BREAD AND CIRCUSES IN DECLINE

Hardly at any level is sports not entangled with government. From public parks and urban recreation departments, to public university athletic departments, taxpayers foot at least some, and frequently much, of the bills.


But, especially in professional sports there is a tight relationship with public financing of sports stadiums and arenas. Look at a few: The ball park for the Houston Astros cost $250,000,000 with taxes accounting for $180,000,000. Miller Park, in Milwaukee, cost $367,000,000, with taxpayers paying $277,000,000. Denver Broncos' stadium cost $360,000,000, with the public billed for $266,000,000. The stadium for the Seattle Seahawks cost $430,000,000, with cost to the taxpayer of $300,00,000.  I could go on and on--the costs directly to the public run into the double-figure billions of dollars over the last few decades.

After the public financing of a sports venue, the privately-held sports franchise's monetary value skyrockets. Frequently the franchises do not have to pay property taxes on the facilities--Madison Square garden is an example. This means that more profits accrue to team owners, with higher salaries going to players. 


It is not clear (probably doubtful, in fact) whether "the public"--beyond the urban elite--benefits economically as the urban elite indulges in their "edifice complex." While the huge sums of public money (yours and mine) go to glitzy venues for sky boxes, public schools starve and languish. As for the other sectors of society, the entertainment is good, especially for people of the urban underclass. For a time, they can forget that they might be part of the low-wage uninsured who are a health problem away from bankruptcy.


Might it be that lavish entertainment, provided at enormous social costs, is what an Empire in decline spends its resources on? As it does, the circus is fun.

UNIDIMENSIONAL UNDER THE LIGHTS

The recent arrest of four University of Tennessee basketball players affords the enticing temptation for other fans around the country to revel in some Schadenfreude (wonderful German word meaning "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others"). What we should instead consider are the pressures placed on all big-time college athletes, pressures that narrow athletes, in role engulfment, into diminished selves, selves that tend to become unidimensional, shaped by coaches, fans, the media.

With role engulfment as college athlete comes the dropping away of other identities. For the most part, big-time college athletes are only that--athletes; they have precious little time for other pursuits. They are adulated while they become specialized into a role that does not usually play well in larger society after their brief sports careers.The overwhelming majority will become "former" and "ex" athletes of a program with little hope of going to the Pros and, sadly, little preparation for life beyond the arena.

Not sure what the UT players were thinking, but it might have been the need to maintain some identity beyond the lights.

BODY AS WARRIOR

After some decades of serious counter-cultural antiestablishmentarianism, including likening American football games (especially professional) to the bread-and-circuses of Roman gladiatorial spectacles imperially and deviously designed to distract the masses, I have returned to near where I began life as a natural athlete and again enjoy watching the pure athleticism of it all, like semi-choreographed, yet spontaneous, grace-in-motion and Greek theater of tragedy and triumph. Sports is life as much as anything else is.

Yet, spectator sports is largely a waste of time, I still believe. Nonetheless, when one roots for a team, sometimes local or one from college days or from whence one came, one's identity is part of the mix. For example, my following the University of Kentucky sports programs--many of you can identify with this sentiment--has a great deal to do with MY IDENTITY as a Kentuckian (but I do not live there any longer) and my sense of where I come from--my sense of place, my sense of who I am. It also affords me a sense of community, as I am part of the diasporic "Big Blue Nation" and I look for other people around where I presently live who have the same roots. Sports is a way of connecting to the world.

As I related above, I was a severe critic of this sort of thinking during the later 1960s through the 1980s. Several things changed my thinking. One was a thin anthropological study about Native American "spirit running," where present-day warriors cover preternatural distances in a single run, say over a hundred miles in a few hours. Yes! They claim they run above the ground. It got me thinking about physical regimen as spirituality. It got me thinking about mind over matter.

Another influence was the books by Dan Millman: Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior, and The Inner Athlete, and its revision as Body Mind Mastery: Creating Success in Sport and Life. He helped me see that everyBODY is an athlete (at some level), as we all live (with our minds) in a body; and that our bodies are in our minds. This breaks down the mind-body dualism.

This I have practiced, I see now, nearly my entire life. It works. I hope to not lose any power by saying that I have created and inhabit--now entering my seventh decade of life--a body (from the neck down) that is nearly the same as I had when I was an 18-year-old competitive athlete. (I have mentioned elsewhere that I was a non-scholarship walk-on on the University of Kentucky freshman basketball team.) It's startling to some when they see me at the gym. It's not all genetics as my three brothers do not look as I do.

Now my "competition" is with myself--with my body, with my mind. We have friendly competition and I'm always the winner.

My admonition to all y'all is to strive for some body-mind mastery as part of your own personal path of human potential. It works. The mind, working in tandem with the body, is a powerful force.