sports

i want a new drug

Photo by Barrett Ward on Unsplash

My dad worked for Timex¹ in the 1980s. He worked on the advertising side. His dad worked in advertising, too. He - my grandpa - was the President of the Ad Council for 22 years. Crime Dog McGruff. This is Your Brain (this is your brain on drugs). Crash Test Dummies (the seat belt Public Service Announcement, not the band of Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm fame). Smokey (the) Bear. Those were all on his watch, ironically not a Timex, but his is a story for another day.

My dad had a client in Bristol, Connecticut called Entertainment Sports Programming Network. You know it as ESPN. At the time, a 24-hours sports channel, let alone dozens of them, let alone multiple streaming versions with sports from around the globe, was considered a completely asinine idea. ESPN had more naysayers than advocates. No one wanted to advertise with them. People thought it wouldn’t last. They were wrong. While meant as farce in the cinematic masterpiece, Baseketball, The Ocho is now a real thing.

a prelude to the Romo/Nance Bromance (or so I hear)

Timex was one of ESPN’s first advertisers. ESPN had the rights to the USFL² and if you look back at old USFL footage, Timex was one of the few corporate logos you saw. I don’t remember watching USFL games, but my Sundays were filled with NFL games. We had one, maybe two, 1 o’clock starts on the local CBS, FOX or NBC stations - depending on who had the rights at the time - one or two 4, 4:15 or 4:25 starts and one night game. Not yet old enough to catch the late game, my evening would conclude with ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown and a boisterous Chris Berman he-could-go-all-the-way-ing a running back into the end zone. I’d watch SportsCenter repeats and I even owned - are you ready for this - ESPN’s Jock Jams, Volume 1 on CD.

I enjoyed watching football; baseball was my first love. I was a fan of the New York Mets and in the 1980s, that was met like a bat hitting a hanging curve over the fence: with happiness, without embarrassment. That bat was likely swung by Howard Johnson, my favorite player. While sharing a name with an at-the-time-still-relevant hotel chain was lost on me, his nickname - HoJo - was not. He covered the hot corner like a glove.³ He stole bases. He hit those aforementioned home runs. He was a man who had his way with facial hair: a beard, a mustache, a fu manchu, then a mustache again. He’d blend in quite well in present day Williamsburg. In fact, the entire ‘86 Mets team would have raised significant cash this Movember with their mustaches.

in 1991, number 20 was the second player to join the 30/30 club (HR/SB) for the third time

Growing up in Connecticut, once the Hartford Whalers - who still claim the title of the best logo in sports - moved to North Carolina, our home state UConn Huskies, who dominated the court in Men’s and Women’s College Basketball, were as professional as it got. Our state primarily split its allegiances between Boston and New York - technically New Jersey for football fans. That’s how I wound up both a Mets fan and a Patriots fan and friends of mine were Boston Red Sox and New York Jersey Giants fans. There were no Jets fans.⁴

I’ve never understood neither NASCAR nor Formula One. With earnest curiosity, I genuinely would like to know how someone could like them, let alone love them. I have questions, the first of which: Do NASCAR and Formula One fans look at a traffic jam as some sort of tantric foreplay?

Alas, I’m getting off track.

While I haven’t attended a match in a while, I still have season tickets to New York City Football Club. Despite playing in a baseball stadium, and having a few mediocre seasons before winning MLS Cup, I was proud to be part of something from the start. I enjoyed taking the girls to matches.

Man, I loved sports. Now, the only sports I like is the album by Huey Lewis and the News. As Mr. Lewis said to Billboard Magazine in 2013:

Back in the day you wanted your albums to have a theme, and Sports' theme was really a collection of singles ... It was really a record for its time. In the 80s, the way radio was programmed, if you didn't have a hit record you weren't going to be able to make any more records. That was it, period. So our priority was to come up with hit singles. Every tune we aimed for radio 'cause we didn't know which one was going to be a hit. We just knew we needed a frickin' hit, period. And fortunately we got 'em.

With the album, he was looking to play small ball, string together a bunch of singles, but ended up hitting a few out of the park.

Even American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman chimed in on the record:

[W]hen Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.

Sadly, they followed up Sports with Fore! a clever nod to one of the most devastatingly boring sports to watch until “professional” corn hole came along.

Men have been drawn to sports like the tail end of a close March Madness game: seemingly forever. The Greeks had their Olympics, the Romans their Colosseum battles, the Mayans their ball game, and the First Peoples invented lacrosse.⁵ The competitors were always men as were most of the spectators.

Men want to be part of something bigger than them. We want connection. We want unbridled joy. It’s not that we always need to win. If we did, we wouldn’t have Mets, Knicks, Jets or Giants fans - and that’s just the teams from New York and New Jersey. Perhaps it’s not the wining as much as it is the shared Schadenfreude - or, Sharedenfreude, if you will. Sport fills not only a lazy Sunday afternoon, but also that void in our hearts left by the loss of organized religion, community organizations and knowing your neighbors’ names. We’d rather laugh and cry over a missed extra point with complete strangers than ask how a friend is doing.

Simply put: sports give men permission to feel. I support that. I still cry when I watch the NYC Marathon. Heck, I cry at a local 5K. But that support has limits.

Perhaps it’s the silliness of being loyal to a team. In middle school, I bought a Colorado Rockies hat with my allowance. I liked their logo and being a skier, while I’d never been, I liked the idea of Colorado. My neighbor up the street called me a poser. Confused - I’d never heard that word before - I asked, “Why would I be an opposer? I’m wearing their hat. I must not oppose them.” Today, I would have been called a hipster. But as with many things, Jerry Seinfeld put it best:

Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify, because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You're actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!

While in the locker room after gym class in high school, I made fun of the Yankees, a friend’s contemporary obsession. I say contemporary because he previously supported the Red Sox. I know what you’re thinking, but he loved Wade Boggs first and his favorite player defected to the Yankees. Instead of booing him at Fenway like Seinfeld recommended, he cheered him at (the old) Yankee Stadium. After one too many ribbings, as a joke (?) my friend put me in a headlock and tried to flip me over his knee. When he couldn’t support my weight, I fell to the tile floor chin-first splitting it to the bone. I still sport the scar from the seven stitches. I missed that day’s Cross Country meet against our rivals from the next town over. We lost, but I wouldn’t have figured in the final score anyway.

Maybe my love of sports - as entertainment, not as an album - has gone because I was truly just a fairweather fan at heart. While being a Mets' fan should earn me a lifetime exemption from this status, the New England Patriots were also my team. And I stopped liking them after Tom Brady took his talents to the swamp and took their winning ways with him.

Maybe it’s because sports, especially team-based ones, have lost their innocence and simplicity. Start with youth sports today. The amount of overspecialization starting at a young age, which leads to overuse injuries typically seen in adults, kids playing on multiple local and travel teams at once, having to get up early for ice time, taking kids out of school for out-of-state tournaments. Like Britney Spears, they are not that innocent.⁶ Parents complain about winter league and need to schlep the kids to practice multiple days of the week - sometimes twice in a day - all for what? An infinitesimally small chance of making the pros and only a slightly better chance at getting a scholarship to collect.

Maybe their little guy will make the Olympics (not likely) aspects of which I still admire, especially the individual competitions. Similar to the tears in the crowds at the marathon, it’s ironic that I feel more connected to community through the solo competitors’ trials and triumphs than through the collective work of the team. But the Olympics have gotten too big: the spectacle of the games, the athletes themselves and the money (corruption) associated with hosting them.

Is it my age and the shortness of time? Brandon pointed out that across all four professional American sports - NHL, NFL, MLB and NBA - there is only one player older than us: Rich (not yet over the) Hill, aged 43, pitcher. Age is a function of time. Speaking of time and aging, I don’t recall games taking nearly as long as they do now. With TV timeouts, and instant replay, American sports seemingly last forever. And our friends across the pond aren’t immune: added time for “injuries” and hydration breaks, soccer too lasts far longer than it used to. And cricket literally takes days.

It may just be that my life has filled up with things more valuable than knowing all the NFL coaches, knowing the Mets’ starting lineup and bench players, spending (wasting) hours in front of a television believing in something that really doesn’t matter. Roger Bennett, of Men in Blazers, is prone to repeating Jurgen Klopp’s quote that soccer is the “most important least important thing in the world”. Maybe I just don’t have time - that is, I no longer prioritize - spending my energy on things that are least important anymore. And to spare you, dear reader, I will withhold my words on soc-corruption.⁷

Football is the worst offender: now instead of three slots of games on Sundays and one on Monday, we can watch 12 hours of football on Sunday, another 6 hours on Monday, and another 3 hours on Thursday and starting in December we get Saturday games, too. We even have a 17th regular season game. Hell, they even had a game on Friday at 3pm. Who has time for that? I’ll tell you who: someone who has a four-game parlay going with MGM Bet, two fantasy teams on DraftKings, a prop bet with FanDuel and an allegiance to a team trying to make the playoffs with a losing record.

Just like today’s hustle culture, sports are always on. This Thanksgiving Day, like REI telling us to Opt Outside instead of shopping on Black Friday, I opted out of watching 9 hours of football and instead read a book, made a fire, cleaned up for dinner, talked with friends, and went to bed at a normal (read: early) hour. Boring? Perhaps. Curmudgeony? You bet, with maybe a nod to Bateman’s take on Huey, but without the sense of humor: just bitter and cynical. Was my day better? Absolutely.

If Formula 1 is any indication, maybe I’m not the only one losing interest. Viewership? Down. Ticket prices for Las Vegas’ event this month? Down. But ESPN hasn’t backed off reportedly paying $85 million for the rights to next year’s season. Perhaps that’s why ESPN licensed its name Penn Gaming to get into sports betting with ESPN Bet. They need more of their viewers to fork over money so ESPN can pay for more exclusive TV rights to show the sports on which those same people can then bet (read: lose money). I can’t fault them for the business model: according to a Men’s Health Survey, 38% of men have placed a sports bet in the last 12 months, one in five forked over a quarter of their salary to the sports books and 78% used an app to do it; I can fault them for helping increase the suicide rate among men.

Let me be clear: sports betting’s proliferation is a direct result of state governments, in an effort to fill their underfunded coffers, and having realized men - especially young men - would jump at the chance, no matter how small, of winning a bet or two, made every effort to legalize it instead of taxing citizens directly.

I used to put my Heart and Soul into sports, but now I Want a New Drug. One that won’t make me sick (from all the blatant consumerism displayed during games), one that won’t make me crash my car (like Tiger Woods), make me feel three feet thick (like the ivy-covered brick wall Wrigley Field). One that won’t hurt my head (give me (another) concussion and cause future CTE), one that won’t make my mouth too dry (getting nervous as to whether my team will cover the spread or not), or my eyes too red (from checking scores through the blue light on my phone late at night to see whether they covered).

The German word for poison is das Gift. The new drugs are found on those same fields, courts, pitches, roads and tracks: endocannabanoids. They are delivered through sweat, competition, pushing one’s physical limits, being outside, being with others. It’s time we make das Gift of sport and turn it into the gift of sport.

As Scott Galloway said in, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love and Meaning:⁸

Show me a guy who watches ESPN every night, spends all day Sunday watching football, and doesn't work out, and I'll show you a future of anger and failed relationships. Show me someone who sweats every day and spends as much time playing sports as watching them on TV, and I'll show you someone who is good at life.

I’ll do Mr. Galloway one better: spend more time playing sports than watching them, and I’ll show you someone great at life. Who’s up for a group run? Let’s be great at life.

1. The name, a portmanteau of Time, as in the magazine, and Kleenex, as in the tissue. Weird, right?

2. That’s the short-lived league, that recently came back, which started a young Steve Young, Doug Flutie, Reggie White and was where Herschel Walker and Donald Trump first feel for each other.

3. I’m a dad. I’ve earned the right to tell bad jokes like this.

4. There still aren’t.

5. A fact that may help during a game of Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy: Canada’s national sport is not hockey, it’s lacrosse.

6. Oops, I did it again. Who knew I’d got back to back newsletters with Ms. Spears references? And no, it wasn’t as a bet, though this is a topic I’ll come back to.

7. You were curious so I’ll put a few words in the footnotes instead. See: World Cup bidding; sports-washing in Saudi Arabia; Youth soccer pay-to-play.

8. Surprisingly, a book I haven’t read yet. Perhaps I’ll buy a copy from Bookshop.org (read: they are not Amazon), where project kathekon will earn a commission as an affiliate if you click through and make a purchase. You’ll also help a local independent bookstore in your community.