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REAL Real Sports

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Published on Monday, 18 January 2010 05:00

Written by Thom Ring

I like sports. I admit it. One of the most enjoyable things I do is attend sporting events. I’ll watch a game on TV, too, but I have a couple of problems with doing that. And not surprisingly, since you’re reading this here, my problems relate directly to how far sports-​culture today has strayed from Mom ‘N Pop culture.

Notice I didn’t refer to myself as a sports fan. That’s because fan is short for fanatic. I’m not. I don’t lose sleep when the local NFL team, the Pats, loses. I don’t give a care who’s batting cleanup for the Red Sox. I don’t proclaim “We need more hitting.” Yeah, maybe they do. I’ve got plenty.

It kills me how caught up folks get in big-​league sports. And it’s bad enough that a big-​league team’s wins or losses become more important to some people than their own jobs, or their families, or anything they do for themselves in their lives. Worse still, they’re living and dying over the exploits of a bunch of guys who often can barely recall what city they called home all year. This winter closets full of overpriced (Did I say overpriced? Try obscenely-​priced) Jason Bay Red Sox jerseys will take their place on Salvation Army racks next to Ramarez and Damon jerseys no one wants anymore, either.

And how badly do these game-​playing mercenaries exert themselves for a team after they’ve signed a contract that will pay them more in a year than the budgets of most small countries? Capitalist theory will tell you that they’ll work harder than anyone else in society because they’re paid more than anyone else in society. But after years of watching athletes, both mercenary and amateur, it’s my view that exactly the opposite is true.

Notice,too, I didn’t say “professional and amateur.” There are plenty of mercenaries who don’t get paid to play. They’re just allowed to attend college for free while they’re playing their game, a privilege that more often than not they don’t bother taking advantage of. So my contention applies to them as well. Just add up the costs of the education they’re wasting.

Which gets me to the point of this entry (“Finally!” you’re thinking). If the opposite of capitalist theory is true when applied to athletes, then the less they’re making the harder they work. And the athletes who love to play the most, it seems, are the ones who aren’t paid at all.

I’ve been to Rad Sox games, and Pats games, as well as Bruins games and a single Celtics game many years back. I’ve also been to New Hampshire Speedway for the Cup races as part of my old job as a racing reporter. And in every one of these sports the best games or races I ever saw played out among competitors who were doing it for nothing more than the love of their sport. And the beauty of it was that I never spent more than ten bucks to witness any of these memorable events.

This weekend I went to two college hockey games. Chances are you weren’t among the crowds of a couple of hundred in attendance at either. One of those games was pretty exciting. The other wasn’t bad, either. And not only weren’t the guys playing not professionals, they were hardly scholarship-​mercenaries. Heck, they weren’t even guys.

And to demonstrate my Mom ‘N Pop theory further, the best of these games was played between two NCAA Division III women’s teams, Nichols College of Massachusetts and Vermont’s St. Michael’s College, neither of which had one player with an athletic scholarship. I went to the game because my daughter Marcy played hockey at St. Mike’s and the game was played at Nichols’s home rink in my hometown — in Rhode Island, 40 minutes from Nichols (so much for coddled college athletes).

I won’t bore the non-​fans among you with details of the game beyond the fact that it was a fast– skating 2 – 2 overtime tie. The point was that it cost five bucks to get in. There is nothing at a Boston Bruins game that you can get for five bucks. There’s hardly a thing you can get at a minor_​league game for five bucks. Tickets to see the minor-​league Providence Bruins are approaching 30 bucks each. My daughter Kate took me to a Boston Bruins game a couple of years ago. Tickets in the cheap seats cost 45 bucks. I calculated that we were eight stories above the ice. It turns out we were nine.

For the five bucks I paid to see the Division-​I Providence College women play New Hampshire, I sat along the boards in the second row. I literally could have chosen any seat in PC’s comfortable little arena. The game started slowly before PC picked it up on the way to a 3 – 2 victory. These women skate like crazy, playing a game they hardly can expect to earn a buck from ever in their lives. I’ve seen that sort of effort at men’s and women’s hockey games across New England over the years. I’ve seen the same at D-​I and II football games as well, on lovely little fields rimmed by autumn foliage on pristine October Saturdays. You’d half-​expect to see Norman Rockwell setting up an easel outside a corner of the endzone. There were no assaults from advertisers there, no booming rap music every time the action stopped, no t-​shirts shot into the stands, no crowds fighting over the cheap garments covered with still more ads. Just a game being played. And well. By people who loved playing the game as well as the school they were playing it for.

Whatever your favorite sport, I bet you can find just such a spectacle near your home. Even if you’re not into sports, wouldn’t it be nice in this land of the bottom-​line to see anybody doing anything simply because they loved doing it?