What Else Makes Sports Suck (Aside from the foaming fans)

[Millhouse]

I couldn't agree with this guy more. Yes, folks, these are our 'heroes', our wonderful athletic Atlases, and these are the people making our children strive to be what they are. Overpaid whiners.


Professional athletes are overpaid and selfish
Editor speaks out
Matt Lefebvre
Issue date: 4/1/04 Section: Commentary

How much money does the average person really need to be able to eat three times a day, have a roof over their head, send their children to school and have a car? All this could be done on an income between $30,000 and $40,000 easily. But somehow it was decided that people who labor harder than most, city workers, janitors and factory workers, would be paid less than someone who sits behind a desk all day or someone who plays a game for a living.

Today athletes are the highest paid people in the country, with the exception of Donald Trump and his toupee. It is ridiculous to believe that someone is really worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and all they have to do is play a sport; a sport that millions of people would play for free if given the chance.

Major League Baseball may be responsible for the rising salaries of athletes. If all 30 teams' salaries were combined, the total price tag of every big league player would be in excess of $2.02 billion. That translates to $67.6 million per team, and $2.7 million per player. There are currently 41 players in the majors who make more than $10 million per year. One of these 41 players, Alex Rodriguez is the highest paid athlete in the world; he makes $22 million a year. You think he can afford to get extra cheese on his Big Mac? Rodriguez and Boston Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez are the highest paid players in the MLB. Ramirez is a distance second with a modest $17.2 million a year. Could A-Rod really spend $22 million, honestly? I doubt it. Now how about getting paid $22 million every year for seven years, no one could ever spend that money EVER.

Where does all this money come from to pay these awesome athletes this kind of money? It comes from the fans. The same fans that cry when their team loses, celebrates when they win and pay $6 for a beer and $7 for a deluxe hot dog at their team's game. Ticket prices continue to go up every year. How fair is it for the fans to drop at least $100 to go see a game and watch Ramirez jog to first base on a groundball or a pitcher not start a game because he is "under the weather?" If an average hard working person missed a couple days a month because they were sick or hurt, they would be fired. In the case of athletes, they go on a two week paid vacation, otherwise known as the 15-day disabled list.

Did anyone even notice that athletes, especially baseball players say "it's not about the money?" If it is not about the money, then why do players like the NFL's Clinton Portis and Ty Law threaten to skip training camp or demand to be traded because they do not like their contract? Law was recently quoted saying he wanted more than the $7 million he was guaranteed for the 2004-05 season because he "has to eat." That much money could buy Law a small island in the Pacific Ocean.

Athletes have become so selfish these days they look past the best interest of the people around them. Some players refuse to take a pay cut to help out the team while others (ex-Celtic and current Knick Vin Baker) file a grievance with the NBA Players Union to get the $36 million his contract says he is owed. The same contract that says if he falls off the wagon again he does not get any of that money, but hey, why read the fine print?

The real problem is that athletes are seen as role models. They are not role models. They are people Nike and Gatorade slap on a poster and make kids want to be like. Even the most squeaky clean athlete has skeletons in his closet, Kobe Bryant (accused rapist), Jason Kidd (convicted spousal abuser), Baker (admitted alcoholic), Mo Vaughn (DUI arrest), Barry Bonds (alleged steroid abuser), and Jason Giambi (see Bonds' accusation). By the way, all of these men have been the face on some advertising campaign at one time in their career and some kid somewhere has a poster of them in their room. Oh, and they all make $10 million plus dollars a year, what good role models.

Source -- http://media.www.quchronicle.com/media/ ... age2.shtml

[Katrin]

Sports suck because they are forced upon EVERYONE, including us who don't like them. I wouldn't mind them if my friends weren't always boring me to death with them and hassling me cause I'm not an idiot Rangers or Celtic fan like them. See the guestbook for proof. Bloody sheep, the lot of them!

[Skul]

This looks like a good candidate for the 'Articles' section of the website, I think. We need a few fresh ones.

[Polite24]

No, athletes probably don't deserve that much, no one does in all honesty.

BUT, the reason athletes and entertainers(musicians and actors) make so much is because they are american pop culture. They are what's popular and what EVERYONE pays attention to. I don't think either of the two professions should get that much either, but both sports and entertainment are VERY big businesses, ran by very rich people.

[Millhouse]

No, athletes probably don't deserve that much, no one does in all honesty.

BUT, the reason athletes and entertainers(musicians and actors) make so much is because they are american pop culture. They are what's popular...

...and what's wrong with this country. You could make anything mega popular like sports, why sports? Actors and entertainers serve a purpose in my mind. So do famous musicians.

It isn't sport for the sake of sport itself that makes most of us 'anti-sports' people angry. It's the idiotic commercialism that comes with it, and the cash fans keep feeding into it, thus making it a larger and more irritating presence. And no, I'm not a socialist, before you ask. Freedom of speech is important to me, which is why I'm on these forums bitching about what irritates me.

Let's talk about this in reverse. I'll actually take the side of the sporting event. The part that makes me truly sick about sports is that in a lot of cases, the hooplah more than the event itself is what attracts the more retarded fans.

Example?

Go to any modernized baseball park. I've seen this so many times. So many men and women there for the booze, snacks, and now full service meals that can be brought to you by some vendor carrying a wireless credit card machine at an inflated price. Little miniature areas where kids can go to compete for a chance to win a signed bat by throwing a damn ball. Giant screen monitors on the ball park focusing on the crowd half the time, people waving like raving lunatics. Half the time you can't see because people are getting up and down to get beer, get food, go take a piss, go pay 100 bucks for a team jersey, or just generally get up and walk around because they're restless and bored.

In other words, and I could have said this to begin with, but they aren't even paying attention to the damned game. Who are these people, you may wonder?

They're usually the people (and usually the majority) that come to the event in a group with the hardcore sports fan, and they usually outnumber the people that are truly paying attention to what's going on out there in the baseball diamond. They don't come for the event. If all these other lights and sideshow attractions didn't exist, in fact, they wouldn't give two shits about who's up to bat first. Oh, they cheer, sure, but it's usually while ordering a beer and a 25 gallon bucket of popcorn to start the evening off right. Oh, and because everyone else is cheering.

They come because it's cool to come, because it's the 'in thing to do, because it's cool to say you're a sports fan, because the sporting industry has managed to convince these sheep that it's cool to be in with the hardcore sports fans, because it's become cool to pay for some team jersey, hat or other price gouged paraphernalia.

But here's the real twist. They act just as bad as the hardcore sports fan when they're in this environment.

It's nothing more than an excuse to drink at inflated prices, which causes you to buy even more merchandise.

I almost sound like I feel sorry for these sheep, but I don't. And yes, I've been to a few baseball games in my adult lifetime in this sort of environment, but I've had to go for social reasons (usually to make a wife or girlfriend happy that I'd hang out with their friends at such an event), and I've hated every one of them.

And I will even go one step further with this rant. When I was a kid, there was a smaller, more modest ballpark in my area. They had hotdogs, nachos, soda and beer, and maybe cotton candy and peanuts from simple cash only vendors. The atmosphere I remember being MUCH more tolerable then, the ticket prices much cheaper, and the entire event much more relaxed. Not saying I liked it, baseball itself when you strip it down like that to where you are forced to watch the game is pretty damn boring, but I am saying I liked it more than I do today's sporting events. Why do you think that is? Could it be because the environment I described above hadn't been invented yet, and the excessive loud happy morons (yes, the very same ones that harass you at work and harassed you at school as a child) weren't far fewer in number back in the 1980s?

Modern sporting events are overbloated commercialised obscenities, and they make people act like out of control animals. But seriously, I think most of them feed the corporate sports monster their hard earned cash because they're convinced that it's a good idea. I'm going to have to do more research on why this is, but I do know one thing about it already... a good number of them aren't being true to themselves, they're just fitting in with the herd.

If I personally hate Metallica (which I don't, this is purely hypothetical), I'm not going to waste money going to one of their concerts. It's just like the 'in' crowd of yabo's that have to go with their friends to a musical event just because it's what's happening in town that night, and/or an excuse to smoke reefers and get loaded in public and act like an ass. Only with sports, it's on a much more widespread scale.

I'm going to end my rant here and give all of this some more thought. The 'whys' are still bugging me.

[blackdog4444]

Aside from that, now the United States [and some other countries] have a shortage of people working certain jobs. Engineering, for example, is in a severe shortage, along with other jobs like diesel engine technicians. But, to balance the effect out, the fun, non-essential-to-life jobs like modeling, PLAYING SPORTS, painting, and so on, have gone way out of their numbers, and hence, have thrown the whole work environment out of balance.
It's like solving this math problem:
2 x 9+74c= 2386

In order to find the variable c's correct value, you must keep the whole equation in balance.
The solution would normally go like this:
2 x 9+74c/2= 2386/2
9+74c= 1193
9-9+74c=1193 - 9
74c = 1184
c = 16
But guess how chaotic it would've been if you hadn't kept the equation in balance. You'd never find c's correct value. It may have been larger or it may have been smaller.
How does this fit in with how the jobs people take up work?
Well if you always did everything on one side, then c might've been 2386. It's like how most people prefer those jobs that are by all means of the definition "useless" to society. We don't need Playboy magazines, nor do we need some jerk sportsman making a total ass out of his self every time he gets to his desk.
Then there's the problem if you did everything on the right side. If we had too many engineers or the diesel engine technicians, then we'd be so bored that I wouldn't be surprised if we'd tear down all major cities within a week or less. It's like the whole equation itself equaling only 16 when it should be 2386, or c most likely being a negative number.
So far we're on the "useless jobs" scale of things where that proportion of the jobs taken is too large for a good balance. Hopefully you can see where I'm getting to by now because by god I feel like I've been speaking tongues for the past week. Hopefully I don't have to give the Sports Boar a more childish example for him to wrap his head around because by god I feel like I've been doing nothing but speaking in tongues to him since he had his alias changed. I feel like a German kid trying to talk in front of the class - and we all know how that must go [erm, racist name calling and what-not].

His idea of worthless spending and supporting the idea that wants are actually "needs" is quite ridiculous. And so I shall end the argument that things of pop culture nature shouldn't be the epitomy of the economy and that believing that it's fair to be payed such amounts of cash to do nothing is alright as long as you're entertained is totally wrong, but that it's alright to deprive the hard working people that keep his toilet from backing up into his house and his electricity running of good payment.

I guess that's the commercialism brainwashing him. The idea that he isn't going to be pushed around because he's like the other sheep. He says "baa", they say "baa", and anyone else that doesn't say so is immediately a mere side show. Poor idiot.