The rise and fall of sports
Amid the din of National Public Radio political news emerging from my phone app this week, this startling fact of a sporting pastime emerged:
Since 2003, the number of times an American has won a major men’s tennis title is:
Zero.
Men’s tennis. I remember it. Jimmy Connors. John McEnroe. Jim Courier. Pete Sampras. Andre Agassi.
Women’s tennis for Americans is the same.
Lindsay Davenport was the last U.S. tennis player not named Serena or Venus to gain the women’s finals of the U.S. Open. That was in 2000.
The NPR piece was from journalist John U. Bacon. This was his opening line:
“Why do we do this? Why do we spend countless hours, week in and week out, on endless road trips, transporting our child athletes across the state and even across the country while sacrificing everything else, including other sports, family dinners and even family vacations? Because the coaches tell us we must. If we don’t, our kids won’t get a college scholarship or even make their high-school team, let alone go pro.”
If his words had eyes, they were looking at me and many parents I know whose noses I’ve seen inching over the white lines of soccer fields and pressed against the puck-scarred glass of hockey rinks.
I think with sports and our kids, we’ve lost something compared to a generation ago.
I think Bacon’s tennis statistic is just one measure.
Youth football participation had been dropping long before concussions chased parents away. We’ve seen just about every youth football league in the Valley merge a couple times over the years as leaders struggle to generate competition.
From 2002 to 2013, U.S. youth baseball membership dropped by 4 million boys. Girls softball dropped by 2.2 million players in that same time. You’ll find these stats and more in a fantastic 2015 Wall Street Journal story written by Brian Costa.
A simple drive around the Valley is telling.
Basketball courts hardly exist in Youngstown any more. The state built brand new schools for the city. Good luck finding any school with a set of hoops. Behind the new Wilson school sits two backboards that have the rims removed. Courts in the suburbs should be thankful for Pokemon Go because that’s the main draw for visitors these days.
This sporting disinterest extends to the top.
Ignore for a minute the hysteria of the Cleveland Indians’ fantastic finish. During the season, they were near last in attendance despite being mostly in first place.
In the NFL, average attendance numbers are the lowest since 1998, and from 2011 to 2014, 2 million fewer fans went to stadiums.
No city or country wants the Olympics. Well, no country that’s not ruled by some dictatorial structure.
From youth participation to professional institutions, sports is collapsing around us.
Well, American sports. European soccer has gone global.
The sports experts point to many things: computer games, fantasy technology, busier lifestyles.
But what the experts won’t look at as a fault in U.S. sports is, well, the experts.
Bacon’s NPR piece notes that U.S. tennis has collapsed, despite millions being spent on special Florida academies and national elite tournaments.
The monopolies, the greed, the excess, the domineering, the arrogance, shady management, etc.
There is a reason why boxing is now in the shadows of mixed martial-arts fighting. Choose any word in my above sentence, and it can be applied to 1980s and 1990s boxing.
All major U.S. sports seem on a collision course for boxing’s fate.
The greed, excess, monopoly, etc. in sports starts at the youth level with specialty coaches and training centers. And it does not stop until a group of rich white guys get their cut at the end of every amateur and professional sporting body.
This sports excess includes ESPN, which I think quietly escapes some of the scrutiny.
When I was a kid, ABC Sports surprised you once a year with coverage of a single youth baseball championship game on Labor Day weekend.
This summer’s Little League World Series ABC/ESPN television coverage spanned 10 days and 30 games.
Did the world really need such TV coverage? More importantly, did the kids and the sport need it?
Some day, some “Moneyball” type person will connect the dots as such excessive exposure grows and youth participation drops.
I said a second ago, “When I was a kid.”
When I was a kid, I was a better all-around athlete than my kids are today. I bet that most of my dad’s peers today can probably say the same thing.
I was middle of the pack in three or so sports and a “top-kid-picked” in two or three other sports. But that’s the key: I played multiple sports.
Sports was part of life when I was a kid.
My coaches and peers saw sports as a life skills tool for leadership, discipline, teamwork and more. They did not talk scholarships or pros. We played almost daily. Maybe once per year, we spent more than an hour in a car to a game.
Today, sports are a life, and I too got sucked in as a dad. Five-hour trips every other weekend are the norm.
When parents talk today about the sports their kids play, inevitably what will come up is:
“Is she/he going to play in college?”
And that simple value point ignites all that leads to the messy stew of sports above.
When I was a kid and my dad talked to another about sports I played, I imagine the other dad simply said:
“Oh ...”
And that was good enough, a generation ago.
Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.