More Than A Game

It’s exceedingly rare for an athlete in this day and age to say what’s on his or her mind. With the media vultures circling about and radio pundits with hours of talk-time to fill, no one wants to become tomorrow’s overblown story. This is why 99 percent of press conferences have been reduced to the same buzzwords like “team chemistry” and “hard work” and “focused on (insert next game).”

So you can understand my surprise when Jason Williams, veteran point guard on the Miami Heat, decided to dish out a little cold, hard—and extremely revealing—truth. Williams, in response to the extensive trade rumors surrounding him this season, let out this gem: “We’re like some high-paid prostitutes anyway in this league. They just use and get rid of us whenever they want.” And he’s right. The fact of the matter is professional sports is not, and has never been, about playing for the fans, or teamwork, or challenges and triumph, or sportsmanship, passion, fun, or any of the other noble characteristics that we often attribute to it. It’s about economics.

While it’s often noted that athletics are big business, many people continue to hold on to the notion that professional sports is just a game. This is the basis for so many fan complaints about exorbitant salaries, increased commercialization, and deteriorating moral standards in today’s sporting world. But if professional sports was “just a game” as they say, then big conference colleges and prep high schools wouldn’t be sending scouts to under-15 basketball games, and 13-year-olds wouldn’t be getting offered professional contracts in soccer.

If it was “just a game,” high school coaches wouldn’t pressure their players to get back in the game after concussions, and NFL players wouldn’t hobble off the field, only to get a cortisone shot so they can come back without feeling any pain. If it was “just a game,” then minor league kids wouldn’t feel forced to turn to performance enhancing drugs to keep up with their peers and get a shot at the big time. If it was “just a game,” players wouldn’t devote their lives and give up their bodies to their teams, only to be casually discarded when it becomes financially prudent for these so-called “families” to do so.

But, to be fair, athletes are paid for their sacrifices. Despite very uncapitalistic constructions like drafts and salary caps, players are compensated well given their incredibly scarce skills. One could make a laundry list of negatives for any job (I’m looking at you, i-bankers), but with those presumably comes some sort of compensation that balances it out.

Professional sports are not that different from any other occupation. Owners and general managers are under the same pressures as the CEOs of any company. And the athletes? Well, despite the fact that we often only witness them as a collection of pixels behind a glass screen, they’re human too, and we must understand them as such. From the members of the press, all the way up to the skybox, the sporting world is not its own little vacuum within our TV screen like we often believe it to be.

Once one reduces the sporting world to the same concepts and ideas as everything else, it becomes easy to see why athletics provide such an important lens with which to view society. Because the final product produced in professional sports is ultimately only a diversion, it can serve as a testing-ground for some of society’s most important issues. This is why seminal events like Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, and John Amaechi becoming the first openly gay former NBA player are so significant. This is why when we see bigotry, sexism, racism, hypocrisy, or exploitation in sports, it is important to say something about it.

Unlike in realms like politics or religion, where these issues can have explosive consequences when brought up, in sports the broader societal externalities are often small. Sports may not be just a game, but it is not a matter of life and death either. Because of this, it serves as the ideal place to see how far society has come and where its major pitfalls still lie.

Aparicio J. Davis ’10 is an economics concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears regularly.