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;void(0)) I grew up not too far from Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn, New York. One of my earliest memories is of the entire neighborhood being out in the streets when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League penant in the early 1950's. Duke Scneider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and PeeWee Reese, were household names. I remember the sadness and heartache when the Dodgers left Brooklyn for someplace named Los Angeles. Back then sports was a form of escape. We knew little about the players' personal lives outside of what the league's public relations people wanted us to know. It served the purpose of keeping us focused on this fantasy world of created complication. I'm not sure when it happened but it was probably sometime in the late '60s that sports went from "play" to another commodity of the entertainment industry. The teams and the players took on the characteristics of most corporations and its employees. Much more, they became "products" of large multinational corporations. All sense of regional loyalty was obliterated and replaced by the drive for profit and finance. The same forces that organized the factory and the office took on the development of the sports industry. Today's rapidly growing technology has relegated spectator sports to an extension of the work world - a passive spectacle of "Win at all costs". The home run was never a major aspect of baseball until the emergence of Babe Ruth and his penchant for celebrity. The knockout in the first round was never a major attraction for true boxing fans who spend their money to see a skilled exhibition between two professionals. However, the two sports have grown trivialized to the point that it has had to cater to an audience hungry for the sudden, powerful, sensational. The audience of the 1990s would have probably fallen asleep watching the fleet footed beauty of a Muhammed Ali, as he wore his opponent down from round after round of blinding jabs and brilliant defensive ability. Thus, Mike Tyson, a young man who lacked the skills to make it as an amateur boxer, became heavyweight champion purely on raw power. His opponenets were mostly mediocre fighters who were unable to use their height to stay away from his blockbuster punches. It's not important whether Barry Bonds used steroids or whether the New England Patriot's head coach used technology to spy on opponents. The fact is that we have come to a point in our culture where our leisure time has been compromised. Our children have given up on leisure activities and have opted for passive means of escape. Sports teams and the athletes themselves have become part of a new corporate culture, and just as technology has impacted the performance of one company over another (or one employee over another), steroids and videotape may have been what has helped make some athletes what they are today. The salaries dwarf what they used to be, and the intensity of the demands placed on the participants have grown just as substantially. At or around the time that Barry Bonds was looking "pumped" and pumping out the home runs, there were quite a few other baseball players who resembled his muscular definition and power at the plate. This is not to mention athletes in other sports venues. The American sports fan is hungry for the performance and even the behaviors that these concoctions produce in athletes, and if they do not get it through real life American athletes there are virtual products and foreign imports that can be exploited to similar ends. In the corporate world we have become a "Must Win!" nation. As long as the source of our leisure activities continues to take on the characteristics of this corporate culture there will always be something out there to give us the winning edge over the competition, and as long as this "something" is of a chemical or technological origin we must come to the realization that we, along with our fantasies, are becoming more and more alienated from ourselves and our surroundings. Oh yeah, don't forget your autographed copy of “The Ackee Chronicles”. Tony VanSluytman - the Author  Newsletter Directory The Aton Project - Home Page Tony VanSluytman info Tony VanSluytman - the Author | Return Home | The BOOK DOCTOR | The BANYON NETWORK | The Banyon Buzz Newsletters | The Aton Project Newsletters | Contact Us | |
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