in sports.

Perhaps we need to heed the advice of the Roman prisoner, Paul, who wrote to a young man named Timothy some 1950 years ago, while Roman citizens were cheering on the exciting athletic events in their coliseums, including feeding Christians to the lions,
"For bodily exercise profits little, but godliness is profitable in all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come." -- I Timothy 4: 15

---The author was the Sports Editor on his high school newspaper (Chicago, IL), served as a Gym Teacher in San Jose, CA at one time, and taught 150 Spanish youth how to play American baseball while serving as a missionary in Madrid, Spain.