Our beloved sports are on the wrong track

I hate to be a cynic, but I don’t like the direction sports are headed.

Lately, I feel like the loyal husband married to a woman who’s gone insane: All I want to do is remember how good she was, how much joy she used to bring me, but every day I’m reminded of how bad things have become.

I’m only 22 years old, but I’m not too young to remember when it wasn’t like this. When the personal lives of athletes didn’t far outweigh the results of a game, or when an up-and-coming player wasn’t getting monster endorsement deals before even contributing a stat line in his or her respective sport, or even when a kid with a nice jumper can be just that — a kid with a nice jumper — and wasn’t being hounded by scouts and reporters before even stepping into high school.

I wish all of these dark clouds that surround the sports I love would just go away, but every day they get darker and darker.

Sensationalist coverage
As soon as the Internet came into our world in the early 90s, we knew it would change our lives forever. But in this day and age, the Internet is changing the entire landscape of how sports are covered.

A fairly new Internet sensation called “blogs” now dominate the hyperlinks on our search engines and have completely changed journalism as we know it. Now, the Average Joe who probably only watches games from his or her couch and has probably never had a credential to be inside a locker room or press conference is giving strong opinions, badmouthing coaches and dissing players for the entire world to read.

Does credibility mean anything anymore?
Even worse, you have cell-phone cameras that take pictures of athletes when they’re getting drunk and kissing women at clubs, and the next morning they’re all over the Web.

What ever happened to respecting someone’s personal life?
Don’t tell that to the New York press. The New York Daily News is constantly littered with front-page headlines about Roger Clemens’ alleged secret life, and Alex Rodriguez’s perceived affair with a stripper.

But I don’t blame these publications for what they put out. They’re just doing what everybody else does: Looking to make money. Why do you think The National Inquirer and People magazine is located at the check-out line in grocery stores? Because people eat that stuff up.

Bloated salaries
Something needs to be done about how today’s athletes are being paid because it can turn really ugly.

In Major League Baseball, a sport with no salary cap, bidding wars are causing inflated contracts for players who don’t deserve them. Don’t get me wrong, Alex Rodriguez will probably go down as the greatest player of all time when his career is finished. But does anybody on this planet really deserve to be paid $28 million a year?

Yes, one person does: The one who cures cancer.

It’s even worse in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. In these leagues, athletes who have yet to prove themselves are getting paid ridiculous amounts of money before their first basket made or down played.

Here’s an example. Before former University of Southern California running back Reggie Bush got a single carry for the team that drafted him — the New Orleans Saints — he was appearing in Pepsi and Adidas commercials seemingly every five minutes. Fast-forward two years and Bush was 38th among running backs last season in rushing. Meanwhile, the third-ranked rusher, Philadelphia’s Brian Westbrook, fails to get the big-time endorsements.

That’s because the media and the public designate the faces of particular sports early on and market them that way no matter what they’ve accomplished.

Victimized youngsters
With all this money going to players who probably don’t deserve it, I can’t blame young kids for skipping out on college for the potential quick buck of a professional sport.
But something needs to be done about this.

It used to be a rarity when guys made the jump from high school to the pros. When Moses Malone did it in 1974, he was considered one in a billion.
Now, it’s become the norm.

The NBA put in a rule recently that says every basketball player needs to go to college for at least one year before making the jump to the pros, but that just makes it worse. What you get is colleges using an athlete for one year to bring money and notoriety to their school, and the athlete using college as a springboard to the pros.

Do you think any of those one-year college athletes even go to class?
And it’s not just the 18-year-olds. The sports world has become so competitive — mostly because of the amount of money pumped in — that general managers, scouts and coaches begin evaluating players in their early teen years. A kid who is 13 years old and dunking a basketball is already starting to get recruited for Division-I programs.

Obviously, playing a sport just because you love it is out of the picture — at least if you’re really good.

A dark future?
To be honest, I have no idea what is going to become of the sports we love. All I know is things are not looking good right now. But like the loyal husband, a divorce is out of the picture. All I can do is hope for better days to come.

It’s what gets me through the day.

Alden Gonzalez is a freelance writer living in Miami.
He may be contacted at Alden@towerpublications.com.

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