EUGENE, OREGON
My house is something of a tourist attraction, and it’s not just because we have a pretty view of the Willamette Valley from here. Busloads of people come by about once a month, and one time an Olympic sprinter knocked on my door and asked to take pictures. Pre’s Rock is a hundred yards away, where on the night of May 29-30th, 1975, Steve Prefontaine flipped his car in a mysterious accident. While he was idolized when he was alive, his death put him into the pantheon of sports immortals.
Prefontaine’s story must resonate with something hard wired into the human psyche because sports is eternal. The heroes, the bums, the winners, the losers, and the bad calls are and will be the stuff of everyday human conversation as long as the species survives. But as sports shapes our behavior, it also responds to the changes in our society over time.
My house looks out over the changes in sports in my lifetime. Pre’s Rock is doubly symbolic as it also represents to me the end of an era. From another angle through my windows I can see Matt Court, named in honor of the late Matthew Knight, son of Phil Knight who’s the founder of Nike. It’s still under construction, and these two Nike totems bookend the changes that sports has gone through in the last 35 years. Matt Court is a stunning piece of architecture, and it was built because Phil Knight decided that the old basketball court was obsolete. In the middle of the Great Recession, Knight decided to inject a quarter of a billion dollars into the local economy for its construction, greater than what the US government provided to the Eugene area in economic stimulus programs.
The construction of Matt Court and the attention that is now given to athletics in the university has become a bone of contention. When I entered the U of O Political Science Department in 1972 our football team had a respectable 1-9 record, and my department was one of the top ten in the country. Now the department’s rank is not even in the top 300, but Oregon has a collection of solid platinum sports facilities, and Nike has an excellent testing bed for its equipment and fashions. Many people complain about this imperial-colonial relationship between Nike and the U of O, and my only defense to this is that the university could have just as easily become the chattel of Blackwater or BP. Clearly the university hasn’t changed nearly as much as the sports industry. Old line athletic equipment like Spaulding or Wilson has been swallowed up by much bigger multinationals, and the old aristocracies have been destroyed along with American jobs. And Nike was one of the first of those to outsource.
I have memories of listening to the Chicago White Sox on my tinny Japanese transistor radio in the 1960s, and I’d pester my parents enough to take me to Comiskey Park for an occasional game. In the 1950s, it was a big deal that Mickey Mantel made $75,000 a year, but in 2007 another New York Yankee, Alexander Rodriguez signed a ten year $275M contract, and A-Rod’s extra money from marketing and endorsements is not included. And my once affordable tickets could now cost as much as $250 a game for one seat. Since the 1950s, America has seen the relative decline of baseball, and the reinvention of professional football as the king of sports.
I think that football’s increased popularity is partly due to the quick visual cuts and violent, oftentimes chaotic action that it provides. Where once three cameras were all it took to cover a baseball game, the modern football game has nearly 30 cameras covering all angles. And football is the one game that has most taken advantage of advances in technology through both equipment design and the instant replay. But beyond the technology, there is the hugification of sports, and football is the ideal venue for that. The poem Casey at the Bat is a reminder of a quieter, more reflective era that has been replaced by the swooping computer graphics leading up to and breaking the action on the field.
Certainly television has become more central to the whole concept. As television has evolved, it’s shaped the way that games are played and the nature of the crowd. My experiences with two Rose Bowls, one in 1995 and the other this year, show what’s happened to sports, and America in the last fifteen years. This year’s Rose Bowl was partly defined by the high level of security that didn’t exist before 9/11. I counted four levels of air cover from local agencies and Homeland Security if you include the fighter jets that did the flyover for the National Anthem.
But there was another change between then and now as well. When Oregon played Penn State in 1995 there was a rhythm to the game; there was the feeling that you were actually at a football game. This year’s contest was very strange, unlike any other game I’ve been to. The entire venue of the Rose Bowl actually appeared to be nothing more than an elaborate and very large TV studio. There was no continuity to the game, as a man in a red coat kept signaling for halts so that commercials could be aired on the international broadcasts. The Rose Bowl tried to placate the crowd with tributes to bowl game parking administrators on the new jumbotron, while the players were on the field wondering what to do.
What’s more, the winner-take-all nature of the global economy had asserted itself quite boldly. In fifteen years, the Rose Bowl had constructed a gigantic four story skybox for the broadcasting and plutocratic royalty. There was no doubt what part of the stadium was occupied by the masters of the universe as Citigroup had plastered its logo all over the face of the skyboxes on one giant decal. With all my free time as a spectator I idly took telephoto pictures of the skybox, looking for Vikram Pandit and his minions, who must have flown in from the East Coast on their Citations and Gulfstreams to enjoy a fun weekend in California before heading back to the grind on Wall Street the next day. The 70,000 people there were just a colorful backdrop for the product placements on TV.
For the vast majority of the crowd, actual attendance at a game has become something of a luxury item. Ticket prices have risen much higher than any rate of inflation due to the overhead of big salaries and bigger markets, and this cost inflation operates for all sports fans. Although good in the Third World, cheap Japanese radios are no longer the delivery mechanism of sports in the United States. Americans require big flat screen televisions or expensive computers, all of which are hooked up through cable or DSL along with their monthly service charges.
Obesity has increased in the United States, as global competition has made the middle class life style a threatened species, and that means that every family feels they need two full time incomes to survive, leaving no one with much energy to go out and actually participate in athletics, or even interacting with neighbors. Instead we cocoon ourselves while we eat the junk foods that the TV commercials tell us to buy. And we can be sure to purchase those totems of sports fashion that will give us some mojo, standing us apart from the crowd.
Michael Jordan may have been the first truly worldwide sports hero, but his successors are playing on the fields of South Africa in the World Cup. Nike’s latest (and most widely watched) viral video, Winner Take All, shows four soccer celebrities I never heard of, and the cost of this three minute piece on You Tube is said to be more than the budget for Gone With the Wind. With hundreds of quick cuts, it plots alternative futures for the soccer gods depending on their ability to score that elusive goal or not. Video now shows that stock markets and the health of nations hinge on who succeeds or fails in alternative universes.
Sports is just a mirror to humanity in our globalized and technology-driven world. But with all of the excesses, the concentration of wealth, the consumption and consumerization, and as I watch the world get ever closer to its ecological limits, I have to ask myself one question:
Is any of this sustainable?
Karl Eysenbach | Contributor
Karl Eysenbach is a retired government administrator and teacher. He is the author of a novel,The Story of the Century, and he lives in Eugene, Oregon and middle Baja California. Watch for his blogging as old new lefty at open.salon.com.
Read more by Karl on RootSpeak
See Karl in action at:
