I have a hard time being invested in televised sports. I could put it in my own words, but the best explanation comes from this essay, which likened it to being in an abusive relationship.
Imagine a girl. Very pretty, a joy to be around, and a nice person that is kind to animals and people alike. She’s a good person, and deserves a good boyfriend, someone who is nice and kind to her.
She has a boyfriend. But he sucks. He makes her pay for everything. When they do something, he tells her what they’re going to do, never asks what she want to do, and never makes any accommodations to her wishes. He only pays attention to her when he wants something out of her, but when she needs something, he is totally unresponsive. He relentlessly lies to her, and is transparently dismissive of their relationship and her as a person. He makes important decisions that impact her without asking her, or consulting her or even considering what she wants. He takes her completely for granted, and almost seems like he holds her in contempt. In essence, he treats her like garbage. Yet, she worships him and supports him no matter what.
What would you tell her? You’d say what any reasonable person would say: What the hell is wrong with you? Why are accepting this? You can do better. He’s not worth it, there are so many other great guys out there who won’t treat you so badly, stop putting up with this.
Now, think about this: If you are a devoted fan of a pro sports team, you have the exact same relationship…with that team.
You are the girlfriend, the team is the boyfriend, and they don’t give a shit about you, and you love them anyway.
Now, with college sports, I get that there’s a connection to a school based on geography, or alumni status or something else. But it’s still an entity that does not give a damn about you, and you are staking your happiness on the performance of people who are, in many cases, not old enough to legally crack a bottle of celebratory champagne. And if you didn’t go to that school? Well, Bark M has words for you.
But what’s worse than all of that is Acura’s campaign to create “memeness” for March Madness. I can’t remember I’ve seen anything so nakedly attempting to be hip or pandering to the “digital native”. It is undignified for any brand, especially for one like Acura that is trying to be taken seriously in the premium space (as the digital marketers would probably call it).
The most recent ad, with a strings version of The Pixies “Where Is My Mind” was pretty great. This campaign sucks. Like everything else Acura has done since they switched to alphanumeric names, it’s two steps forward, one step back.
I don’t think they’re so bad. I beats the Toyota ads with two simpletons discussing being “Grounded to the ground”
As far as girlfriends/boyfriends and sports teams, don’t love something that’s incapable of loving you back
Totally with you on sports and the campaign.
Pro sports is the worst. Corporate welfare to virtual monopolies. What’s not to like?
To me, college sports are the absolute worst. The schools, networks, coaches, all get rich, and the kids, supposedly (I have seen myself that sometimes it doesn’t work that way) they play “for the love of the game”, and if they get hurt, too bad. “What a career he might have had in the pros, if he hadn’t had his knee blown out!”. Pay the kids to play. Screw the NCAA, tell them to take a hike, and form a new association.
I’m someone who doesn’t ever, never watches, cares about, who can even sit through a basketball or football game, pro or college, it bores me more than I can take. I have to turn the channel. I would rather watch a chick flick rom-com.
Oh please. College sports are much worse and morally less defensible than pro sports. At least pro sports don’t pretend that they aren’t some sort of commercial, profit making enterprise and pay its participants accordingly.
The NCAA is a cartel in the business of talent development for the pro leagues, only instead of paying its professionals (college players are held to regimens as strict or even stricter than the pros), its four years of indentured servitude.
College ball is much, much slimier business than pro ball.
Certainly, I agree with all your points, but the colleges build their own stadiums. The athletes being taken advantage of have a choice. Local taxpayers are just getting robbed.
BTW, ROTC is pretty much the same as the NCAA. You get a small check, but you can be scooped out of school and sent into combat in an “emergency”. Still, you have a choice.
Anyway, it’s all bad.
“BTW, ROTC is pretty much the same as the NCAA. You get a small check, but you can be scooped out of school and sent into combat in an “emergency”.”
Uh, no you can’t. The military is not going to scoop someone out of school that they’re paying for to send them to war except in possibly extreme unlikely circumstances.
-USN ROTC alum
Thanks for clarifying that S2k. I’m not a ROTC alum but have several friends and relatives who are.
Landcrusher is beyond right about publicly funded stadia, though. It’s a scandal, and it’s disheartening how few Americans recognize the problem. Panem et circenses.
I’m not saying it’s likely, but cadets are part of the reserve. At any rate. Injuries in ROTC do end careers without disability. I was taking my chances going to Airborne training. We lost a cadet to injuries at Ranger school.
@Landcrusher.
Now you’re just dating yourself – unless policy has changed, they haven’t let non-prior service cadets go to Ranger School as a cadet since the mid to late 90s.
The unlikely circumstances of being a contracted ROTC cadet and being pulled to go serve before you obtain your commission are astronomical.
Unless you’re Reserve or National Guard with a very specific MOS skillset, experience and you happen to have failed out of school or are on multiple consecutive academic probations, that just ain’t going to happen. I knew green/gold 18 series MOSes who were within a couple semesters left in 04-05 who Big Army didn’t even considered touching before commissioning. Army prioritizes you finishing your degree, not just another body.
-USA ROTC Alum
That’s true until it isn’t. It’s good they don’t send cadets to Ranger School anymore. Still, I have seen lots of people get caught up in all sorts of crazy policy changes with no recourse so your way of thinking has been proven to be flawed.. Of course, I have been around longer to see it all.
I’m sorry, but there are aspects of your assertions that don’t ring true to me. What was the timeframe you are talking about?
For one, you can’t go to Airborne (or any training school for that matter) unless you’re contracted and have taken the oath. That’s been true since at least the late 80s and hasn’t changed since. Any and all injuries sustained in training are service connected and are treated as such. Short of completely debilitating injuries (say, over 50%), most disqualifying injuries and conditions are waiverable.
In my experience, people who say they were denied commission for XYZ condition such as torn/reconstructed ACLs (popular one) were looking for an out and weren’t motivated to push the medical waiver process. I know, because I’ve run into people who used that excuse and I respond with, that’s funny I got mine waivered, and that was on top of another waiver.
If you are that injured and receive a disability rating, you’re on service connected disability pay and benefits for the rest of your life (unless you didn’t bother applying for that, either).
And while you’re correct in saying that ROTC is a part of the reserves, 1st and 2nd year cadets can quit at any time with no service obligation and they’re not going to pull MS3s and MS4s with a few semesters. Since you’re making this assertion, can you provide a documented example?
Honestly, I didn’t find jump school to be that big of a deal. More people screw up their knees and ankles at Air Assault.
80’s. I attended jump school in 87. Graduated in 88 and received a commission. There was no disability nor pay if you went as a cadet. My reserve commander, I was SMP, tried to get me a paid slot for both the pay and the disability issues. I don’t know about the comparison to air assault, but knees get lost in both. I suspect my herniated disk came from jump school, but I got surgery and still got into a reserve on active duty slot but was never getting into ranger after that.
All juniors and above were contracted, but only some scholarship students were contracted in first two years. Contracted had nothing to do with it. We were all warned, at least at my unit.
BTW, I know an army pilot who was part of a group whose training accident related injuries were reclassified as non service related to save budget money. Uncle Sugar gives a rat’s ass about wounded soldiers all the time. It’s all a lottery.
My fave was in the nineties when a bunch of med school program kids got told their service would begin AFTER they completed residency as civilians. That was a huge change from the deal they signed up for. It was essily a quarter million dollar change in the deal. Traditionally, you did residency as part of your eight years.
As for waivers, I knew two guys who got out senior year who fought to stay, but only heard rumors about the folks actually wanting out. That year they had many more cadets wanting active duty than not. Some years in the nineties I heard they simply asked who was interested in not taking their commission.
LC, I, too have seen many changes since I enlisted in June 1965, and after I retired in 1985, from the US Air Force.
But the lying and cheating of candidates is not limited to just the military.
Bear with me here: my grand daughter contracted to do a work study program with the government Jan-May 2014 which would result in a job offer of a Career-Conditional GS-7/9/11/12 position.
After she graduated, she got a job offer for a Temporary GS-5 position, and HR blamed “The Sequester” for the change.
She declined the offer, and there was major consternation at HR (she was told), but no better offer.
Ditto with doctors and lawyers. These days they no longer get credit for the schooling they attended prior to Commissioning.
But when they sign the obligation and take the oath, they are not told of this until they get on active duty and are obligated for TMSD/TAFMSD eight years into the future.
Geez, who *doesn’t* have a blog anymore?
I have one, but it’s only a part of my portfolio website, all of which is not ready for prime time as of yet.
I started one a long time ago that I neglected. I discovered that I don’t think of myself as very interesting. Of course that isn’t a prerequisite for most of the blogs out there.
My first blog helped pave the way to being paid to write for others. In fact, I began writing here nearly three years ago when messaged Jack on Facebook about putting my fashion blogging skills to use here. The rest is history.
Me. I find it difficult to believe that I’ve got anything important enough to say to bother. Also, while I have a Twitter account, I’ve never used it, and, in retrospect, should have bothered because I can’t figure out why anyone would want to listen to my daily opinions.
You and me, we need to work on our narcissism.
But see, Derek, your argument assumes that *I* am a good person, or that anyone’s a good person, or that anyone actually deserves anything but what they can take by pure force (of will, or personality, or violence). Just kidding, but yeah, pro/college/etc sports are just parasites infecting and thriving off a constant, steady supply of new victims/carriers/hosts, much like politics, n’est-ce pas?
You should be watching the games and not the commercials. They just want to sell you something you would otherwise not interested be in.
It sucks for those willing to suck.
If you want bad car ads, I submit for your consideration the series of banner ads I’ve seen for Jaguar, urging me to “mark your territory”. Seriously? Ads from a company named after a cat that are telling me to piss on stuff to prove it’s mine? By buying their car?
Never have I wanted one less.
The Mark Your Territory campaign is about as far from Jaguar’s brand image as it could be. People associate Jaguar with the smell of fine leather, not cat urine.
I’m guessing that it’s part of their “edgy” villains drive Jaguars meme.
It’s a cute concept; too bad most of the videos/images aren’t
funny. If the humor isn’t funny enough to be shared, it’s not a meme. My guess is that edgier fare was rejected by Acura, leaving them with these mostly cringe-inducing non-jokes.
The imagery would’ve been sharper and the connection to the Acura brand more clear had they used proprietary animations. This was cheaply done, and it shows.
I don’t really care for sports except for baseball – if I have to care. I do like the game of baseball, though I have no game nor ability for any sport, and since my eye went south, I gave up on golf because I no longer have accurate close depth perception.
Whatever sports season it is, all car OEMs try to tie in their advertising in the hope to sell more cars – capitalism at its best!
A Bronx Tale. The movie that ended any of notion of being invested in a sports team. Thank you Robert DeNiro and Chazz Palminteri.
Calogero: Bill Mazeroski, I hate him. He made Mickey Mantle cry. The papers said the Mick cried.
Sonny: Mickey Mantle? That’s what you’re upset about? Mantle makes $100,000 a year. How much does your father make? If your dad ever can’t pay the rent and needs money, go ask Mickey Mantle. See what happens. Mickey Mantle don’t care about you. Why care about him?
Calogero: [narrating] After that, I never felt the same way about the Yankees.
Organized sports, either amateur or pro, have little interest to me beyond the occasional opportunity to socialize with friends who are interested. But what chaps my @ss about sports is the fact that I pay every month for ESPN because my cable carrier can’t/won’t offer an a la carte service that lets me select channels. It’s bad enough that sports advertising costs are built into so many products that I use, but I NEVER watch ESPN, yet pay about $10/month because Comcast feels they have to include it.
There are grown men (and I guess women) who take their love of sports way too far, but this whole boyfriend/girlfriend analogy is predicated on “you take sports way too seriously and you shouldn’t because you take sports way too seriously.” “and you are staking your happiness on the performance of people” No, I’m not. I’m staking a fleeting couple hours on it.
So maybe it’s inferred that this essay is directed ONLY to those who live and die for sports, but that wasn’t particularly clear, it reads as though some obscure craft beer swilling neckbeard is grouchy in the corner at a Super Bowl party muttering to himself how sports are dumb because he got picked last for dodge ball in third grade, but everyone else is just having a good time, and the outcome will be all but forgotten on the folllowing Tuesday anyways.