Only Seat in the House
SPORTS by Christopher Dean Heine

Sport Has Become All Curses and Mirrors
What I am about to write could be applied to the larger modern society. But this is where I do a go-around about sports, so I will keep it small.
        Sports are no longer bound to the idea that they can be reflections of the human state, but they are also confounding mirages. ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN Classic, ESPN.com, ESPN.com Page 2, Fox Sports Net, talk radio and any other channel that discusses athletics often displace TALK above the games and players themselves.
        How many times do I have to hear from a sports talking head how the media is going to jump all over (a story angle) on (an issue, person) and distort (the bigger picture … the truth) before I go nuts? Wait, fine professional, aren’t you IN the media? Aren’t you supposed to set the record straight so sports history comes off clean?
        The first example that comes to mind involves last year’s home run pursuit by Barry Bonds, one of the ten best ball players that ever lived. Now Bondsy doesn’t like the media much and he is a bit of a social yob. Funny thing is, Bondsy is the son of Hall-of-Fame outfielder Bobby Bonds and the godchild of the greatest ballplayer who ever lived, Willie “Say Hey” Mays. He is spoiled beyond his own knowing, according to reports, and has the kind of chip on his shoulder that can turn ugly all newborns and three-for-four nights at the plate.
        As a brash, young ballplayer during the early 1990s, he allegedly cursed and spat at reporters at times because that was his mood for the day. What else can you expect from the GODCHILD OF THE GREATEST BALLPLAYER EVER? The world obviously still owes him a lot.
        So maybe he is a punk. Has he ever been a punk to me? Do I even really know he’s a punk? No, and no. I only recognize him as an extraordinary talent who hit a ball just a foot below the top of the centerfield fence at Shea Stadium last August. Joe Krings and I, regular fans, initially leaped from our seats as the ball sailed high en route to lore. We laughed out loud in melancholy after it dimpled the cushioned fence, knowing that history had just evaded us.
        That’s what I think of when I think of Bondsy. I don’t think of a loogie on some hack’s tape recorder. But fans obviously don’t count when sports reporters speak of Public Perception. “Well, no one really likes Barry Bonds. EVERYONE thinks he’s a jerk.” Did someone commission Gallup to do a poll on this? Or, do the vacuums those big-time sports hacks live in equate into the entire American baseball universe, which entails the United States, Upper Mexico, Lower Canada and demographical dots of Japan?
        When I listened to sports talk radio last summer here in NYC, I sometimes would hear fans call in and lazily say it too: “Well, Barry Bonds is a bad guy.” They never, ever sounded like they meant it. They said it because that was what they were supposed to say when trying to converse to a member of the sports media. That is pathetic, and very modern.
        And take the Miami Hurricanes’ successful campaign for college football’s 2001 mythical national championship. The next day, legendary Florida coach Steve Spurrier announced his resignation to seek a job at the professional level.
        Sports journalists immediately opined on how old Steve done stole the spotlight from the state-rival Hurricanes. Now, there is a small grain of truth to that. However, once it is repeated over and over again, his announcement actually progresses from an interesting news tidbit to a headline as big or bigger than the outcomes of championship ballgames. Staying with college football, let’s look at the sport’s recruiting process and how analysts and fans alike on talk radio and via the Internet overly intellectualize the subject. It’s been said time and time again that recruiting is an inexact science and really doesn’t mean much if a team does not win A LOT of games.
        Yet, I have heard people say an exorbitant number of times how winning a big bowl game or even a championship game will help recruit better players. Now, again, there is a little truth to this reasoning. However, it is stated so often that it sounds like people actually believe getting a wide receiver from a German Air Force base is actually more important that winning and losing live ballgames. Does the chicken come before the…
        In the world of college football, analysts actually crown “recruiting national championships” to support the importance of their published work. That’s similar in sentiment to going to the playground every Saturday for five months for a serious tackle football league, stopping and then having captains pick new teams and then sitting around for two months discussing the merits of their team-building decisions and then having an awards banquet to commemorate the supposed realizations deriving from the talks, as if all those earlier ballgames taught no one nothing at all. The Texas Longhorns have won several “recruiting national championships” in recent years but have far less to show for it on the field. Fans of the team love the recruiting victories.
        Ludicrous.
        Perception and suspect information have become more important than action and truth. That’s my point here. Look at the world around you. It’s a joke. No, it’s a curse. Fry that mirage analogy, it’s like a broken fucking mirror.

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